Smax

Alan Moore, Zander Cannon & Andrew Currie
Smax (2004)
For anyone who may not know, Smax is a character from Moore's Top 10, a grunting blue giant given to thumping people whilst dispensing terse observations of a generally grudging disposition; and Top 10, in case that too should seem mysterious, is sort of a cop show set in a city populated by superheroes, but funnier than that probably sounds. The story of Smax, his background and origin, never really felt like a story which needed to be told, but I'm really glad that it was.

Smax is basically Alan Moore doing a Terry Pratchett, or if you prefer, giving fantasy fiction the treatment he dishes out to the superhero genre in Top 10; and so our blue man returns to his home dimension to defeat a dragon, and to do his best to not get married to his own sister. It's one of those tales which seems so simple and yet could have gone so horribly wrong at the hands of almost any other writer, or even at the hands of Moore himself under other circumstances; but it's cute without slipping over into twee, clever without being smartarsed, and the jokes are funny, even laugh out loud funny here and there.

After the mindfuck of nine-hundred-plus pages of Jerry Cornelius, Smax is exactly what I needed - warming and gentle without turning into Terry fucking Wogan; and in terms of this particular writer, it's also exactly what I needed after that Fashion Beast shite the other week. As with much of Moore's work for the America's Best imprint, you can really tell he had fun writing this book. Such a shame Wildstorm and DC had to go and fuck it up for everyone.

The Cornelius Chronicles

Michael Moorcock The Cornelius Chronicles (1977)
I had two of the four volumes collected within this housebrick a while back, having picked them up cheap under the impression of Jerry Cornelius probably being important for some reason or other; but I ended up giving the collection away without having read the thing, and I'm not quite sure why beyond that I wasn't a big reader in the nineties. Having since recognised Moorcock as a fucking genius, I'd been quietly kicking myself on this particular score for a while, so here we are, back where I started, and this time I have all four in a single volume and my brain is probably better attuned to this sort of stuff than it once was.

Truthfully, I'd been put off Jerry Cornelius by association with Grant Morrison's Gideon Stargrave strips in Near Myths magazine which, according to Moorcock, were essentially photocopies of his own character coloured in with a slightly different crayon; but Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time novels were decent enough to suggest that I should at least give Jerry a look, and on close inspection I see Moorcock was right, and that Gideon Stargrave is indeed a poor substitute for the real thing - Blink 182 when you could be listening to the Sex Pistols. It was specifically the affected flamboyance of Gideon Stargrave which always irritated the living shit out of me, so I'm amazed to read the genuine article and see that it can be done right, with wit, and without coming across like one of those seventies teenagers who used to walk to school with a Gentle Giant album under his arm and without the bag which would have prevented the rest of us seeing what he had and just how cool he was, how far ahead he was compared to everyone else. He'd probably even done it with a girl and everything.

Anyway, enough about that guy. I'd been warned that Cornelius is best read by just diving in, holding on tight, and not worrying too much over whether or not it makes sense. This was sound advice, although it's not so disjointed as I anticipated - at least not in the sense of a William Burroughs novel being disjointed. The Final Programme (1966) and A Cure for Cancer (1971) at least seem to follow vague stories, or else give a good impersonation of doing so. I've a feeling that it may be the latter - scenarios and set pieces arranged so as to suggest narrative without quite amounting to one, with the novels following a non-linear logic of their own, like a dream or a piece of music, or - if this isn't too obvious an observation - one of the weirder psychedelic albums of the era to which these stories refer.

It's significant that Jerry Cornelius is absolutely of his time, the sixties arguably being the point at which the ideas of the European avant-garde in art entered the mainstream and suddenly you had pop music taking its cues from Pierre Schaeffer or Marcel Duchamp. Hindsight has possibly dimmed the significance of this particular great leap forward, coming as it did with an intellectual dimension expressed as young people rejecting whatever behavioural models had already been set up for them by their parents' generation, but reading these novels is a great reminder of how dangerous such ideas once seemed, even the fact of their being ideas.

'These old fashioned rules no longer apply. Your sort of morality, your sort of thinking, your sort of behaviour—it was powerful in its day. Like the dinosaur. Like the dinosaur it cannot survive in this world. You put values on everything—values...'

'I think I can see a little of what you mean.' Marek lost his composure and rubbed at his face. 'I wonder... is it Satan's turn to rule?'

'Careful, Herr Marek, that's blasphemy. Besides, what you are saying is meaningless nowadays.' Jerry's hair had become disarranged as he talked. He brushed it back from the sides of his face.

'Because you want it to be?' Marek turned and walked towards the stove.

