Happy Days

Jason Williamson Happy Days (2018)
Gave up after fifty pages without so much as a sniff of the Fonz...

Possibly in the way of a joke which gets better with each telling, Happy Days inhabits the same territory as Williamson's previous, substantially slimmer collection, but is somehow more convincing, more satisfying - if that's quite the right term. Where Slabs from Paradise was a short and sour belch in the reader's face, but probably in a good way, this one settles in and builds up enough momentum to say something beyond what may initially have seemed like an improbably harrowing version of Tom Sharpe. It's rich in the sort of working class detail that I'm not sure anyone else is bothering to record at the moment, and so much so that I felt as though I'd lived in a couple of these stories, albeit without the cocaine and swingers; and Happy Days goes further, becoming more than just a smellier Mike Leigh, as we see in Dolled Up wherein grown men take to transvestitism specifically for the purpose of getting into fights with dangerous shitheads. I expect Garth Ennis tried something similar at some point, and it would have been rubbish, whereas this is actually weird and amazing.

Naturally, it feels a little like reading Williamson's stream of consciousness from a Sleaford Mods record, but it's nevertheless impressive how well all that bile translates from that medium to this one, still side-splitting, yet still appalling.

Martin and Zanna start fucking as Dolly looks on and tries to remember all the things he thought he would be feeling when he finally got to do this but the fantasy's edge doesn't materialise. The house stinks, the carpet stinks, the sofa stinks and most who are in attendance look way past their best years, with Zanna being the exception.

It seems the title, Happy Days accompanying an image of a graveyard, isn't quite so ironic as it might have seemed at first. These are tales of it being as good as it gets under predictably dire circumstances - Liveable Shit, as the song goes; and somehow the tone is ultimately uptempo, which should be impossible given the details of all that goes on here. I am seriously impressed with this one.

Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes

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

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

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

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

Shocked, aren't you?

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

Seriously?

Seriously?

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

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

Second Person

Gabi Losoncy Second Person (2017)
Gabi Losoncy was one of the names with which I was not familiar from that first splurge of Amphetamine Sulphate titles, hence my only just getting hold of Second Person now, having figured I may as well bag the lot given the standard which has been established. It's a bit of an oddity even as an Amphetamine Sulphate book, novella, chapbook, whatever you want to call it - one of those monologues habitually labelled intensely personal when we're not quite sure what else we can say, but actually quite broad in its aim in so much as that Losoncy seems to be addressing each and every one of us individually in hope of establishing the sort of relationship which might almost categorise Second Person as self-help literature. At least that's the first thing that came to mind.

Losoncy is also, broadly speaking, an artist working in sound, performance, or somewhere in between, so I gather, although I'm unfamiliar with her work, of which Second Person seems to be both an account and an instalment. The text is precise, but unusually dense, written in long, long digressive sentences packed tight with information. Read at normal speed one experiences information overload whilst accumulating an impression of understanding; so it works, for me, a little like A.E. van Vogt of all people, although coming from the opposite direction - a rush of information rather than too little or deliberately vague. If possibly not absolutely essential, there is nevertheless something to be gained from a slower, more measured reading, thus reducing the manic word salad to more easily digestible details. Whether read as a literary waterboarding or as introspective analysis at the lesser velocity, meaning is transmitted, and transmitted in sufficient quantity as to make it worth reading, even if I wasn't always clear on the import of what I had just read; which, oddly, also reminded me of trying to read A Brief History of Time; and while a cynic might equate the above analysis to I didn't understand a fucking word but I should probably say something nice innit, I would refute this by pointing out that not once did I find myself bored, or inclined to skip to the end in search of an explanation. So yes, I found the narrative so intense as to render it quite difficult to translate in a literal sense, but it was obviously doing something which I liked very much.

The Trespasser

D.H. Lawrence The Trespasser (1912)
This was Lawrence's second novel, and the one with the reputation of being his worst, seemingly on the grounds of nothing much happening in physical terms and of being derived from Helen Corke's diary rather than Lawrence's direct experience. Helen Corke was a colleague with whom Lawrence worked as a school teacher in Croydon, and I gather our boy would have quite liked to have had sexual intercourse with her, but it wasn't to be; so doubtless some frustration informs this novel, or - more worrying still - it may even have been Dave trying to show that he really, really, really understood - not that any of this necessarily works to the detriment of the novel in my view. Helen had been having an affair with a married music teacher. They went off to the Isle of Wight together for an extended naughty weekend, following which the gentleman topped himself immediately following his resumption of married life. Corke recorded this much in her diary, and then Lawrence worked his magic, expanding and embellishing.

