Jorge Luis Borges - The Book of Imaginary Beings (1967)

 

One of those books which became part of my personal reference library as a kid was the Piccolo paperback Dictionary of Monsters and Mysterious Beasts by Carey Miller, which I treasured for both its inclusion of obscure monsters I'd never heard of and the evocative black and white line illustrations by Mary I. French. Online research reveals that Miller made a career from books which terrified and fascinated the children of my generation, another one I owned being the beautifully painted hardback Mysteries of the Unknown: Monsters, Ghosts & UFOs from 1977 which only now do I realise was by the same author. This may all seem obtuse as preamble to my writing about Borges, an Argentinian author whose works have, as Wikipedia puts it, contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in twentieth century Latin American literature; but with hindsight it's difficult to believe Carey Miller wasn't cherry-picking from this earlier compendium when compiling her own dictionary given the quota of mythical monsters I've never seen mentioned outside of these two books - the Kujata, the Squonk and the Nasnas, to name just three. This isn't an accusation of plagiarism so much as one of influence given the differences. Miller's purpose being to give kids goosebumps, she includes dinosaurs and Frankenstein's monster.

I'm not sure Borges' intention was at variance but for a slight shift of focus, and we're in roughly the same territory as his short stories, here with narrative boiled down to its essence of time, place, character and so on, delivering equivalent observations and ideas in alphabetical order and without any of it being pinned to the customary progression of regular fiction. Where Miller's scope was sufficiently broad as to include Mary Shelley's hit single, Borges similarly draws in creatures from the writing of both Poe and Kafka whilst himself employing considerable artistic license in relating established mythological figures, and even creating one of his own - the Peryton, a half deer and half bird chimera which somehow casts the shadow of a man. This, I would assume, is because a rigorously scientific bestiary of mythical beasts arguably misses the point of that which it purports to describe, and because the larger world is often mapped from the seclusion of daily existence by fictions or truisms at best; and The Book of Imaginary Beings seems to provide a more informative account of the historical human experience as related to our environment than whichever facts or statistics might apply, even where the facts and statistics are more accurate in material terms.

This distinction is probably something we should try to keep track of, not least in recognising that there is a distinction which doesn't detract from the world described herein by Borges being a wonderful place.

Interzone 275 (2018)

As may be apparent from the review of a couple of previous issues I wrote back in July, I haven't exactly been climbing over my massive pile of X-Men comic books to read this; and I only picked it up because Erica L. Satifka is featured, and she's great and therefore deserving of support. I suppose at least this time it's only taken me six years to generate sufficient enthusiasm to read the thing beyond Satifka's characteristically excellent The Fate of the World, Reduced to a Ten-Second Pissing Contest, which probably means something. It took me sixteen years, marriage, and a change of continental landmass to get around to reading issue 218.

It's not the worst science-fiction digest I've read, but I'm still getting a whiff of those boys and girls who went to better schools having a jolly wheeze. The Fate of the World, Reduced to a Ten-Second Pissing Contest is, as I say, wonderful even given its being a mere two pages in length - a lesson in getting to the point if ever there was. Leo Vladimirsky's The Christ Loop is similarly readable, presenting the death of Himself as a sequence of increasingly ludicrous execution beta tests, each followed by a focus group meeting before they finally settle for the version with the wooden cross. Malcolm Devlin's The Purpose of the Dodo Is to Be Extinct has an enjoyable touch of the Borges about it but probably could have been shorter. I didn't really understand either The Mark by Abi Hynes or Steven J. Dines' Looking for Landau. The former seemed nevertheless decent, but the latter was eighteen pages of growling bikers going into Arizona dive bars and starting fights like you see on the telly, but with infrequent puzzling interjections about the Holocaust.

Elsewhere we have mostly inoffensive editorials, reviews and one instance of the word cisheteronormative, which can fuck right off. A couple of short stories in some anthology or other are slated for satirising the political correctness of wokesters because, as you know, it's only satire when coming from the left, so when the right does the same thing it's hate speech, actually. Regardless of anyone who may or may not be channelling their inner Jeremy Clarkson, I believe I've reached the point of equilibrium where I find those whining about political correctness not significantly less irritating than those whining about those whining about political correctness. The review section spunks away a phenomenal generous word count on nothing that really warrants it, so far as I can see, notably the Ready Player One movie - which I haven't seen and have no interest in seeing - about which we learn:

As Infinity War understands but this film never quite does, true geek knowing is a superpower in itself: a creative, expansive mode of cognition which parses tropes against a vast internalised corpus of actual and potential narrative utterances, and comprehends megatextual vastness beyond the puny grasp of high-cultural minds.

