William the Ancient Briton

Richmal Crompton William the Ancient Briton (1965)
I never developed any particular attachment to William as a kid. I had William and the Space Animal - a book my father passed on from his youth - but I only recall looking at the pictures. I came across this one in an antique shop when visiting England and bought it for my stepson on the grounds of his being named William, and because he has fixated on certain aspects of my homeland. He reads more than I ever did at his age, but mostly because he's obliged to do so by his school. I didn't read much, but what I did read was usually read because I wanted to read it. Hypocritical though it may be, I really wish my stepson would read for pleasure rather than wasting time and brain cells on shitty games and YouTube wankers.

'Here,' I said, having just sat down and pulled a few things from my bag following more than twenty hours in transit. 'I got you this.'

I placed the book on the corner of the table in the front room. He looked at it, then looked at me, then started to tell his mother about some new fact he'd just learned from the internet.

Because we're a somewhat slack family, William the Ancient Briton was still there on the corner of the table in the front room one month later. 'Is he even going to look at the thing?' I asked my wife.

She relayed the question next day whilst giving the kid a lift to school. Of course, was apparently his reply, adding that he certainly wasn't one of those people who fails to appreciate a gift. The book remained where it was for another three weeks, at which point I reclaimed it; and now, three years later, I'm getting around to reading it so that someone has. There doesn't even seem much point in being disappointed in the boy. I was never a big reader at his age, and Crompton's William Brown is an outdoorsy sort of kid who has adventures, and I think our gamer would be out of his depth.

I have a theory regarding the cultural differences which divide England and America, and one which is thrown into sharp relief by Crompton's William. We grew up with Dennis the Menace, the Bash Street Kids, and of course this guy, chuckling as our heroes got away with it, or were else punished for misdeeds whilst remaining gleefully unrepentant. America grew up with the Hardy Boys and Superman, wholesome boy scouts who righted wrongs and taught us how the coolest kids are those who brush their teeth and obey the rules. This is a massive generalisation, as Enid Blyton is my witness, but I firmly believe there's something in it, and that these formative and quite different attitudes to authority reflect how the rest of us got here - how someone as relentlessly cuboid as Trump could ever be regarded as rebellious; or even that Boris Johnson has ascended through somehow passing himself off as one of Lord Snooty's pals for that matter. Anyway, this is a debate for some other time.

William was not originally written as a children's book in the strictest sense, which explains the tone of the stories collected here - wry, sardonic, and expecting readers to keep up rather than simplifying anything. Mostly they are short, sharp bursts of absurdist slapstick of the kind to which Arthur Askey and others almost certainly aspired, but the kindly yet long-suffering narrative voice conveys a wit which might be seen to foreshadow much of Peter Cook's career. William himself is a pain in the arse for sure, but not actually a bad lad, and is allowed to get into all sorts of trouble without anyone having to learn a lesson at the end because Crompton clearly trusted her readership to have developed a moral code without requiring that it be spelled out in primary colours. These are therefore lessons in idiocy featuring a wise fool who tends to come out on top through finding himself pitched against persons more idiotic than himself, often adults but not always.

Some of the tales work better than others. The story which lends its name to the collection as a whole is a little underwhelming, but elsewhere we have William Enters Politics, William is Hypnotised, and other gems approaching near Dadaist levels of peculiar brilliance. The former features himself spying on a local council meeting by pretending to be a portrait painting hung on the wall, which he effects by leering through a hole in the aforementioned wall whilst holding a gilt picture frame around his face; and in William and the Campers, our boy is scheduled for a scrap with a neighbouring gang even as his own group is perilously reduced to just himself and Ginger. He swells the numbers with otherwise pious, well-behaved children from a visiting Sunday school by fooling them into treating the scrap as an exercise in cultural anthropology. This he achieves by delivering a lecture about tribal traditions, pretending to be a visiting speaker by agency of a false beard, having somehow managed to derail the lecture the Sunday schoolers were supposed to have received.

