Kangaroo

D.H. Lawrence Kangaroo (1923)
This is one of Lawrence's leadership novels, as they've been called, although I've also seen the same cited as evidence of his fascism. I'm not sure leadership is quite the right term, and Kangaroo is as much a refutation of the notion that Lawrence suffered from a stiff right arm as anything, unless you regard fascism as everything which isn't actually Owen Jones. However, it can be said that it's one of his more transparently autobiographical novels, with details drawn from his flight from England and three months spent in Australia prior to sailing to the Americas. Central to Kangaroo is the rise of a popular nationalist party, some of which is doubtless drawn from what Lawrence witnessed in Italy during the rise of Mussolini, which is where the fascism supposedly comes in.

Kangaroo is the nickname of one of those dynamic leader types around which angry young men who just happen to love their country tend to cohere; and so far as I'm aware, the character wasn't really based on anything inhabiting the Australian political spectrum of the day. It's also interesting that he's Jewish - much like Bertold Goltz, leader of the paramilitary Sons of Job in Philip K. Dick's Simulacra. Kangaroo's somewhat dilute brand of fascism doesn't seem to go further than a not unreasonable distrust of labour unions, typically nebulous waffle about international banking, and some fairly mild racial stereotyping - at least mild for the twenties - and, politically speaking, he seems to represent revolutionary figureheads making the same mistakes as those whom they aspire to replace. His role in the novel, as with those of his supporters befriended by the itinerant Richard Somers, is seemingly as a screen onto which Lawrence projects his ideas about fascism, authority, and everything that was going on in the world, in order to provide a critique; so we're talking about ideas and beliefs which the author is examining rather than necessarily endorsing; and Kangaroo's eventual assassination during a failed coup of his own instigation doesn't suggest a whole lot of faith in the road trodden by Mussolini and others.

Unfortunately though, not all of the novel is as interesting as this may sound, and Somers' time spent with Kangaroo is mostly extended conversational circles about the possibility of love between a man who was never confused and another really strong man without any of the funny stuff getting in the way, which is fairly typical of Lawrence talking to himself and is difficult to imagine transposed to the lips of Nigel Farage.

Evil is the great principle that opposes life in its new urges. The principle of permanency, everlastingness is, in my opinion, the root of evil. The Ten Commandments which Moses heard were the very voice of life. But the tablets of stone he engraved them on are millstones around our necks. Commandments should fade as flowers do. They are no more divine than flowers are. But our divine flowers - look at those hibiscus - they don't want to immortalise themselves into stone. If they turned to stone on my table, my heart would almost stop beating, and lose its hope and its joy.

Huh! What a flipping Nazi!

I gather the philosophy which Lawrence eventually developed had some parallels with Buddhism, or at least the idea of there being nothing permanent but change, and it is expressed here at crippling length but without any coherent development, ideas being set down in whichever order they occurred to the author, Kangaroo being one of his semi-improvised works. The accusation of fascism seemingly comes from the discussion of those details already mentioned in combination with Lawrence's growing misanthropy, the contradiction of which he himself remained very much aware.

It's a kind of nervous obstinacy and self-importance in you. You don't like people. You always turn away from them and hate them. Yet like a dog to his vomit you always turn back.

That being said, Lawrence's cynicism is given thorough account in the two painfully autobiographical chapters flashing back to Cornwall during the first world war. Lawrence had evaded the draft, having been declared unfit for active duty, but was treated with heavy suspicion, and harassed by the authorities beyond reason to the point of being effectively driven from the country; all because his wife was German and he wrote novels and was therefore presumably a bit weird. Anyone who can read these chapters and still attribute authoritarian tendencies to their author is an idiot.

So Kangaroo is some way down the list, but flourishes of poetic genius are to be found throughout, and chapters twelve and thirteen are amongst the most powerful written by the author.

Revelation of the Daleks

Eric Saward Revelation of the Daleks (2019)
As you may recall, Doctor Who was a children's science-fiction serial on the telly back before the advent of the video recorder, meaning that if you wanted to catch up on older episodes, you had to buy the novelisation published by Target. Happily, at least for persons such as myself who require everything to exist within the context of a neatly ordered set, Target eventually novelised everything seen on the box, even a few which would have been on the box but weren't due to the lazy, work-shy BBC sponge-monkeys being on strike that year because the tea served in the staff canteen was the wrong colour.