'Because it is. I am scarcely self-indulgent, Herr Marek—not in present-day terms.'

'So you have your own code.' Marek sounded almost jeering.

'On the contrary. There is no new morality, Herr Marek—there is no morality. The term is as barren as your grandmother's wrinkled old womb. There are no values!'

I get the impression this is additionally what Moorcock was doing with narrative, rejecting the tightly woven plotting of Sexton Blake and others in favour of something weirder, more organic, and certainly more provocative. What has surprised me most about reading this is suddenly realising where all those loopy sixties spy thrillers came from, The Prisoner, The Avengers, and ultimately Austin fucking Powers. Even the current, painfully self-conscious television version of Doctor Who looks a lot like it's trying hard to be Jerry from where I'm sitting. To veer off at a fairly substantial tangent, the position of Moorcock as a writer seems very much parallel to that of Hawkind, the band with which he has been closely associated, as memorably summarised by Nigel Ayers of Nocturnal Emissions in issue seven of The Sound Projector:

If you look at the whole of that so-called industrial scene from Cabaret Voltaire to Marilyn Manson, the band with the most far reaching influence wouldn't be Throbbing Gristle, but Hawkwind! This is something that they rarely mention in the press, as Hawkwind have this reputation as a British hippie band who do science-fiction and theatrics and therefore must be naff. Zoviet France have told me they were very keen on Hawkwind; SPK were well into Hawkwind back in Australia; and what are Graeme Revell and Brian Williams doing nowadays? Making soundtracks for science-fiction films - I rest my case! I think it's about time Hawkwind were reassessed. I have long been tired of those outfits who cite influences no-one has heard of, or can stand listening to. Back in the early '70s, Hawkwind were the first band I was aware of to popularise the idea of sonic attack, infra and ultra sound as a weapon. Listen to Sonic Attack on Space Ritual. That of course has long since been taken up by that whole noise scene, but Hawkwind were rarely acknowledged. If you look at the information war thing, you'll notice that Hawkwind had the post-modern writers, Michael Moorcock and Bob Calvert working with them. Though Moorcock is best known for his very popular science-fiction and fantasy genre work, it's more accurate to call him a postmodernist or at least a modernist. Moorcock pointed many in the direction of William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard and - stone me, he even wrote for Re/Search. When Hawkwind's In Search of Space came out in the early seventies, it came with a booklet of very similar material to what the London Psychogeographical Society, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, Iain Sinclair, and Tom Vague have been doing more recently. Whenever I used to see Psychic TV, I thought Hawkwind. Whenever I saw Throbbing Gristle I thought Hawkwind without the lights and without the tunes. That combat clothing thing - Hawkwind!

Of course, members of Hawkwind get walk-on parts in the third and fourth Cornelius books, so maybe the above isn't too great a digression. Reality logically intrudes upon Jerry Cornelius because it is our world to which his story refers, even at its wildest. Jerry is dead for much of The English Assassin (1972), or at least dead in some of its variant realities. Notable amongst the alternate worlds described in this volume are the proto-steampunk variants featuring Oswald Bastable from Moorcock's The War Lord of the Air, and Zenith from the Sexton Blake continuity for which Moorcock has also written, and there's the world - possibly our own - in which Jerry Cornelius is a fiction and A Cure for Cancer is only a novel. Generally speaking, The English Assassin is a parody of the establishment and the class system, rendered comic and ultimately stripped of meaning at a party with a guest list encompassing Frankie Howerd and numerous members of Hawkwind, amongs others. Over and over, it reveals institutions and traditions in collapse, returning to inert cultural material by a process of entropy, or even just boredom:

In the third bedroom of the Casa del Monte, seated on a black walnut panelled Lombardy bed, covered in seventeenth century carvings, the most corrupt and feeble-minded publisher in America sipped his vodka and tonic and stared sourly at his tennis shoes while one of the Oxford dons bored him with a long and enthusiastic description of the joys and difficulties involved in doing Now We Are Six into Assyrian. It was what they both deserved.

