Spike Milligan - Where Have All the Bullets Gone? (1985)

 

I'd drifted away from funny books into more po-faced territory by the time this, the fifth of Spike's war memoirs, was published; but having read the first four, and feeling I owe it to my younger self, here I am again. The previous volume closed in harrowing fashion with Spike binned up in Italy with shell shock and an attendant absence of jokes and one liners. I was assuming this volume might represent a deeper descent into the psychological twilight, but no. Spike recovers despite the best efforts of the British Army, who arrange for him to continue his convalescence at a medical facility in close proximity to Mount Vesuvius just as it's about to blow; but in sunnier news, the war is over with Mussolini hung upside down in a garage somewhere. Somehow, this doesn't end the memoir because rather than being sent home as one might expect, Spike and pals continue to bum around Italy for another year, mostly entertaining the troops while playing in a variety of jazz bands, or possibly swing bands - something you dance to anyway. I assume the British Army hung around in Italy after the war as part of some clean up operation, or maybe getting the country back on its feet - Spike doesn't go into detail on this or even much else of the bigger picture unless I blinked and missed it.

Not that it matters because the author clearly never intended to bump heads with A.J.P. Taylor, instead delivering a worm's eye view of the war as many of us working classes would have experienced it - as something too vast and remote to comprehend except when the bombs are dropping directly onto our heads. Now, as the fighting retreats and dribbles away to nothing, our man catches up with himself and the job of existence, torn between the loss of all that was familiar and the pleasures of sun, sea, a different country, and not being shot at on a daily basis. The barrage of jokes and zingers is tempered with pleasantly reflective interludes of the kind experienced when realisation dawns that you've been through hell and survived. It's conversational and with an impressionist grammar that's more or less its own thing, which can be frustrating for anyone wondering why we're suddenly in Florence, or Naples, or wherever else, but is probably the only way to capture this kind of history. That said, the notes and letters reproduced solely as photographs - leaving us to struggle with Spike's handwriting or a typewriter which obviously needed a new ribbon - seem more trouble than they're worth, but your own mileage may vary.

Also, Harry Secombe finally shows up, in case anyone was wondering, and is a lot more funny on the page than I'm afraid I remember him being in real life. It isn't War and Peace*, but it's pleasantly substantial and satisfying compared to at least one of Spike's earlier, scrappier memoirs.

*: I haven't read it either.

Richard Webber - 50 Years of Hancock's Half Hour (2004)

 

In my own personal hierarchy of character comedy - where the belly laughs are generated by a performance more than a description or a representation - you have Laurel & Hardy, Hancock's Half Hour, then everything else with a substantial drop off just after Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? and before you ask, no - Young Sheldon didn't make the cut. With the dynamic of the cast and what they achieved in Hancock's Half Hour, the radio show represents something of a lost golden age for me in its faithful preservation of actual working class humour, the sort of stuff which kept us going through many a back-breaking slog in the warehouse, the factory, the car plant or walking the streets. Much of the humour was presumably born from the same battered camaraderie which helped men such as Spike Milligan survive the horror of the Second World War, which also meant that early radio comedy tended towards variety - short improbable sketches interspersed with music replicating how the concert party once kept the troops entertained. The great leap forward introduced by Hancock's Half Hour was its loose concession to realism, favouring recurring characters in short comic plays rather than unrelated sketches punctuated by singing. To call it the first sitcom, as does the author, may be stretching a point, but its long term influence on the genre was substantial and should not be underestimated; and most important of all, it was fucking funny.

Webber does a fantastic job of documenting the show in the context of its era with copious support from the testimony of writers, cast members, and others, while keeping the humour firmly in sight - as opposed to crushing the sheer joy out of the thing by pinning it to the dissecting table. There's also a complete episode guide for both radio and television series along with two untransmitted scripts in their entirety from Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. I still regularly listen to what Hancock I am able to thanks to the 2001 release of all surviving episodes as fancy CD boxed sets, because the humour and pathos ages more like a fine wine than jokes cracked seventy years ago; so this tome is probably as close as I get to a Bible.

