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| 3.83
| 1,842
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| Sep 2004
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really liked it
| This was the first novel (1930) of Anglican fantasist Charles Williams. It contains all his opacity, irony and subtle and sometimes sardonic humour ab This was the first novel (1930) of Anglican fantasist Charles Williams. It contains all his opacity, irony and subtle and sometimes sardonic humour about a weak but basically decent humanity faced with the ineffable, set within something close to a pastiche of interwar popular fiction. Elsewhere I have reviewed his later (1937) 'Descent into Hell' which is a much more intense and difficult work and which I know I am going to have to read twice in order to understand it adequately but this first novel is a good starting point for entering his world. Williams is never an easy read but here he is possibly at his most accessible if only because he frames his theology within a murder mystery (which is not the point of the tale) and a tale of Satanism and dark magic (which is) as well as a fantasy about the San Graal. His books have been called 'supernatural thrillers' but the thriller aspect should not be exaggerated. This is essential a book of 'ideas' that uses magic and fantasy to convey concepts that, in other hands, would require poetry to convey. His gravestone has 'poet' upon it. I may be wholly out of tune with Williams' religious position, a form of High Anglicanism that can mock gentle but kindly fun at rival Catholics and Wesleyans whilst seeing them as allies in the fight against evil, but I consider Williams to be a subtle genius. He may not be widely read now but his influence on Anglo-American fantasy fiction is substantial and he is definitely a major figure within a specific genre of it, Christian fantasy, a category that includes the more didactic C S Lewis and T F Powys. His genius lays not only in laying bare the complexity of the relationship between Man and God (if you believe what he believes) but in doing so in a way that manages to have quasi-allegorical characters who are also human-all-too-human. They are both representative and somehow real. In his rather peculiar way, he manages to ground magic and the transcendant in everyday reality and sometimes to make reality, and especially human behaviours faced with reality, transcendent and magical. The Arthurian aspect of the tale sets the transcendental within a great tradition. Human foibles are dissected with compassion. The prize at the end is to see one character of undoubted piety translated to eternal happiness and his counterpoint defeated not in some grand guignol descent into hell but by becoming human again and 'confessing'. There are descents and ascensions into otherworlds which are never over-explained. Indeed, in other hands, too much might be spelled out. He has not converted me and will not convert me to his way of seeing the world, one which is essentially mystical and ritualistic but he has helped me to respect it as something more than catholicism made pragmatically viable for the English character. Anglicanism is, of course, very English (not British but English) and even today defines the easy-going country Tory mentality. Williams, the Oxford intellectual, allows fantasy to be the tool for introducing the magical into English pragmatism where it is very much at home. Outsiders often find it difficult to understand the traditional English character. It seems to be a classically bourgeois trading and practical mentality (which it can be) and to be a little distant in its social relations, with gradations as complex as those of a Chinese court. But it is also very romantic about its ideals and about nature and not merely tolerant but hungry for the magical and the fantastic. After all, its only contribution to the creation of a world religion was to be Wicca later in the century. This one of those books that requires either a relatively brief review on the lines of 'read it because it is unlike anything else you might read' and a lengthy and close critical analysis that would involve as much attention as the Bible, Homer or a Greek Tragedy. But life is short. I suspect only literary critics and engaged Anglican would do such a thing but, for the rest of us, it is a book that bears reading for the diamonds in the conventional thirties coal seam. Merged review: This was the first novel (1930) of Anglican fantasist Charles Williams. It contains all his opacity, irony and subtle and sometimes sardonic humour about a weak but basically decent humanity faced with the ineffable, set within something close to a pastiche of interwar popular fiction. Elsewhere I have reviewed his later (1937) 'Descent into Hell' which is a much more intense and difficult work and which I know I am going to have to read twice in order to understand it adequately but this first novel is a good starting point for entering his world. Williams is never an easy read but here he is possibly at his most accessible if only because he frames his theology within a murder mystery (which is not the point of the tale) and a tale of Satanism and dark magic (which is) as well as a fantasy about the San Graal. His books have been called 'supernatural thrillers' but the thriller aspect should not be exaggerated. This is essential a book of 'ideas' that uses magic and fantasy to convey concepts that, in other hands, would require poetry to convey. His gravestone has 'poet' upon it. I may be wholly out of tune with Williams' religious position, a form of High Anglicanism that can mock gentle but kindly fun at rival Catholics and Wesleyans whilst seeing them as allies