Will Self - Elaine (2024)

 

Following on from 2019's directly autobiographical Will, Self travels further down the branches of his family tree to formative events of his childhood, with the focus shifted to the prime mover of those events, specifically his mother who died in 1988 leaving behind over forty years worth of diaries. These diaries seem to have provided the recipe and psychological ingredients for this approximately biographical novel, although the novel itself inhabits less than a year of her life with events occurring in order of significance rather than where they appeared on a calendar. Having already read 2000's How The Dead Live, dealing in part with his mother's death*, I felt I knew what to expect, so naturally it's something else entirely.

Elaine is hardly light reading, and yet proves surprisingly breezy for a novel which eschews many of the usual conventions of the form, presenting not quite a stream of consciousness, more like events ordered according to an associative train of thought - which I swear is different even if I'm not sure how to describe it. I've witnessed at least one denizen of social media whining about lines of speech left to roam free within the text, unfettered by those handy inverted commas which at least allow us to pretend we're watching it on telly, but it works fine for me, keeping the dialogue buried firmly in the swirling mists of memory from which the narrative is woven. I won't claim it reminds me of Ulysses because I still haven't got around to that one yet, but I gather it's not the worst comparison that could be made. The style of the writing levels everything out, giving more or less equal emphasis to what happens, what is thought of what happens, what hasn't happened as a result and so on. It can be disorientating, but somehow serves to root the reader in the exact moment of what is read, as distinct from the usual unconscious gathering of information where A, B, and then C adds up to the story we probably expected. If that suggests short change, the effect is, I would argue, emotionally more powerful than what we might have received from the traditional written equivalent of a diagram.

Another cracker, and any peanut gallery season ticket holders still alive to wheel out the stuff about some hypothetical anal thesaurus and how no-one actually reads Will Self, they just say they do because they think they're all lush and that but they don't know nuffink can go fuck themselves, as they should have been doing from day one.

*: This is the impression I've picked up from somewhere, although I'm no longer able to find anything to support the conceit beyond vague literary parallels I seem to recall as present in How the Dead Live, although the main character's name is actually closer to that of the author's maternal grandmother.

Nick Sweeney - Daedalus: All Dublin Talking (2023)

 

Never having read Ulysses, I may be at something of a disadvantage here given that Daedalus extends the existence of its principal character; and yet it didn't feel as though I was at a disadvantage. Similarly, this is a work in progress - a breather taken for the sake of comparing notes and due consideration given to what other materials will be needed before the building can be completed - and yet to me, in my potential ignorance, it feels finished. Daedalus presents thirteen snapshots in the life of himself beyond the final page of Joyce's novel and dating from 1904 to 1925. Sweeney hasn't yet settled on what will occur to link these interludes, hence the temporary pause to take stock.

I didn't have much of an idea of what occurred to Stephen before the final page of Joyce's novel, but Sweeney isn't afraid of making what I suspect may be dramatic changes - dramatic changes being more consistent with real life than with fannish extensions. So our man turns his back on the poetry and we find him later crossing the Atlantic to churn out popular songs for Tin Pan Alley - or at least one of its cousins - then hanging out on Hollywood lots with Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel. It probably could have turned a little pear-shaped given some of the supporting cast, but doesn't, retaining its focus on what it was doing anyway and otherwise ignoring the legends of celebrities who happen to be passing through; although this paragraph gave me a warm chuckle:

He gave in to sleep, dreamed of a bananaeating lion roaming the Emperor Diocletian's Palace in Split, and he and Stan and a fat man comically trying to shoo it out the door before the illtempered boss noticed and put his one fearsome beady eye on them all.

Somehow, although written in a style which pays homage to Ulysses, or so I gather, Daedalus is recognisably the work of Nick Sweeney in that it's the voice established in Laikonik Express and The Émigré Engineer, which seems like no mean feat, elaborating on migratory themes - where we end up and how we're changed by the journey, which appeals to me for obvious reasons. So Daedalus isn't either - ugh - fan fiction, or even Wide Sargasso Sea which, fine book though it is, sings from an entirely different hymn sheet to Brontë's Jane Eyre. Most surprising of all, at least to me, is that it doesn't read like a work in progress and does everything it apparently needs to do in just 150 pages. It feels complete and satisfying as it stands, and doesn't suffer from its episodic composition; and it's of a quality suggesting that any expansion, extension, or filling in of gaps the author chooses to make can only add. I'll be interested to see where it goes from here.

I really need to read Ulysses, don't I?

Dubliners

James Joyce Dubliners (1907)
I'd been umming and ahing about tackling Ulysses before my brain fully reverts to adolescent slush in the wake of my having resumed reading comic books with teenage fervour. Nick Sweeney, or possibly someone else, suggested I first give Dubliners a shot, and so I have.

I thought A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was mostly wonderful, inhabiting territory with which I was loosely familiar. Dubliners I've found a little more impenetrable in so far as I couldn't really tell whether there was anything to penetrate, so to speak. I picked up a few hints from the internet, but mostly themes which I'd already noticed, or at least suspected might be in there somewhere, none of which significantly increased my reading pleasure. Dubliners is a collection of short stories describing significant moments of understanding in the lives of Dublin people around the turn of the century, but feels a little like a novel given the consistent themes running through these fifteen vignettes; and the progression from youth to age, book-ended by death in both the first and final stories is surely deliberate. The turn of the century apparently saw a rise of Irish Nationalism, notably in Dublin, which Joyce views with scepticism, regarding it as a stifling influence. Much of the book is concerned with inertia and the weight of tradition or expectation, with the contrast of modernity and social progress faintly tangible as occurring around the edges of the narrative.

I could tell what the collection was doing, and I enjoyed most of the stories, but the sense of detachment was a little overwhelming in places, with the author leaving us to pass judgement in situations which seemed to rely upon a much greater investment in the culture of Dublin than I've ever enjoyed. This isn't to say that I needed - ugh - identifiable characters, so much as that it was all a bit too relentlessly brown for my tastes. It felt like reading a Walter Sickert interior of roughly the same vintage.

Probably a bit too soon for Ulysses then.

two Stan Lee biographies

Stan Lee & George Mair
Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee (2002)
While my own personal jury remains out regarding how much credit Lee deserves for strips co-created with Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and others - because we'll probably never know for sure - the other extreme by which Stan was just some lucky schmo who happened to be in the right place at the right time seems equally unfair. Excelsior! is his side of the story, with linking paragraphs wedged in by George Mair so as to keep it all from degrading into a sort of Borscht Belt James Joyce; and while his side of the story is mostly well known, it's nevertheless worth preserving because it's enlightening and often genuinely funny and Lee comes across as a nice guy with the best of intentions. The extent to which this is the facade of some scheming snake oil retailing mastermind could be debated, but I suspect that if it were a facade, he would have done a better job of it.