Whether intentional or not, this establishes Rupert Murdoch and J.R.R. Tolkien as essentially variations on a theme, or at least it does from where I'm sat. Only the lower orders - those with less to lose - survive more or less unscathed, as suggested at the close of the book with Mrs. Cornelius scoffing candy floss and contemplating bingo on the beach as she watches her offspring build sandcastles. When Moorcock novelised The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle he recast Irene Handl's nameless cinema usherette as Jerry's wonderfully coarse mother and its not difficult to see why. She is solid and eternal, unaffected by the broad sweep of history, history being for her, I suppose, a bourgeois affectation - more Jerry's concern:

The image of a Britain become a nation of William Morris wood-carvers and Chestertonian beer-swillers drove him deeper into his jungle and caused him to abandon his books. He was only prepared to retreat so far. He was forced to admit, however, that the seventies were proving an intense disappointment to him. He felt bitter about missed opportunities, the caution of his own allies, the sheer funk of his enemies. In the fifties life had been so appalling that he had been forced to flee into the future, perhaps even help create that future, but by the sixties, when the future had arrived, he had been content at last to live in the present until, due in his view to a conspiracy amongst those who feared the threat of freedom, the present (and consequently the future) had been betrayed. As a result he had sought the past for consolation, for an adequate mythology to explain the world to him, and here he hid, lost in his art nouveau jungle, his art deco caverns, treading the dangerous quicksands of nostalgia and yearning for times that seemed simpler only because he did not belong to them and which, as they became familiar, seemed even more complex than the world he had loved for its variety and potential.

Note the emergent sixties obsession with Victoriana, which Moorcock rewrote as that which we now recognise as steampunk. The Condition of Muzak (1977) completes the cycle and serves better than any of the other books to define just what it has all been about, namely the complex degrading to the simple, great art, culture, or even thought reducing to background music; and furthermore that the process of entropy is itself inherent to the existence of that which it destroys:

'If time could stand still,' said Hira reflectively, 'I suppose we should all be as good as dead. The whole business of entropy so accurately reflects the human condition. To remain alive one must burn fuel, use up heat, squander resources, and yet that very action contributes to the end of the universe-the heat death of everything! But to become still, to use the minimum of energy—that's pointless. It is to die, effectively. What a dreadful dilemma.'

This final part of the story is framed within a variant of reality in which Jerry is revealed as a struggling musician and a bit of a loser, someone destined to fail, with all of those other, more glamorous realities quite possibly having been just his drug-addled juvenile fantasies, in turn serving to emphasise just how pathetic is the reality of this, his last and lowest plane of existence.

The Cornelius Chronicles are about change, the nature of change, the future, our expectations, and history as a construct; or they are in so much as they can be said to be about any one thing; at least I think they are. It's hard to tell because this is one fuck of a lot of non-linear narrative to get through, and it's routinely bewildering, even boring in places - some of which may be intentional - but as promised, the whole really is worth the effort expended in sticking with it. This is one of those rare books which could potentially change either your life, or at least the way you see the world.

Moorcock really is a genius.

Little Fuzzy

H. Beam Piper Little Fuzzy (1962)
I've never heard of him either, but this one proved impossible to resist with its cover striving so hard to be cute as to come across as slightly disturbing, and obviously not intentionally. What the fuck? can be the only logical response to this cover, followed immediately by I need to read this thing.

Novelty aside, Little Fuzzy is surprisingly decent, written by someone who clearly knew how to write whilst retaining a common touch, and is spun upon an ecological theme which put me immediately in mind of Clifford D. Simak - which can only be a good thing. The story is fairly simple and yet avoids any of the potential hokeyness you might anticipate: a pipe smoking prospector on an alien planet encounters cute fuzzy critters the existence of which threatens company interests, depending on whether or not said critters can be proven to constitute sapient beings, as opposed to just more local animal life. Our prospector is convinced the Fuzzies have culture at a more or less stone age level, whilst the company shits itself over losing all those lovely plunderable resources should the planet be granted reservation status.

More surprisingly, Little Fuzzy is essentially a court room drama, with the greater body of its page count given over to the judicial process of declaring the Fuzzies sapient whilst persuading the company to piss off and leave them alone; and yet - aside from a minor dip around halfway when a whole new load of characters show up - it remains engrossing and delightful, just as the cover promises. In fact, it reminds me a little of one of the better Asimovs, wrapping some fairly complicated ideas - in this case relating to evolutionary biology and the legal system - in a deceptively straightforward prose style with plenty of fifties science-fiction gentlemen pausing to light up thoughtful pipes. Even Little Fuzzy - our cover star and leading native after whom both the book and his species are named - pauses to light a thoughtful pipe at one point following the example of his human friend in a general spirit of experimentation; and yet it all remains funny, charming, and very, very readable without the slightest invocation of ironic yucks.

