Red Son

Mark Millar, Dave Johnson, Kilian Plunkett & some other guys
Superman: Red Son (2003)
...and this is what I love about Mark Millar: just when you think you've had it with the guy and those stories in which he's basically waggling his dong at the local vicar, picking up Red Son for the first time is enough to wash away even the most unpleasant lingering stench - even the athlete's foot strength fetor of The Ultimates.

Red Son rewrites Superman for a world in which the well-worn origin story of escape capsules conveying infants from doomed planets occurs in the Soviet Union rather than the United States, roughly inverting the entire history of the cold war. Whilst Millar's understanding of the Communist USSR as described here probably isn't significantly deeper than it was in his wilfully ludicrous Red Razors strip of years gone by, neither is it precisely the crowing refutation of Socialism one might expect of an American publisher. This politically soft focus works quite nicely in maintaining the fidelity of all the grey areas necessary for the story to work, so we are forever caught between no-one quite being the bad guy, or anything objectively heroic.

With Superman in his corner, Stalin facilitates the spread of Communism across the globe, not so much through force as by means of natural economic and political evolution. That America in its isolation remains the supposed voice of freedom seems irrelevant as it is reduced to a state paralleling that of the former Soviet Union at the point of collapse, as it was in the real world. Without a single slogan fired or any of the gratuitously nasty crap for which Millar has become unfortunately famed, Red Son holds a mirror up to contemporary America and shows us - us seeing as I've been here for nearly five years now - and shows us what the last century felt like for everyone else, or at least for those on the receiving end of our foreign policy.

Millar seems to specialise in narrative details which anyone in their right mind would reject as unworkable - the big, the brassy, and the incredibly stupid; and his talent is to be found in holding everything together in such a way as to conceal just how ridiculous or overambitious it really is. When he gets it right, as he does here, it's a wonder to experience - a perfectly oiled machine taking all sorts of unexpected turns with poetic grace, seemingly the end result of a process of winnowing down all the details to just those which achieve perfection. Red Son falls a little way short of carrying the weight and intense atmosphere of Miller's Dark Knight, but really only a little way.

Tom Strong

Alan Moore, Chris Sprouse, Al Gordon & others
Tom Strong book two (2001)
At the risk of simply repeating whatever it was I said about the previous collection, Tom Strong is Alan Moore doing Supreme properly, as in without the baggage of Rob Liefeld, Image Comics, or the obligation of working with anyone else's playset. It's Moore's own brand mash-up of Superman, Captain Marvel, Doc Savage and others - the square-jawed good guy - starring in stories told just as they were way back when, loopy ideas, bright colours, and very little in the way of cynicism; and it reads as though aimed at children or at least younger teenagers, as I'm sure it is.

This presents a sort of problem in so much as Tom Strong so obviously speaks to an idea of teenagers as I guess Moore would like them to be - or would have liked them to have been fifteen years ago when this came out - rather than to actual teenagers who were probably more likely to have been playing Decapitator XII for Nintari X-Cube, or reading X-Men variants if they were actually reading comics at all. Tom Strong is pitched to a generation of kids who probably couldn't have cared less about Jack Kirby, or any of the hokey golden age team ups and crossovers so deftly parodied within - well, not even parodied exactly because most of it is played absolutely straight. This leaves the narrative light on substance, and yet heavy with material resembling subtext, or at least requiring a fairly thorough knowledge of the history of comics. This would tend to define a fat, old cunt like myself as the target audience, except I'm quite obviously not. The whole therefore comes across as lacking balance in some sense which is quite difficult to identify. The art, writing, and mechanics of how it all fits together are stunning, beautiful, perfection itself - and yet the whole somehow fails to engage, at least for me.

There's probably a clue as to why this should be in Space Family Strong, drawn by Hilary Barta in a style which I assume pays homage to Wally Wood's strips for Mad magazine. The tone is perfect - exaggeration and parody executed with affection which unwittingly and unfortunately throws the admittedly flawless artwork of Sprouse and Gordon into sharp relief as a good idea taking itself just a little bit too seriously. Even when Alan Moore fumbles the ball, he manages to do it in an interesting way and to make it look like it was deliberate.