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall

Spike Milligan Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall (1978)
The fourth of Spike's war journals opens with a slightly testy rebuttal to Clive James having described a previous volume as an unreliable history of the war. Whilst I'm sure it's true that, as Spike claims, he spent a lot of time getting his dates and facts right, Monty was erratic even by Spike's standards with those doubtless correct dates and facts speckled by jokes, comic asides, and absurdist sketches to the point of giving the impression of it having been edited by shoving everything loose into a carrier bag. Mussolini accordingly feels a bit more substantial, striking a fine balance between what happened and how stupid it seemed at the time.

Having read this one before, I recalled it as a harrowing volume concluding with a shell-shocked Spike gibbering away to himself in a secure facility; but my memory is off-kilter here. It's mostly light, or as light as one might reasonably expect under the circumstances, with shell-shock bleaching only the last twenty or so pages of humour.

As is probably obvious from the title, this volume records Spike's posting to Italy in 1943, and the eschewing of comic illustrations in favour of a higher, more thorough word count does well to capture the grinding misery and mundanity of warfare - in this instance, mostly waiting around in the pissing rain, terrible food, not enough sleep, and not much idea what the bigger picture looks like - contrasting wonderfully with the sublime experience of a few days leave in Amalfi, for one example.

Spike gives good account of how it looked from ground level, even expressing genuine sympathy for the occasional deceased German. As with anyone who ever had to get their hands dirty, he doesn't have much time for the bullshit of those higher up; and to hilarious effect when reporting a fire in the officers' mess, with the hated and officious Major Jenkins scrabbling to rescue his possessions from the conflagration, oblivious to a resentful Gunner throwing it all back on again.

There are a few later volumes of these war memoirs that I've never read, but this one seems to have been the best of those published at the time, reading as a proper autobiography beyond it being the work of someone more at home penning radio plays about hurlers of batter pudding. There was always a certain pathos to Spike's humour, even if it wasn't always obvious, and Mussolini is a powerful account in that respect.

The Making of the Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle

Joel McIver
The Making of the Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (2005)
Here's an oddity, one of a series of books examining classic movies - classic movies such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Scarface and er… The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle.

Me neither.

I guess the general public must have been similarly mystified given that I picked this up cheap from a remaindered section somewhere in the general vicinity of its publication date. It's been sat on my bookshelves ever since, five different bookshelves given the number of times I've moved house since my presumed purchase - presumed because it's a vague impression rather than a definitive memory. I assume it's been there sandwiched between Lydon and Milligan all this time, somehow eluding even those sweeps deliberately intended to select volumes I never got around to reading. Similarly, I've seen The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and don't remember much about that either. I rate the soundtrack album quite highly, and even Moorcock's bizarre pseudo-novelisation of the film is pretty great, but the movie itself…

McIver's autopsy handily includes a scene by scene synopsis, thus allowing me to remember why I've failed to remember the thing, specifically that it was mostly existing footage cobbled together like a last minute homework assignment which cleverly admits to being crap in the hope we won't notice that it is, in actual fact, crap; plus it was McLaren's vision of the Pistols and therefore pretty much a complete waste of time.

Nevertheless, in discussing a movie which wasn't anywhere near as amazing as I hoped it would be when I was fourteen, McIver pulls together all sorts of fascinating historical details which somehow failed to make it into other Pistols biographies, or were else so underplayed that I didn't notice. Sid, in particular, comes out of it quite well, and actual light is shed upon why he almost certainly wasn't responsible for killing his girlfriend, which is good to know; and crap as the film was, Julian Temple's justification is interesting. Even Russ Meyer comes out of it well enough to suggest his version might have been worth a look, had it been made.

It's surprising that anyone should have found something new to say about punk rock in 2005 - or if not new, at least something obvious which hadn't been said before - but McIver pulled it off. I'm still not too bothered about watching the movie ever again, but I'm glad this thing found its way onto my shelves.

Monty - His Part in My Victory

Spike Milligan Monty - His Part in My Victory (1976)
I needed something light after On the Road, and this was funny when I was fourteen - or whatever age I would have been when I first read it - so here I am again. Monty is part three of Milligan's memoir of the second world war, reading more like the second part of Rommel? Gunner Who? than a book by its own terms, accounting for just four relatively uneventful months of 1943 in what is a distinctly slender volume. Spike and his khaki pals spend most of Monty bumming around North Africa prior to their posting to Italy, as described in the fourth volume and requiring a much darker tone; so I guess the point of this volume was mostly to round things up and keep it all tidy. Most of this occurs on the periphery of the war so there's no combat, mostly just getting by in a foreign land, missing home, and so on. As with the previous volume, the story is told through a blend of text, hastily drawn cartoons, stock photos embellished with ludicrous captions, and sheer fantasy presumably capturing the spirit of Spike's experience better than would a more sober and rigidly autobiographical monologue.