I gather this collection is something of a greatest hits featuring material written as far back as 1924 - William's Extra Day which first appeared in William the Fourth - which itself speaks well of Crompton's ability and the versatility of her creation, which, if something of a one joke character, is at least a joke which survives endless retelling.

Post Office

Charles Bukowski Post Office (1971)
To begin at something of a tangent, I recall being told that no-one actually reads Bukowski - or William Burroughs for that matter - but we tell people we do so in order to appear sophisticated, or because we think we're lush when we really aren't or something of that sort. I was told this by a person on a forum dedicated to Doctor Who, the children's television programme, and it is, I suppose, typical of the sort of bollocks rattling around in the heads of those who can't cope with anything but adventures, one after the other, an endless fucking line of thrills, scrapes, and companions captured for the sake of shifting the story along towards yet another ballsachingly familiar conclusion. I mention this only in the hope of annoying anyone reading who might subscribe to this view, and in the hope of annoying them so much that it causes them to grow the fuck up and invest at least some of their time in something besides adventures, because we really, really, really, really need as many thinking adults in the world as we can get right now.

I first read Post Office many years ago back when I was working for Royal Mail. I wouldn't say I loved it, because it isn't the sort of book you love, but it is nevertheless a great book which left me with mixed feelings over how something written in the American sixties so precisely described my own working conditions in the English nineties - mixed feelings incorporating equal measures of depression and satisfaction, specifically satisfaction at having my suspicions confirmed regarding the universal experience of bullshit. Reading it again in 2019 is interesting from the point of view that although I'm no longer in the job, I now live in America and some of the other details have accordingly come into sharper focus.

Bukowski keeps it plain and simple, just the things you need to know but assembled in such a way as to resonate with a more or less common experience which ends up saying something arguably more profound than that which is given in the text. This is probably why dunces of the kind described in the first paragraph don't get Bukowski, because they lack either the common experience or the imagination to work with anything which isn't directly spoon fed to them as adventure.

To be fair, most people have Bukowski all wrong, also meaning those who need this to be considered transgressive literature because our man likes a pint and has sex with ladies. This probably accounts for his receiving notice in the same open mouthed breath as William Burroughs. The two of them never met, although they once stayed in the same hotel. Burroughs sent a message inviting Bukowski over for a drink, and Bukowski declined because he preferred to drink alone and didn't see what the two of them could possibly have to talk about, the only common ground being their shared disregard of authority. Burroughs dissects power structures, even proposes solutions up to a point, where Bukowski simply reports, tells it how it is, and we can take what we like from that because it's mostly bullshit - even the good bits, those details which might seem worth remembering.

Where the transgressives have it wrong is that this isn't even nihilism. Like I said, Bukowski keeps it plain and simple, the unsteady testimony of a drunk, but a gentle drunk, laced with warmth and humour in the face of horrible reality but without the wasted effort of cracking jokes, or any other ploy used by lesser writers in pursuit of your sympathy. Post Office probably isn't a great novel in the sense of Mountainhead by New Juche being a great novel, but it doesn't try to sell us any bullshit, which is a rare thing, and is therefore good enough.

Lost: Fifty Suns

A.E. van Vogt Lost: Fifty Suns (1972)
I've now reached the point of owning so many van Vogt paperbacks that I have to spend at least five minutes inspecting each new, unfamiliar title found in Half-Price just to make sure it isn't one of the ones I already have under a different name. So far as I can work out, I think there are about five or six which I'm still to read - which is impressive for an author I initially dismissed as worthless after struggling with Away and Beyond back in the before times. That said, there are still a good number of his short story collections I'm yet to read, albeit short story collections most likely containing a couple of things I've already read through van Vogt subsequently welding them to other short stories and having the resulting Frankenbook published as a novel. The somewhat lengthy Lost: Fifty Suns, for example, was eventually stitched together with related material to form the novel Mission to the Stars, as I read it, or The Mixed Men, as seems to be its more popular title.

