Studies in Classic American Literature

D.H. Lawrence Studies in Classic American Literature (1924)
I approached this with some trepidation assuming it would be fairly dry, being Dave's thoughts on a stack of novels I've never read - excepting Moby Dick - and which I can't see me reading at any point in the near future. Happily, at least for me, Studies reads almost like a dry run for Apocalypse, or at least limbering up in preparation for The Plumed Serpent. It was begun in 1917, then revised and completed after the Lawrences moved to the States in 1922, and D.H. naturally had a few things to say on the subject of the country in which he'd made his home.

Studies in Classic American Literature gets the last couple of centuries worth of American society up onto the psychiatrist's couch and pulls them apart to see what's happening under the hood - if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor - an inspection made through the medium of its writing, what the land of the hypothetically free has had to say about itself.

This is something I've pondered myself, having moved here back in 2011 and been struck by the contradictions, and how it really isn't just Europe with different stuff. America makes a big deal out of having thrown off the yoke of hereditary monarchy, and so being a country where no-one is held back through having been born to the wrong parents - which is patently false. It's all about freedom, liberty, and other intangibles; and yet America's dedication to tradition, ceremony, speechifying, awards, more ceremonies, ionic columns, tradition, marble statues, medals for everyone, capes, salutes, honour, proclamations, ceremonies commemorating the previous ceremonies, pomp, circumstance, processions, and so on, is such as to make your average Euro-coronation seem like a fund raising piss-up at an anarchist collective. It's the messy divorce wherein one of those formerly wed spends the rest of his or her life telling you how great it is being divorced.

They came largely to get away - that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That's why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been.

'Henceforth be masterless.'

Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom. Rather the reverse. A hopeless sort of constraint. It is never freedom till you find something you really positively want to be. And people in America have always been shouting about the things they are not. Unless of course, they are millionaires, made or in the making.

Lawrence being Lawrence, much of the argument strays into philosophical, even pseudo-mystical territory, although not without  justification so it's never entirely self-indulgent; and pretty much everything he's said remains approximately true today, a full century later.

As discourse, Studies tends to freewheel, to follow a train of thought like a dog sniffing its way around an unfamiliar field; so it's a monologue which makes coherent observations in an order which mostly makes sense, as distinct from a rigorously mathematical  analysis - a form which would, in any case, contradict Lawrence's most fundamental arguments. It hasn't left me with the desire to read Hawthorne, Fenimore Cooper or Poe - whose writing I already know I dislike in the latter case - but then that isn't really the point, and for a title which may look somewhat peripheral next to the others, it's one of the breezier and more clearly expressed introductions to Lawrence's view of the universe and our place therein.

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851)
During the thicker, chewier novels, I'll occasionally take a break around the half way mark to read something—or even anything which feels a bit less like being at work; because I like to enjoy what I read, that usually being the entire fucking point of reading something in the first place. Sometimes if I discover that I've actually been reading an overextended gusher of piss bladdered by an idiot who doesn't deserve my patronage - as occurred with Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, I'll give up, just stop reading, perhaps even hurl the book across the room and switch to something better. This didn't really feel like an option with Moby-Dick, given that the first hundred or so pages are astonishing and that it has a certain reputation, but I reached the point where I needed a break, and in fact ended up taking two separate holidays - about half way and then again just before the end - still with no fucking whale in sight. I read no less than ten other, considerably more enjoyable books during those two periods of rest. Some of them were comic books, although I'm not sure that necessarily has any bearing on Melville's inability to hold my attention, aside from that Superman was, on this occasion, more interesting than - off the top of my head - the entire chapter describing a bit of stick against which harpoons may be propped when not in use.

Actually, the chapter about rope was probably worse.

Fucking rope.