To be fair, I've a feeling this may be deliberate affectation as set-up to the somewhat more direct punchline, but honestly it's hard to fucking tell - or to care for that matter. Nick Lowe writes the movie reviews and is clearly perceptive, and I've very much enjoyed his writing, but I don't understand why movies are given so much space in this magazine, or why Lowe is wasting his time on such garbage. I guess that's more or less it for me and Interzone.

Side Effects

Woody Allen Side Effects (1980)
In reference to the usual objections, please refer back to this review. Otherwise, I'm afraid this is still mostly very funny, and funny beyond simply cracking jokes or overloading the reader with non-sequiteurs.

Our project is coming to a close—unsuccessfully, I am sorry to say. Funding has been cut off, our foundation board having decided that the remaining money might be more profitably spent on some joy-buzzers.

The Kugelmass Episode, for one example, allows the aforementioned Kugelmass to enter literary classics and get busy with the great female characters of fiction, and so feels oddly like a Borges homage albeit with sex and wisecracks. Being the work of Woody Allen - even without referring to more recent transgressions - we begin with an understanding of this collection being maybe one step up from Mad magazine or whatever, because humour is generally regarded as a low form unless dignified by age, as is the case with Rabelais, Voltaire and those guys; but Allen's satire was often both literate and pointed, and would surely deserve to be held in higher regard had he not allegedly pissed on his chips.

That said, of the three collections I've read, this has been the first to hint at anything we probably would have rather not discovered, specifically in Retribution which strikes a peculiar note in describing a man who seduces his girlfriend's mother and, in doing so, becomes suddenly irresistible to the former girlfriend who tries to rekindle the original relationship:

 

'Marrying Mom has made you my father.' She kissed me again and just before returning to the festivities said, 'Don't worry, Dad, there'll be plenty of opportunities.'

Which gets a great big prudish ewww from me, not least because the story's near twenty pages seem curiously lacking in the usual zingers; so it's quite difficult to separate the art from the artist with that one. Of course, it should be remembered that Allen was never convicted of anything, and no evidence of abuse was found; but it's hard to avoid being reminded of the whole shitshow when reading Retribution in particular.

Never mind.

Blindness

José Saramago Blindness (1995)
Ursula LeGuin seemed to think this was something special and it sounded great. Happily, I chanced upon a copy at Half Price and Ursula was right, as usual. The quick version is that Blindness is Day of the Triffids had it been written by Borges, but deserves a somewhat more thorough account. Our story begins when everyone in the world - so far as we're able to tell - is suddenly unsighted for reasons which remain undiscovered and which probably don't matter. The blind are at first quarantined in an abandoned asylum, with food left sporadically at the gate in the hope of their being able to fend for themselves without infecting anyone else; except, whatever it is, it doesn't seem to be a disease and the food deliveries soon cease. Naturally, it doesn't take long for civilisation itself to cease, and human existence becomes a vision of hell as all that we take for granted is stripped away - electricity, running water, law, order, food, transport and working toilets. Blindness is potentially one of the most harrowing things I've read, except Saramago clearly understood that what he wanted to say about human nature might be lost to the visceral horror of its telling. In fact, he specifically states as much near the end of the novel while additionally describing one of his solutions.

Ah, you were in quarantine, Yes, Was it hard, Worse than that, How horrible, You are a writer, you have, as you said a moment ago, an obligation to know words, therefore you know that adjectives are of no use to us, if a person kills another, for example, it would be better to state this fact openly, directly, and to trust that the horror of the act, in itself, is so shocking that there is no need for us to say it was horrible.

Additionally, as you may notice from the above, Saramago utilises his own conventions of punctuation and grammar, embedding dialogue within the text without indicating quotation or even direct attribution to the speaker, instead trusting the cadence of the words to distinguish speech. He abruptly switches tense or makes occasional authorial observations, even speculating what may happen next, and there are plenty of commas, not many full stops, and very few paragraph breaks. It's initially disorientating - not least because we never learn the names of any of our people, persisting with identification such as the doctor, the doctor's wife, the boy with the squint and so on right up until the end - but it soon becomes absorbing by somehow placing the reader at the centre of the horror, so it feels as though the book is occurring around you rather than simply on the page; and it really is horror of the most harrowing sort, the kind which occurs here in the real world when we reduce ourselves to living garbage. Yet Saramago keeps his emphasis firmly focussed on the positives, even when those positives constitute just the faintest glimmer of hope in a brutal world of blood and shit, forging a powerful parable about human nature without it reading like transgressive body horror drivel, and yet without pulling any descriptive punches. Blindness is honestly not like anything I've read before.