The weirdest thing for me has been that it's essentially a much shorter, funnier On the Road, with consequence being something only ever occurring over the next hill and the same jazz obsession - although frankly I prefer Spike's wacky populist version to Kerouac's hipster cat bollocksarooni. Beyond a few admittedly solid chuckles, Monty doesn't really do a whole lot, but the modest page count doesn't allow time for boredom to set in so complaints would seem churlish; plus knowing what the next book has in store for the poor bastard, only a twat would have a problem with this volume.

Rommel? Gunner Who?

Spike Milligan Rommel? Gunner Who? (1974)
I first read this as a teenager in the seventies, when most of those named therein as Milligan's pals were still alive, as was the working class culture from which they were drawn forth to fight the rise of Nazism. It seems safe to assume that nearly everyone named in this book is now dead, and I probably belong to the last generation to recognise the environment. Rommel? Gunner Who? was written thirty years after the events it describes, and nearly fifty years have passed since it was written. I'm still not sure how to process this information.

As you possibly know, it's the second of Spike Milligan's war journals, detailing his daily life, having been sent to man the guns in north Africa. As part of an artillery regiment, his experience of the second world war was, at least for the first half of 1943, as something occurring over the next hill - a distant point at which shells were fired, and from which shells were returned in retaliation. It probably wasn't the worst part of the fighting to have been caught up in, but there were nevertheless casualties and the humour is very obviously the thing which kept them from losing their marbles.

Its composition is somewhat haphazard compared to that of the first volume, reading as an assemblage of memoirs - some in much greater detail than others - jokes, comic scripts taking the piss out of the enemy, and jottings which might almost be the preliminary shorthand notes for the book - suggesting that he never quite got around to writing the thing in full and simply handed what he had in to the publisher on the grounds that it worked fine as it did and didn't  require transformation into anything more respectable.

A line of black clad Arab ladies carrying pitchers moved liquidly by. 'You'd think their old man would buy 'em a suitcase,' said Chalky White.

'How you gonna carry bloody water in a suitcase?'

'Look, I just think of the ideas, it's up to the wogs to make 'em work.'

There are quite a lot of wogs in this book, and the term would - lest it need stating - leave me somewhat uneasy in almost any other context, but the context here is that of young working class men spending at least some of the time trying hard not to think about whether they'll still be alive in six weeks; and there's nothing particularly mean spirited in their casual dispensation of this racial slur, or any others for that matter, just anger with the circumstances and at having to get on with it regardless. I mention this because Spike's bunch were patently good people for the most part, and they remind me of people I worked with - often from the same part of London, as it happens - and I grow tired of the demonisation of the working class by humourless fuckers who have taken it upon themselves to police our language on our behalf because they went to better schools than we did; and I fear that the people who still get this will one day all be dead, with entire tracts of valuable human experience whitewashed out of existence because of a generation so insecure that it can't stand anything not made in its own fragile image.

Anyway, once you get into the rhythm of this thing, the humour is both relentless and infectious, despite the disjointed rhythm of prose turning to script, punctuated with absurdly captioned but otherwise unrelated photographs or engravings. I have a feeling that this telling of the events of a few months in north Africa by means of what amounts to collage may actually serve as a better record of the mood which Spike was hoping to record than the more traditional narrative of this happened, then this happened, and here's how we felt about it. Strangely, the technique allows for a sense of creeping unease without requiring detail beyond a few incongruously pensive passages describing the writing of the book, Spike's communication with old friends regarding the same, and even a few nightmares from the time. It's a riot, but you can tell that he knew what was coming, and that he knew it would be terrible.

As to why anyone would make jokes about anything so terrible as the second world war which, lest any of us should have forgotten, led to the routine industrialised slaughter of six-million Jews, the answer is because we have to; otherwise the enemy have won.