I found Mission to the Stars a little underwhelming - not without redeeming features but nothing special - which is sadly equally true of both Lost: Fifty Suns, the short story, and this collection as a whole. The main problem is that it all seems very uneven. The Timed Clock is okay, but leans a little too heavily on multiple twist endings the approach of which can be seen from many miles away, and - as with The Confession and The Rat and the Snake - doesn't quite read like the work of Alfred Elton, lacking the usual atmosphere, jarring angular sentences, or even any of his customarily familiar themes; and The Rat and the Snake stands suspicious comparison with his wife's writing, although I haven't found anything online to support the possibility of it being one of her efforts. The Barbarian is enjoyable, but worked just as well in Empire of the Atom, leaving Ersatz Eternal - which didn't leave much of an impression - and The Sound of Wild Laughter featuring characters from The Secret Galactics and which is another of van Vogt's slightly puzzling examinations of sexual inequality. The same views were expressed quite clearly in The Violent Man, but for some reason he never quite managed to get the subject working in any of his science-fiction novels, usually leaving us with a series of faintly troublesome mumblings about women turning frigid immediately following marriage. The frustrating thing is that while he probably doesn't quite qualify as a feminist pioneer, van Vogt's views on sexual inequality seem entirely reasonable in comparison with those of his contemporaries, but were often poorly expressed, as they are here, perhaps through a reluctance to terrify his mostly male audience. Although, given the number of female characters featured in this collection I can't help wonder if it might not have been assembled as one for the ladies, so to speak.

Oh well. His heart was in the right place, I guess.

The Prussian Officer and other stories

D.H. Lawrence The Prussian Officer and other stories (1914)
This was Lawrence's first short story collection, originally published in 1914 by Duckworth and collecting material which had mostly already seen print in the English Review. Lawrence actually revised most of the stories for this collection, and even gave them a specific order so as to draw attention to the development of certain themes from one story to the next. Unfortunately Duckworth threw this order out of the window, bringing the two stories referring directly to the first world war to the fore presumably in order to cash in on an anticipated upsurge of militaristic and patriotic fervour. I gather that this revision somewhat undermined the author's intended thematic development, which is in any case a subtle detail even with everything running in the proper sequence, leaving the whole seeming patchy and uneven. This version restores Lawrence's running order, although I wonder if the power of the original hasn't been a little overplayed. Antony Atkins' introduction describes the collection as a story cycle wherein certain themes are revisited, developed, or expanded upon in subsequent stories, and in which we notice an occasional warm-up exercise for one of the novels, but the pattern is something you may not even have noticed had it not been mentioned.

Roughly speaking, these twelve stories trace an evolutionary path from spooky nineteenth century mysticism through to twentieth century realism, ultimately leading to Lawrence's own somewhat mystical brand of twentieth century realism; so this notional path may refer to English society and the elevation of the lower classes, to the course of literature around the turn of the century, or to Lawrence's own development as a writer. It's really a case of taking your pick depending on which seems the most interesting sequence. Most of the stories are respectable, and a few, such as Odour of Chrysanthemums or A Sick Collier, are exceptional; but elsewhere, Lawrence gets so lost in his own prose, rendering even the tiniest quirk of psychology as something poetic and mythological, that the narrative collapses under its own lack of momentum, possibly because whilst the novel grants him space in which to achieve escape velocity, the short form is not always so well-suited to what he was trying to achieve. The thematic sequencing of the stories compensates for the shortfall in places, but still leaves the whole a chewier read than I would ordinarily like.

It's hard to imagine what Duckworth were thinking, particularly given that the two first world war tales are hardly Bulldog Drummond material, focussing instead on class issues with a distinct anti-militaristic tone expressed as deserters and conscientious objectors who rebel against their commanding officers; and Lawrence sidesteps any issues of such tales lacking due patriotic fervour - as I presume would have been a concern at the time - by setting them behind enemy lines, doubtless drawing on his experience of eloping to Metz on the German border with Frieda von Richthofen.

There's plenty here which conforms to the quality promised by Lawrence's reputation, but it's probably not a casual read.

