David Weber “On Basilisk Station” – The Queen’s Royal Space Navy adventures

David Weber writes science fiction and fantasy. On Basilisk Station (1993) is the first in a series of books about the female spaceship captain Honor Harrington.

I have to start this review off with an explanation of sorts. I have this thing about Sci-Fi/Fantasy. It’s subjective as all hell and that’s why I feel the need to start with explaining my basic point of view.

A lot of the time I have this feeling that this kind of literature is so intent on creating a world and explaining it to the reader that the author loses sight of the main objective, which should be the telling of a story. The reader is given in-depth descriptions of various machines and theorems of space travel, or drug production, or alien biology or cryptozoological phenomenon. It isn’t Setting the Scene as much as it is just a way of showing that the author has done his homework.

I understand that some of the attraction lies in creating this vast world for the reader to inhabit and the idea there is that that’s the main objective of large chunks of text.

Let me be blisteringly clear just so we don’t misunderstand one another – I do just not have the patience.

For me the main thing is always the action and the interaction and the characters in and of themselves.

So the aspect of this type of literature that has to do with creating a world for me to live in nibbles at the notion that there is such a thing as objective reality to put it into contrast with, and philosophically speaking I’m not a great believer in objective reality. That means the endless gratuitous descriptions that are inherent in the genre do nothing for me. Oh, wait, that’s not true. They bore me.

So – now you know where I am coming from. Onwards.

On Basilisk Station does that thing where it leans heavily on literature like C.S. Forester’s The Hornblower series, but here we’re in space instead of fighting the Napoleonic Wars. This is competently written. The crew is described in detail and their interaction is important for the general progression of the action, so there’s that to take into account. Harrington herself is described and just like with so many of these kinds of books she is given certain specific characteristics which are produced again and again least we lose sight of what she is.

The basic story is that Harrington is given an impossible task (guarding the Basilisk Station) and that she prevails at great personal and material cost. She does come out of it richer in experience and in material goods and with newly made friends in high places and enemies likewise made that are going to cause her career problems, not that she didn’t have those already, considering her humble beginnings.

It follows a pretty steady course and it is adroitly written all the way through, up to and including the spaceship battles and the loss of men and machinery out there at the ass-end of the “civilised world”. The natives are treated pretty much the way natives do get treated in this particular setting, i.e. as staffage. The petty personal vendettas within the Royal Navy (yes, they are in service of the Queen, god help us all) are shown as instrumental in how someone like Harrington winds up where she is.

The novel itself is skilfully written, competent and well worked through and within its genre it is definitely not slouching in a corner. It’s a good read, the text flows and all the criterion are filled as neatly as ticking off boxes on a “how to” manual.

There’s an old adage “show, don’t tell” when it comes to writing. I think my issue with these genre pieces in general is that they are always listing heavily towards the “tell” side. It is their nature and it is the thing that attracts its fans. They will no doubt get a kick out of this one.

I, however, can only view it through my total and utter rejection of that style of writing. So despite the fact that it is good within those set parameters I don’t really enjoy it. It’s my nature, you understand, and no slight on Weber for that.

If you like this kind of thing, though, this is probably right up your alley and by all means, more power to you.

The trick about reviewing books is to understand that there is no real objectivity in what you do unless you can see the merits of literature despite your own particular taste and inclination. I just wanted to put that out there so you understand my reviews for what they are.

Mule

A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren – New Orleans during the Depression

Nelson Algren’s novel A Walk on the Wild Side (first published 1956) is one of those weird ones that you have a vague feeling of having read before. I get threads and hints to Steinbeck and Kerouac and the likes of those two gentlemen. It’s a case of having read the followers before reading the trailblazers. That happens sometimes and you just have to try and remind yourself that there is a linear flow to literature as well as a non-linear one.

The story is set in New Orleans, mostly on Perdido street in the French Quarter with the pimps and the working girls and the petty criminals – who are more petty than usual, considering that this is during the 1930s and the Depression is in full swing.

The protagonist is Dove Linkhorn, a young man with no formal education and a great deal of that naïve cruelty you expect from children. He isn’t being intentionally malicious, he just falls into bad company and tries to save his own hide and sometimes even when his intentions are good, things still go pear-shaped through no fault of his own. He’s a kind of annoying character to follow, though, for those reasons and because he simply doesn’t have that cause-and-effect thinking that you need to act like an adult.