To start at the beginning, I assume we all know what Moby-Dick is and what it does, more or less. Of course, it's worth keeping in mind that, having read Superman comics, my twenty-first century expectations may perhaps be unfairly accustomed to the sweet, sugary taste of an instant populist fix, meaning I'm unlikely to be well disposed towards an entire fucking chapter about a piece of rope the more plodding, archaic narratives of the nineteenth century; although actually I've read plenty of novels approximately contemporary with this one and haven't had a problem, or at least no problem of the kind I encountered trying to frog march my attention span towards the chapter in which shit actually happens. It may be that Moby-Dick had less work to do in 1851, back when the world's oceans were as much unknown territory as outer space became during the century which followed; and it's worth remembering that the majority of the novel inhabits the realms of water, air, fire to a lesser extent, and with earth as nothing more reliable than the deck beneath the feet of its unfortunate cast. So it's a novel which creates a world of its own, far removed from anything familiar, and maybe that was enough in 1851.

The first one-hundred or so pages, during which Ishmael meets and forges a rudimentary friendship with Queequeg, his future shipmate, are wonderfully vivid, strange and engrossing, and seem to promise much for the rest of the book. Then we set sail, meet Ahab, and settle into a droning testimony about whales and how to kill them which surely didn't need to be anything like so long as it was, and which feels as though the author is desperately scrabbling for fascinating facts by which to keep us interested while nothing happens due to no-one having yet spotted the whale which took Ahab's leg. I can see how the immersive level of detail - mostly gore and slaughter reduced to an industrial process - and the duration of its long-winded delivery might serve to impress upon the reader just how much of a whaling trip is spent hanging around, and how much is at stake, but it nevertheless reads like the work of someone without anything much to say who nevertheless doesn't know when to shut up. Even D.H. Lawrence noted:

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Melville, even in a great book like Moby-Dick. He preaches and he holds forth because he's not sure of himself. And he holds forth, often, so amateurishly.

Melville will tell us that at this juncture the delivery of my news must apply itself to a more earthy subject than might delight listeners' ears, namely that I would deliver information concerning and detailing my intent to adjourn to a secluded spot so fashioned for the broad and impolitic custom of its dispensation, rather than guys, I'm going for a shit, okay?; and it becomes exhausting, just as America's love of ceremony, capes, ionic columns, and the longest, long speeches ever has always been exhausting, and an overcompensation. Should any of it deliver us unto anything of consequence, it would be fine or at least appropriate, but it doesn't. The Ahab of myth may be a man driven by his own mania, but the guy in this book is just a bit of a cunt, and probably less nutty than you would expect of a man who once had his leg bitten off by a whale; and the novel may well be about the death of God, or proof of how little the universe cares about any of us, but Melville seems to depend on scale alone for the communication of his message, whatever it was - if he even knew.

The literary potential of whaling as a metaphor is astonishing, at least as of the mid-nineteenth century, given the whale as the largest living creature then known to mankind - something more like an ecology than an animal. A few years ago, an acquaintance of mine developed a theory about the influence of the whale on human history - all founded on many world cultures supporting creation myths based around giant oceanic monsters - Tiamat and Cipactli to name but two - and the apparent global prevalence of solar symbols combining a circle with a chevron which, my friend suggested, might be derived from whale vertebrae. There was more to it, and although it was overly reliant upon coincidental resemblance and didn't really explain anything which wasn't already supported by a decent explanation, the idea was nevertheless an impressive attempt to grapple with our experience of reality and the assumptions we make about it; and I really feel that Moby-Dick should have done the same thing, but better.

Deadman

 

Mike Baron & Kelley Jones Deadman (1989)
The closer I get to actually finishing Moby fucking Dick, the harder it becomes. I'll open the book, set my eyes to yet another droning chapter, and before I know what's happening, I'm half way through something more enjoyable - even anything more enjoyable given that it's a massive fucking category encompassing every book ever written except for Moby-Dick and possibly the works of Dostoyevsky. This time it was Deadman, specifically a single story spanning a couple of prestige format series - two issues each - published '89 and '92 respectively.

Deadman is the creation of Arnold Drake, who also came up with the Doom Patrol, and is similarly at odds with the mainstream caped milieu upon which he occasionally intrudes. His superpower is that he's dead - hence the name and the red costume with a big white D on the front. Specifically, he's a crime-solving ghost, or at least that's the resume. The supernatural is a realm where DC Comics always fared quite well, not least since Alan Moore knotted all of the various characters together into a single spooky continuum during his run on Swamp Thing, and which arguably resulted in the founding of the Vertigo imprint. I liked Vertigo, but I still think their best stuff happened before they felt like they had to give it a special name - Mike Baron's Deadman, for example.