Anyone still reading?

Never mind.

Anyway, by the time Target went tits up, they had published all but five of the Who serials seen on the television, notably two by Eric Saward who supposedly didn't want anyone else adapting his work - although I may have remembered that wrong. It could have been something to do with the estate of Terry Nation, but really - who gives a fuck? Revelation of the Daleks was unofficially novelised by Jon Preddle back in 1992 as part of the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club's campaign to fill in those five terrifying gaps in our collections. I didn't know of this until many years later, by which point, copies of Preddle's version were impossible to find unless you count eBooks, which I don't.

Well, I'm nearly fifty-fucking-seven, older, probably wiser in some poorly defined capacity, and with a general suspicion* regarding almost everything sprung forth from Who since he came back on the telly played by an Easter Island statue in 2005; and yet my devotion was once so deeply ingrained that, even now, I still feel the need to fill those five gaps in a collection of books I may never read again because I'm no longer thirteen.

Revelation of the Daleks was an odd story, although one for which I recall some affection. I think I may have watched a VHS copy at some point back in the nineties, but I'm otherwise so unfamilar with whatever it did as for this to be an almost new thing, now that Eric has finally found time to write it.

Saward seems to be regarded as one of those problematic Who writers, probably meaning he wasn't afraid to point out when some sacred fan cow was actually a pile of shite, or at least that's how it usually works. For my money, he wrote some decent stories and did a good job of keeping things interesting during his time as script editor on the show. I've seen him criticised as a Douglas Adams knock off, which I don't quite see given the lesser level of annoying self-conscious whimsy.

Converted to prose, Revelation of the Daleks serves as a strong reminder of Who having been developed back when television was still pretty much theatre with cameras pointed at the actors. Everything here occurs within what may as well be a couple of rooms with a cast of eight or nine chasing each other from one set to the next; and if it's not exactly Shakespearean, it's closer to being a twentieth century Billy than it is to either Star Wars or Asimov's Foundation. Revelation reads very much as a telly script novelised for the benefit of thirteen-year olds or younger, which doesn't mean that it's bad so much as that certain narrative weaknesses seem amplified and they're difficult to overlook.

The strengths of the original story were arguably its big ideas regarding what's really going on at Tranquil Repose, but here - even without the Dalek connection already spunked away by the title - everything is signposted from almost the very beginning with clues so fucking obvious as to what's coming that the eventual revelation of what's really going on feels redundant. All the running around therefore seems designed to keep us busy as we wait for certain discoveries to be made - even though we've already guessed what they're going to be - and accordingly lacks drama. This leaves us with just the humour, which I assume would be the DJ, played on the box by Alexei Sayle, and which could have worked as a linking device in the vein of Lynne Thigpen's DJ in The Warriors, but didn't because the whole thing may as well have been an episode of fucking Rentaghost; and Dave Lee Travis in space is not an inherently funny idea if you've actually mistaken Dave Lee Travis for anything genuinely cool; and in case you've forgotten and were wondering, the DJ's weapon by which he blasts his foes with - sigh - concentrated rock'n'roll is also corny as fuck on the printed page, and not even in an entertainingly ironic sense, as it might have been had Saward specified that, for example, such and such a Dalek had been obliterated by the mighty force of that fucking terrible I Like It song by Gerry & the Pacemakers.

So, I'd say I'm too old to get much from this adaptation, except I routinely read all sorts of juvenile shite, most of which works just fine for me; and it's really, really difficult to work out just who it's aimed at, given that I found it in the science-fiction section at Barnes & Noble, as distinct from the children's section. It's a shame because some of it works, and a quick peak at other Sawards suggests he may simply have rushed this one to get it over and done with. An even greater shame is that a quick peak at Jon Preddle's unofficial online version leads me to suspect that he probably did a better job.

*: I say general suspicion but I actually mean uncompromising hatred.