The women in this story suffer a bit from the whore-and-Madonna complex, sometimes quite literally, but there is enough insight to their strengths along with their weaknesses for it to be bearable, even if it is a dated way of viewing the world. Some of the working girls, like Hallie, are actually portrayed as real complex characters with motive and drives and more to them than just the obvious.

Algren himself claims the book “asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why me who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind”. Obviously, for the author there is an Odyssean quality to this story, what with the journey and the trials and the self-discovery.

I read it and see the many people Dove steps on to get where he’s going, not that he doesn’t get his come-uppance and all that, but still. He cheats, steals, lies, betrays, fornicates and well – just in general runs the gambit on the seven deadly. In the end he comes to a turning point and returns back home hoping for a shot at the love of a good woman. A woman, mind you, that he left behind in a less than dignified way.

It’s a good read. It has all the beautiful losers and interesting freaks and weird occurrences you could possibly want and the language alone is worth the time. The morals feel a little murky, but then again, murky can be good. I like murky.

Also you get the following little gem of advice from a character named Cross-Country Kline:

“Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own. Never let anybody talk you into shaking another man’s jolt. And never cop another man’s plea”. (A Walk on the Wild Side)

It just goes to show that some advice is still good, no matter the passage of time.

Also, there is a connection to the Lou Read song. He was approached about a project to turn the book into a musical and wound up using the title for his “Walk on the Wild Side” describing the lives of transsexuals and transvestites at The Factory. I’m sure Algren would approve.

Mule

Blood Meridian – Violence

Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian first published in 1985 is probably one of the most violent books I’ve ever read – and that’s saying something. Violence is sort of the theme here, and not in any way that makes you feel easy about the subject. This is not a moral parable that will give you easy outs by defining the areas of right and wrong through the use of dialectic morality. This is more the kind of tale that lays bare the most sordid aspects of human nature without giving you any handles and you’ll just have to make up your own mind about it.

See, now, the warlike nature of man – that is what we’re dealing with here and no matter how much we as a species propound that we want peace, we just never seem to get there, do we? That’s what this is all about.

It’s set along the borderland between the US and Mexico in 1849-1850 and we’re riding with the Glanton gang who are taking scalps and massacring Indians. This is not Manifest Destiny in any pretty Laura Ingalls kind of way. This is dirty and bloody and unnecessarily cruel in every single manner you can imagine. What makes it worse is the cool and detached way the author goes about his business.

The main protagonist is The Kid, a young man who leaves his home in Tennessee and gets signed up by Captain White to ride with the gang. He takes the bloodiness of the business in stride as far as we as readers can tell, and only ever runs contrary to expectations when his own physical safety is in question.

Set against all this is the Judge, a huge towering giant of a man with intellectual capital and a strain of mysticism and otherworldliness about him, not only in appearance, but in reasoning as well.

Here’s the logic of the thing, given the form of dialogue between The Judge and a man called Brown.

“What is my trade?
War. War is your trade. Is it not?
And it ain’t yours?
Mine too. Very much so.
What about all them notebooks and bones and stuff?
All other trades are contained in that of war.
Is that why war endures?
No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.
That’s your notion.
The judge smiled.” (Blood Meridian, p. 249)

This novel has something in common with Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. Actually, it probably has a lot in common with it. The Judge is like Kurtz, The Kid like Marlowe. And there is much, much more to it than that.

The language of it is beautiful and uses so many archaisms and rare words that you find yourself reading slowly to catch it all.

It also has the cool inexorable quality that I recognize from McCarthy’s The Road. It never lets up, not even for a second. Nothing comes to any good and even the end leaves you with a sickening reeling feeling in your stomach, being open enough that you can use your own imagination on the horror of it.

It gives violence in relentless and impartial detail and shows us everything we don’t want to see. It never judges, or offers a moral high ground. It also describes the landscape in a way unlike anything I’ve seen before. It’s just fascinating and deeply unsettling, every aspect of it – and like all the best books it makes you work hard for any understanding.