 

Abraham Riesman True Believer (2021)
On the other hand, there's True Believer which has the advantage of not actually being written by Stan himself and accordingly paints a quite different picture. Thankfully, it doesn't seem to be anything you might term a hatchet job. Credit is given where due, as is the benefit of the doubt, but the bottom line is that this is a scrupulously thorough warts and all biography of a life which is revealed as having been, so it could be argued, mainly warts; which isn't to suggest that Stan was necessarily a bad guy or that he fucked kids or any of that sort of thing, but there's a point at which self affirmation crosses over into something more like mania. I would guess Stan understood this, hence the winning combination of boasting tempered with self-deprecating cornball humour of the stripe which makes Excelsior! so readable.

The creative ratio of Lee to Kirby or Ditko to be found in all of those characters for which he is famed remains debatable, although the success of the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and the rest is surely at least in part down to Lee's tireless promotional bounce and general inability to shut the fuck up, even for just a second. So he's to be credited for something, and True Believer does as good a job as anything I've read of trying to pinpoint what that might have been. Oddly enough, I feel as though I've known at least a few Stans in my time, albeit none with quite the same level of charm or ability to generate money from thin air, but I recognise the type and this passage, referring to POW - one of our boy's later, admittedly shabbier enterprises - struck an uncomfortably familiar chord.

If Stan had doubts about his own abilities, he certainly didn't let them show. In fact, POW was presenting an image of the octogenarian Stan as a creative powerhouse, capable of churning out a wealth of ideas that could be converted into lucrative entertainment properties. However, POW's primary product was announcements.

Of that which emerged from the mind of Stan Lee in the latter years, most seems to have been on the level of Alan Partridge's Monkey Tennis, with very little transcending the press releases about how great it was definitely going to be. One of the few exceptions was an animated series called Stripperella about a crime-fighting pole dancer with massive tits which, as evidence of Stan's wild imagination as something existing autonomous of Kirby, Ditko or whoever else was sat at the drawing board that afternoon, is pretty fucking thin; but you can't keep a good man down, as they say, and that was Lee's superpower, roughly speaking, coupled with an inability to monitor his own strengths and weaknesses. Comic book history has remembered the archetypal Stan Lee piece as Captain America leaping out of the page with a massive grin and an improbably distended sense of perspective, yet it should probably be one of the captioned photographs from You Don't Say. This one idea - if you can truly call it an idea - to which Stan returned time and again was that of stock photos to which he added side-splitting captions. He published a magazine along these lines in 1963, and there were a couple of others issued to a generally mixed reception a bit later, and yet it was something he tried to get happening over and over like Gretchen's use of the term fetch in Mean Girls, this sort of thing:

 

If you now need to go and change your pants, damage control the coffee fountain, maybe take a shower or whatever, I can wait.

Bizarrely, Stan doesn't seem to have been able to tell the difference between the Fantastic Four battling an underground civilisation led by an evil genius, and a photograph of Jimmy Carter amended with a comic observation about golf, which is ultimately tragic. As, I guess, was his life in certain respects, most of it being spent looking for something he probably never found, believing manic optimism alone would eventually bring it within reach, and failing to recognise anything with which he'd been involved as having been of value - contrary to whatever ludicrous bluster he may have committed at the time. He clearly wasn't a saint by any description, nor even anyone particularly remarkable, but he probably deserved better than he got; and it's hard to imagine there will ever be another account balancing sympathy with unflinching honesty as this one does.

Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes

Neil Gaiman etc. Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes (1989)
I was quite excited by Gaiman's Sandman when it first appeared, and not least because of Dave McKean's covers which I regarded as amazing. I said as much to Charlie Adlard seeing as he was sort of my comics advisor at the time, and was a little surprised when he made sniffy noises. His objection, as I understood it, was that McKean's work failed to live up to the hype for a number of reasons, and I realised that he was right, much as it pained me to admit it. McKean's art is necessarily impressionistic because his drawing ability is fairly limited. He's good with lighting, which compensates for a multitude of sins; and he tends to favour certain colour combinations which create a striking effect regardless of what one does with them. It's mostly shorthand and distraction, but no-one notices because they're too busy boggling at electrical components and scraps of underwear stapled to the page. Bill Sienkiewicz did it first and did it better, but Bill Sienkiewicz really can draw and his visual experiments are conducted through choice rather than necessity. Of course, McKean's work isn't bad by any means, although it's certainly not wildly original. He has a wonderful sense of design, but as such has more in common with Vaughan Oliver than the aforementioned Sienkiewicz.

Anyway, I kept on buying Sandman, month after month, even past the point at which I was buying it in the hope of it eventually getting better again, which it didn't. Then in 2009 I flogged the lot, having decided I'd rather have the money, although I always remembered those early issues as having been something good.

So here we are again, and yes, I still enjoy those first issues, but not so much as was once the case. I've read too much Gaiman to ever get myself back to factory settings. He pushes buttons in the same way that Dave McKean pushes buttons so as to distract from the inherent weaknesses of the structure, which is probably why those covers seem such a good fit. He's doing an Alan Moore in the same way that McKean was doing a Bill Sienkiewicz. To be fair, he does more than just push characters through some Alan Moore algorithm, and he writes dialogue beautifully - at least some of it - but everywhere else, all I see are tricks, shortcuts, and sleight of hand distracting from what feels as much like recycled material as anything by J.K. Rowling. The mood suggests something specifically written with fans of the Cure in mind, all cobwebs and bits of antique jewellery; and allusions to literature come and go as props, like a James Joyce held open at no particular page for minute after minute as you wait for a certain someone to come through the door and be duly impressed; and then every once in a while, it pushes the weird horror button just to keep us on our toes

Somewhere in Basildon a maniac with a bacon slicer has made ice cream out of his own arse. He's serving it to little kids.

Shocked, aren't you?

Narrative works by pushing buttons, but it really shouldn't be quite so obvious if it's done right. Even just the fucking title, Preludes & Nocturnes…

Seriously?

Seriously?

Additionally, the art isn't overly great either, and the one thing in Sandman's favour is that it is at least consistent for the run of these first eight issues. It may have been drawn as an expressionist homage to those same horror comics which eventually led to the likes of Swamp Thing - and most of this story rummages around in Alan Moore's version of the Swamp Thing mythology, seeing as I didn't already mention that - but to me it looks like, at best, a promising eighties fanzine, everyone with massive wonky heads like Thunderbirds puppets, and facial expressions last seen drawn in biro on the back of a school exercise book amongst the logos of late seventies heavy metal bands.

Having said all that, I still enjoyed this one, and almost as much as I probably enjoyed it back in 1989, but I enjoyed it as an efficient impersonation. It's good, but if Sandman changed your life, that says more about your life than it does about the power of Gaiman's writing. Preludes & Nocturnes, my arse...

Jerusalem

Alan Moore Jerusalem (2016)
I get the impression that Jerusalem is Alan Moore finishing off Big Numbers in so much as that it attempts to show how the big picture of human experience is recursive, and is therefore made up of a lot of similar smaller pictures. Except it seems he's changed his mind about free will since Big Numbers and is no longer convinced of there being such a thing. He did it better in Voice of the Fire, and he did it better because Voice of the Fire was snappier and made no assumptions about our willingness to hang onto its every last utterance.