Adolf Hitler - My Part in His Downfall

 

Spike Milligan Adolf Hitler - My Part in His Downfall (1971)
I read this - and this very same copy - when I was fifteen and doubtless pissed myself with laughter. I read it again at some point in the nineties and was left with a vague impression of it being relatively sober in comparison to Milligan's subsequent war memoirs, as though he was still trying to write a proper grown up autobiography without being quite sure why. Now I've read it again and have gone back to my initial reaction, or at least something more in that direction. I haven't actually pissed myself with laughter, but I've chuckled because it's often funny, and the humour has aged well for me. It may also be significant that the last Milligan I read was Puckoon, which mostly tried too hard and failed. However, Puckoon was a novel where Adolf is autobiography, and autobiography describing what must have been a truly terrifying time, freeing the author from the onus of delivering one gag after another, instead allowing his humour to settle in a more natural configuration across the events of the early forties.

It's fascinating for me because I lived within walking distance of the Milligan family home in south-east London for more than a decade, so the account opens on what is very much familiar territory. It's also fascinating because this is the second world war as seen from ground level, from what is very much an authentic working class perspective, part of a narrative which has become very much sidelined in recent times, not least by the current appetite for the past recontextualised as cutesy heritage product in service of some exhausting contemporary dialogue - and if you're waiting for the diatribe about momentary lapses of judgement such as Curry & Chips or the Pakistani Daleks, then you may actually be part of the problem.

There were the deaths of some of my friends, and therefore, no matter how funny I tried to make this book, that will always be at the back of my mind: but, were they alive today, they would have been first to join in the laughter, and that laughter was, I'm sure, the key to victory.

The victory he's referring to was - obviously - over Adolf Hitler, Fascism, screaming Nationalism, and the drive to reduce human society to a black and white world of good and evil with dogmatic and definitive answers to complex issues reducing the need for actual cognition. I'm sure we're all aware of the traditional role of the funny man as jester, the one who uses humour to express that which might be otherwise frowned upon. Well, Milligan's work still fulfils that role with devastating wit, humanity, chilling insight, and even poetry. We should try not to forget that.

Without Feathers

Woody Allen Without Feathers (1972)
I have no illusions regarding the possibility of Woody Allen having turned out to be an absolute shocker - before anyone feels compelled to begin a sentence with don't you realise that... but I remember when he was funny, and I remember reading this book when it had cartoon Woody as a plucked chicken on the cover and laughing my ass off.

I have decided to break off my engagement with W. She doesn't understand my writing, and said last night that my Critique of Metaphysical Reality reminded her of Airport. We quarrelled, and she brought up the subject of children again, but I convinced her they would be too young.

It still makes me laugh, even that punchline. I'm still not sure that I believe in cancel culture as an actual thing, but I sure am tired of new puritans attempting to police my reading habits, almost to the point of actively seeking out that which has inspired a thousand whiny blogs; but, as I said, I'm here mainly because I wanted to find out whether it was still funny, and whether it had ever been funny. I have some vague recall of Allen's Love and Death being side-splitting when first I saw it, and yet it barely raised a smile during a more recent viewing.

Revisited in 2021, Without Feathers reveals itself as surprisingly formulaic with most of these reprinted New Yorker articles reliant upon the same peppering of the grandiose with small change absurdities as has served Monty Python, Spike Milligan, Vic, Bob and many others so well. Allen has a good sense of conversational dialogue, so mostly it works without the author grinning, winking, and digging you in the ribs every thirty seconds - which you wouldn't want, for obvious reasons. I've seen it suggested that Allen is essentially a creep, and that even this persona of the nerdy autodidact who ain't getting any represents a calculated projection designed to lure the vulnerable with their defences duly lowered; which may well be the case, but has no bearing on the fact of Without Feathers being still mostly funny. Furthermore, both The Whore of Mensa and Death, his Kafka-inspired one act play, are surprisingly profound, and enough so as to inspire the wish that things had turned out different - even with the possibility that maybe we're only talking about his later films being a bit more watchable.

For what it may be worth, Off the Wall is still a great album.

The Third Policeman

 

Flann O'Brien The Third Policeman (1940)

I've been aware of this one for a while but couldn't quite get past descriptions promising a comedy set in Ireland involving policemen. I've already read Puckoon and it wasn't that great.