The most obvious flaw of The Trespasser is that not much happens for a long time, it being primarily focussed on Helena and Siegmund's stay on the Isle of Wight, which mostly gushes with emotion seasoned by the awareness that the two of them are not particularly well matched, and that their time together is limited. In other words, it isn't anything which is likely to survive in the real world. This section, which dominates the book, drags a little in places, but on the other hand, it's not a particularly long book so the repetition doesn't really have space in which to become a nuisance; and the language is meanwhile nevertheless engaging, giving rich and poetic description of nature, the island, and love with particular emphasis on flowers as a recurring motif. There's almost certainly some shagging going on in here, but the language is of such florid composition that it's difficult to tell, which is probably for the best as it would doubtless disrupt the flow, which seems stylistically rooted in Symbolist literature, or at very least definitively belongs to that era.

As he leaned on the Embankment parapet the wonder did not fade, but rather increased. The trams, one after another, floated loftily over the bridge. They went like great burning bees in an endless file into a hive, past those which were drifting dreamily out, while below, on the black, distended water, golden serpents flashed and twisted to and fro.

Ignoring frequent references to Wagner - which were apparently quite trendy at the time, much as are references to the Smiths these days - Lawrence's primary theme here is his fixation with nature as an ideal, something from which we should not stray too far. It underscores the entire narrative, expressed in recurrent references to flowers, the lunar cycle by which we are notionally bound to nature, and quite a lot of sheep. The lovers watch Isle of Wight farmers dipping their flock, inspiring this conversation, for one example:

'In an instant it makes me wish I were a farmer,' he laughed. 'I think every man has a passion for farming at the bottom of his blood. It would be fine to be plain-minded, to see no farther than the end of one's nose, and to own cattle and land.'

'Would it?' asked Helena sceptically.

'If I had a red face and went to sleep as soon as I sat comfortable, I should love it,' he said.

'It amuses me to hear you long to be stupid,' she replied.

'To have a simple, slow-moving mind and an active life is the desideratum.'

'Is it?' she asked ironically.

'I would give anything to be like that,' he said.

'That is, not to be yourself,' she said pointedly.

He laughed without much heartiness.

He laughs because he knows he's fucked, hence the dearth of heartiness, perhaps even because he knows that his aspirations aren't fooling anyone, least of all himself. He returns to London, to marital misery, and hangs himself; and as seems to be the general consensus, this last part of the story is where the novel really finds its feet, possibly due to Lawrence being obliged to imagine that which Helen Corke could not have known. Siegmund's marriage really doesn't seem particularly terrible - which is nice given the frequency with which Lawrence is accused of misogyny - so the inertia which Siegmund finds so loveless and so difficult to endure is down to him rather than the long-suffering Beatrice. He is a trespasser in his own existence.

'Don't look at the moon, Miss MacNair, it's all rind,' said Mr Allport in melancholy mockery. 'Somebody's bitten all the meat out of our slice of moon, and left us nothing but peel.'

'It certainly does look like a piece of melon-shell - one portion,' replied Vera.

'Never mind, Miss MacNair,' he said. 'Whoever got the slice found it raw, I think.'

I don't know if The Trespasser is really his worst novel, but if so, then I can think of plenty of writers whose work I might enjoy more were they able to write something as bad as this. It's no masterpiece for sure, but its brevity is its salvation.

Peculiar Lives

Philip Purser-Hallard Peculiar Lives (2003)
At the risk of repeating myself, I sometimes find it quite difficult to maintain warm, fuzzy thoughts about Doctor Who fandom, which is awkward because I used to quite enjoy Doctor Who and would like to be able to continue to do so on some level without inadvertently finding myself reminded of the toxic idiocy practised by about 85% of the shitehawks who will inevitably turn up to pitch in at the faintest whisper of its name. When I say Doctor Who, I really mean the novels, and mostly - although not exclusively - the novels published after the show was cancelled but predating its resuscitation as an advertising franchise in 2005. As with Who itself, there was something progressive about those books, an exploration of relatively new territory, an expansion of horizons, and I vaguely recall someone suggesting that the New Adventures were intended to bring new science-fiction authors to the fore. The New Adventures ceased in 1997, but their momentum was sufficient to spawn entire series of related novels with the serial numbers filed off: the Bernice Summerfield books, Time Hunter, and of course Faction Paradox. This seemed like a positive development to me because I was quite keen to read more by the people who had brought us Christmas on a Rational Planet, The Death of Art, and others; but it seems that I've been out of step, and the thing Who fans really want is more Doctor Who, or anything which we can pretend is Doctor Who - cosy adventures in time and space reminding us of teatime all those years ago, an endless string of quirky time-travelling eccentrics having scrapes and solving crimes and occasionally cracking a joke which we'll all recognise as a cheeky reference to something which happened in episode three of The Dalek Masterplan.