Firstly, the art of Kelley Jones is incredible, drawing on the expressionism of all those pre-code horror comics to render something which is as much its own visual language as Giger's biomechanics - to which it's a sort of swampy, mushroom festooned rural cousin. Mike Baron's writing further abstracts the story from its distant caped origins to forge what I suppose you might call tender horror, allowing a crushing sense of pathos to a character who may as well be the contents of a butcher's shop window and without any obvious aesthetic contradictions. Deadman falls in love with another ghost, it all goes horribly wrong, and ludicrous though it probably should be, it still does its job better than Herman Melville evidently did his. This is one of those things which I had on eBay for a while, but no-one bought it presumably due to none of the usual attention grabbing names being involved. This has at least meant that I haven't had to buy the thing twice - as happened with a few of the comic books I ended up selling - but seems like a sad indictment on the taste of the comic buying public.

Crisis on Infinite Earths

Marv Wolfman & George Pérez Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985)
Sometimes if I find something I'm reading a bit joyless, a bit of a chore, I'll take a break halfway through and read something else for the sake of a breather. This time it's Melville's Moby-Dick which has been kicking my ass, and so much so that I took a short holiday around the halfway mark. I'm now taking another break even though I have just one hundred pages to go, because it's like reading a novel written by William Sanderson's portrayal of E.B. Farnum in HBO's Deadwood. There was an entire chapter discussing maritime rope, for fuck's sake, which is why Crisis is the eighth thing I've read which isn't Moby-Dick even as the same remains glued to my bedside table with the tenacity of that nine-incher which no amount of sink plunging can force around the s-bend.

Anyway, Crisis on Infinite Earths was a little before my time in terms of my comic book habit, and I never really felt the need to backtrack. It was an attempt to rationalise, streamline and reset the DC Comics universe of Superman and the rest so as to spare us the indignity of having to read stories about Krypto the Superdog or Batman drawing his pension, because that would be like, you know, ridiculous. I can see the sense of the idea, although it seems a bit redundant given that the DC Comics universe of Superman and the rest remained pretty fucking ridiculous even without all those alternate realities making the place look untidy. From where I'm stood, this caped stuff tends to work best when emphasising something other than the fact of everyone wearing leotards whilst biffing criminals and returning the stolen wallet to the millionaire, and DC always had a much harder time rising above its inherently wholesome ideals than the competition. Even if the point of Crisis was the excision of talking ducks and crime fighting dogs that we might feel at least a little more grown up when seen reading the thing in mixed company, Wildcat and the Joker still somehow made it past the interview stage. Wildcat is a superhero whose mask features not only cat ears but also whiskers and a cleft upper lip, and this Joker is the guy who leaves comedic clues to his crimes for Batman to solve.

That said, I generally have a lot of time for Marv Wolfman, and he does what he can with the material. I'm not a massive fan of George Pérez and while his art can be occasionally gorgeous, I've always found it a bit too clean somehow. Crisis sort of works in that it deals with events on such epic scale whilst juggling a cast of thousands so that nothing amounts to much more than a passing glimpse of something huge, which probably wouldn't work with a more refined focus; and in keeping everything moving, it tells a story with the tone of hearsay, lending the saga a mythic quality - a tale of war amongst the Gods, which is approximately what it is, despite most of those Gods being essentially ludicrous. There's a problem in so much as that we all know where the story is going so all of those caped types firing rays at one another page after page feels somewhat inconsequential. Much of the story was intended to rewrite its own continuity so that actions would have consequences and couldn't be conveniently written off as having occurred on Earth-180 or wherever; so it's ironic that the epic conflict should feel so arbitrary and lacking in consequence, being just what superheroes do so that we know they're superheroes - an endless repetitive loop of days saved on a Biblical scale.