Thankfully it turns out to be a comedy in the sense of Gulliver's Travels rather than Are You Being Served? and is both fairly dark and massively fucking strange. More than anything, I'd describe it as a surrealist novel given the peculiar, slightly disturbing atmosphere derived from our man inhabiting a world where the laws of physics work by the logic of dreams. Specifically, if you've ever had one of those dreams wherein you realise you know how to fly or to work some otherwise superhuman power, but you know it's a dream so you have to tell yourself to remember exactly what to do so that you'll be able to do it when you wake up - and of course you always forget - well, The Third Policeman feels very much like one of those; so I suppose we're talking the general vicinity of Beckett.

Additionally, The Third Policeman approximately constitutes Menippean satire, and although it thankfully never quite becomes fully aware of its being a novel - which has become something of an overused trope, I feel - most other signifiers of the form are here, notably the book within the book - in this case the works of de Selby, a pseudo-philosopher who believes that, amongst other things, night is caused by an accumulation of dark air rather than the occlusion of sunlight. Quite a page count is used up in discussion of de Selby's crackpot ideas, many of which seem to echo those of Charles Fort, funnily enough, to the point of later chapters being squeezed up to the top of the page by lengthy footnotes concerning the man's imaginary works. The point of this specific focus is oblique but works because it seems to describe the nightmarish world inhabited by our unnamed narrator. Among de Selby's ideas we find, for example, that a person who rides a bicycle every day will eventually become part bicycle due to an exchange of atomic material between rider and transport, and so the bicycle itself will become partially human; which is explained with a straight face and thus maintains the integrity of the novel as a whole, as distinct from turning it into some awful Douglas Adams gag-fest. So it's funny, but you don't have to laugh if it seems inappropriate, as it most probably will.

The scene was real and incontrovertible and at variance with the talk of the Sergeant, but I knew that the Sergeant was talking the truth and if it was a question of taking my choice, it was possible that I would have to forego the reality of all the simple things my eyes were looking at.

Roughly speaking, we seem once again to be mapping the space between objective and subjective reality, which is possibly why so many of de Selby's peculiar ruminations seem to hint at the weirder findings of quantum theory - unless it's just me - as well as the aforementioned Fort. I can perhaps see why O'Brien claimed to have lost the manuscript when it failed to find a publisher back in the forties being as it sags a little in the middle, apparently spending an eternity in the police station - although that may well have been the point - but its growing reputation seems otherwise deserved.

Puckoon

Spike Milligan Puckoon (1963)
I was struggling with Lord of Light, and Zelazny's novel was proving more demanding than I can cope with during the ten o'clock slot prior to turning off the light and going to sleep. It was fine for the seven o'clock slot when I've just woken up and I'm eating toast, and my powers of concentration are up to the task, but the evening session was a waste of time; so I decided to switch to something lighter, less demanding just for the hour at bedtime, and there was this which I recall as having been side-splitting when I was fourteen.

Time hasn't been kind to Milligan, not in the sense of the decades passing having revealed him as not particularly funny, but some of this no longer packs quite the same punch as it once did, or seemed to do. The obvious objection would, I suppose, be the seemingly endless sublimation of chuckles from the laziest of racial stereotypes, but I'm not sure it's even that. Milligan's Irish are routinely stupid, comic alcoholics with barely a brain cell between them, even before we get to Ah Pong, the implausible Chinese policeman whose grasp of English is about as good as that of any Chinese character in a seventies sitcom. The racism is boring, mainly because it's so bleeding obvious, although it's probably significant that Milligan's fools tend to be underdogs who come out on top through agency of their own screwy wits. They are grotesques, the inhabitants of satire pushed to the limits of cliché for the sake of Dadaist absurdity, and so whilst the racism may seem a bit predictable, it isn't applied to the denigration of the characters or even to any particularly racist theme; which I suppose is why we don't view Milligan with quite the same disdain as Bernard Manning, aside from Milligan having been funnier, obviously.

Apparently it took him a couple of years to write Puckoon, and it shows. The premise is an idea which may well have reduced everyone to tears in the pub about fifteen minutes before chucking out time, but it needs more than it has here to make it work as a novel - something about the Irish border redrawn around the village of Puckoon, with the IRA smuggling bombs into the north by burying them in a coffin prior to the aforementioned reconfiguration. This is padded out to novel length by means of every other sentence being some kind of joke or pun playing on its predecessor, including passages in which our main character breaks the fourth wall and complains to the author about the quality of the legs which have been written for him. After a while it becomes exhausting, and you begin to wish he'd just tell the fucking story, whatever it was.