in the fight against evil, but I consider Williams to be a subtle genius. He may not be widely read now but his influence on Anglo-American fantasy fiction is substantial and he is definitely a major figure within a specific genre of it, Christian fantasy, a category that includes the more didactic C S Lewis and T F Powys. His genius lays not only in laying bare the complexity of the relationship between Man and God (if you believe what he believes) but in doing so in a way that manages to have quasi-allegorical characters who are also human-all-too-human. They are both representative and somehow real. In his rather peculiar way, he manages to ground magic and the transcendant in everyday reality and sometimes to make reality, and especially human behaviours faced with reality, transcendent and magical. The Arthurian aspect of the tale sets the transcendental within a great tradition. Human foibles are dissected with compassion. The prize at the end is to see one character of undoubted piety translated to eternal happiness and his counterpoint defeated not in some grand guignol descent into hell but by becoming human again and 'confessing'. There are descents and ascensions into otherworlds which are never over-explained. Indeed, in other hands, too much might be spelled out. He has not converted me and will not convert me to his way of seeing the world, one which is essentially mystical and ritualistic but he has helped me to respect it as something more than catholicism made pragmatically viable for the English character. Anglicanism is, of course, very English (not British but English) and even today defines the easy-going country Tory mentality. Williams, the Oxford intellectual, allows fantasy to be the tool for introducing the magical into English pragmatism where it is very much at home. Outsiders often find it difficult to understand the traditional English character. It seems to be a classically bourgeois trading and practical mentality (which it can be) and to be a little distant in its social relations, with gradations as complex as those of a Chinese court. But it is also very romantic about its ideals and about nature and not merely tolerant but hungry for the magical and the fantastic. After all, its only contribution to the creation of a world religion was to be Wicca later in the century. This one of those books that requires either a relatively brief review on the lines of 'read it because it is unlike anything else you might read' and a lengthy and close critical analysis that would involve as much attention as the Bible, Homer or a Greek Tragedy. But life is short. I suspect only literary critics and engaged Anglican would do such a thing but, for the rest of us, it is a book that bears reading for the diamonds in the conventional thirties coal seam. ...more |
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| 3.98
| 280
| 2021
| Sep 01, 2021
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really liked it
| Darryl Jones gives us one of the neatest and most informative accounts of what counts as horror in his introductory chapter although the rest of the b Darryl Jones gives us one of the neatest and most informative accounts of what counts as horror in his introductory chapter although the rest of the book, despite many insights, will not contain many surprises or fresh thinking for any but those with no previous knowledge of the genre. As an 'introduction' (which is what it is supposed to be) it is solid and to be recommended but it is not without minor flaws and absences. Nevertheless, it has the virtue of clarity. Someone new to the field will get sufficient information to suggest a useful private reading or watch list. Not everything can be covered in 'a very short introduction' but the over-emphasis on literary fiction and film with only a passing mention of British television not merely misses out horror in gaming but horror in eighteenth century poetry and some important writers. If mention of Caitlin Kiernan, Robin Ramsey or Adam Nevill might be forgivable for reasons of space, it seems perverse not to mention Thomas Ligotti or Dan Simmons or refer to a wider range of popular literary parallels to some of the films he mentions. He is overly dismissive of Lovecraft, picking out his racism with the same core ignorance of those who disrespect Heidegger for his Nazi experiment without looking at the man as a whole. It might be a slog but he really should read S T Joshi's 'I am Providence' before making jejune judgements. There is also a fair degree of over-thinking at key points with the academic mind coming into play, sometimes missing the commercial and popular point with an over-emphasis on politics and a certain Adorno-derived 'snobbisme' about popular taste and desires. There is a point where the general reader can almost predict (I am sure that an advanced AI could do this) the ideological formulations that will get trotted out whenever an academic is asked to introduce his subject to the great unwashed. Some of the political commentary is justified to be sure and it is not, to be fair, overly obtrusive in most of the book but, when it appears, it can be over-egged and makes one realise just how ideologically conformist the academy has become over the last half century. There is not much more to say. The final chapter on contemporary horror is the least useful as so often happens but the introduction is very good and (if you are a newcomer to the field) the bulk of the book is going to be very helpful as an initial guide so I can recommend it on those grounds. ...more |
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| Jan 01, 2013
| Jan 01, 2013
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it was ok