Adventures of the Wishing Chair

Enid Blyton Adventures of the Wishing Chair (1937)
As a kid I led a sort of double life divided between home and the house of my grandparents. Whilst I've no reason whatsoever to criticise anything my parents did or didn't do, it was my grandparents who - presumably through having more leisure time and a slightly better budget - bought me books and encouraged me to read. My parents also bought me books from time to time, but otherwise generally left to my own devices. Of all the books I recall having read with my grandmother, Adventures of the Wishing Chair looms pretty large, at least equal to Brer Rabbit's a Rascal and six little Sir Prancelot picture books published by Collins. Naturally when I saw a copy in some junk shop in Shipston-on-Stour a few years ago, it was like the memory sherbert equivalent of a Diet Coke-Mentos explosion; and with it even being the same edition, I just couldn't not buy the thing. I'm not really in the habit of reading books aimed quite so squarely at those still half a decade short of being able to form dirty thoughts, but I refuse on principle to own anything purely for the sake of having it, and so...

As an adult, I've never been quite sure what to make of Enid Blyton or her work, and by weird coincidence I spent ten years of my life living across the road from her birthplace, as distinguished by the inevitable blue plaque on the wall above Plough Homecraft, from which I made regular purchase of screws, nails, tools and the like. I am aware of Blyton's oeuvre having accrued an unfortunate posthumous reputation for racist caricature, although I don't specifically recall anything of that sort in any of the books I read, at least nothing worse than the typical reinforcement of certain colonial-era values you find in children's fiction of a particular vintage, Rupert the Bear, Dan Dare, or whatever. This isn't to say that the casual racism didn't exist, only that I don't recall having directly encountered any of it.

Blyton's oeuvre also acquired a reputation for being of a low standard, one book churned out after another at the rate of something like fifty a year - formulaic, unchallenging, and lacking the obvious literary merit of a Winnie the Pooh or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Whilst there may be some validity to this accusation, it may equally be a case of condemning a horse for not being a cow given Blyton's aims and methods of composition:

I shut my eyes for a few minutes, with my portable typewriter on my knee. I make my mind a blank and wait, and then, as clearly as I would see real children, my characters stand before me in my mind's eye... The first sentence comes straight into my mind, I don't have to think of it. I don't have to think of anything.

And whilst we're rummaging around in Wikipedia:

If I tried to think out or invent the whole book, I could not do it. For one thing, it would bore me and for another, it would lack the verve and the extraordinary touches and surprising ideas that flood out from my imagination.

This presents the startling possibility of Enid Blyton having been the A.E. van Vogt - or even the André Breton - of children's fiction, and it is almost certainly to account for the appeal of Adventures of the Wishing Chair - that dream-like quality of casual surrealism splashed around all over the place without any obvious concessions to established narrative traditions.

The story begins with two very young middle-class children, Mollie and Peter, out on a mission to purchase a birthday present for their mother - all very commendable until, having bought a vase from a peculiar junk shop, they encounter the Wishing Chair. The chair sprouts tiny wings from its legs and will fly you wherever you wish to go, and because the wizard who runs the shop is freaking them out somewhat, they hop into the chair and fly away home. Reading this as a forty-nine-year old man, I must admit I found this blatant act of shoplifting a little weird given that neither the wizard nor his assistant - apparently a pixie - seem particularly malevolent or deserving of having their stock nicked by kids, and yet the chair is repeatedly referred to by Mollie and Peter as our chair from that point onwards.

Next they make friends with a pixie called Chinky - thankfully lacking obvious Asiatic characteristics, although the name still seems a bit of an odd choice to me - and Chinky serves as their intermediary with the realm of fairies, pixies, giants, and other mysterious creatures somehow inhabiting the castles of a world also including planes, buses, and trains to London. As intermediary, it is usually Chinky who presses the proverbial magic button, providing the means of escape from whatever situation the children find themselves in, which in turn most often results from the theft or appropriation of their magical chair - consequences here tending to be those which occur to would-be chair thieves, but not so much to the children themselves; so this is something in the tradition of a fairy tale without quite being one. The children are as isolated in their adventures as they appear to be at home with their play room at the end of the garden, kept far away from the adult world. Their adventures occur mostly as diverting novelties equivalent to play, incurring few serious consequences and requiring minimal agency on their part.

I can see the appeal of Blyton in how she speaks very directly to her intended audience and in their own terms. Adults remain principally remote figures not directly involved with the narrative, aside from a couple of chapters in which Mother briefly becomes yet another threat to Mollie and Peter's continued ownership of the Wishing Chair. The morality of the tales are fairly vague and rudimentary, mostly to do with the basic manners of those whom the children encounter, and with the children themselves held to slightly less rigorous standards.