Jerusalem is apparently over six-hundred thousand words, which places it in the category of being a book which many people will never finish; additionally, their reasons for bailing out will, in certain cases, be reduced to because it was too long and you're too thick by those who made it to the very end and have taken to advertising this victory with evangelical fervour. Some of the quality of this novel, as defined by both its admirers and its critics, will therefore be determined by volume alone, which I can't help feel may have been a deliberate attempt to place it beyond criticism; because, as we have established, the best records ever made were prog rock triple albums, and they were the best because they were the biggest and most complicated.

Oh well.

For the most part, Jerusalem isn't a difficult read, just a laboriously lengthy one, and slightly overwritten in places as though fearful of simplicity, perhaps equating straightforward descriptive prose with an inability to carry complex or otherwise florid information. The first of the three books into which the novel divides is mostly soap opera and the roughly psychogeographical mapping of a territory - specifically Northampton and its working class without presenting too much of a rose-tinted spectacle.

The public had an appetite for sadness and for sentiment, and what they saw as all the colour of the worse-off classes, but nobody liked the taste of squalor. The Inebriate went down a treat for just so long as he was hanging around a lamppost, talking to it like a pal. The skit was cut off long before he shit his trousers or went home and put his wife in the infirmary by belting her until she couldn't walk.

This first book introduces the idea which runs throughout the novel, namely that Northampton is the centre of the universe, or at least human civilisation, whilst shoehorning London and Lambeth into the picture presumably by virtue of association with Alan Moore's family history - because a lot of this is patently autobiographical. It's an engaging, even convincing idea, providing we're allowed to read it as allegory.

It should probably be noted for the benefit of transatlantic readers, or anyone else who remains uncertain of the facts, that Northampton actually isn't at the geographical centre of the country, despite that it would make for a pretty pattern if it were. The geographical centre is Fenny Drayton, some forty miles distant and much nearer to Coventry. I could rewrite the same novel about the importance of Coventry in terms of world history because that's where I'm from, broadly speaking. I grew up on the farm where they filmed Teletubbies, my mum's best friend married the brother of a Beatle, Hitler bombed Coventry, and my wife is related to Johnny Cash by marriage, so you can see how it all revolves around me.

Wooooooo…

Anyway, it's magical thinking which makes for an interesting foundation upon which to build an argument, but otherwise reads a little like an expression of virtues found in a failure to engage with the wider world. It's parochial, but I suppose that's the point. Snowy Vernall - the ancestral Atlas holding up this particular narrative globe and presumably Alan's great grandfather - is basically Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, and Jerusalem is the story of the Moore dynasty and how it reached its peak in the wonderful person of our humble narrator.

Perhaps the only meaning that events had was the meaning that we brought to them, but even knowing this was probably the case, it frankly wasn't that much help. It didn't stop us chasing after meaning, scrabbling like ferrets for it through a maze of burrows in our thoughts and sometimes getting lost down in the dark.

I was bored by chapter ten, Hark! The Glad Sound!, and took to skimming. The characters simply aren't very interesting, and the weight of like as nots and persons who prefix every address with our becomes more and more aggravating, our Jack, our Percy, our Alma. It began to remind me of Alan Bennett, or conversations with certain professional northerners, specifically individuals whose smile always told me what they were thinking before even a word had been said: that it would be a rare pleasure for myself, evidently someone southern and of lesser substance, to bask in the radiance of such earthy wisdom, forged under t't circumstances more real than tha could ever comprehend, our Lawrence. Jerusalem began to remind me of conversations with my dad which weren't really conversations - a polite enquiry as to whether he'd been out on his motorbike met with a droning forty minute lecture on motorcycling, the state of the roads, and a blow by blow account of buying a new gasket from some bloke down in that London.

It picks up a little in book two before settling into the almost adventures of a ghostly version of the Famous Five, who time travel to various pivotal moments in the history of Northampton in order to have conversations about the global import of what they're looking at.

The third book opens in self-aware fashion by proposing that the reader has begun to lose interest, or has at least found some of the first book something of a plod, suggesting either that Moore is a good judge of his own work, or - more depressingly - that he purposefully wrote the first book as a plod and that the novel has been written as an endurance test. This is also the point at which he just comes right out and says it in the chapter A Cold and Frosty Morning with a day in the life of Alma, our thinly veiled author substitute. Alma has enjoyed more or less the same life as Moore but founded on art rather than comic books, inexplicably shares the same famous friends, and is subject to three media interviews a week. She shares Moore's preoccupations, and complete strangers routinely congratulate her on a painting they really liked - Lookpersons, The Murdering Limerick, or R for Revenge - or examples which feel at least as ludicrous as those I've invented here for the sake of a chuckle. It's all a bit Richard Stilgoe, all a bit pleased with itself, and the novel goes from being Adrian Mole…

Jake Butcher closed his eyes against the cruel wind that whistled over the paving slabs of the deserted shopping precinct. His cigarette dropped with a curse from his lips.

'Damn' he expectorated.

It was his last cigarette. He ground the forlorn fag under the sole of his trusty Doctor Marten's boot. He dug both fists into the womb-like pockets of his anorak, and with his remaining hand he adjusted the fastening on his Adidas sports bag.

Just then a sudden shaft of bright sunlight illuminated the windows of Tesco's. 'Christ,' said Jake to himself, 'those windows are the same yellow as in Van Gogh's sunflower painting!' Thus ruminating on art and culture, did Jake pass the time.

Quite soon a sudden clap of thunder announced itself. 'Christ,' said Jake, 'that thunder sounds like the cannons in the 1812 Symphony.'

He bitterly drew his anorak hood over his head, as raindrops like giant's tears fell on to the concrete wasteland. 'What am I doing here?' questioned Jake to himself. 'Why did I come?' he anguished. 'Where am I going?' he agonised. Just then a sudden rainbow appeared.

'Christ,' said Jake, 'that rainbow looks like...'

…to being - Huitzilopochtli help us - an arguably more poetic take on Grant Morrison's near-unreadable Supergods, all famous friends randomly encountered whilst contemplating the genesis of this or that particular idea what I had, and which was brilliant even though I say so myself, which I do.

Alma smiles now at the memory as she enters the bank. The critics and sometimes admirers who describe her as eccentric really haven't got the first idea.

Which isn't to say that there isn't some point to all of this.

Alma, who makes little distinction between internal and external reality, doesn't much care if the Destructor in her brother's vision is the awful supernatural force that he described it as, or if it's some hallucinatory and visionary metaphor. As Alma sees things, it's the metaphors that do all the most serious damage: Jews as rats, or car-thieves as hyenas. Asian countries as a line of dominoes that communist ideas could topple. Workers thinking of themselves as cogs in a machine, creationists imagining existence as a Swiss watch mechanism and then presupposing a white-haired and twinkle-eyed old clockmaker behind it all.

See, beyond all the self-mythologising, that's the core of what the book seems to be saying. Certainly it's something worth saying, but - as you will have noticed - here he's said it in a single paragraph, which begs the question of why this needed to be six-hundred thousand words, aside from some hypothetical need to make Supergods look like a pamphlet.