Mule

The Joe Pitt Series by Charlie Huston – Vampires in New York

Charlie Huston – The Joe Pitt series

Already Dead (2005)

No Dominion (2006)

Half the Blood of Brooklyn (2007)

Charlie Huston has come up with a brilliant concept. You take the modern day vampire myth as we have come to know it through writers like Anne Rice and mix it with a good old fashioned hard boiled detective noir reminiscent of Raymond Chandler and set it in a gritty New York filled with vampires, zombies and regular folks and you get a very good ride.

The protagonist Joe Pitt is a vampire. He’s got the blood lust and the superhuman strength and the usual foibles and weaknesses and he’s about as cynical as you could expect from a guy who has been around a little too long and seen a little too much. The vampires of New York are organised in clans, like mobsters and they are about as territorial and dangerous. Each clan has its own philosophy, and there are all manner of politics as you could expect, and Joe gets caught right in the middle of it, despite being a rogue, which is more or less the equivalent of a Ronin – tolerated, as long as he is useful.

I’ve read three of the books in this series so far, Already Dead (2005), No Dominion (2006) and Half the Blood of Brooklyn (2007).

The first novel gives a good indication of where we are going right from the get go. The opening paragraph on page one reads:

“I smell them before I see them. All the powders, perfumes and oils the half-smart ones smear on themselves. The stupid ones just stumble around reeking. The really smart ones take a Goddamn shower. The water doesn’t help them in the long run, but the truth is, nothing is gonna help them in the long run. In the long run they’re gonna die. Hell, in the long run they’re already dead.” (Already Dead)

And that sets the scene. We get the dry commentary voice-over that conjures up a black-and-white old Marlowe detective story with all that that entails, like ladies with dangerous curves and chunky glasses of whiskey and rough villains and a mastermind in a silk suit with a silver cigarette case. This isn’t ever going to be anything other than what it advertises itself as, but – that being said – there are still quite a few ways in which it could be a whole lot less.

Huston, however, doesn’t disappoint. He actually pulls it off and then some.

You get language like this: “Color me pensive. Color me lost in thought and avoiding getting on the train, lighting a cigarette without even thinking about it, because that’s my story. That’s my excuse for why I don’t smell Tom until the fucker jams the barrel of his gun in my back”. (No Dominion).

For all of Pitt’s tough talk, though, he’s not just muscle for hire, even if it seems to be a role he finds it convenient to play. He’s fallen in love with a woman who is dying from HIV, and that’s another clever twist of the overall vampire myth seeing as how vampirism has always been compared to other diseases of the blood like syphilis and malaria.

If it seems like I know a little too much about the vampire myth, believe me, I do. I have read a lot of vampire stories, enough that they have their own section in my library. This is pulp, by it’s own admission. You’ll find Charlie Huston’s stories over at pulpnoir.com. Still, there is pulp and there is trash and the twain should not be confused.

This is smart, savvy, intuitive and intelligent pulp. It takes a lot of cues from a format you will recognize and affords the reader the pleasure of recognition at the same time as giving it a unique voice. There’s nothing wrong with clichés as long as you do something creative with them and Charlie Huston does.

The Enclave, for instance, are the mystics of the bunch. They believe that if they starve themselves long enough and thoroughly enough they will be able to walk in the sun. It just fits that there would be one group that went this way, became monks and tried to reach the next level, because somehow there has to be more to life than just this.

I’ve argued, and believe me it’s not always been a popular view, that vampires are trying to teach us how to die. Practically every vampire legend, story, or franchise always snags on the ennui and pointlessness of living forever. The toll it takes, the cost of giving up human society and all that we grade as natural always ends with a yearning towards death. In most vampire stories you come in either at the beginning, or at the very end, when the stake hits the chest cavity. It’s good to drop down somewhere in the middle and see what that might mean.

This is light, easy, bloody and enjoyable all the way through, provided that you have a taste for the basic genre itself. It’s also violent, dark and cynically funny. Above all it has a voice of its own, and that’s hard to find.

Mule

Ada – Or Ardor: A Family Chronicle by Nabokov

Ada was first published in 1969 and is the work of Vladimir Nabokov.

I’m a Nabokov fan.

I admit it willingly and take my chances. Lolita is one of my favourite novels.

The first thing you have to do when approaching one of Nabokov’s works is resign yourself to the fact that you are going to be swamped by words, imagery, references and literary connotations that will most certainly take you out of your comfort zone no matter how erudite you are.

Case in point – Ada.