Milligan wrote better for radio, television, and as autobiography, or at least that's how I remember it, and although there's some wonderful turns of absurdist comic phrase here, it's not anything like as much fun as it wants to be.

The Terminal Beach

J.G. Ballard The Terminal Beach (1964)
I didn't get on very well with Ballard last time, finding Vermilion Sands to be kind of like reading one of those fucking awful David Hockney paintings of a Californian swimming pool. Having now read this one, I'm still not absolutely convinced about the guy, but the collection does at least have a little more in the way of texture. The Terminal Beach comprises twelve short stories - no shared narratives as with Vermilion Sands, although the beach theme reoccurs throughout and is specifically addressed in The Reptile Enclosure:

But I think the psychological role of the beach is much more interesting. The tide-line is a particularly significant area, a penumbral zone that is both of the sea and above it, forever half-immersed in the great time-womb. If you accept the sea as an image of the unconscious, then this beachward urge might be seen as an attempt to escape from the existential role of ordinary life and return to the universal time-sea...

So it's about thresholds, I guess, which makes sense given that Ballard writes at length about the future and just what the hell we're going to do when we get there, whether allegorically as with The Drowned Giant, or arguably more literally as with the story after which the collection is named - a thoroughly depressing portrait of life in the wake of environmental collapse. The surreal imagery, elegant prose, and general focus is such that you really don't have to regard Ballard as an author of science-fiction if you don't want to, and such categorisation seems mainly to acknowledge that it's simply a better fit than whatever else you might want to call it - as with Burroughs, Moorcock, Ursula LeGuin, Will Self and others.

The people of Vermilion Sands led lives of bland Mediterranean luxury. Whilst there's not too much of that here, Ballard nevertheless writes with a slightly detached quality so that while we witness effects we do not directly experience them, excepting possibly the violence of the bloke who - from what I can work out - willingly has his eyes pecked out by gulls in The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon, apparently as some sort of Oedipal gesture which went way over my head. It's not that any of these stories lack emotional content, or that Ballard should have included more injured puppies, but beyond the admittedly satisfying surrealism, I've found it difficult to fully engage with some of this material, or to really see why it might be desirable for me to do so. It might be the lack of humour, although clearly there are some nods in that direction and not everything has to be Spike Milligan; but in places it felt as though I was reading through a codeine haze.

Here among the blocks you at last find an image of yourself free of the hazards of time and space. This island is an ontological Garden of Eden, why seek to expel yourself into a world of quantal flux?

It makes sense quoted in isolation, but came across as generic philosophical landfill in context of the tale from which it is taken. Sometimes making some fucking sense can really help a story, you know?

Okay, so I enjoyed The Terminal Beach, albeit with certain reservations; and I'd say this is down to my own tastes rather than necessarily to Ballard's ability as a writer, although I still say his reputation is probably inflated somewhat out of proportion. Admittedly I've yet to read High-Rise or Crash or any of the other supposed classics, so I'll happily revise my opinion should I need to do so; and having read this lot, I can now at least imagine the possibility of the aforementioned being as wonderful as everyone seems to think they are.

Catch-22

Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
I guess I shouldn't feel so bad about failing to connect with yet another supposed classic of twentieth century literature given that a significant quota of the reviews I've found posted online seem to express a general sense of bewilderment, and actually I liked it more than most of the people who actively hated it, so I suppose there's that.

It's beautifully written, but extraordinarily repetitive. There's a point to the repetition but acknowledgement of the fact doesn't really help. Unless you've been living in the proverbial cave since 1961, you will almost certainly be aware that Catch-22 is about absurdity and contradiction, or rather it dissects the second world war in terms of these qualities. The catch of the title is the idea that Yossarian - around whom the novel revolves - aspires to get out of flying yet another bombing mission on grounds of insanity, an aspiration which unfortunately proves him to be entirely sane; and almost every page is crammed with actions rendered meaningless by this sort of circular logic, and there are nearly five-hundred pages. Harold Pinter employed similar devices, but usually required only an hour or so of our time to make his point. Kafka also managed it with greater brevity. My guess would be that Heller was simply hammering the point home, striving for a sort of scale vaguely analogous to a Rothko painting wherein no part of the canvas draws greater focus than any other; or if you prefer, the book is kind of boring, but maybe it's supposed to be boring, like Tony Conrad drawing a single note from his violin over the course of an hour because, as Eno puts it, repetition is a form of change. Maybe I'm getting carried away with the analogies, but I'm guessing the point is boredom plus absurdity times scale in contrast to the horror of the details, the bombing, the severed limbs flying all around, even the rape, all reduced to the absurdist wallpaper of conversations about shoes; for, as Kurt Vonnegut also discovered, war eludes description because the actual experience cannot be replicated, so it's easier to describe its psychological habitat.