Gobbolino the Witch's Cat

Ursula Moray Williams Gobbolino the Witch's Cat (1942)
This is a Puffin book which I was given for either Christmas or a birthday back when I was an age for which a book about a witch's cat might be deemed appropriate. I read but I wasn't a big reader, and I never got around to reading it because, quite aside from it being obvious that there wouldn't be any spaceships involved, I was put off by the cover illustration which made our boy look pleased with himself in a way that bothered me - and which somehow reminded me of Nicola Bennett at school. I remember her marching around the playground during some game or other with more or less the same expression and I found her a bit annoying.

Then suddenly on the fifth of November, 2010 - which I know because the receipt is still inside the book - I found this copy in a charity shop in Coventry. I bought it because I still felt profoundly guilty at having failed to read the thing when I was a kid.

So here goes - half a century late, but never mind…

It pains me to say because I wanted to get something out of this, but the best that can probably be said is that it is what it is. Gobbolino - which is a fucking terrible name for a cat - just wants a quiet life and doesn't really enjoy doing bad stuff, so his owner dumps him. She's a witch so obviously Gobbolino is a huge disappointment. The rest of the story entails Gobbolino finding a new home, getting settled, then having that ticket to dumpsville renewed once it becomes obvious that he's witches a cat; and this happens over and over and over because children like repetition. Williams apparently insisted that she wasn't writing children's books even though children enjoyed what she wrote, which I personally find a bit unconvincing. Gobbolino the Witch's Cat does its best with all the usual stuff about orphans, knights, princesses who live in towers, Lord Mayors, a travelling Punch & Judy show, and so on, but is let down by its star acting more like a dog than a cat, particularly with all the arse kissing and self pity. Maybe Williams didn't actually know what a cat was, and the frequent saucers of milk seem to support this given that cats are lactose intolerant. Also, the reference to a little black slave on page 102 is a bit weird.

Well, if low on surprises, Gobbolino has its moments at least as much as anything you probably should have read before you developed pubic hair. It's not an unpleasant read, nor was it in any sense a chore, and it's nice to see that at least someone was waving the flag for cats in the kiddie books of our youth given that I seem to remember a lot of scheming felines forever paying the price for being too clever, not like all those loyal hounds.

I just wanted it to be better, and I wanted my six-year old self to have been wrong.

The Quitter

Harvey Pekar & Dean Haspiel The Quitter (2005)
This one is Harvey's life from birth up to his first forays into underground comics publishing with particular emphasis on occupational dead ends and failures. Some of the ground has already been covered, but not quite in this context, and there's a lot more of Harvey's childhood as a Polish Jew growing up in Cleveland than I've seen before.

I'm sure there will turn out to be many examples of why Harvey can't be considered the father of the autobiographical comic book should I make such a claim, but he remains father of the autobiographical comic book as we know it so far as I'm concerned, and I still don't believe that anyone has published better than American Splendor. The strange thing is that I still can't work out what Harvey did that made his work so distinctive and so powerful. It may be attention to detail, or the sort of detail he felt needed recording, or simply the way he tells 'em. It could just as well be the tenacity with which Harvey stuck to his own guns, ploughing his own furrow regardless of commercial concerns, because when a writer has this much courage in their own convictions, I guess it shines through, even when it's just some story about a guy buying a pair of shoes.

I must admit to having very little idea of what the autobiographical comic book is doing right now, but in the nineties it was mostly a confessional describing pornography habits, spiced up with how mad the girlfriend became when she'd read the previous issue. Between them, Joe Matt and Rob Liefeld drove me away from the medium for pretty much the next two decades; and yet Harvey's work endures because he kept on going, doing what he did best, being Harvey, and at times I identify with what he's been through so hard that it hurts. I don't know whether this is because I'm more like Harvey than other people - we're both blue collar, more or less self-educated and obsessive - or whether he genuinely tapped into some sort of universal experience of the human condition; but this one is a genuine masterpiece, even by Harvey's standards.

I realise he'd now be 83 were he still with us, which is probably pushing it a bit, but Godammit a world without Harvey Pekar still feels like a fucking stupid idea.