Ultimately, Jerusalem is a defence of the working class and those customarily on the receiving end of unfortunate metaphors. I approve on principle, although as an actual working class myself, I feel compelled to point out that many of us often experience a feeling of unease when free expression drama groups take to speaking up on our behalf, because they usually get it wrong through having missed certain details implicit in the term working. At the risk of engaging with an admittedly tiresome more downtrodden than thou dialogue, while it's nice that there are arts labs to put on plays about our sorry lot, maybe get back to me when you've done a couple of decades behind the till at Tesco or turning a fucking spigot on and off for eight hours a day.

She recalls the last time that she'd had Melinda Gebbie over for a memorable meal during which the expatriate American provided an unanswerable critique of Tracy Emin's work which Alma wishes that she'd said herself: 'My God, can you imagine being able to fit all the names of everybody you ever slept with in a tent?' Alma had gaped for a few moments and then soberly put forward her suggestion for capacious venues that might just about accommodate Melinda's list. The Parthenon, Westminster Abbey, China, Jupiter.

Oh my sides!

You should have been there!

It was hilarious!

Leaving aside that the Parthenon, Westminster Abbey, China, Jupiter, isn't a sentence, it's important to let people know you've had a lot of sexual intercourse, because that means that you're doing it, and that you're awesome, and that you're not saaaaaaad. The best people will always tell you that they've had a lot of sexual intercourse.

One of my closest friends died a virgin at the age of forty. You could have sewn his list in an Action Man tent, and he's dead!

What a loser! Ha ha!

I also like that this discussion about the pitiful state of contemporary art bravely flies in the face of popular opinion by daringly taking a pop at Traci Emin, the very opposite of an easy target.

I'm being sarcastic.

This one niggles on a more personal level, regardless of my agreeing with what Moore has to say about contemporary art, because I knew Traci back in the day, and actually she was a pretty fucking great painter prior to reinvention as someone who doesn't make beds, and if we're going to argue by naming famous friends with all the reckless abandon of a Grant Morrison autobiography, then I don't see why I should be expected to hold back. I didn't know Traci in the sense of ending up named and shamed in the dreaded tent, and truthfully the woman could be a bit cunty at times - although usually in a very entertaining way - but at least you can have a laugh with Traci, and I prefer even her wankiest art to Melinda Gebbie's twee, whispy renditions of illustrations from community information posters of the seventies, even though she's clearly had a lot more sexual intercourse.

Therefore nyer.

Anyway, I couldn't be arsed to trudge through the James Joyce tribute. The first nine-hundred or so pages had failed to reward the effort taken to unscramble any of their more obtuse passages, so I skipped the not for thickies chapter and it could have been fucking amazing for all I know. I finally stalled completely at Eating Flowers, another serving of impenetrable overwritten gibberish immediately following on from The Steps of All Saints, a chapter written as a play which seems to suggest that whilst rape and incest may be terrible, they should be considered inconsequential evils in the great scheme of things, and that we need to get over it because existence is amazing, regardless.

That there's anything alive at all to interfere with its own children; that there's children; that there's sexual interference; that we can feel misery. The way I see it, on the whole there's not much to complain about. It's heaven. Even in a concentration camp or when you're getting beaten up and raped, even if it's an off day, it's still heaven.

I doubt whether this directly addresses those of Moore's critics who have noticed his repeated use of rape as a narrative pivot, but between this and the increasingly wearisome character of Alma, I found it difficult to shake off the idea that this might be Alan engaging in a little mansplaining. I realise he's not technically female, but maybe he slipped on a pair of the wife's knickers during some ghastly threesome or summink, so - you know - he's probably developed some very real and profound understanding of what it's like to have a fanny and that.

The most surprising revelation - at least for me - is that Moore simply isn't a particularly good writer; not to say that he's terrible, but I can't tell if he realises that he isn't writing a comic strip, and so he commits all manner of basic errors of both composition and judgement, not least being those aspirationally filmic non-sentences deployed in submission of dramatic lists. Portentous lists. Lists constituting the written equivalent of Brian Blessed enunciating Shakespeare through a digital delay. He additionally does a lot of that Adrian Mole thing to which I referred earlier, with characters engaged in some heart-warmingly working class activity whilst thinking about what Plato said in The Republic, effortfully segueing into a twenty page essay dissecting Plato's assertion.

Gay or not, the Knight's Templar clearly aren't the first people to think of folding money - Roman reckons that he can remember something about paper notes in seventh century China…

Yes, what do you think, Roman?

Given how Jerusalem is such a big one - sort of on the scale of a really massive penis* in the trousers of a mighty man who knows how to use it, and uses it a lot, if you know what I'm saying - I doubt it can have been subject to the same level of tidying up as either Voices of the Fire, or indeed almost every other novel ever published; but never mind. Just feel the girth.

Otherwise there you have it, and even without getting bogged down in Jerusalem as a hymn to how everything was nicer in the old days, back when everything was better than it is now; which is a viewpoint I can at least understand, even if I don't entirely agree.

Capitalism is certainly worse than it used to be, and I'd say the rest is most likely an illusion born of swifter, more efficient transmission of signals, meaning it's now much easier to drown in crap than has ever before been the case. On the other hand, it's now possible to be openly homosexual at school without having one's head stoved in on a daily basis, and the global horrors which once escaped our attention are now, if nothing else, at least widely known and understood. One of my stepson's classmates came out as transgender a couple of years ago. I think she was eleven at the time, and we're talking about a school of distinctly religious emphasis in Texas. A number of parents inevitably complained, and the school principal, one of the most overtly religious men I have ever met, told them to fuck off, albeit not with those actual words.

The notion that the past was better is essentially that what we didn't know didn't hurt us. It's just as insular as Jerusalem, a novel which places a single town at the heart of the map of the universe then throws away its own passport. If Quetzalcoatl taught us anything, it is that only change is permanent, and that very little is ever better or worse in the great scheme of things, only different - apart from the work of Alan Moore, which definitely used to be better.

*: Hampton is Cockney rhyming slang for penis, from Hampton Wick. On reflection, I'm actually surprised that Moore didn't write a whole fucking chapter exploring this particular parallel - the mighty penis of the north fertilising the globe with the spunk of destiny, our James Joyce, and so on and so forth. Maybe that's covered later on in the two-hundred pages I didn't read.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975)
I've avoided this one for most of my adult life without quite having formulated a coherent reason why, and in the end it was Andrew Hickey's testimony which changed my mind, inspiring me to the realisation that I had no good reason to not at least just try the thing.

You've almost certainly come across every idea in it before, in a watered-down form from a million wankers who think they're being amusing by repeating things other people have said, he suggested, having anticipated most of my reservations, but if you can get past that, it's a good book. Most of its innovations have been absorbed into the countercultural mainstream, so it won't blow your mind or anything, but if you can get past that, you might well enjoy it.