The Turing Test

Paul Leonard The Turing Test (2000)
If this Who novel following on from something first read back before I had pubes suggests an emerging theme, I should probably make it clear that it's really just comfort food for my eyes. My reading time is otherwise presently taken up with proofing print copies of my own five volume Mexico Diaries. I've spent the last five years editing the thing, and whilst I consider it at least sufficiently entertaining to have been worth the effort, it's pretty tough ploughing through all five of the cunts for the millionth time and still finding typos. Anyway, the point is that I needed light relief, hence The Turing Test.

The Turing Test was, as you probably know, part of a series of novels which kept Who going during the decade or so of it being off the air prior to its 2005 revival as a massive steaming pile of shite. This one followed on from the slightly underwhelming Paul McGann movie, and has been remembered as one of the better books, although not necessarily by me - which I'll come to in a moment.

To give credit where it's due, the BBC Who novels pulled some interesting moves in their time, facilitated by their collectively working as a larger ongoing narrative. At this point of his notional existence, the Doctor had been left stranded on Earth following not only the destruction of his home planet but also the retroactive erasure of his past; so he doesn't know who he is and the TARDIS may as well be just a wardrobe. He doesn't seem to age, and he doesn't know why, and he's living his life one year at a time with the vague understanding of something due to happen around the year 2000. I gather the point of this was to really get the writers earning their tuppence ha'penny, and to see if Doctor Who still worked with more or less all of the established props and references rendered off limits.

The Turing Test occurs during the second world war and draws in Alan Turing, Graham Greene, and Joseph Heller as both characters and authors; furthermore, the novel is divided into three parts, each one a first person narrative written in an approximation of their respective styles. The story, just to get it out of the way, concerns an impenetrable code which, so it transpires, derives from alien visitors rather than Nazis, hence Turing. Graham Greene additionally worked for MI6, aside from being a novelist, so that's how he figures, and Joseph Heller knew how to fly a plane, and at one point they need to fly a plane…

In its favour, The Turing Test is a novel which is quite happy to be a novel, with none of the usual passages half-wishing they were on telly. It's been a while since I read either The Power and the Glory or Catch-22, but Paul Leonard seems to do a decent job of capturing the voices of their authors, so far as I'm able to tell. Additionally in its favour, The Turing Test tries to say something beyond simply plugging up a few hours of your time with adventures. Specifically, it presents comparisons by which we might consider the question of what is human - hence the title - with variant flavours represented by the Doctor, the aliens, Greene's somewhat dour pessimism, Heller's humanism, Turing's vulnerability, various Nazis just doing their jobs, and so on and so forth.

It's ambitious and generally exceptionally well written, and it almost works but sort of doesn't, or didn't for me. I felt the same way the first time I read it however many years ago. The problem is that, I would guess, Leonard put so much work into impersonating Turing, Greene, and Heller that he lost his grip on the dynamic of the story, which just seems to drift along for a few hundred pages without any clear objective in sight, pissing away the goodwill of the reader - me in this case - until we come to the final third and suddenly notice that here is a writer who has taken the author of Catch-22 and made him have an exciting adventure with Doctor Who from the telly, which is just silly. The Turing Test has its feet in two camps and is neither one thing nor the other - too ponderous to be gripping, too juvenile to provoke much thought. Its not a bad book by any means, but I really feel it should have been better.

The Story of the Loch Ness Monster

Tim Dinsdale The Story of the Loch Ness Monster (1973)
Retracing my book reading footsteps back even further than Doctor Who and the Zarbi, as discussed the other week, raw nostalgia brings me to Tim Dinsdale's The Story of the Loch Ness Monster, which was certainly the first Target book I ever bought, and was probably the first book I ever bought in which text took precedence over pictures. I have vague memories of reading the listings in the back of this and being surprised to note that Target had published novels of Doctor Who stories I hadn't seen on the box; so it began here for me. Unfortunately, I have no memories - vague or otherwise - of actually reading this and may have found it all a little dry, what with it not being off the telly.