I am sufficiently proud of knowing something that I don’t need to pretend I know everything. I am contented by looking up notes in the back of the book explaining the sometimes very recondite references and jokes based on word play in Russian, French and English. Polyglot intellectuals volleying intense word puns at each other (throw in some Latin for good measure) makes for focused reading.

Some readers no doubt find that kind of thing off-putting. I am not one of them. I read and enjoyed “The Wasteland” while other’s in my Lit. class wanted to punch T.S. Eliot in the mouth for not saying what he meant. They argued the point until I calmly stated most of their vehemence was clearly based in the fact that they felt stupid. Ada will surely have the same effect if you are expecting a light read.

The two principle characters are Van Veen and Ada, two cousins that fall in love and have an intense affair in their younger years. They believe themselves to be cousins, and their fathers are cousins and their mothers are sisters. They later discover that they are, in fact, brother and sister.

The story is told in manuscript form, as the recollections of a full grown Van – and folded into the text are Ada’s notes into the margin.

As it is with Lolita, so it is with Ada. The story in itself is rich and textured, lending itself to all kinds of reasoning about a great many topics, philosophy and morals not withstanding as well as literature and art. The structure is of the same complicated nature as well. It’s recollections and oblique passages, comments in the margin, some things gone over and re-glossed, and so on and so forth. It also deals with time as a theme and that’s always a little tricky.

Nabokov is a word nerd. A large part of the pleasure in reading his work comes from the painstakingly carefully wrought crenellations of his style.

And the subject matter might seem simple, even tawdry, at a cursory glance, but good lord, the man can write. The further into the material you go, the more intense it gets. Even if the basic premise is this life long love story between siblings and the occasional duel, threesome, descriptions of brothels and pick nicks in the green, jealousy, philial hate and love, the many tentacled social constellations and so on and so forth – there is still more to parse. It’s not tawdry, never boring and … oh, did I mention the science fiction element? No? Well, this takes place in a Terra/Antiterra not-quite here and now or when and never alternate, but sort of parallel universe.

This is one of those novels that doesn’t hide it’s ambitious nature, it’s literariness and you just have to grab the reins and hold on. It’s not a book you should pick up if you want distraction and an easy read. If you want quality and a challenge, though, this is the way to go.

But, then, I would think that – I am a fan.

Mule

Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson

Stephen Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You first published in 2005 is a non fiction discussion on popular culture.

Steven Johnson has a degree in semiotics and literature and you can kind of tell. This book has the subtitle “How popular culture is making us smarter”. That’s plenty provocative enough, so with that you expect him to plead his case well. And he does.

Johnson takes on the task of discussing mass culture as something other than a trivial past time with no inherent merit. It’s kind of a mouthful to go at, but he does it with verve and humour and a good deal of theoretical structure hiding behind the blithe smile of the text.

It’s actually a relief to find that someone is willing to discuss mass culture as something other than a guilty pleasure we all indulge in, but won’t talk about in the clear light of day. What he goes after is proving that the current expressions of mass culture have definitely become more sophisticated and challenging in later years.

When talking about computer games he point out that the most popular games are not the shoot ‘em up games that get all the attention, but the slow and painstakingly complicated ones like SimCity and Age of Empires. He pleads a good case for the delayed gratification these games offer, the things you so rarely hear discussed, like how many hours you sometimes have to spend on a relatively sedate task in order to achieve some minor goal and the frustration that goes with that.

When discussing television he compares the series Dallas to 24 or the Sopranos, making good arguments for how the complexity of the story line has something to do with the taste of the viewers. There’s also a mention of the extremely fast paced and incredibly complicated series The West Wing, a series that actually doesn’t explain anything to the viewer, and more than that, makes it really necessary for the viewer to be active rather than passive.

He also discusses things like how the show The Apprentice or Survivor requires skills like social intelligence rather than the trivia knowledge you need to keep pace in random game shows.

Why is all this relevant? Well, there’s something to it, alright.

“So this is the landscape of the Sleeper Curve. Games that force us to probe and telescope. Television shows that require the mind to fill in the blanks, or exercise its emotional intelligence. Software that makes us sit forward, not lean back. But if the long-term trend in pop culture is toward increased complexity, is there any evidence our brains are reflecting that change?” (Johnson, p. 136).