The point here is, I guess, to engage with the very young audience without it feeling like a lecture, and I suppose this is where the accusations of poor literary merit come from. I can sort of see it, in so much as Adventures of the Wishing Chair commits most of the same crimes currently perpetrated by a certain telly show about a man in a blue box, although that isn't the same as saying that it doesn't do its job, or that it is without purpose of some kind. For all their potential flaws, Mollie and Peter come across as essentially likeable, even noble, and the tales for all that they may lack any overtly educational element, are engrossingly weird without too much to give young minds either a headache or nightmares.

Enid Blyton got children reading, and doubtless got children reading who might not have otherwise bothered. This was at least my mother's verdict, having herself been raised on Enid Blyton, so I guess my later introduction to Adventures of the Wishing Chair was simply a continuation of the family tradition. She knows they were terrible, as she has told me more recently, but loved them regardless. Bums on seats is never an indication of quality, but then neither is mass appeal necessarily an indication of its absence, and on the strength of this one I would say that Enid Blyton did what she set out to do very well.

Against Nature

Joris-Karl Huysmans Against Nature (1884)
About three of you may be aware that I myself once wrote a novel, and that it was similarly called Against Nature, and had previously languished for nearly a decade in publishing limbo answering to a variety of different names - Flatline, then The Other Side of the World, then The Hollow Hills, and finally The Empty Days. Eventually Stuart Douglas of Obverse Books took it upon himself to climb my lengthy beard - which at the time was dangling out of the window of the stone tower in which I had been detained - so as to effect my rescue, which was nice of him.

'I'll publish it,' he said, having very recently received a John Bull printing set for Christmas, 'but you'll need to give me a title, just something provisional which I can use when discussing funding with my many, many shareholders.'

I'd never really liked The Empty Days, and Against Nature just seemed to suggest itself out of the blue. The more I thought about it, the more I realised it was a perfect fit for the major themes of the novel. A few days later I realised that someone or other had already written a similarly named book of which I must surely have been aware on some subconscious level; and thusly did I hunt it down, reasoning that if I was going to nab his title, I might at least do Huysmans the courtesy of reading his version, even if only because such a course might prove useful in regard to my own efforts; and it was useful, not least because - aside from anything - Huysmans' Against Nature additionally carried certain themes in common with Sartre's Nausea, to which I was also alluding in certain sections of my own narrative, albeit mainly for the sake of general flavour.

Nausea is the story of a man experiencing revulsion at the conditions of his own existence, which is likewise the principal motivation of Jean Des Esseintes in Huysmans' novel. Huysmans seems to have been reasonably well established as a novelist in the Realist tradition when he published À Rebours, which in my general ignorance I presume to have paralleled related developments in the painting of the time, namely Gustave Courbet rejecting the romanticised portraiture of cherry-lipped toffs surrounded by cherubs in favour of regular working people with a bit of texture and very little in the way of sentiment. I gather that Huysmans may have tired of the possibly somewhat reductionist tendencies of his art, just as Des Esseintes' tastes become ever more rarified and refined, moving ever further from the mainstream.

He felt irritable and ill at ease; exasperated by the triviality of the ideas normally bandied about, he came to resemble those people mentioned by Nicole who are sensitive to anything and everything. He was constantly coming across some new source of offence, wincing at the patriotic or political twaddle served up in the papers every morning, and exaggerating the importance of the triumphs which an omnipotent public reserves at all times and in all circumstances for works written without thought or style.

Already he had begun dreaming of a refined Thebaid, a desert hermitage equipped with all modern conveniences, a snugly heated ark on dry land which he might take refuge from the incessant deluge of human stupidity.

So he shuts himself off from the world, dedicating his time to study of those few arts still apparently worthy of his attention and immersing himself in the artificial, seeking to fashion a new kind of human environment through stimulation of the senses. This is roughly where the title comes in, this being - I suppose - a pilgrimage against the natural, although it might also be taken to imply the spirit of opposition for its own sake, depending on where you are in the book.

After all, to take what among all her works is considered to be the most exquisite, what among all her creations is deemed to possess the most perfect and original beauty - to wit, woman - has not man for his part, by his own efforts, produced an animate yet artificial creature that is every bit as good from the point of view of plastic beauty? Does there exist, anywhere on this earth, a being conceived in the joys of fornication and born in the throes of motherhood who is more dazzling, more outstandingly beautiful than the two locomotives recently put into service on the Northern Railway?