At the risk of sounding affected, I was already bored thoroughly shitless by the supposed twenty-three phenomenon by about 1982, the year of Psychic TV's impressively disappointing debut album. I too had read William Burroughs, and had assumed everybody nicked it from him. There was a feature about Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! books in Vague, which I never bothered reading - it being too much trouble with colour images printed over faint text - so I never made the link. In the late eighties I provided artwork for a relatively popular fanzine called Hoax!, which seemed to be another variation on Re/Search with a load of fairly predictable Porridgey obsessions thrown in, but I liked the guy who put the thing together. Well, I liked him up to a point, but I didn't share his fixation with conspiracy theories, and I got tired of drawing stuff I wouldn't otherwise have drawn and drawing it for free - notably a cover for the second issue of Hoax! which I now recognise as having been an exercise in ticking off boxes on the Illuminatus! check list. In fact, having now read the trilogy, I realise that Hoax! was pretty much a straight exercise in recycling Wilson's material wholesale because plagiarism is the new originality blah blah blah...

By the time Grant Morrison came out with The Unreadables - recycling his own juvenilia as Robert Anton Wilson recycled via Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius with the plates switched, I was about ready to punch the next giggling imbecile to tug at my sleeve and point out that something or other had just cost him - oooh fancy - twenty-three pence chortle chortle...

As Andrew suggested, I have indeed encountered much of this material before, often without realising it; and of course it would be churlish to refuse admission to members of the Rolling Stones on the grounds of Primal Scream being a big pile of wank, so let's do this.

Firstly, as you might gather from the title, Illuminatus! is concerned with conspiracy theory in so much as that conspiracy theory forms the fabric of the narrative, serving as the language by which the book describes whatever the hell it's trying to describe. By conspiracy theory I mean the idea that secretive organisations or forces might be controlling human society from behind the scenes. I've never really given much credence to this sort of thing, mainly because I don't believe any of those supposedly in charge of human society possess either the resources or the intelligence necessary to maintain a contrary façade or to orchestrate anything resembling a tangled web of subterfuge. In other words, there's probably a story behind the Kennedy assassination, but I seriously doubt it's even half so interesting as everybody seems to think. That said, I believe that human society - and particularly where large governmental systems have formed - tends to behave like a living organism, subject to the will of its own internal manias without much in the way of conscious influence on the part of those involved, and that this often very much has the appearance of the kind of society we would inhabit were any of the conspiracies true. So conspiracy theory can serve as a useful metaphor for the discussion of human activity on an historical scale, which is partially what Wilson has done.

It's not just Wilson though. Himself and Robert Shea were both working for Playboy when they came up with this thing - apparently inspired by cranky letters sent in to the magazine - each writing sections to play off the other as a sort of narrative duel utilising the premise of all conspiracy theories being equally valid. The story roughly follows a private detective named Saul Goodman - doubtless inspiration for Bob Odenkirk's character in Breaking Bad - investigating the disappearance of a magazine editor, a person presumed silenced by the conspiracy, whatever it may be. The narrative serves as a framework upon which are hung all manner of conflicting theories and versions of human history, at least a few of which involve Atlantis, the Bavarian Illuminati, Hassan-i Sabbah, various Lovecraftian entities, Adolf Hitler, John Dillinger, and everything else ever.

It's mostly bewildering, not least with the narrative switching from first to third person every so often, and with different passages blending into one another with no break to differentiate scene or subject. There are strong elements of satire alternating with parodies of other writers - notably Ayn Rand - then Joycean streams of consciousness, and even the main characters realising they're in a book. Whilst the prose is such as to make for generally pleasurable, even thought-provoking reading, you may as well give up on  expectations of finding a coherent story in here. It seems to have one - something about a golden submarine, a rock festival, and a monolithic single-celled entity named Leviathan - but spends most of the page count having a fight with itself. Wilson's writing is apparently influenced by William Burroughs, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound, and to me Illuminatus! reads a little like a hybrid of Burroughs and Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius books in its tendency to switch between the vaguely hard-boiled and ponderous or even inscrutable philosophical discussion; and there are eight hundred fucking pages of it.

Probably for the sake of argument, Illuminatus! adopts the value system which I later found so aggravating about Hoax!, namely that no single view holds greater validity than any other, so nothing is necessarily more true or even more interesting than anything else, meaning we are obliged to accommodate a certain quota of complete bullshit - at least as I see it. Shea and Wilson therefore jam conflicting fantasies of human history up against each other so as to create confusion, and the point of this is that we might learn to be more picky about which ideas we let into our heads, or at least accept that those already incumbent might have gained access under a false pretext. The confusion seems to be a variation on Burroughs' cut-up technique, destroying the familiar patterns in order to discern what others are to be found.

Some of it is fascinating, and some of it is just annoying or boring - which probably isn't deliberate but may be inevitable given that the authors probably didn't envision Illuminatus! condensed to two-hours of screen time with a grimacing Sean Connery in hot pursuit of a mysteriously robed foe - at least not literally, the escapades of agent 00005 notwithstanding. The subject of the trilogy is more or less the nature of reality and how we experience it, so the book isn't above invoking the eternally yawnsome Timothy Leary alongside a load of guff equivalent to how quantum physicists and tribal shaman are the same thing, which they aren't, but I suppose it's forgiveable. Philip K. Dick did kind of the same thing with a more reader-friendly voice, and without quite such a page count.

More disappointing still is that every single reference to pre-Colombian Mexican culture - more or less inevitable in a book involving conspiracy theories and pyramids - is drivel of the kind suggesting that research in that specific area didn't even stretch to a  library book. For starters, there's no such thing as a Great Pyramid of the Maya, the references to Tlaloc actually refer to Chalchihuitlicue, and the famed Feathered Serpent was neither feathered nor in any sense serpentine and thus has no place in a list alongside either the mythic serpent which devours its own tail or old Snakey from the Garden of Eden; and I know it shouldn't really matter in a novel which spends at least some time hanging around in Atlantis, and the whole point is to illustrate approximate truths as worth more than absolutes; but if you're going to smuggle an indeterminate quota of complete bollocks in with the good stuff, you really need to make sure the good stuff is of a certain standard.

Anyway, against all odds, Illuminatus! achieves that for which it was written, and manages to be more or less entertaining throughout, and certainly philosophically provocative - which is more than can be said of almost everyone following in its footsteps, most of whom really needn't have bothered, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty; but eight-hundred pages! I still don't quite get why it needed to be so long, but whatever. It didn't blow my mind, although I still sort of wish I'd read this prior to exposure to at least some of the drivel it inspired, directly or otherwise.

I think that's a recommendation.

Let's just say that it is.