I am a child of the postmodern, or what Bauman has chosen to term “liquid modernity” so of course this approach is going to appeal to me. Johnson offer the opinion that you have to ask a different set of questions to the popular culture than has been done in the past. I’m all for it. By all means, look at the statistics and see how the levels of complexity offered in computer games challenge the players ability to vast amounts of information at a glance and what that means in terms of intelligence and information assimilation.

There’s always been a sort of canonical war between high and low culture, but there’s always been considerable crossbreeding between the two as well, and this book argues the point that the sheer complexity of some popular culture is a symptom of something or other. That, in an of itself, is enough to make this a work worth reading.

And besides… it’s fun.

Mule

Michael Herr “Dispatches” – The Vietnam War

Michael Herr’s Dispatches was first published in 1977 and is a non-fictional book.

There are all kinds of first hand accounts of war. I’ve read quite a few, probably more than I should have at an age when most people were still trying to work through the dolled up teenage literature so heavily prevalent. I went straight to Eric Maria Remarque, Sven Hassel and suchlike.
The Vietnam war has seeped down deep into the mythology of America that it is subjected to a little cross cultural bleeding. But the thing is, there haven’t been many books like Michael Herr’s Dispatches to say anything about the experience itself.
I do the movie thing too, so it’s easier for me to find references in that arena. But there’s a lot of tricky territory to navigate and it’s easy for it to disintegrate into a moral tale like Oliver Stone’s Platoon, or a convenient backdrop the way it’s used in a great many bland American action movies.
There is a brilliant jewel of a parallel here in a totally different style, though, and that’s Bao Ninh’s novel The Sorrow of War (1994). But that’s a story for a different time.
Herr’s perspective is that of the perpetual outsider, because he is a journalist. That being said he is in it with the soldiers because he is a battle field journalist. He’s there in the mud and jungle and in the strange highlands alongside the soldiers seeing what they see, but one step removed from them, because he isn’t actually fighting. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t get shot at, though.
But he is trained at observing and that makes this book more immediate. He has an uncanny ability to keep the bigger picture in mind, what’s being said by the generals and press officers as well as what’s going on in the field. He offers a million observations of minutiae like the gunner in a helicopter that asks him to cover up the corpses they’re riding with when the tarp comes loose, or random comments and little throw-away things, like the patter of the soldiers trying to distance themselves or the things they’ve written on their helmets and flak jackets. “A sucking chest wound is natures way of telling you you’ve been in a fire fight”, that kind of thing.
It takes a while to figure it out, because the tone is seductive, but this is actually literature. It might as well be fictional, it is written with that kind of sensibility. It doesn’t pretend to be a truthful account of what happened while Herr was “in country”. It records the experience and gives the reader a good sense of what it was like, of how these event actually felt for someone who was there.
The movie reference isn’t idle on my part, Herr does that himself too, saying those that were there knew what movie they were in. It’s this kind of awareness of cultural pattern that’s laid down over all of it as a template that makes this book so much a warrior poet retelling on par with Sassoon or Remarque. It doesn’t matter if Herr is describing the way Saigon feels or the jungle or the highlands, or his fellow journalists or the grunts.

The telescoping eye of the author gives you glimpses and catches and explanations as well as just remembrances that enhance and enrich the descriptions. There’s very little glory in it all, but there is a kind of beauty none the less, and that makes it all the more compelling and horrific. Which is just the way you want this kind of narrative to be really, at least to my mind.

Mule

Generation X by Douglas Coupland

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland was first published in 1991.

According to Thomas Reed Whissen’s Classic Cult Fiction no one can set out to write a cult book on purpose, at least not in the same way as you can write a western or a whodunit; cult has to do with reader reaction rather than genre.

But if there ever was a generic cult book Douglas Coupland’s Generation X is a strong contender for the title. It has it all. Already the word “generation” in the title gives away the subculture, spokesman-ambition. And the “X” – symbol of the unknown – catches the spirit of alienation, essential to culthood, perfectly. As if this is not enough, Coupland offers the reader a trip via identification with the narrator, Andy, to the Shangri-la of all cult books: ego-reinforcement and spiritual rebirth. It serves up Mcjob-cynicisms and spiritual sustenance in the same helping and it is all very masculine, white, alienated and intelligent. A counter-culture assault aimed at the kneecaps of mainstream America, Andy thrashes contemporary yuppie culture verbally, while his friend, Dag, who is more physically resolute and subversive, vandalises expensive cars. In between these moments of revolt Andy, Dag and Claire share stories with each other and experience some kind of nostalgic hope.