There may be some use of comic effect here, but the passage nevertheless prefigures the Futurists and related Modernists singing their love of machinery; and as Des Esseintes furnishes his environment contrary to accepted standards of the time - particularly the garden - he specifically seems to foreshadow the Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe proposed by Giacomo Balla's 1915 manifesto of the same name. This may be significant given how heavily the Futurist tradition was rooted in that of Symbolism, both the artistic movement and as a general sensibility which Against Nature grasps with both hands, not least during extensive passages discussing the paintings of Moreau and Redon.

For much of his page count, Des Esseintes systematically works his way through nineteenth century culture - and any earlier culture considered of value in the nineteenth century - dividing what little wheat there is to be had from the great bulk of chaff. He goes through art, literature, philosophy, and religion finding each an endless source of disappointment, even ultimately tiring of what little he has left for himself at the end of the process - effectively painting himself into a corner, culturally speaking; and as he becomes further entrenched within his own isolation and increasing alienation, his health fails in concert. By the end of the novel, our boy is ingesting his meals by means of an enema in order to prevent further aggravating his already temperamental digestive system - which he of course regards as a triumph.

Des Esseintes could not help secretly congratulating himself on this experience which was, so to speak, the crowning achievement of the life he had planned for himself; his taste for the artificial had now, without even the slightest effort on his part, attained its supreme fulfilment. No one, he thought, would ever go any further; taking nourishment in this way was undoubtedly the ultimate deviation from the norm.

I suspect the reader may be forgiven a few chuckles at this juncture, and Huysmans does well to lay on the satire fairly thick at certain intervals without turning it all into caricature. Regrettably though, the prescribed course of enemas fails to improve the heath of our man who, at the end of the novel is commended by his doctor to return immediately to Paris and immerse himself in the ordinary and commonplace on peril of wasting away altogether.

I'm doubtless somewhat out of my depth here, but there's a lot going on in this one. Even without prefiguring Sartre's existential nausea and the fairly thorough mauling of nineteenth century arts, the narrative seems to present a warning against aesthetically - or possibly philosophically - cutting off one's own nose to spite one's face. Des Esseintes ends his great experiment driven back to that which initially so repelled him. It's dense but witty, and entirely lacking in anything resembling padding, and it greatly rewards repeated reading. I suspect there's a fair bit more to it than I've picked up on even this second time around; and should one feel so inclined, it probably wouldn't be such a leap of faith to find in Des Esseintes artificial world of scents and senses a precursor to Philip K. Dick's later psychologically artificial worlds - although I'm not sure how useful that would be unless you're Ridley bloody Scott.

Against Nature seems in many ways much, much greater than the sum of its parts, and it's a huge relief to realise that I've borrowed from a work of such distinct quality.

...and there's an interesting looking website dedicated to Huysmans and his writing here.

Red Lanterns: Blood and Rage

Peter Milligan, Ed Benes & Rob Hunter
Red Lanterns: Blood and Rage (2012)
There used to be a couple of DC comics of which I was quite fond way back in the mists of time - the Keith Giffen version of Justice League, Blue Devil, the New Teen Titans when Marv Wolfman was writing - but I've never been that deeply entrenched within DC mythology, and have always found myself bewildered by all that stuff about Guardians, Monitors, and going back to year zero every five years just in case anyone notices how Superman has been a teenager since 1930 and thus decides that this detracts from the staunch realism of the character. So I have no idea what the hell is supposed to have happened here. I have a vague knowledge of the Green Lanterns being some sort of super-powered intergalactic police force, but that's about it.

A couple of months ago, Junior - who is eleven - began to babble about the Red Lanterns during long car journeys, as ever predicating his monologue on the premise that people in their forties share most of his interests and will therefore give a shit about Minecraft and whatever other combination of noise and flashing lights he's adopted as self-brainwashing strategy of choice this week. I assumed these Red Lanterns to be either the wrong end of some stick he'd grasped at school, or a pointless console game variation on characters fondly remembered from Keith Giffen's Justice League.

Then I saw this in the book store and bought it out of curiosity, and because I remember liking a few things Pete Milligan wrote for 2000AD and Vertigo; which, if nothing else, impressed the living shit out of Junior who, so far as I understand it, had only experienced this stuff indirectly as the testimony of kids he admires in his class. So it turns out that several car journeys worth of verbal diarrhoea centred upon Red Lanterns, Green Lanterns, and even Yellow Lanterns is more or less on point thanks to yet another reboot of the DC universe; and just as Junior claims, they all have a motto, and the Red Lanterns are fuelled by rage, and one of them is a cat - or at least a cat as drawn by someone who has drawn a hell of a lot of grimacing superheroes but maybe not so many cats.