Bug Jack Barron

Norman Spinrad Bug Jack Barron (1969)
I vaguely recall having been put off Spinrad by one of his short stories in an old New Worlds collection, and put off mainly by prose quite clearly written by a man wearing sunglasses and a beret, smoking one of those LSD cigarettes and listening to jazz - I say man but I really mean some cat; and yet it is this same be bop mangling of language which makes Bug Jack Barron such a great book. Bug Jack Barron is a TV show in which viewers are invited to call in on their futuristic vidphones and bug the host - Jack Barron - about whatever political issue of the day might be bothering them. Barron then vidphones the person or politician responsible live on air and gives them a hard time, and the viewing figures for the show are such that only an idiot would pretend to be otherwise engaged when Barron calls. The book moves slowly in terms of events, taking its time to pick over numerous moral quandaries and to establish an entirely plausible future more or less resembling the present but for a few minor details; yet it doesn't feel at all slow, its first person testimony tearing along with the breakneck pace of a Stan Brakhage film somehow comprising a stream of consciousness rendered as highly caffeinated hipster jargon - James Joyce and William Burroughs collaborating on an episode of Mad Men with a whole load of Lenny Bruce and Marshall McLuhan thrown in for flavour.

As the elevator stopped, Barron looked at the nameless girl clutching his hand, saw the honey-blonde-dyed hair big brown eyes slightly-prosthetic made-for-balling body, saw the latest in interminable line of honey-blonde big-eyed not-Saras, felt pattern enmeshing him like fate, like creature plugged into Kismet-relay circuitry, felt stronger-than-lust weaker-than-love thing for the nameless girl, girl hungry for living-colour image-prick of world-famous Jack Barron.

It can be disorientating but it's really worth hanging on in view of where the story takes us.

I noticed a few Biblical parallels - Jack's symbolic crucifixion and himself and Sara as Adam and Eve tempted by the serpentine Benedict Howards. Actually, they're hard to miss.

'Think about what that means every morning when you wake up, knowing it's all there forever—the way food tastes, the way a woman's body feels, the smell of the air—all of it yours, and all of it forever. Wouldn't you sell your soul for that? Wouldn't anyone? Because you wouldn't need a soul to go somewhere and play a harp when you croak. You'd have it all, right here on terra firma. Forever.... Forever....'

'You sound like you're about to breathe fire and brimstone and ask me to sign a contract in blood,' Barron remarked dryly.

Bug Jack Barron is one of those striking a deal with the devil tales, so I'm sure such imagery is intentional, and the context is capitalist society, specifically the media-driven American version with the significant and still very much relevant problem of morality being defined by the highest bidder. As is probably obvious from the above quote, millionaire industrialist Benedict Howards develops a process which facilitates immortality and is busily buying up senators and congressmen whilst killing at least one president who refuses to play ball. Contrast is provided with snapshots of black America, those getting shat upon at the bottom of the heap for whom Jack Barron has become a televisual campaigner, injustice being his bread and butter in terms of ratings. Howards' brand of immortality comes with a terrible price - as the cliché has it - at which point the novel veers off in the general direction of stomach churning body horror, or at least enough so as to make its point quite clear.

I dislike body horror, generally speaking, having thus far failed to find myself in any way excited by the thought of someone having a penis sewn onto their face - that being the level of thematic thrust the genre so often seems to employ in lieu of actually bothering to tell a fucking story. If anyone feels that such a view represents some kind of censorship or perhaps a violation of their human rights, screw you and grow the fuck up. Winky face. Winky face.

Anyway, Bug Jack Barron does its job extremely well without quite sticking fingers down the readers throat, which is nice; and given the present state of politics and society as it is here in America, this book is at least as relevant as it ever was, arguably more so, and not even the author snapping his fingers with an mmm mmm yeah every few paragraphs quite manages to date it. In fact, when Spinrad names Reagan as having been president - as he does at several intervals - it blends so seamlessly with the landscape that I had to remind myself of this having been written in the sixties.

Possibly the only detail which Spinrad seems to have passed over is the role of the media which here appears less insidious than has been the case in recent years; although passages such as the following suggest this is more to do with the novel focussing on the wider society than any oversight on the author's part:

He put a razor in the last word, signalled to Vince to give him three-quarters screen and zingo, Howards was a scared little twerp cowering below him in the hotseat. He suddenly realised that to the hundred million people on the other side of the screen, what they saw there was reality, reality that was realer than real because a whole country was sharing the direct sensory experience; it was history taking place right before their eyes, albeit non-event history that existed only on the screen. A strange chill went through him as for the first time he got a full gut-reality flash of the unprecedented power wielded by his image on the screen.

Grazing the internet, I find that this seems to be one of those novels which divides people in so much as that some have apparently hated it, even described it as unreadable and slow. As is probably obvious, I belong in the other camp. I suppose my only criticism would be that I've personally never seen the appeal of immortality, but then that isn't really what the book is about, so it's not a problem.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
I've always been a little scared of James Joyce, not least because he used to come around to our house every third Friday of the month and demand money with menaces back when I were a lad; although admittedly that may not have been James Joyce - I was very young at the time and my memory is hazy. Also, he famously wrote books making use of long made-up words. Anyway, my point here is that, being entirely unfamiliar with the man's oeuvre, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man seemed as good a place to start as any, given that it was his first and is as such supposedly not quite so weirdly impenetrable as his later page-turners.

Joyce famously wrote his narratives as a stream of consciousness, swerving from random thought to subject to event and back often without warning - the prospect of which is probably what kept my curiosity at bay as I imagined something like an Irish William Burroughs but more extreme and with none of the endearing toilet humour. Thankfully I was entirely wrong, and it hasn't required quite so much homework on my part as anticipated to appreciate what Joyce was doing. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is roughly autobiographical, with the specific focus being its principal character developing a sense of aesthetics; and it's probably entirely pertinent that this was written during those decades when European artists - or at least the painters - were most noisily engaged in the development and declaration of new ways of seeing by which to replace those of the classical tradition. Joyce seems less conspicuously modernist than Hemingway in this respect - Hemingway being Joyce's drinking buddy and my other recent point of reference here - but his narrative seems to share some common ground with the swirling subjective imagery of the Symbolists and other decadent types, albeit pared down to the microcosmic world of Stephen Dedalus.

Joyce, it turns out, was keen on rhythm, less in terms of there being a young lady from Ealing, and more so in the same sense as certain modernist painters of his day, persons such as Max Weber or Umberto Boccioni - thinking specifically of the States of Mind series here. I should probably stress that this is something I've noticed rather than necessarily indicative of anything directly or specifically relating to the author or his influences. Maybe it would be easier to simply give an example, such as the swell of the ocean as suggested by the repetition of the word waves in the following paragraph:

How pale the light was at the window! But that was nice. The fire rose and fell on the wall. It was like waves. Someone had put coal on and he heard voices. They were talking. It was the noise of the waves. Or the waves were talking among themselves as they rose and fell.

Rhythms shape the overall structure of the novel as well as the detail, informing the relationship of the five chapters, each representing a distinct age in the development of Dedalus, and almost certainly echoing some theological form of which I am unfamiliar through having little background in that area. That said, the structure reminded me somewhat of the five directions, the five points of the Mexican Nahua world through which one must cycle in order to achieve completion; and so it feels like Joyce may have been doing something similar here, assembling five formative pieces in order to achieve a whole in acknowledgement of some specific pattern.