The Abortion

Richard Brautigan The Abortion (1971)
Having thus far failed to come up with a convincing comparison, I've at last realised who Brautigan reminds me of with this one, and it's Borges. The language and the mood are both very different to anything I've read of the Argentinian, but there's common ground in their both having fixated on the written word and language as reality, or as something distinct from reality. Half of Sombrero Fallout, for example, occurs on scraps of paper discarded and tossed into a waste paper basket by a frustrated writer, while The Abortion sets out its stall in a library and features librarians as its main characters; and because it's Brautigan, it's a library of unpublished books, an institution which, rather than being built or founded, seems to have come into existence in organic response to some obscure need within the culture at large. The librarians here are people who ended up in the job without quite meaning to, having mostly just wandered in off the street; and unpublished authors turn up with their manuscripts - typed or handwritten - and add them to the library, sometimes at three in the morning.

Our story begins when Vida shows up with the book she's written about her own body, specifically how she doesn't understand it or particularly relate to it, which is a shame because it's apparently a great body - as Brautigan describes in some detail. Vida has sex with the narrator, becomes pregnant, and so we come to the reason for the title. I wouldn't say alarm bells were quite ringing by this point, but I had my fingers crossed, hoping to avoid a descent into mansplaining and what men may or may not think about abortion. I've seen online criticism of The Abortion suggesting that Brautigan spends a little longer than seems necessary describing Vida's tits and is therefore an oppressive phallocrat of some description, which is, I suppose, one reaction. Of course, the logical extreme of such arguments are that whatever a man may have to say on the topic of abortion will be essentially worthless. I agree in so much as that the casting vote should probably go to the person whose body is directly under discussion, but worthless is too great a reduction which as such seems based on the gender of the speaker more than on the actual potential worth - or otherwise - of anything said. Additionally, human biology is such that certain female physical features have a fucking powerful effect on certain males, and while I recognise that no-one should reduce another person to a mere object, whining about it is probably a waste of time. I guess Brautigan liked boobs, and I also like boobs, none of which necessarily gets in the way of anything else The Abortion may strive to achieve.

Returning to Borges, the library of The Abortion seems to inhabit its own reality, which is something slightly separate from regular reality. Vida is likewise divorced to a certain extent from her own body, which is what her book is about. Brautigan's book is therefore about regular reality imposing itself on those otherwise maintaining some distance from the same, something which tends to happen whether we like it or not - see also certain aspects of human biology. I don't have anything profound or worthwhile to say about abortion, and Brautigan reports without necessarily saying anything beyond that which we mostly know and understand to be approximately true, and so, writing without any of the usual hysteria, manages to avoid shooting himself in the foot as Philip K. Dick did with The Pre-Persons.

The Abortion is, perhaps paradoxically, quite life affirming for something which really could have gone horribly wrong; or at least I found it so.

Ficciones

Jorge Luis Borges Ficciones (1956)
Fuck me - this one took some doing, having been punctuated by the autobiography of a Sex Pistol, a Longshot collection, and a couple of issues of Marshall Law, all read for light relief because after a number of days which had been shite to varying degrees, I felt as though I deserved to enjoy my bedtime reading. I'm a little surprised at my having had this reaction. The last two Borges I tackled were great, and I was told this was the one I really needed to read, the solid gold hit single, so to speak.

Borges writes short pieces of surrealist fiction, often in the form of reviews of imaginary books, texts, or authors, which blur the lines between imagination and reality, prompting all sorts of peculiar questions about whether we're reading the story or it's reading us. I'm sure you get the idea. While Ficciones is patently at least as atmospheric as whatever I read in Labyrinths and The Book of Sand, at least as rich in imagery, and as wild in terms of existential questions, it nevertheless felt like homework. The stories seem, generally speaking, to inhabit more cerebral narratives than those in Labyrinths, which at least wrapped their ideas around a sense of space or something physical, thus giving my poor brain something more to work with; or at least that's the impression I had, and I could be wrong, and it may simply be that I simply should have saved this one for evenings in a more receptive frame of mind.

I still enjoyed this, and particularly Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote and Three Versions of Judas, but I have a feeling I should have enjoyed it a lot more than I did.