Tee hee.

Did anyone here buy the adventures of the time-travelling police station? Me neither. It was like Dixon of Dock Green from when we were kids, and the building itself jumped backwards and forwards in time, and it was populated by these really barmy characters, yeah?

I have nothing specific against pulp adventures, or cliches, or corporate entertainment, or even things which - God help us - aspire to corporate entertainment, and it doesn't all have to be Crime and Punishment - which is handy because I find Dostoyevsky unreadable; but I despair at how few of those surfing this tsunami of increasingly repetitive time travel thrills and spills aspire to anything greater, and how the few who do tend to get lost amongst the many who just want to see what would happen if something a bit like the Daleks encountered something a bit like the Ice Warriors.

Time Hunter was born from a Doctor Who novella called The Cabinet of Light, written by Daniel O'Mahony and published by Telos Books. When the BBC reeled in all of its most lucrative licences, Telos elected to continue their series of novellas with the lead transferred to that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as Honoré Lechasseur. I've read both The Cabinet of Light and now this one, and I still don't really understand what the deal is, why the title identifies him as a Time Hunter, or why I should care; but it doesn't matter because Telos always seemed to favour authors with some genuine ability to write, as opposed to simply publishing anything by anyone who liked Doctor Who a very, very lot.

Nothing if not ambitious, Philip Purser-Hallard's second novel takes on the eugenic elephant in the historical room of twentieth century science-fiction, daring - where many have preferred to mumble something about people being of their time before wandering off to see whether Neil Gaiman is still signing stuff - to draw attention to certain themes common to all those futuristic Gernsbackian supermen, and the Third Reich; and in a display of prowess bordering on the ostentatious, he writes it as a sort of sequel to Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, and writes it in a pitch perfect homage to Stapledon's style, and the bad guy is George Bernard Shaw in a false beard. So there's a lot which could have gone horribly wrong, particularly given the subject, and yet the narrative is all nuance, not one slogan or generalisation, and a beautifully rendered and atmospheric period piece.

Practically speaking, the story falls somewhere between Wyndham's Chrysalids and Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human and, as befits both the subject and the genre, is mostly a discussion of morality, transcendence - a theme which runs through much of the author's other works - and how these relate to evolution and the mythology of the same. For the purposes of the reader who just really, really, really, really needs someone to have an adventure in time and space just like on the telly, this kind of leaves Honoré Lechasseur without anything much to do, arguably sidelined in his own novel, but with this being due to the novel's great success at doing what it sets out to do, no-one with a brain could reasonably object.

Even now, with Purser-Hallard's Devices trilogy on shelves in actual high street book stores, he seemingly remains a best kept secret, but one day the reading public will surely catch up, and they'll go back to this one - if they can find a copy - and realise that it was obvious all along.

Taking Candy From a Dog

Vic Templar Taking Candy From a Dog (2010)
I lived in the general vicinity of the Medway towns from 1984 to 1989, and the first thing which struck me about the locality was that everyone seemed to be doing something. I don't mean doing something in the sense of a couple of local bands and maybe a bloke who wrote a fanzine. There seemed to be hundreds of bands in Medway, three or four gigs in different parts of town every night - most of them decent, a few of them fucking astonishing - and a house brick randomly launched from the upper deck of a bus heading along Chatham High Street would, nine times out of ten, most likely hospitalise someone who'd written a book, or at least published a collection of poetry. None of this would be particularly significant were it not for the high quality of this creative wellspring, and how little of it seemed affected, not even the self-conscious acknowledgement of itself as a scene.

Of the bands, my favourite - favourite in so much as that I still listen to them - were probably the Dentists, and this guy was their drummer. I knew him at the time, if not well, and was vaguely aware of him having had a couple of things published through Billy Childish's Hangman imprint. I should have picked them up when I had the chance, but never mind. I had a feeling Vic would probably have something interesting to say, but I hadn't considered the possibility that it would be this good.