This development of themes is seen in Stephen the child losing his glasses early on in the novel, for which he is punished over and above simply being unable to see; reflected by his development of aesthetics in the final chapter as he is reborn by some definition, although reborn not necessarily of the vaguely traditional fire, fire having been earlier defined as having two forms - that which God made for the service of humanity, and that more fierce variant which torments the sinners in hell. Stephen appears, at least to me, to take his own path, embracing science whilst refuting the priesthood without any flags unnecessarily nailed to the masts of any ship which might sail too far in any direction other than his own, that of the great craftsman and artist as signified by the name.

Stylistically, Joyce's innovation - so far as I am able to tell - was in banishing all but the purely subjective voice of the world as experienced by his character, placing the reader at the centre of the novel in an entirely new way, but without any of the usual compromises which reduce narrative to sequential melodrama. So we are expected to make some effort to join the dots and to keep up, which can't really be done without superimposing our own subjective experiences onto those of Stephen Dedalus. Returning to possibly spurious comparisons with early twentieth century painters, the steady internal rhythm of this dialogue, coupled with Joyce's refusal to render speech as separate from the narrative, presents a sort of written equivalent of the bold surface of the work of certain Fauvists such as André Derain, no area of the image taking precedent over another, everything levelled out to an even if not necessarily uniform texture.

—A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

So, whilst a degree of contextual depth is necessary to appreciate the narrative beyond that which is set down in the novel, we supply that depth, and Joyce therefore has more common ground with his friend Hemingway than may be apparent from first glance.

The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of aesthetic apprehension.

Hence the unrelenting subjectivity of the narrative.

Pretentious as this all may seem, not least because there's a strong chance I've been firing blanks and in the wrong direction all along, it should at least communicate that there's a lot going on here for those who wish to work at it, and so, as the above probably indicates, I may have bitten off more than I can chew. Nevertheless, I take away from this novel that whilst Joyce's written style may seem an initially daunting prospect, there's really nothing to be afraid of, and this specific portrait makes for rich and particularly rewarding reading.

A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway A Moveable Feast (1964)
I can be a bit clueless when it comes to the history of literature besides that which generally has a picture of a spaceship on the cover, although possibly not quite so clueless as some, but more clueless than I would like. Having been drawn to the probably inaccurate idea of Hemingway as a man who wrote books and enjoyed a good healthy punch-up, I decided to start with A Moveable Feast on the grounds that I sometimes like to know something of the character of an author before I proceed further, and being an autobiographical account of our man's life in Paris in the 1920s, this seemed like a good place to start.

Being rather less clueless when it comes to the history of twentieth century art, I'm interested to find that Ernest spent a lot of time hanging around with artists whose work I know, forming opinions which tend to support that which I suspected. He likes Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, finds Aleister Crowley unsavoury, and summarises Wyndham Lewis in a way as to suggest parallels with a certain weird little fannish hard-boiled egg man presently spewing out a million internet words a day on how Terrance Dicks' Doctor Who and the Giant Robot novelisation recontextualises proto-Shakespearian misogyny as a millennial détournement of Situationist theory, which is a shame as I always liked Lewis' Vorticist work, but never mind.

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.

This passage stood out for me as a good example of Hemingway's greatest strengths, the style he developed, and because of the thematic link to the proto-Cubist painter, Paul Cézanne. Stylistically, Hemingway appeared to be reacting against the baroque excesses of Symbolist writing - if that's what I mean - with an efficient and stripped down text delivering solid blocks of meaning in straight lines without the distraction of adjectives or hyperbole. It is, I suppose, a style that has come to be identified as hard-boiled, at least by me, and might be seen as partially ancestral to the written work of Charles Bukowski, Billy Childish - albeit maybe with a dash of Louis-Ferdinand Céline - and even Philip K. Dick. Rather than presenting a dry, emotionless narrative, this technique instead offers one which might in fact be characterised as more emotionally honest - providing the components of the image, allowing the reader to perceive that which is seen along with the emotional response; or less is more; or as Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

To get to the point, this is essentially similar to what Cézanne and those influenced by him, most notably Picasso, were doing with painting, stripping the subject down to its most basic essence in order to expose artistic truths which had for so long been eclipsed by the artist as the most important part of the equation. In other words, this is what art, whether written or painted, used to do before shit television fooled us into believing sad scenes require tears and Murray fucking Gold sobbing into his London Philharmonic Orchestra in order to convey emotion.

Apparently he wrote better than this, but A Moveable Feast has nevertheless made for a very refreshing change.

Of the City of the Saved...

Philip Purser-Hallard Of the City of the Saved... (2004)
For anybody unfamiliar with this one, the setting of the title is a city the size of a spiral galaxy existing beyond the end of time wherein all the human beings who ever lived - and even some of the fictional ones who didn't - find themselves resurrected to eternal life. Neanderthals coexist with cybernetic posthumans, ancestors with distant descendants, and death is only a memory because everyone is both immortal and immune to injury whilst they remain within the city limits. It's heaven allegorised as science-fiction, an idea already tackled in Philip José Farmer's Riverworld books, apparently, although not having read them I couldn't really say how well they compare. On the other hand, I think I've read this three or four times now, and it's frankly fucking brilliant, as acknowledged by Lawrence Miles, editor of the Faction Paradox novels and never one to heap praise upon the undeserving, when interviewed by Andrew Hickey on Resonance FM's Reality Check podcast:

I am going to blow my own trumpet here, because I think I was quite a good writer of the Doctor Who books, but as an editor, I really, really came into my own. Phil Purser-Hallard wrote what was basically an eight out of ten book, and I said no, do that bit different, do that bit different, and turn it into a nine out of ten book. I am possibly more proud of the fact that I edited Of the City of the Saved... than I am of any of the books I actually wrote myself, because although I wrote a lot of books that I think, looking back, are quite good - that was the book which was already good, and I can't say that about any of my own books, that any of them were really good, because I look at them now and go yeah, I could do that better. [Of the City of the Saved...] was my proudest achievement.

Rightly so, I would suggest; but before we lose sight of the fact that this novel is already built upon one of the most ludicrous premises imaginable in terms of how improbably distant its setting is removed from any familiar, definitively experienced environment, it should also be remembered that here we have cameos from resurrected fictional characters, and a story the size of a galaxy told from fifteen or sixteen very different viewpoints, and Philip K. Dick himself shows up thinly disguised as a character named Rick Kithred.

By rights, this should have been the biggest, most disastrous soufflé in literary history, a deck of cards Eiffel Tower erected in the path of a hurricane, a 250 page kick me sticker, and yet not only does it hold together beautifully, the sheer scale of such an unlikely triumph accounts in part for why it works. There's a saying about the common problem of debut novels being authors who try to do far too much, and this is of course a prime example, except the basic ideas are so beautifully worked as to yield a story which seems simply tightly packed with wonders as diverse as its setting - possible evidence for the quality of the material being the continuation of the story in more recent Obverse anthologies edited by the author.

Ridiculous ambition is rarely in itself the problem so much as writers whose ideas are much bigger than the scope of their ability to communicate the same cough cough Stephen Moffat blowing up the fucking universe every five bleeding minutes which happily isn't a problem because Philip Purser-Hallard writes with the confidence and ability of someone who clearly loves his medium and greatly enjoys his art.