Unfortunately though, the uniformity of absurdist surface texture serving to level everything out to actions of equivalent consequence makes it difficult for the reader, or this reader, to really care about any of it, or about who is even who. Such is the quality of writing, not least the jokes, that it's easy enough to keep on going, and is even a pleasure for the most part, so while I didn't feel inclined to pack it in at any point, I frequently found myself thinking that Spike Milligan's war diaries did pretty much the same thing but were funnier and more engaging, and so made the same points better.

I don't know if Catch-22 is quite a classic, although I guess it must be simply because we've all already agreed that it is - which is possibly ironic given that this is more or less what the book is about, namely a world which behaves in such a way entirely because we've agreed that it is so. I'd dispute its being anything like the roller-coaster described by the cover blurb of this edition. My best guess is that its popularity is in part mainly just numbers, and that it first saw print just as a great many Americans really began to ask themselves what the fuck just happened?; and in that context it's probably a better response than the gung-ho or else purely statistical alternatives.

On the other hand, Slaughterhouse Five is half the length, considerably more confusing, and yet clearly a fucking masterpiece, so maybe the previous three paragraphs really aren't much more than word salad and excuses.

The Quantity Theory of Insanity

Will Self The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991)
Collections of this kind traditionally suggest short stories gathered together from other, earlier sources, but The Quantity Theory of Insanity has so far as I am able to tell always been sold as Self's debut, and I've a hunch it may have been written as such. Whilst each of these six short tales is certainly self-contained, the book as a whole features such thematic blurring as to read like a novel, albeit a novel with its narrative simultaneously pointed in six different directions.

Prior to writing for a living, Will Self had a crack at stand-up comedy, and I was thinking about how both this and his stint on Shooting Stars made a lot of sense in view of these short stories, when I found an interview with The Literateur in which he says:

I did, and still do some stand up comedy so it came naturally to me, the idea of trying to make people laugh in that way. And I suppose that's how the stories in The Quantity Theory of Insanity, my first book, came to me. They were riffs to begin with, they were things that I would entertain people with - these preposterous stories. So it was a natural outgrowth of the sort of things I’d done before, turning them into more serious fiction.

Just to be clear, this isn't Spike Milligan. The humour runs deeper and darker, as in The North London Book of the Dead wherein it is revealed that the dead of the capital don't so much die as just move to a different part of the city; or Understanding the Ur-Bororo which introduces the world's most boring tribe; and then there's the title feature which takes Rupert Sheldrake's faintly ludicrous morphic fields a step further by classifying sanity as a finite resource varying from one place to the next much like air pressure; so for example, Sid's return to mental stability sees a decrease in ambient sanity elsewhere:

And the onion-growers? Well, even though we had to wait to quantify the data, we could see with our own eyes that they had started to exhibit quite remarkably baroque behavioural patterns. With Sid palliated they now not only believed in the beneficial agricultural influence of Ceres, they also believed that Ceres was a real person, who would be visiting them to participate in a celebration of the summer solstice. Some of the really enthusiastic communards even sent out to Lerwick for twiglets and other kinds of exotic cocktail eatables, all the better to entertain their divine guest.

The stories are linked in so much as characters and themes reoccur to map out a roughly coherent territory, although as with the assorted fruitcakes of the title story, the connections are metaphysical rather than causal.

Jesus. Did I just write that?

The Quantity Theory of Insanity holds together quite well as a sort of non-linear novel, which may be intentional given Self's interest in the psychogeographical, the logic of apparently random associations and so on. It seems subdued in comparison with his more recent writings, with some individual stories having too little narrative direction to really work in isolation - Mono-Cellular, if prophetic, is otherwise barely comprehensible.

He went on to better, weirder, and probably even funnier things, but this is nonetheless astonishing as a debut.