Do I sound hostile?

I am not, really. It may be that the writing is according to prescription, but I buy it all the same.

The three friends are confused, disoriented. To be more precise, they are lost in the desert of Palm Springs and their disorientation is metaphorical rather than geographical. They are not roaming the desert: they are meditating in it. Very little happens. They relax by the swimming pool, earn their living from unqualified jobs, refuse to take responsibility of their lives, and do their best to keep boredom at bay by going into an ironic self-chosen exile where they can tell stories and anecdotes, decamerone-style, about themselves. But it is not the plague that is being exorcised here, or even the atomic threat (evoked again and again in the book), but rather a sick society that threatens to infect them with a fatal attraction for conventional middle (or should I say middling) class life.

But it is easier to take the rat out of the rat race than to take the rat race out of the rat. Andy, Dag and Claire have chosen their lot as castaways of society. Yet at the same time they want to be part of it. Actually, they want to have the best of both worlds: the adventure of the republic of Bohemia and the security of the kingdom of Boredom. But they cannot, and they are frustrated. This is not as bad as it seems, however: their frustration leads to a delicious sensation of weltschmerz – enjoyable since the pain is able to make up for the lack of meaning and can make them feel somewhat alive.

In real life the options are not that big either. In practice many young people are forced to become castaways, X-ers, outsiders, whatever one wants to call them – they have no choice. The price to pay for a middle class situation in terms of workload and stress increases day by day. Hence, one of the mottoes of Generation X is “reinvent the middle classes”.

Statistics available at the back of the book point to the fact that the polarisation between the rich and the rest (in the US and the rest of the west) is increasing. Rich or poor – soon there will be nothing in between. Given this social context it is small wonder that Andy & CO feel neurotic and alienated.

But to be alienated is not entirely bad. If you are an outsider, you are somebody; you have an identity, since identity to a large extent is a question of defining oneself against a norm. Women, blacks, children, the old and handicapped, the underprivileged are all defined against such norm or “ideal”. But what do you do if you are defined as the norm? Young, white men are per definition without identity – at least if they are well behaved. In my opinion cult books show that these “men without qualities” are special too, and different, albeit neurotic…This explains too the high status cult books enjoy despite their often counter-cultural messages.

When maladjusted young, white man reads about another maladjusted young white man a very special chemical process is started. Boy meets boy = True. Whissen uses words like idealisation, alienation, suffering, ego-reinforcement, behaviour-modification and vulnerability to define this truly platonic love.

Andy is a higher being, despite his alienation. He is supreme because of his intelligence, his radical attitude and, not least, because of his suffering. Identification with Andy leads to a situation where the reader’s ego is stroked and petted. You feel almost as intelligent, radical and brave as he. Yet identification can never be complete and this is of course unsatisfactory. Hence, the ideal cult reader modifies his (it is usually a he) behaviour in order to emulate the idolized and idealized Andy.

Whissen claims that this kind of reading process both depends on the reader’s vulnerability and enhances it. You have to be vulnerable to be receptive to cult books. The problem is that this openness also makes the cult reader an easy prey for ideologies hazardous for one’s mental health. A reader cum disciple is susceptible to simplified solutions and does not take real responsibility for his actions.

I don’t know.

I don’t think it is an ideal to be a superman reader – texts ricocheting from one’s impenetrable breast, texts scrutinized with X-ray vision. Words must be allowed to stab you in the heart, to flash in your eyes, to turn you on – at least for a blissful moment. Anyway, neither Andy, nor any other cult hero I know of would model their lives on a book. If I want to be as smart as X-friend Andy I too have to  realise that I must take the responsibility for my own vulnerable life.

Mule

The Prestige

This is a Christopher Priest novel written in 1995.

Now this novel has all the trappings that should make a successful story. At the heart of the story is the bitter feud between two stage magicians Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier.

The reader is first introduced to the grandchildren of these two magicians who are investigating what really happened between the two and the effects this has had on their own lives almost a century later.