Thus far, I've seen only one review attempt to identify problems with this book - namely that appreciation is too greatly reliant on foreknowledge of the characters involved, and so it becomes a bit tiresome spotting all the cameos by resurrected celebrities. Even aside from the fact of Of The City of the Saved... being published as one of a series of loosely interconnected titles - which you would have to be an idiot to miss - I don't really buy the first point at all, or find the novel lacking any vital piece of information which may aid in either the reader's understanding or pleasure; and secondly I think I missed almost all of the star guests anyway, so that aspect made very little difference to me.

Having read Philip K. Dick until he was coming out of my arse - if you'll pardon the repulsive simile - or at least coming out of a sort of notional second century arse that's since been eclipsed by the iron rectums of imperial Rome - Purser-Hallard's depiction of said author is a joy, immediately familiar and entirely justified. Also, I'm fairly certain the possibly underused Dedalus character is a homage to James Joyce given the form taken by his narrative. There were other characters whom I suspect may have been borrowed from elsewhere, but nothing that impacted on the wonderfully florid momentum of the narrative, at least not for me. The conclusion, as Daphne Lawless has pointed out, echoes that of Robert Graves' Claudius novels, which I assume was entirely deliberate given the novel being, amongst other things, a discussion of free will and security as mutually exclusive in an environment which may as well be heaven; but otherwise you'll have to argue that one amongst yourselves.

It does a whole lot of fascinating and different ontological things, and I'm not going to sit here listing all of them when it would be easier for you just to read the book; but I will say that it does them with a smile on its face - and a smile quite unlike that slightly off-putting smirk of Douglas Adams congratulating himself - and it does them with the conviction of an author who knows what he's talking about, as opposed to just throwing in a few pseudo-religious allusions for the sake of texture. Even on top of everything else, I've a feeling this novel may also offer some form of commentary on our contemporary culture in which nothing is ever quite lost, and the past remains forever with us - a variation on William Gibson's idea of there no longer being any such thing as the future, which in turn feeds into Lawrence Miles' This Town Will Never Let Us Go. This may equally well be simply a pattern I've read into the text, perhaps the inevitable crosstalk thrown up by so many rhythms all running consecutively.

This is the sort of environmentally bizarre novel I always hoped Larry Niven would write, but sadly he never quite got there; and whilst we're making free with the comparisons, we might also consider the very best of Iain M. Banks, the previously mentioned Douglas Adams, and even a touch of Alastair Reynolds or maybe Charles Stross, but in each case without whatever qualities have kept their books from creeping up into my own personal top ten. Of the City of the Saved... remains among my favourite science-fiction novels of the last few decades, and Lordy I wish there were more of such calibre.

Doctor Who Classics Omnibus

Pat Mills, John Wagner, Steve Moore, Grant Morrison & others
Doctor Who Classics Omnibus volume one (2010)
Perhaps inevitably, I was once quite the fan of Doctor Who, right up until its 2005 reinvention which, for me at least, missed all the major points of what had made the series so enjoyable in the first place; and then I found my disappointment somewhat polarised by the repellent fervour with which so many embraced the revival, a fervour which often seems indistinguishable from bullying from where I stand, and bullying offered in support of opinion presented as doctrine, received wisdom reiterated as fact.

The wonderful thing about Doctor Who is that it can allow for the telling of almost any kind of story.

That's just one example; and it might work if accounting for novels like Campaign or The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, but these are usually some way off the radar of those for whom Doctor Who is beyond criticism. I have no idea who first said those words, and I'm amazed they can be restated year after year without anyone actually pausing to ask themselves what is actually meant, whether it might be true, or whether it's just another flavourless lump of hyperbole wheeled out because it sounds vaguely more authoritative than the one about my dad being bigger than your dad. What it appears to mean, so far as I am able to tell, is that being as the Doctor can go anywhere in time and space, the settings may vary a great deal without stretching credibility too thin, additionally allowing for some liberties to be taken with the narrative. You could probably say much the same of Star Trek, not that it would necessarily be any more true as a statement. Stories set in fictional environments or from the viewpoint of a minor character are not necessarily indicative of wild narrative anarchy, and certainly not when every last one boils down to the magic Doctor Who telly man having adventures in his TARDIS whilst occasionally reminding us to be nice to those who are a little bit different. Maybe I'm wrong, and Doctor Who really does allow for the telling of almost any kind of story, in which case I assume I must have missed the equivalents to Finnegans Wake, Rendezvous with Rama, Heart of Aztlán, Lady Chatterley's Lover or all those other Doctor Who stories which didn't frame everything in relation to a time traveller having adventures whilst human companions are captured and find themselves having to ask what's happening, Doctor?

So the wonderful thing about Doctor Who is more likely that it can allow for the telling of almost any kind of story, excepting stories of which any aspect is of greater importance than the main character, which actually leaves quite a lot that Doctor Who can't do without looking ridiculous.

Anyway, that's just one aspect. My point - quite aside from Doctor Who merely being a television serial from which a mighty ocean of merchandising has sprung forth, just as Softly Softly and On the Buses were merely television serials - nothing was ever the better for being taken more seriously than it deserved.

Nostalgia guided the hand that picked this from a pile of cheapies in a branch of Borders just before the retail chain imploded, specifically the nostalgia of having read about half of the strips collected herein when they first appeared in Doctor Who Weekly back in the early 1980s. The Iron Legion, The Star Beast, City of the Damned and others - they were great at the time, just as you might expect from 2000AD regulars like Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons, but returning to these now that I'm fat and in my forties, it's difficult to get beyond their being written for a slightly younger audience than at least those early 2000AD strips which have generally stood the test of time. The ideas are nice enough for all the predominance of primary narrative colours, and Dave Gibbons' artwork is beautiful, but it's the kind of shorthand storytelling wherein panels are captioned so as to describe what is quite clearly seen to be happening without any real need for such descriptions. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just that I'm a fully grown man and it no longer works for me, not least because the mere presence of that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as etc. etc. does not in itself hold my interest. The thing is, as children's comics go, there are plenty which retain some appeal in later years mainly through having refrained from too much talking down to their readers - Asterix the Gaul, Dan Dare, at least some of what 2000AD published - besides which these strips read sadly like ham-fisted promotional material such as you might find printed on the wrapper of an ice lolly. Neither content, vintage nor the presence of a Doctor Who logo is really enough to justify describing these stories as classic, although I've no doubt there are many people out there prepared to wage dreary online wars in their defence. There may even be one or two reading this review, getting ready to fulminate, having never before taken any interest in either Pamphlets of Destiny or the novels I've written about herein, but this is Doctor Who we're talking about and it must therefore be debated with all due reverence, which I really feel proves my point about things being taken more seriously than they deserve.

Of course, it could be argued that this is also what I have myself done when I could just have said Doctor Who Classics Omnibus is all right if you're about ten, but even then you'd be better off with some Judge Dredd or whatever.