Heart of Aztlan

Rudolfo A. Anaya Heart of Aztlan (1976)
I seem to recall Heart of Aztlan being important to the Chicano movement. The Chicano movement, in case you were wondering, emerged around the same time as other civil rights groups of the late twentieth century, in this instance representing the Mexican and Hispanic working classes principally in the southern United States. In Heart of Aztlan, Anaya reminds his people where they came from, reinforcing a cultural identity which was disrupted when the typical Chicano family found itself ejected from its traditional land and obliged to head north in search of work. For Anaya, this exodus represented an inversion of the Aztec origin legend wherein his people first came from the semi-mythic island of Aztlan in the north following a prophecy which, if historically specific to the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, has since become an abstract ideal serving all Chicanos.

That's my understanding anyway. I first read Heart of Aztlan back in the nineties when nary a day went by without my thinking about Huitzilopochtli*. I was trying to work out what happened next, and how Mexico coped with assimilation and syncretism. I liked it, and I got something from it, although it's about a present I barely recognised more than it's about the past. Since then, I've moved, and now live in a city with a 60% Hispanic population, so I'm getting a lot more from it. In fact the Albuquerque barrio of Anaya's book may as well be my own neighbourhood, and I'm sure it helps that I no longer need to look up any of the pachuco slang because I hear most of it daily.

That said, I can see why Anaya's big hit was Bless Me, Ultima rather than this one. Ultima tells a fairly similar story of a Mexican family moving north in search of work, but has a sharper narrative focus from what I recall, and is hence fairly dramatic in its own way. Heart of Aztlan tends to meander like a soap opera, moving from the unemployed father to the frustrated matriarch to the careless offspring hoping to get lucky at the high school, because their stories are different parts of the same thing, and the main character is the barrio itself more than its individual inhabitants. As with a soap, plenty happens - Clemente realises that neither his employer nor his union have his best interests at heart, the family integrates with its new neighbours and so on - but it feels chaotic, just as life tends to be.

The application of mythology to contemporary life is seamlessly done, and I particularly liked how la Llorana - the woman who wails at the crossroads, and Cihuacoatl in Mexica times - has become the siren of a cop car in twentieth century America; but the comparison is revealed only in the novel as a whole, and is less obvious in close up during individual passages. It's a good novel and a fairly powerful restatement of contemporary Chicano identity as the latest expression of a much older tradition, but it seems to lack the urgency of Bless Me, Ultima and at times feels like trying to read an Arboles de la Vida sculpture.

 *: Admittedly he's never far from my thoughts, even now.

Infinite Requiem

Daniel Blythe Infinite Requiem (1995)
Regular readers may be dimly aware of my general dislike of Doctor Who and the possibly record breaking levels of bile to which it and its devotees have occasionally driven me; but, as is probably obvious to any passing psychologist, I was once quite the fan, and my anger is therefore driven by what fucking idiots have done to the thing I once loved. I'm not saying it was ever the most brilliantest brilliant thing of all time as its contemporary cultists would claim, but it was fun and it had something, and it was mostly half decent as science-fiction. Perhaps significantly, my favourite era of the show ended up being those years when it wasn't actually on the telly due to having been cancelled, but carried on as a series of monthly novels selling to a presumably dwindling hardcore of readers.

Virgin Books had bought the rights and took to publishing these New Adventures as a continuation of what we'd seen on the screen, but without the fucking terrible music. The idea was that they might stand as decent science-fiction novels in their own right, perhaps even launching the careers of promising new science-fiction authors in the process. Fandom being what it is, what careers were launched were mostly in the direction of yet more Who novels, and the discovery of the next Asimov never really happened; but on the other hand, most of the New Adventures actually worked as decent science-fiction novels in their own right, or were at least of a standard allowing one to regard them as spiritual successor to at least Doc Savage, Perry Rhodan and Sexton Blake rather than just yet more product on the shelf adjacent to the one sagging under the weight of all that Star Wars tat.