Taking Candy from a Dog is an autobiographical novel fondly remembering details of childhood and growing up in Kent in the seventies, but because memory cheats, because it's often difficult to get all pieces of the jigsaw puzzle back into a shape which makes sense, it's the autobiography of both the author and his sister's sock monkey, a wartime gift from an American GI whose interjections and commentary still carry a faint trace of the Sammy Davies Jr. So, in other words, there's wiggle room allowing for some things which, although true, didn't actually happen.

It could have gone horribly wrong, ending up as Peter Kay chortling over Curly Wurlies. Andrew Collins similarly wrote an autobiographical account of growing up in the seventies in what was a fairly happy home, but I found his Where Did It All Go Right? cloying and a little too pleased with itself. Templar, on the other hand, gets the balance absolutely spot on, perhaps through a focus which relishes the sheer weirdness of childhood without really trying to play it for laughs, at least not as an end in itself.

Yogurt is a game that Kes invented. The rules are very simple. You can't play it in your shoes though. The reason is you have to pull your socks so they hang off your feet like a panting dog's tongue. You then raise your toes in the air so that you're standing on your heels. You then walk around on your heels saying 'yogurt, yogurt, yogurt' in a voice from the back of your throat, like a Dalek. That's it, I told you yogurt was a simple game, didn't I?

There's also the cargo cult re-enactment of Wimbledon undertaken one summer, kicking off with someone playing the theme tune on their cassette recorder, taped off the telly - one of a whole string of sporting reconstructions with various sisters, friends, relatives competing as celebrities of the day.

'In comes John Noakes, off of his long run up, looking for his third wicket of the match. He bowls to Jean Jacques Burnell, who pulls it over mid wicket into Eric's fence for four.'

Most authors writing this sort of thing tend to spend half the time digging the reader in the ribs and grinning, but Templar's deadpan delivery combined with his attention to details - regardless of how much sense they'll make to the rest of us, results in something both profoundly moving and funny without actually cracking jokes. In short, he actually captures, right there on the page, the flavour of growing up in a certain era, and I recognise a ton of my own formative years in here despite the furniture having been completely different. Taking Candy from a Dog serves to illustrate how the most powerful, even profound statements can often be the least assuming, words softly spoken and well meant without the need for a full theatrical production.

...and extra points for remembering that the adult reaction to the music of the Sex Pistols was mostly amusement. It was about time someone actually took the trouble to point that out.

Judge Dredd: Crusade

Mark Millar, Carlos Ezquerra & Mick Austin Judge Dredd: Crusade (1995)
Grant Morrison is credited as co-writer of Crusade, but it feels a little like something he may have mumbled in the pub which Mark Millar expanded into a ten part story. A ship returns from deep space apparently with a message from God - which sounds like Morrison's sort of thing - and the rest is a pie fight amongst Judges of various futuristic nationalities as they scramble to the site of the ship's crash landing, each hoping to be first to hear the good news. The Japanese Judge ends up committing hari-kiri, the Irish Judge is already on the sauce when first we meet him, and the Indian guy is called Judge Bhaji; so yeah - my guess would be that this is mostly Mark Millar's doing. I'm ordinarily a fan, although when Millar's writing is bad, it's fucking awful. His version of Dredd mostly reads as though he's taking the piss, but Crusade and Frankenstein Division - the other story here - are mostly saved by gorgeous art. Mick Austin had moved on from drawing people with giant heads and his art was at this point approaching a painterly elegance suggestive of the classic sixties artists who drew for Eagle, TV21 and the like; and the late, great Carlos Ezquerra drew Frankenstein Division, so obviously it's amazing.

It's been a while since I read Judge Dredd, and I was a little taken aback by its singularity of purpose. Judge Dredd is the very opposite of anything which marketing executives would describe as character driven, which is why it works and has proven so enduring. Judge Dredd himself is essentially a massive fucking cunt, but a ruthlessly consistent one so we always know where we stand with him, which is a rare and admirable quality. The strip comprises Dredd punching the rest of the characters over and over, page after page, indiscriminately dishing out desserts both just and unjust whilst shouting, and so it's a lot like listening to a Ramones album in so much as that it's a Ramones album and there's not much joy to be had in arguing with it. At times it approaches Viz levels of absurdity, and the cynicism is of such density as to go into negative figures and come out the other side looking peculiarly sanguine. Considering that it's more or less 1984 with greater emphasis on leather and motorbikes, there's something strangely uplifting about Dredd.