Longshot

Ann Nocenti & Arthur Adams Longshot (1986)
Here I am again with the reading equivalent of comfort food, or even the reading and looking at pictures equivalent of comfort food. Shitty occurrences temporarily brought me down and I just couldn't cope with Borges. This was originally purchased during my time as a Marvel zombie, then sold, then bought again once a mid-life crisis expressed itself as nostalgia for the Marvel zombie days, the innocence, the excitement of some new character showing up, all that good shit…

Longshot isn't the worst, but it hasn't aged quite so well as others of its vintage. Actually, it's far from the worst and is mostly readable, a decent story ever so slightly handicapped by its own telling. Longshot is a relentlessy chipper superguy, a character whose creation alludes to more innocent, wholesome times. He's a former slave escaped from a cruel media-fixated dimension, blessed with good luck powers, and the six issues collected here are about his escape and subsequent attempts to get along in our world, or at least the Marvel version of our world. Buckles are swashed with some frequency, and it feels as though Ann Nocenti was probably a fan of The Never Ending Story and its like. We have mullets aplenty, and we live in a world of leg warmers and pizza as a guilty pleasure, so yeah - this one was never aimed at fifty-four-year old men with Sleaford Mods albums such as myself. However, the most unexpected element is that it feels like a fanzine, or at least an eighties indie comic, the work of people who were still very much learning as they went along. There's way too much dialogue cluttering up each page, suggesting overcompensation, and Arthur Adams artwork was still surprisingly clunky and uneven at this point, some hints of what was to come, but quite a few figures suggestive of Ian Gibson characters as drawn by Rob Liefeld. Of course, given those responsible, it's not without redeeming features. You just have to keep your eye open for them.

The Book of Sand

Jorge Luis Borges The Book of Sand (1978)
These short stories apparently number amongst Borges' last writings, and I gather the collection is regarded as being amongst his lesser works. Personally, although I didn't find much which packed quite the same punch as any of the stories collected in Labyrinths, it may simply be that I had a better idea of what to expect with this one, and it seems simply a quieter, less demonstrative work. A couple of the tales simply pass beneath one's gaze, like watching a stream from a bridge, leaving only a vague impression; and yet even in such cases, Borges' voice remains gripping, pulling the reader into the narrative regardless of how well the story appears to be shaping up. It's quite difficult to work out how he does this, but he does it very well, and the effect is slightly eerie, underscoring the notion that maybe we're reading something which is more than just fiction.

The years pass and I've told this story so many times I no longer know whether I remember it as it was or whether it's only my words I'm remembering.

As a writer who appears to speak directly from within his own pages, Borges writes books within books, implying layers of reality which blur the distinction between the reader and that which is read. These tales are short and evoke the mystery and serenity of de Chirico's art, fleeting presences half seen around a corner. In this one we have forgotten languages, a book which reads differently each time one opens it up, and even a tribute to those forbidden texts so pivotal to the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft - who, for all of his qualities, probably doesn't quite deserve such a tribute. This collection leaves the reader with the impression of having said a great deal, even though it's just a whisper, and the words seem to be different each time.

Welcome to the Arms Race

Justin Isis Welcome to the Arms Race (2015)
Justin Isis is an enigma, at least from where I'm perched in Texas with the rest of creation perceived only through my little social media portal. I first encountered him when he sent me a friend request on facebook, apparently having read something I'd written - which is noteworthy because that sort of thing doesn't happen too often. He seemed to be either an Englishmen or an American living in Tokyo, and his interests combined with a slightly airbrushed looking facebook photo led me to assume he was probably some kind of idoru. Westerners fixated on the more lurid expressions of Japanese culture have historically irritated the living shit out of me, and yet Justin Isis seemed cut from a very different cloth to your average weeaboo.

I'm familiar with the term weeaboo because I'm down with the kids on the streets.

Actually, I'm not. I wasn't even down with the kids on the streets back when I was a kid on the street, or at least adjacent to it. I'm somehow in my fifties without quite knowing why, and new for the sake of new gives me a headache. I feel as though I'm stood on a beach, with all the proper culture safely behind on dry land. Before me is the ocean of all the shite that probably doesn't matter - Imagine Dragons, autotune, Japanese animation, Minecraft, YouTube commentators, drippy nostalgia, MST3K, cosplay, Doctor fucking Who, what a twenty-four year old thinks about almost anything, Pokémon Go, Chvrches, adult fans of My Little Pony, iPhone, eBook, anything else named by means of a self-conscious lower case vowel preceding an upper case consonant, and all other hopelessly passive distractions which have helped create the developmental vacuum in which evil fucking shitehawks like Breitbart, Infowars, and more or less all of our current political pantheon have been able to flourish; or, it's simply that I don't understand this stuff because it is of greater complexity than I have patience to decode for what I intuitively suspect may be very little reward. Either way, I know what I like - as the saying goes - and I find myself with an uncomfortable insight into those generations preceding my own whining that the bass is too loud, and I can't hear the words, and why don't you just put VH1 on or something, watch the Beatles or one of the classics - bit of Spandau Ballet, that'll do…

Justin Isis fascinates me because, stood on a possibly similar beach he gazes out and is able to understand what he's looking at and is able to deal with it, to reweave it into something of worth which carries what I feel to be the same weight as culture with which I'm more familiar. He is able to translate ephemeral culture in a meaningful way, and most crucially of all, he writes novels which aren't trying to be fucking films! In fact there's a couple of these which are probably unfilmable.