That being said, my first impression upon seeing one of these in a book store was oh for fuck's sake, let it die. Then a couple of months later I noticed a few of them cropping up in my local WHSmith, and Paul Cornell's No Future - which sends Sylvester McCoy's Doctor to London in 1977 to defeat an alien invasion which intrudes upon the formative years of punk rock - was apparently just stupid enough to warrant my buying the thing. Then I read Jim Mortimore's Blood Heat because there was a Silurian on the cover, and I decided that was it. I was nearly thirty. I had a girlfriend and we were having it off and everything. I didn't need to collect yet another series of anything, not least because there were already thirty or forty of the fuckers at a fiver a throw and it was just too much. I think The Left Handed Hummingbird was next because it sounded like an unreleased Nurse With Wound album, followed by this.

I bought it because it was the only one they had in Chener Books, my local book shop on Lordship Lane, and in buying it I knew I was doomed to collect the fucking set.

Curiosity is therefore why I'm reading it again in 2022. Infinite Requiem made an impression at the time, although not much of one, but enough to inspire my shelling out for the other four million in the series over the years which followed. I read it back before I could really consider myself a regular reader of anything, back when it might take me up to six months to get through a book, and I rarely strayed from my lane, thematically speaking. I wanted to see how well this had aged, and whether it turned out to be better than I remembered.

Thankfully, it actually is reasonably well written, and my own generally increased literacy hasn't left it beached as time travelling Harry Potter or equivalent. It features the man from the telly having an adventure and is about as deep as you need it to be, but Blythe avoids the sort of clichés and shortcuts which often blight ventures of this kind. The only real problem is that, as the title possibly indicates, it pits our man against one of those all-powerful and omnipotent greatest threats to everything ever - or three of them if we're counting - attempting the kind of horrifying scale which never seems to work in print and isn't massively interesting here. This is a shame because the peripheral detail and supporting characters are great, and thus significantly more engaging than the menacing psychic tosspots who want to destroy everything because that's the sort of thing that menacing psychic tosspots go in for. Being the fruit of 1995, we get a futuristic space library where everything is stored on disc, but on the other hand we get the Phracton Swarm which could have been one of the more interesting alien species to run riot across Who continuity, but I guess it wasn't to be.

Internet research reveals that Daniel Blythe went on to write a shitload of other things as distinct from the same thing over and over again, and as such achieved a sort of escape velocity from the cult ghetto which developed once Who made it back onto the telly. So that's good, and if Infinite Requiem probably isn't a masterpiece, it nevertheless had enough going for it to translate into a generally decent read three decades later.

Other Worlds of Clifford Simak

Clifford D. Simak Other Worlds of Clifford Simak (1960)
This was originally a twelve story hardback collection by the name of The Worlds of Clifford Simak, divided in half and reprinted as two individual collections due to the limitations of paperback book binding in the sixties. The six stories which didn't make it into this one were also printed in paperback form as The Worlds of Clifford Simak, which seems confusing but never mind.

It's been a while since I read any full length Simak, meaning cover to cover as distinct from stories appearing in the digests, and I somehow forgot what a pleasure it can be when he's firing on all four cylinders. Well, I didn't forget, but merely recalling having enjoyed a Simak or two isn't really the same as what you get from actually reading; and this one has been a real pleasure.

Given the number of short stories he churned out over the years, it's inevitable that they can't all be The Big Front Yard - which is amazing although it isn't in this collection - but this is nevertheless an impressively solid set with only Green Thumb representing any sort of dip in focus or standard, albeit not actually much of one. Of those authors who have achieved escape velocity from the science-fiction ghetto - here assuming such a shift is even desirable purely for the sake of argument - it seems increasingly strange that Simak remains yet to join Ursula LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury and others on the shelves of persons who otherwise wouldn't be seen dead reading anything with a picture of a rocket on the cover. His stories explore what it is to be human, or more accurately to belong to something bigger than ourselves, which he does by means of strange and fantastic ideas we tend to identify as either science-fiction, or science-fiction by virtue of their not really belonging anywhere else; and the warmth and humanity of his stories is both powerful and profoundly moving, yet without eschewing realism at the expense of the dunderhead positivity which often blights the work of authors going for the same sort of effect. He doesn't always get the balance quite right, but he shines bright in this lot with homespun tales of seemingly familiar people in weird or jagged situations unlike anything I've noticed anywhere else in fiction. Dusty Zebra, Carbon Copy, Founding Father and Idiot's Crusade are in particular amongst the best Simak I've read, and I've read a lot.