The inevitable introduction tells us how important Crisis was, how it was the first of its kind, and how it was so much classier than Marvel's Secret Wars; and true enough Secret Wars is pretty fucking stupid and nowhere near so elegant as this, at least in the rendering; but frankly, Secret Wars was a lot more fun with different things happening from one issue to the next, so it didn't really matter that Klaw seemed like a guy who had hit his head and stumbled off the set of Crackerjack. While Crisis on Infinite Earths is readable and reasonably entertaining, or at least more entertaining that Herman Melville describing different types of harpoon, it's kind of underwhelming and it's certainly nothing like so deep as Grant Morrison might have you believe.

Jaws

Peter Benchley Jaws (1974)
This is probably a bit off the beaten track for me. I've never seen the movie and tend to steer clear of thrillers, but I vividly remember a copy of the Sphere paperback knocking around the house when I was a kid, so I assume my mother must have read it at some point; plus being the sort of thing I wouldn't ordinarily read, my curiosity is piqued. It's good to surprise yourself every once in a while.

Well, it isn't the relentless thriller described by the cover, unless you're thrilled by the prospect of entire chapters given over to awkward dinner parties where guests struggle to make small talk, or lengthy scenes of men who don't really like each other stood upon beaches wondering what the fuck they're going to do. In fact, I'd propose that it's not even a book about a massive shark, but will refrain from such definitive statements on the grounds that the novel itself seems to keep changing its mind about what it wants to be.

What it isn't, is a blockbusting page-turner calculated to shift units, or at least it's difficult to discern such intent within its DNA. If scoring low as poetry, Brenchley's prose is efficient and well lubricated, but with enough of a flourish to elevate the whole above what one might expect of the form, at least barring the occasional intrusion of the peculiar.

But Meadows had reason to believe that the girl was on drugs and that she was being supplied by the son of a Polish potato farmer.

Quint inexplicably yelling, I see your cock, you bastard, at the shark in chapter fourteen probably also deserves a mention here.

The characters are somewhat modular - police chief, journalist, mayor and so on - but not so much as to seem implausible; and there are a few instances of the novel being wearily of its time - notably the black rapist we hear about early on, and Ellen Brody's unlikely sexual fantasies - being raped and working as a prostitute, both ideas which seem to have crossed over from bathroom magazines of the seventies rather than from the heads of actual women. I wasn't wild about the cat being killed on whichever page it was either, but aside from these details, it's not a bad novel, just one with a bit of an identity crisis. I get the impression Benchley may have set out to write something a bit more Steinbeck given the strong focus on how the arrival of a massive shark impacts on the small town folks of Amity, those whose livelihood is very much seasonal and reliant on the annual flood of tourists. At certain points it almost feels like an ecological novel, specifically a warning, and one which seems unusually pertinent given the current pandemic. I assume there may be parallels with Moby Dick - which I haven't read - and if Jaws is a monster movie, it's the heavily allegorical 1954 version of Godzilla more than it's anything else.

This being said, Jaws switches tack to soft porn, then horror from one chapter to the next - not quite to the point of schizophrenia, but enough to let the reader know this was someone's first novel, albeit a pretty decent one in most respects. The final chapters steer a bit too close to animal-snuff for my tastes but could have been worse, and Benchley eventually regretted any influence he may have had on the subsequent gratuitous slaughter of sharks in the wild and became a conservationist.

The Stillness in the Water would have been a better title though.

The Brakespeare Voyage

It has occurred to me that there are people who may object to the following on the basis of its revealing certain details of a book they may not have read, or spoilers as is the generally accepted but nevertheless irritating term. Whilst I can appreciate that if one is a fan of detective fiction, a review praising and detailing the ingenuity of the means by which the butler did it might diminish one's reading pleasure, but there are limits - one of which was crossed when I recently found myself berated for revealing a specific plot detail of a television show first broadcast fifteen years ago. Seeing as I write these reviews principally for my own pleasure, as a means by which I compel myself to attend greater scrutiny upon a particular story than I might ordinarily have done, I feel no strong obligation to protect the fragile enjoyment valves of those whose reading pleasure is based principally on plot twists and revelations, who might be better served by a fucking jigsaw puzzle than a novel or comic book. So just to be absolutely clear, if you can't stand the thought of discovering something about a particular piece of fiction prior to actually reading it, please don't bother with my reviews.