The lesser lights leaned backward on their own transmission-sculptures, indifferent to the performance fluids and ritual songs drifting down from the deep intervals. An and Non took broadcast armour from the lesser lights, rotating the transmission-sculptures into their own speech orbitals and adjusting their size, shape and cardinality to suit the local reign.

Welcome to the Arms Race comprises short stories, or short fiction, or possibly simply short pieces of writing, depending on which term works best. Most of these tales have a flavour as traditional as any Graham Greene you might care to mention yet without really resembling anything I've read before, utilising bold splashes of modernism and not even the faintest suggestion of mere technique being its own ostentatious virtue. Isis identifies as a Neo-Decadent writer, which is a thing you can look up, in addition to being author of the Second Manifesto of Neo-Decadence, in which it is written:

No precedence is given to the Decadent writers of the 19th century, their modes or milieu. Neo-Decadence is more likely to cross 1990s video game dialogue with the structure of a 16th century picaresque to discuss a drug deal in present day Mongolia. Fealty and earnestness can only hold back progress. We do not have saints, and we consume our idols.

...and while we're here:

Writing can be neither sincere nor authentic; these are the cliches of the ranks of the dead. Style is a mute scream in symbols - that's all.

In practical terms, Arms Race adds up to what all those William Gibson novels promised but never delivered, with the rich, texture of maybe Clark Ashton Smith and the firework display innovation of Michael Moorcock at his most outrageous - which is my scrabbling around trying to describe something I didn't expect would be able to exist in this century, more than it is necessarily indicative of perceptible influences or even sources. As literature it reminds me of vapourwave - another new fangled phenomenon I would not have encountered were it not for Justin Isis - the repurposed or even stolen blended into something new and bright and fizzy. Most of these stories concern themselves with fictions of one form or another, people who are written, without quite going the full Borges and directly addressing the reader, although the mood is similar - playful and pretty much fearless, not too worried about pushing any of your usual buttons, not even during the unrelenting narrative barrage of M-FUNK VS THA FUTUREGIONS OF INVERSE FUNKATIVITY, science-fiction in a universe where all of those Sun Ra albums were documentaries - the sort of thing which logically should have fallen flat on its arse as a bad joke, but which takes flight with such jerky grace as to beg the question of why no-one tried it before.

It will sound like hyperbole, but I don't really care: unless I missed something - which is admittedly not beyond the realms of possibility - this collection does what literature hasn't done in a long time, and what I'd forgotten it can do, and should do; and even with the cheeky steals, homages and general thievery, it does it in a way which feels absolutely new without any of the usual ooh ooh look at me, you won't have heard of this, but I have bollocks. I'm still not entirely convinced that Justin Isis isn't an idoru of some description, but maybe it doesn't matter.

The Infinity Doctors

Lance Parkin The Infinity Doctors (1998)
The magic of Doctor Who is that as a franchise it can be used to tell absolutely any kind of story, squeak the Whovian pod-kidults on a fairly regular basis - and please note depressingly telling use of the term franchise. It's one of those things people say because they've heard someone else say it, which actually translates to adventures in the wild west contrasted with adventures on one of Jupiter's moons as somehow equating to thematic variation rather than just a change of scenery. Try telling D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow as Doctor Who - or any other grown-up book for that matter - and the claim is revealed as absurd because The Rainbow is fine as it is and doesn't need to be Doctor Who. Annoyingly it also misses the point that there is a particular type of science-fiction story which Doctor Who seems almost uniquely suited to telling simply thanks to it being a serial of several decades duration, allowing writers to focus on some particularly weird narrative twists without first having to spend five-hundred pages on background and continuity; and this, I would say, is - or at least was - the great strength of the - ahem - franchise, if we really must call it that like the loyal little product-sponge cunts we have apparently become.

To further lay a few of my doubtless contentious cards on the table, Doctor Who ended when it came back on the telly in 2005. Certain gibbons of my unfortunate acquaintance have made the usual sneering noises about continuity, and about being more open-minded when it comes to the possibility of the Doctor enjoying a quick knee-trembler from time to time, or that maybe he had a Time Lord mummy and daddy whom he wuvved vewy, vewy much, but it isn't that which bothers me.