The Soft Machine

William S. Burroughs The Soft Machine (1961)
This was, so I gather, Burroughs' first novel published since Naked Lunch had caused everyone to shit themselves with its tales of men's johnsons going in and out of the bottoms of other men, and with it having been written at least in part by glueing random bits of text together. High court judges and the more conservative elements of the literary establishment doubtless asked him to rein it in a bit, maybe think a bit more about what motivates his characters, maybe introduce a few witty catchphrases; but I guess he just decided to go for it, and The Soft Machine has accordingly been described by some bloke on the internet as the Burroughs novel which makes the others seem relaxing.

The body rose presenting an erection, masturbates in front of the Comandante. Penis flesh spreads through his body bursting in orgasm explosions granite cocks ejaculate lava under a black cloud boiling with monster crustaceans. Cold grey undersea eyes and hands touched Carl's body. The Comandante flipped him over with sucker hands and fastened his disk mouth to Carl's asshole.

I guess we've all had days like that. As to what any of it may mean, you should probably just read the thing, but the title is a metaphor for the human body, and some bloke on the internet reckons this is about the infiltration of the human body by hostile, alien elements. I can sort of see it in a structural sense, with a surprising majority of this text having been cut in with unrelated material to form a weird, ugly hybrid; and Burroughs was always obsessed with the notion of malign external forces intruding upon the human mechanism, almost a variant on original sin, rather oddly - language, addiction, information, or at a significantly greater stretch, the ugly spirit which supposedly overtook Burroughs during an innocent game of William Tell with his late wife. How well this idea is communicated by the text is debatable, but I nevertheless found it entirely readable; and it certainly communicates something fairly profound, even if that something isn't obvious. The Mayan Caper presents the most coherent narrative, and I'm tempted to read significance into its appearing close to the centre of the novel as relative calm at the eye of the storm, or possibly the core around which the rest forms, but it probably depends on the angle from which you look at it. Certainly it expresses the theme of language as both virus and modifier of environment in clearer terms than elsewhere in the novel.

I probably prefer my Burroughs a little more coherent than this one, but it's nevertheless worth a look, providing you don't have anything against text which rewires your brain as you read it.

Rogan Gosh: Star of the East

Peter Milligan & Brendan McCarthy
Rogan Gosh: Star of the East (1990)

Revolver was another one of those 2000AD spin-off comics which came and went back in the nineties. It lasted seven issues and, brushing up on Wikipedia, I realise that I have absolutely no memory of at least half of its contents. I remember the name Happenstance & Kismet, but not Fighting Figurines - whatever the hell that was, nor Dire Streets, which looks horrible. I have the impression that Revolver was instituted in response to the then prevalent subcultural premise of the sixties having been like a really amaaaaaaazing time, yeah? which additionally served to launch a million terrible bands. Grant Morrison's version of Dan Dare appeared in Revolver, and I quite liked that, and there was some sort of biographical strip about Jimi Hendrix which probably worked better for people who care about Jimi Hendrix, and then there was Rogan Gosh, which I didn't really understand.

It's painted by Brendan McCarthy so you can't really blame me for revisiting this one. I still don't understand it, but then I don't think I'm supposed to. The narrative is impressionist rather than realist, and may as well be considered as nothing deeper than an excuse to have a certain quota of Brendan McCarthy pages assembled in the same place. There's an afterword offering explanations about how Rogan Gosh isn't a linear story - which funnily enough I'm sure most of us noticed - but it reads like whining excuses invoking dogs eating homework tagged on at last minute when someone realised that Milligan hadn't actually bothered to write a story, and it particularly reads that way when he invokes Einstein, Bohr, and Schrödinger.

Give me a break.

Nevertheless I'm a big boy, and I can handle impressionism and abstract narratives splattered across the page with a logic closer to music than writing. I've read William Burroughs, and so Rogan Gosh sort of works providing you keep in mind that the words are no more an explanation of what's going on with the pictures than they can be considered representative of any deep insight into the illusory nature of reality. Like most of the stuff we've bothered to remember of the sixties, Rogan Gosh spends a lot of time selecting which books to leave casually scattered across its coffee table prior to your arrival, and oh - there you are at the door - on goes the record: second track, side two so it doesn't look too obvious.

Come in.

This?

Oh they were called the Vanilla Tea Kettle. You probably haven't heard of them. I listen to this album a lot.

Still, as something pretty much inviting its readers to BYOS*, Rogan Gosh is nevertheless enjoyable thanks to the art and the occasional flash of snappy dialogue. It slightly bothers me how this apparent attempt to engage with Indian culture is centred around a man named after a fucking curry, and for pretty much the same reason that Kula Shaker's continuing to draw breath bothers me, although this aspect is addressed a little way into the story, albeit not very convincingly; but providing you keep in mind that Rogan Gosh isn't really about Indian culture so much as it's about our slightly clueless reaction to the same - albeit possibly not deliberately - you should be okay.