I say I remember liking a few things by Pete Milligan, but I suppose I mean mainly Bix Barton, Johnny Nemo, and his run on DC's Animal Man. I loved Shade the Changing Man at one point, but then went back for a re-read whilst working out which runs of comics I should flog on eBay in order to finance my moving to the United States, and I couldn't actually get through the first issue. It was Kathy's boyfriend I found objectionable, a black man whose role was apparently limited to getting killed by a stereotypical racist redneck from the deep south in order to upset everybody and legitimise traumatic experience as a substitute for character in the hope that no-one would notice it wasn't so much a story as a series of clichés strung together by someone apparently assuming that Deliverance had been a documentary describing the daily lives of everyone south of the Mason-Dixon. It struck me as nasty, cynical, lazy, and manipulative, even without the clumsy paradox of a hopefully anti-racist subtext based around an arguably racist reduction of this particular character to a one-dimensional human sacrifice.

Sadly, there's some of that here in this volume collecting the first seven issues of the comic. The Red Lanterns appear to be instruments of some sort of universal justice motivated by blind rage and the desire for revenge. Each of them became a Red Lantern after something terrible was done to them - and so we have more variations on Kathy's boyfriend slaughtered by a redneck serial killer in order to justify this, and it feels mostly just as cheap and obvious. Most of the revenge origin flashbacks star alien creatures in obviously fictitious environments which, oddly, doesn't really diminish the element of schlock horror despite there being nothing quite so close to home as in that first issue of Shade. One character turns out to have been an evil fucker prior to himself being wronged and thus set on the path of revenge, prompting some unconvincing philosophising about vengeance as a matter of cosmic balance beyond any moral concerns, roughly the sort of thing Boyd Rice keeps banging on about when not having his picture taken with white supremacists because he thinks it's funny, or wants us to think that he thinks it's funny, or whatever.

The art of Red Lanterns is competent in so much as it's the usual Rob Liefeld with a couple of life drawing classes under his belt - grimacing mouths full of sharp teeth, massive beach-ball tits, excessive perspective, a ton of cross-hatching, and everyone with the face of some guy who has been trying and failing to do a poo for at least the past two weeks. I suppose it's okay for what it is, except the previously mentioned cat doesn't really look much like a cat, and regular human civilian characters all seem uncomfortable in regular clothes, like they're missing the spandex and capes the artist would have preferred to draw.

Superhero comics have become a foreign country for me, and I couldn't find much to love about this one. It's kind of silly, which would be fine if it were for kids, I suppose, except I can't even tell whether it is or not, whether I'm the target audience or it's Junior, who clearly seems to love the thing. It has the narrative simplicity of something aimed at his age group, scattered with details which would suggest a much older target audience, and specifically somewhat gory details. The combination of the overly elaborate art and portentous first person narrative captions seems either misjudged or extraordinarily pretentious, and actually make me a little nostalgic for the days of ridiculous thinky clouds about how Louise sure is swell but must never find out that by night I wield the sword stalwart of Galaxy Knight!

I suppose it is what it is, and I suppose I've seen worse, but Red Lanterns seems somewhat lacking in redeeming features.

The Silent Thunder Caper

Mark Hodder The Silent Thunder Caper (2014)
Just to get it out of the way, I had some initial doubts about this one. Aside from my being pretty much a stranger to detective fiction in general, the somewhat cartoony cover just didn't inspire confidence, which I realise is probably a facile observation but it would be stupid to deny that cover art has no influence on my initial impression of a novel. Happily, holding a physical copy in my hand dispels all doubts, it being a pleasantly chunky doorstop of a hardback, beautifully put together and reminding me of the Dean & Son hardback children's editions of Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island and other classics my grandfather used to buy for me as a child in a sadly premature effort to introduce me to culture; and the cover works very nicely out here in the physical universe, and in a way which it doesn't on a screen for some peculiar reason.

As for detective fiction and the possibility of me being out of my depth, I dipped a toe into an anthology of Sexton Blake material some months back, most of which I enjoyed, so this isn't entirely unfamiliar territory, and not least because it's written by Mark Hodder - he who once so cruelly poured admittedly eloquent and descriptive scorn upon my overachieving sphincter back during our college days, despite my defence of it having been a bad pint, or something.