Doctor Who began as a kid's show, and as a kid's show it moved accordingly with the times, occasionally playing with the Prisoner dressing-up box in the sixties, going all Mission: Impossible in the seventies and so on, eventually settling into the habit of weirdly pseudo-allegorical narratives such as Logopolis, Castrovalva, Warrior's Gate and so on - or if not allegorical then certainly ponderous and a long way down the road from William Hartnell battering Daleks with his cane whilst screaming take that, you soppy metal cunt! Towards the end of the eighties Who began to suffer mild schizophrenia, unable to decide whether it was Jorge Luis Borges or Timmy Mallet, and was thus cancelled making way for the novels, most of which did a reasonable job of keeping things going in the right direction. Being written by fans, there was of course a certain reliance on fanwank - entire stories spun from minor points of earlier continuity just like what that Alan Moore might have done - but Who stayed true to itself, regardless of contradictions, because if a narrative so fixated on time travel and the fluidity of established history can't occasionally change its mind, then it may as well just be Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century.

It wasn't the introduction of a natural born Doctor who might nip off for a sneaky fuck every once in a while which rendered the show pointless in 2005 - although such details certainly served to diminish its uniqueness, reducing everything to just more generic cult TV landfill to be gathered on the shelves with all the other DVD boxed sets. It was the spirit in which it had been revived and how this tarnished the entire enterprise. Doctor Who began life as the work of cranky eccentrics who had difficultly playing nicely with other children and ended up writing for the BBC because they wouldn't have lasted two weeks as a milkman, and this was when the BBC believed it knew better and had a duty to educate the thickies whether we liked it or not. It believed it knew better because it was a cultural institution rather than a purely financial enterprise, dedicated to promoting elevated thoughts, arts, and in part to the literature of awkward anti-establishment buggers like Orwell and Huxley. Even as the BBC evolved, it retained some of this element, which continued in the Who novels during the nineties due to their similarly being the work of individuals pleasing themselves rather than a corporate agenda, and individuals raised on the work of cranky eccentrics who had difficulty playing nicely with other children.

The show returned in 2005 as a product designed by committee to provide optimum entertainment value to specific consumer demographics, retaining a percentage of its former typically English idiosyncracies for the sake of brand identification, then filling in the rest with proven formula material which had been seen to work for Babylon 5, Buffy the Ratings Slayer and others - notably a shitload of catchphrases, generic emotional crises, and more boo-hooing than your average Mexican telenovela, sweetie. Its anti-authoritarian content had been commodified as a marketing strategy. I'm probably repeating myself here, but it's relevant to what follows, and it brings me an almost sexual sense of satisfaction to upset those who might be upset by the above.

Anyway, to get to the point, there I was wading through yet another Peter F. Hamilton housebrick when I got to page three-hundred and just couldn't go on. I needed a break so I read Daniel Bristow-Bailey's The Ruins because it was short and had just turned up in the mail; and yet I still couldn't quite face getting back into The Dreaming Void so I picked this because I once read Who books to the point of obsession, thus quantifying The Infinity Doctors as comfort food; plus I vaguely recalled not quite getting it first time around, and Lance Parkin is clearly not lacking in talent so there was an appealing mystery there.

Despite that Doctor Who can be used to tell absolutely any kind of story, Whovian pod-kidults tend to argue over this book due to its featuring an ambiguous incarnation of the Doctor occupying an alternate non-canonical history; or it could be the first Doctor before he left Gallifrey, or the Eighth, or the last one, but the truth is that it doesn't matter. Oddly, I've only just noticed that the title makes most sense as a conflation of The Three Doctors and Arc of Infinity, television stories featuring Omega, the Time Lord who invented time travel and in doing so got himself trapped inside a black hole; and this tale riffs on both of them. Odder still is that much of it reads quite strongly as a television production in written form. By this I'm not referring to the tendency of certain Who authors who would quite clearly love to be writing something for telly, but find themselves obliged instead to plump for second best, a mere book which is pants because books are boooring innit, thus resulting in what is usually just a script with the phrase he said grinningly inserted hither and thither. Lance Parkin knows better than that, as is demonstrated by those portions of The Infinity Doctors which I suspect may serve as homage to Stephen Baxter, particularly the nosebleed physics, the wonderful descriptions of the process of universal expansion and so on, plus a mention of The Time Ships and the presence of a fictional element named baxterium.

Rather, the narrative unfolds as though we're watching a sequence of scenes upon a stage, rarely with a cast of more than five - some of them probably English character actors with lines provided by a BBC script writer, not least the Baldrickesque guard who refers to one of the Time Lords as that bloke. I suspect this is deliberate given the element of homage in combination with a few peculiarly self-aware passages, most notably:

'The best thing about books,' the Doctor confided to his fellow diners, is that you can always tell when you're getting to the end. No matter how tricky the situation the hero's in, you hold the book in your hand and think, hang on, I'm two-hundred and twenty-nine pages in, with only another fifty-one to go. It started slow, but it's building to a climax. This menu, though, with every single detail spelled out for you on an infinite number of pages is just dull. Where's the fun if everything's possible?'