Whilst we're here, I suppose I should also admit to a possible degree of bias on my part in respect to the following in that I wrote Against Nature, the previous Faction Paradox novel published by Obverse Books, and I painted the cover of this one, and will probably be painting the cover of the next one.

Jonathan Dennis & Simon Bucher-Jones The Brakespeare Voyage (2013)
I've been waiting for this a long time, at least since Mad Norwegian Press dropped the Faction Paradox ball and a seemingly wistful Simon Bucher-Jones posted the proposal and outline for a then abandoned novel called Nebaioth on his blog. Nebaioth sounded phenomenal - an author renowned for massive, wonderfully bizarre ideas extrapolated from the weirder realms of nosebleed physics really turning the volume up to eleven and letting it all hang out, if that isn't too gruesome a simile. Years later, I experienced a minor resurgence of squee upon discovering what all the banging noises coming from the cell next to mine had been, and then a fairly serious nerdgasm when our beloved Faction Paradox hitched its wagon to one of those publishers which likes to put out a book every once in a while just to see what happens mutter mumble don't get me started...

The Brakespeare of the title is a ship the size of a small universe, its decks, bridge, and rigging made up of stars, planets, and entire cultures. Its mission is the retrieval of an earlier ship from the outer darkness beyond our own spacetime, and ultimately a quest for the sort of extracosmic biodata which can only be found out there beyond the brane universes described by some of the stranger theories of contemporary physics, biodata which it is hoped will yield an advantage in the War of the Faction Paradox mythos.

You can pretend it's the Doctor Who Telly Zoo time war if you like, and whilst you're there you might also like to pretend that Busted were the Sex Pistols.

Simon Bucher-Jones - assuming The Brakespeare Voyage to have been his baby in its formative stage - is a master of this sort of fiction, specifically the novel which can be only a novel because it wouldn't work in any other medium, and does one hell of a lot more than simply describe a sequence of visual images. I'm less familiar with the writing of Jonathan Dennis, although what little I've read has been of a quality to suggest this collaboration being effected on very much equal terms; and the end result forms a beautifully woven whole with no suggestion of variant voices bolted together.

Nebaioth himself turns out to be a central figure, significantly named after the Biblical son of Ishmael who in turn gave a name to the narrator of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Further specific parallels are not overly pronounced beyond, I suppose, Captain Robert Scarratt's obsession representing a more measured version of that which drove Captain Ahab onwards, and Leviathan entities beyond the edge of our universe roughly equating to whales, although there's a reasonable chance I may not actually know what I'm talking about here. A more general comparison can be found in the strongly nautical thrust of the entire narrative which proves so dominant as to surely warrant The Brakespeare Voyage being termed nautical science-fiction despite the cosmic setting. Given the predominance of high-seas imagery coupled with a certain seventeenth century flavour, this novel puts me strongly in mind of the ur-science-fiction of Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe and others - voyages made beyond the limits of the world as was known at the time, and the investigation of terra incognita discussed as an imaginative rather than purely scientific endeavour. I'm inclined to suspect this may be significant given the purpose of the mission driving both the Brakespeare and its predecessor, ultimately the introduction of new data to a closed system, in this case our universe. This presents a broader restatement of a central theme of the War, as mapped out in The Book of the War and others, namely the forces of the inverted in conflict with those of the imaginative.

If that possibly verbose summary casts The Brakespeare Voyage as one of those novels about which people on bulletin boards make observations along the lines of I couldn't get my head around it, what with all the words and stuff before dashing off elsewhere to praise the stratospheric brilliance of a slightly Shakespearey episode of Charmed, then it probably shouldn't. Even the most ludicrous concepts found here are beautifully communicated with the atmosphere and sobriety of Ursula LeGuin at her finest, and whilst the narrative is sometimes information dense, it flows like a good wine. I occasionally had difficulty recalling quite who was working for what, but not so much as to present problems, and I've a feeling certain allegiances may have been purposefully ambiguous in a few cases.

In all honesty I haven't read anything this good in a long, long time, and nor have I read anything quite like it. It really has been worth the wait.

Purchase your copy here, then purchase additional copies for all of your friends, and just keep buying until it outsells Alastair Reynolds and accrues the recognition it most certainly deserves.