The overall structure is very familiar to anyone who has even a glancing knowledge of the classical Gothic horror story. We have the large house with its unspeakable secrets hidden in the basement, in this particular case the Tesla machine, we have the secrets hidden in the manuscripts of Borden and Angier – manuscripts found and read in the middle of a dark and stormy night leading to horrible conclusions. And towards the very end the main character even goes into the cavernous basement where the past becomes known in all its decadent gory glory. The basement also happens to double as a family tomb.

So – yeah, I’ve seen this before.

Another main theme of the novel is the “dark double”, another Gothic classic. Stage magicians rely heavily on the prestige, the reveal at the end of a magic trick. And they rely on deceit. Some magicians go further than others in staging an illusion – and there is throughout the novel a discussion of whether Borden is one or two men. He might actually be a set of identical twins, something that figures heavily in his most famous trick “The New Transported Man” – an illusion that plagues and harrows Angier until he actually finds a way to replicate and improve on act.

But Angier takes it further than Borden. He finds a way to actually transport himself, at a high cost, via his Tesla machine. The machine itself is a classic Gothic horror too, complete with coils and wires and electrical flashes. He pays through the nose to have the machine constructed and then pays a more subtle price for using it.

All this makes for one fine and lurid tale indeed. Problem is, I know the conventions too well and find myself unaffected by the prose. The epistolary style leaves me cold, it is written in a way that’s meant to be a couple of diaries and when the voice does not appeal to you as a reader you quickly lose interest. I like Borden, there is a greater sense of mystery there, but the diary of Angier is quite frankly dull. It doesn’t bother with evoking the period, it doesn’t sketch the personality of the author to any great extent,  merely cataloguing the main events.

The ending is supposed to be a big reveal, but by the time we get there I have frankly lost interest. Borden, who is the foil all through the action, is summarily knocked-off earlier and we are left with the vestiges of the prestige of Angier

I can’t really go in to it in greater detail than that without giving it all away.

I remain sadly unimpressed. But then I have read all the classics in the genre, The Castle of Otranto, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Inmost Light and The Fall of the House of Usher to mention but a few – and they are by far a much more interesting read. Mostly I think because in and around the horrors are woven the minute and detailed character portraits that drive the action. If you want Gothic go straight to the source.  Start with Arthur Machen. Leave The Prestige for those who have not read the forerunners.

Or watch the movie. It makes good the promises of costume, time and suspense in a way you could only infer in the novel.

Mule

Rumble Fish

S.E. Hinton’s 1975 novel Rumble Fish is generally described as a youth novel. That’s not all it is however.

While involved in another project I actually stumbled on this novel and re-read it a little while ago. Sometimes a novel benefits from being left alone in your book case for a while and this was definitely one of them. For me personally most of the novels I read in my early teens have lost their pertinance and as we all know there come a time when you must put away childish things.

This novel however stands the test of re-reading and actually as your own perspective changes so do the connotations. Since my last reading I have gone though a lot of literature in the alienation genre and I catch the tone here as well. It is in part because the voice of the main character Rusty-James has that same distance and anhedonic quality.

As a matter of fact all the characters are more or less iconic in that respect. The Motorcycle Boy is referes to as The Pied Piper, Robin Hood and Jesse James all rolled into one and he sees these tags given him more as a burdon than an honour. He chastises Rusty-James gently when they speak of it and says it’s great to be a leader if you have somewhere to go.

The novel also gives a very precise voice to Rusty-James. He know himself well enough to know that he is not smart like his brother and father and he doesn’t understand what goes on around him like they do.  He believes that he could have been just like Motorcycle Boy, but everyone around him tells him that would never be the case.  He wouldn’t be in charge of the gang his brother used to run, he doesn’t have the brains.

Rusty-James best friend, Steve, also fills a particular role. He is in a way the voice of reason, as well as the recorder. He starts the story off by running in to Rusty-James on a beach and making him remember the past. I think it is this particular framework setting off the story that  makes me think of alienation.

Rusty-James doesn’t think about the past, perhaps because it is too painful, but running in to Steve means he is forced to remeber and once the floodgate is open the story pours out of him.

The prose is terse and precise and has a lot to recommend it, actually. Writing from the perspective of a young adult is never easy and Hinton manages to work around the difficulties by giving herself some leeway with the distance of recollection.

The novel gets a lot said in a very short space of time, using language sparingly and leaving a lot of imagery behind. Specially for those of us who enjoyed the movie.

Mule