...and yes, this monologue does appear on that very same page with another fifty-one to go.

There's a lot to recommend The Infinity Doctors, but its ambition somewhat outstrips its achievement, at least for me. It successfully invokes more ponderous television episodes such as The Keeper of Traken - with everything played as stagey pseudo-Shakespearian - but not quite by terms which work consistently on the page. The result is that some of the tale is unfortunately a little dull, leaving an overall impression of dramatic progression without much descriptive evidence of the same or any strong suggestion of there being anything much at stake; and of the fifty-one pages still to go, I managed about twenty before I lost interest and reluctantly shuffled back to The Dreaming Void.

The Infinity Doctors reads like a story stretched out to a much greater page count than was really necessary - much like Savar's TARDIS - or perhaps simply like something which could have used a further rewrite just to tighten up the saggy bits. It certainly has its moments and is in no sense a bad book, but Lance Parkin has written better.

Batman Incorporated

Grant Morrison & Jim Nick Nick Davidson Batman Incorporated (2012)
Ever since Stewart Lee described him as such, I can't quite pull back from thinking of the guy as Batman the children's character, and probably because I've never really found him that interesting. Although I haven't read it in a while, I recall loving Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns in which our man is portrayed as a vicious nutcase, which seems about right. He's more or less a vicious nutcase here, but a vicious nutcase inhabiting a story which may as well be derived from the goofy 1960s television show, albeit a version of the  goofy 1960s television show without much in the way of humour.

The story is that Batman, having decided that crime is a disease and that there's only one cure and so on and so forth, trains a whole team of international Batmans so as to cure the disease of crime on a global scale. It starts well enough, and seems beautifully told regardless of whatever it is that's actually being told, and then it sort of gets lost in an undifferentiated mush of narrative and stuff you might understand if you're some kind of Batman expert, which I'm not. I'm all for showing rather than telling so as to instil a comic book with the portentous atmosphere of a Fassbinder film, but occasionally it helps to tell your audience what the fuck is happening, particularly when what you're showing is mainly ingenious plot points and obscure references to Jorge Luis Borges punctuated with scenes of Batman kicking someone's head in. It tends to give the impression that the point of this comic is principally as a vehicle for Jim Davidson's beautifully cinematic illustrations of Batman descending upon ne'er-do-wells from tree, balcony or tall building and then kicking their heads in; so it's more or less Judge Dredd, except there's a point to Judge Dredd and it's usually funnier.

Come to think of it, I very much enjoyed Keith Giffen's Batman in the old Justice League comics, but then the point of that Batman was giving the other characters something to take the piss out of.

Raving Communist that I apparently must be, the thing I took from Batman Incorporated is more or less the same thing I take from Donald Trump's presidential campaign - tough on crime but protect your investment in the causes of crime, so let's get the drug dealers and kick their heads in and shit. Chavs too - let's add them to the list whilst we're here, the greedy bag-snatching work-shy fuckers.

Conversely, I suppose you might point out that we also have a Native American Batman here - which is a nice idea - and Morrison takes the trouble to explain in the appendix how he identifies and empathises with the slow genocide of the native American because he went to a reservation and it was a lot like some parts of Glasgow.

Great.

Well, it's not so much an appendix as pages of Jim Davidson's preliminary sketches, mostly of amazing new character sensations - some of whom you'll miss if you blink whilst reading the actual comic - notarised by Morrison listing the obscure 1950s issue of Detective Comics in which they first appeared.

Also there are schoolgirls wearing stockings and suspenders, like they do. Phwoaar! Eh? Eh? They love it!

I have no idea what I've just read, but it wasn't for me.

Jim Davidson didn't really draw it by the way. I just couldn't be arsed to type out the four million names of those who did, although they all did a really tremendous job.

Great.

Labyrinths

Jorge Luis Borges Labyrinths (1964)
I was beginning to get the feeling that almost everything I've ever read might either be traced back to Borges or else somehow prefigure his writing, but I never actually located any of his writing in the usual book stores and, in any case, probably wasn't in a huge hurry to do so due to a niggling fear of finding myself way out of my depth. Almost everything I've ever read is admittedly something of an exaggeration here, when really I mean certain things I've read which have made a significant and particular kind of impression on me - Philip K. Dick and certain looser strains of science-fiction, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, and a few other comic strip authors. Borges seems either an originator or an otherwise significant name in the history of books within books, seemingly self-aware narratives reflecting  the readers' existence as potentially no less a fiction than that which appears on the page. His central point seems to be that reality is a function of language, or something of the sort, and he illustrates this over and over in a series of surprisingly succinct short stories and essays. Curiously, the dividing line between what constitutes fiction and what constitutes an essay in Borges' oeuvre is ambiguous as he tends to employ each form towards similar ends, whether it's an analysis of Cervantes' Don Quixote, or the fiction of the writer who strives to rewrite the same.