Dinsdale wisely took the position that the best way to address children is to speak to them as though they are adults, because they can already do all that where's the dolly gone? shit and it encourages them to keep up. The Story of the Loch Ness Monster is therefore only a children's book in terms of the occasional aside to explain a few of the longer words, which is as it should be. Regarding the proposed existence of Nessie, I don't actually have a water horse in this race, and Dinsdale was one of those properly educated good eggs who had spent time in the RAF - as opposed to some lone nutcase - so he presents what there is to present on an even keel, by necessity concentrating on investigations of the hypothetical monster rather than the monster itself. The book is interesting and readable - if not exactly mind-blowing to someone reading it nearly fifty years later - and only the later chapters listing different types of tripod which might be purchased by the budding monster hunter get a bit chewy, somewhat revealing how little there was to actually write about regarding Nessie back in 1973.

Still, I finished the thing suspecting that there probably was a Loch Ness monster or monsters, regardless of more recent puritanical rationalists insisting it can only have been an escaped circus elephant seen reflected from the planet Venus; and it didn't make me irritable, so that has to be a plus.

Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free

Randy Henderson Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free (2016)
I couldn't make it past page fifty-three, which at least disqualifies Bigfootloose from having been the worst thing I've ever read. It's an urban fantasy and sequel to some other thing I'd never heard of, which amounts to magic, elves, and fairies in a contemporary setting cunningly juxtaposed with sardonic references to episodes of Star Trek. The author refers to Tolkien and others on his blog, which is to be found on the interwebs - tee hee - and yet this novel reads as though his literary foundation was rooted in watching a shitload of television and hanging out with people who dress up as wizards. The narrative is almost all dialogue interspersed with faintly sardonic commentary from the narrator.

Pete removed the customised embalming tubes with the kind of delicateness one might expect from a Jedi manscaping his nethers with a lightsabre.

I think you probably meant delicacy, although I'm sure there's a better term. As author, it was your job to come up with one, yeah?

Elsewhere our man exclaims shazbot in homage to Robin Williams' character from Mork & Mindy, and surprise-fucking-surprise, each page is spattered with extraneous fullstops in the usual attempt to recreate the portentous mood of a cinematic voice-over, instead simply breaking the flow with clumsy sentences lacking subject or action. Like this one. Or beginning with and.

And then we come to:

Oh absolutely. We plotted to replace George Lucas with one of our changelings and have him create movies so terrible they would destroy all hope. We called it Operation Pandora's Jar Jar. And it almost worked.

Ha! Ha! Do you see? He called out George Lucas, dude!

My twenty-five years exiled in the Other Realm had been spent in the wildlands outside of the shaped Demesnes, confined to a pocket of space not unlike a holodeck where I could re-experience any memory but not create anything new, nor control my own appearance or apply imagination.

Yes, you see I can't help noticing how we're now discussing imagination within a sentence dependent on the reader having watched Star Trek: the Next Generation, which is interesting. Reviews quoted on the cover praise Henderson's allegedly ripe sense of humour, and yet aside from a sasquatch engaged in knitting - which is really only an absurdist juxtaposition, albeit a comic one - the only humour I can find is the sort of deal passed off as such in episodes of the Big Bang Theory, references to pop culture and something which once happened in an issue of Green Lantern; which isn't humour. It's button-pushing. It's culty dog-whistling. It's a list calculated to bring smiles of recognition to the faces of readers, with the comedy, such as it is, sprung from the incongruity of someone in a fantasy novel making a reference to Star Wars, a joke which actually isn't that side-splitting after the first few hundred iterations and particularly not if that's all you know how to do.

So, it's mostly dialogue, pop culture references, sentences which were probably suffixed with dude prior to editing, assuming there was editing, and let's not forget chapters named after eighties pop songs, and mostly fucking awful eighties pop songs; and what I could follow of the story is incomprehensible. Henderson attempts to fill us in on the background by describing his characters watching an instructional video called So, You're a Feyblood Now, which itself is reduced to a meaningless information free gag by the wearying MST3K style interjections of its viewers. This is fiction for people who dress up as characters from television shows. I don't know how it got published.