*: Bring Your Own Story.

Mother Night

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Mother Night (1961)
Well, this is an odd one. Kurt Vonnegut draws you in with his characteristically timeless and engaging prose, conversational and forever scattering arrestingly surreal images in one's path; so it's probably technically impossible to be bored, unless you're some sort of twat; and he draws you in whilst writing something which doesn't quite add up, or at least didn't for me. It's decent, but compared to the others I've read, it doesn't quite get there.

Mother Night represented an earlier stopping point in Vonnegut's continuing mission to describe that which cannot be described, or at least earlier than Slaughterhouse Five which did a better job of dealing with the atrocities of the second world war specifically by acknowledging that the horror is simply too big, and that one can only describe it by showing it to be beyond description. Here we have a representative of the American Nazi party awaiting trial in Israel whilst backtracking through the misdeeds which ultimately put him there. He is initially a character which cannot be defended, an architect of the holocaust by word if not deed; and so we are invited to examine all aspects of his character except for those pertaining to that which can be neither excused nor forgiven. All very well, except this is all undone near the conclusion of the book once we discover our boy to be the ideological opposite of that which we believed him to be, and so he faces execution knowing he must maintain the illusion of his war crimes, I suppose becoming something of a Christ figure. The implication of the title, taken from Goethe's Faust, would suggest that we are each of us the stuff of darkness, coming to the light only through acts of will, through education and moral evolution. This squares well with what I gather to be Vonnegut's take on morality, namely that its absence relates to ignorance rather than anything specifically evil; although this also seems close to the notion of original sin, which possibly confuses things.

The problem with Mother Night is that, whilst it's a fairly straightforward narrative, it attempts a few too many about-turns with our understanding of its main character and the message becomes confused so it doesn't quite hang together so well as it might. I suppose this is odd considering how Slaughterhouse Five played the same cards whilst juggling time travel and a narrative occurring in what may as well have been random order, and that Slaughterhouse Five got it right. Mother Night still does more than most authors would attempt and is obviously worth a read, but he wrote better.

I, Claudius

Robert Graves I, Claudius (1934)
One of the most celebrated and most gripping historical novels of all time, it says in a number of places, so here I am once again reading above my weight due to having experienced a feeling of passing foolishness on the occasion of having to admit I'd never read I, Claudius, which would be more forgiveable had I not read greatly in excess of fifty Terrance Dicks novels. Ignoro ab urbe condita Roma, which is possibly to say I ain't know nuffink when it comes to ancient Rome, but Graves' Seven Days in New Crete was decent so Claudius seemed worth a look.

I gather Graves has remained more or less faithful to a common form of Roman narrative, that somewhat having been his field, rendering this as much a reconstruction as a novel due to its major events and characters being historically factual. Claudius did actually write an eight volume autobiography, and although this isn't it, I guess it almost could have been. Our man's discussion of his approach to the recording of history at least reminds me of similar monologues by both Plato and Lucian of Samosata, which I mention mainly because those are the two classical lads I have read. Additionally, Graves exercises a certain degree of wit, at least without quite turning it into Up Pompeii, even casting a few knowing winks in the general direction of us readers, notably when the Sibyl informs young Claudius of the eventually impending Robert Graves' version of his life:

But when he's dumb and no more here,
Nineteen hundred years or near,
Clau - Clau - Claudius shall speak clear.

Cheeky!

To further expose my roots, most of what I know of this story comes from John Wagner having rewritten it as The Day the Law Died in 2000AD comic, so it's a pleasure to return to the source and find it no less enjoyable. That said, gripping might be a bit of an overstatement, although I might find it so were I a little more engaged with Roman history. Certain accounts of military campaigns felt a little dry for my tastes, but the book generally did enough to keep me reading, and the intrigue and conspiracy, particularly once we come to the reign of Caligula, is thoroughly absorbing; and it's thoroughly absorbing in part because its dissection of politics is as valid now as then, then being in this case the times of both Claudius and his modern biographer, in respect to whom, it's difficult to miss certain parallels with Graves' own era:

Caligula was very angry. He sent a platoon of Germans along the benches and one-hundred heads were chopped off. This incident disturbed the conspirators; it was a reminder of the barbarity of the Germans and the marvellous devotion that they paid Caligula. By this time, there can hardly have been a citizen in Rome who did not long for the death of Caligula, or would not willingly have eaten his flesh, as the saying is; but to these Germans he was the most glorious hero the world had ever known.

So yes, jolly good. Quid a stupri fantastic est libri huius etc. etc.