He did not want to compose another Quixote—which is easy—but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.

Peculiarly, there are points at which Borges reminds me of Woody Allen, specifically the absurdity of Without Feathers.

Do I believe in God? I did until Mother's accident. She fell on some meat loaf, and it penetrated her spleen. She lay in a coma for months, unable to do anything but sing  "Granada" to an imaginary herring.

Compare, for example, the tone of the above with that of Borges' The Library of Babel:

The mystics claim that their ecstacy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.

This actually reminded me of laughing until my sides hurt over an article in an old issue of Brian Moore's Head football fanzine presenting a fictitious history of the introduction of football to colonial Africa: our Livingstonian narrator arrives at the remote village and realises that the locals have failed to grasp the point of the game once he sees their circular pitch with its single set of goalposts erected at the centre. I'm not trying to denigrate Borges here so much as illustrate his finely-tuned sense of the absurd, albeit in an informally Surrealist or Symbolist context, and how this renders some seriously headachey philosophical points as entirely more readable than they probably have a right to be, even compellingly so.

Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1883, Carlyle observed that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they are also written.

Which would be more or less the same as the point at which Grant Morrison has Animal Man look out of the page at his reader and exclaim 'I can see you!', except Borges states his case in clearer terms which are much more difficult to refute - I would argue - not least in the essay in which he more or less proves - at least in philosophical terms - that words constitute reality; unless I imagined that one.

There's much more in Labyrinths than I could hope to summarise, even had I understood all of it, so I'll close by stating that it has depths within depths and yet remains mostly as clear as an unmuddied lake. His reputation seems entirely warranted.

Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys

Will Self Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (1998)
During the three days it took me to read The Divine Invasion I came across at least two references to Finnegans Wake and three to Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, which struck me as odd given that only one of these occurred in relation to Dick's novel, popping up as I was skimming some background detail, and I'm not actually convinced I'd heard of Borges before. Now looking into the internet ephemera relating to this specific collection of short stories by Will Self, once again I come across the name of Borges. It's as though the cosmos is trying to tell me something, which is of course relevant to Philip K. Dick, possibly also to Jorge Luis from what I gather, and certainly to Will Self.

All three write or wrote within different regions of the vague hinterland of magic realism - or let's at least assume as much for the sake of argument - writing the impossible as common place, and the common place as magical. This squares neatly and synchronously with a line from third century Christian writer Tertullian quoted in Dick's Divine Invasion: Certum est quia imposibile est, roughly amounting to this thing is improbable and is therefore plausible; which in turn relates to Dick's observation regarding the surreal science-fiction novels of A.E. van Vogt, that fiction is often more convincing when things don't quite add up, when loose ends remain unresolved, because that's how real life occurs.

Arriving finally at my point, the above should probably be taken into account with Self's fiction, which dutifully invokes a reality at least as richly anatomical and honest as Lucian Freud's paintings of sagging breasts and wonky eyes, and which convinces to the point of defusing any surprise, any suspension of disbelief that might ordinarily be required when things turn weird. Amongst these stories are insects forming themselves into letters so as to spell out sentences across a work surface, requesting that the human in residence kindly cut it out with the fly spray; and there's the baby whose first words are revealed to be spoken in business German; and the emotos - twelve foot tall engineered humans whose sole purpose is to cuddle their neurotic upwardly mobile owners; and yet you never really notice that what you're reading is essentially barking mad.

In case it needs restating, language really is Will Self's bitch, and not just for the weird stuff smuggled in below the radar, but the basic flawless detail of characterisation. His crack-smoking aspirant yardies read as they should without any of the I sat next to one on the bus and isn't that Will Smith great deal that sometimes comes with black characters written by patently Caucasian Oxford graduates. More astonishing still is The Nonce Prize, set mostly in the sexual offences wing of a prison which briefly details a truly repulsive child abuse case without the faintest suggestion of a gleefully smirking author pushing those shock buttons in the hope of a reaction - the sort of thing Iain Banks never quite manages and which renders Irvine Welsh unreadable.

As a collection of short stories, this one isn't even Will Self's best effort, but it's still impressive.