Anyway, down to business: Sexton Blake as some readers may already know is the star of a long running detective serial of over a hundred's years vintage, now under the wing of Obverse Books. Roughly speaking, he's the Sherlock Holmes who isn't afraid of a punch-up, but the more you read, the more he begins to feel very much his own distinct character. Mark Hodder, having been a fan of Blake for a long time and curator of Blakiana, the dedicated website, was a great choice as author to the first of what will hopefully be a long-running series. Even aside from the sort of attention to detail he brings to the regular cast of Blake, Tinker, Mrs. Bardell and others, his Burton & Swinburne novels have already shown him to be a thorough and expressive hand when it comes to period pieces of this kind. The Silent Thunder Caper strikes a fine balance, perfectly evoking the atmosphere of a time in which even the humble telephone was relatively new-fangled, achieving nostalgic effect without parody, and somehow avoiding any suggestion of affectation - the sort of thing you get when a nineteen-year old reads himself some Lovecraft and decides to have a go. Most surprising of all - at least to me - is how happily The Silent Thunder Caper sits in two places at once, constituting both solid Blake and a great Mark Hodder novel with the sort of political convolutions, elaborate plotting, and earthy humour which have served the Burton & Swinburne books so well. As ever, Hodder delivers an accomplished and thoroughly classy narrative, and anyone who has ever enjoyed his superior pedigree steampunk will find a lot to love here.

If not for the sake of comparison but nevertheless serving as such, this hardback also reproduces G.H. Teed's The Wireless-Telephone Clue from an issue of Union Jack first printed in 1922, an earlier Blake story serving as introduction for some of the characters of The Silent Thunder Caper. Teed seems to have been generally acknowledged as one of the best Sexton Blake authors, and his tale sits quite comfortable alongside Mark Hodder's continuation as both complement and contrast with a narrative which could probably have been condensed to a couple of pages in terms of incident, yet remains engrossing for a hundred or more.

I'm pleased and genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed this.

The Sirens of Titan

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The Sirens of Titan (1959)
This being my third Vonnegut, I've begun to notice certain themes and to recognise that the thoroughly wonderful Slaughterhouse Five was but one single work of a generally impressive set rather than the anomalous flash of brilliance I had assumed it to be. As with the first two that I read, Vonnegut spins a story so implausible that it can only be taken as allegorical, nailing that weird-looking thing to some sort of narrative backbone of such warmth, confidence, and wit that you don't really notice how stupid it is. Here, amongst other junk devices, we have a Martian invasion by the Army of Mars, somehow comprising expatriate Earth people with a dynamic that's more Beetle Bailey than Heinlein; and there's the millionaire who finances his own space mission, the stranded alien from Tralfamadore, the astronaut and his faithful pet, Kazan, the dog of space who, having travelled through a chrono-synclastic infundibulum find themselves beamed back and forth between Earth and Titan; and we learn that the entirety of human history has been manipulated from distant Tralfamadore so as to produce the spare part needed to repair the ship of Salo, the stranded traveller.

Suddenly I realise where Douglas Adams got it all from, most of Hitchhiker's Guide amounting to The Sirens of Titan read aloud by Eric Idle playing a perpetually embarrassed vicar; but happily the Vonnegut version doesn't spend its page count digging you in the ribs and smirking to itself, despite being considerably funnier and actually having something coherent to say.

The Sirens of Titan is about freewill, relativism, and the selfsame freewill looking one hell of a lot like predestination depending on where you're standing. There's the question of whether millionaire Malachi Constant has any choice in growing up to be an arsehole, given his upbringing, and whether he is capable of redemption once he loses all of his memories - clues to how much wiggle room he really enjoys given his phenomenal success on the stock market being based on a seemingly arbitrary pick of Biblical passages. Then we discover that the chrono-synclastic infundibulum is a phenomenon by which different, incompatible views of the universe are united; and finally there's the punchline of what human history looks like to a stranded machine from Tralfamadore, one to whom Stonehenge seen from above is actually a form of text reading replacement part being rushed with all possible speed.

Where I found Cat's Cradle to be a little messy, The Sirens of Titan is smooth, all parts well-oiled and sliding together with absolute harmony - as is probably essential given the John Heartfield collage of its constituent elements. This is probably the best book I've read this year.