| It is very rare for me to abandon a book. I generally follow my Gran's rule which is 'if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all'. If I dump It is very rare for me to abandon a book. I generally follow my Gran's rule which is 'if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all'. If I dump a book before a third of the way through I tend to remain silent but if I have invested roughly five hours to reach two thirds I comment. Exactly why I dumped it at that stage and not earlier (and merely skimmed the rest to see if I was likely to miss anything) will come a little later but, for the moment, let us try and see what this book was supposed to offer us. It struck me as the work of an intense man with ideas drawn from a form of 'ressentiment' at minds that operated in ways that normatively he could not approve of. This was work that seemed to be seeking proof for some form of prejudice about the 'other'. The irony of its moralism when the bulk of the book seemed to be a condemnation of the moralising of Blake's 'Urizen' (Your-Reason) struck me as showing a lack of self awareness and even of analysis. Anti-moralism became transformed into a form of neo-moralism that dared not speak its name. The style is repetitive as if trying to hammer home points to readers who perhaps he felt may not be listening intently enough. He is preaching, not teaching, three themes that are not reliably connected and which need teasing out for their different levels of value and meaning to the reader. One theme is the claim that William Blake's poetry provides us with insight into how the human mind works confirmed by contemporary neuroscience. I am no scholar of Blake and Tweedy is a literary scholar who specialised in the romantics so some benefit of the doubt has to be given him here. The leap from a reading of Blake (which I have no reason to believe is not well based on a close reading of his life and poetry) to neuroscience is suspect but those interested in the peculiar mind of this poetic genius may still get some significant profit from the book. The second theme are the claims about the left and right hemisphere of the brain that seem more dubious and are part of a sometimes self-serving literature of hemispheric difference in a cultural war of personality. It is a psychological cult begun in good faith by Julian Jaynes many years ago. Do not misunderstand me. The evidence of different functional roles related to our two brain hemispheres is reasonably demonstrated. The construction of our consciousness genetically, historically and experientially in light of this is well worth open-minded study. My quarrel is only with the temptation of cultural figures both to extrapolate what we know into what they want to be true and to use their extrapolations in order to make sweeping, usually normative, statements about the human condition. Great leaps are taken from brain science to cultural criticism. The third theme is that of Tweedy's own great leap into huge assumptions (Jaynes attempted the same) about the origins of human consciousness and its current nature and so to value judgements about good and evil that are mere opinion but accord with the demands of his first theme (Blake). None of this would have stopped me finishing the book despite the flaws in thinking, repetitions and passionate intensity (which rarely appeals to me on matters of great moment). What stopped me in my tracks were his comments on 'psychopathy' and 'autism'. Suddenly, the oddity emerged of someone condemning the gross authoritarianism of religion and science (on both of which I agreed with him, albeit not quite for the same reasons) becoming singularly authoritarian in favour of what was starting to look like right hemisphere extremism. Being live and let live by nature, I do not have a problem with the 'hello trees, hello flowers' type of mind or the peculiarities of those who are 'spiritual' or seek to be without 'ego' but I reasonably expect to be allowed to live and let live in return and not be damned to hell for the way I might think. Not that I think in pure right or left hemispheric ways - indeed, observation suggests that most people most of the time are on a huge spectrum of balances between extremes. The healthy mind is any that, on either side of the game, can communicate with the other side on respectful terms. Two thirds of the way through we get two sets of authoritarian statement that I found very worrying. The first was the unjustified deep association of very dominant left hemispheric thinking with psychopathy. The second was the severely negative attack on the autistic (neuro-diverse) mind. For me, this was getting close to personality fascism on two grounds. The first is that the fashionable labeling of certain personalities and achievers as psychopathic is little more than 'ressentiment' in spades of people who have as much a role in the construction of humanity as they do. This is a trope of the most conservative element in our society - the frustrated, angry and anxious progressive liberal-left (I cannot say if Tweedy belongs to this community or not). All our problems are believed to derive from some 'psychopathic other' (military, banker, corporate, political). It is the error of thinking that a total system like late liberal capitalism is a conspiracy of some kind rather than something that has evolved organically to represent the current relationship between technology and the human condition. These alleged psychopaths are just part of us. If you really want to change things, you do not attempt the fantasy (as the Soviets did) of changing humanity but instead concentrate on creating different social and political forms to improve the relationship of humanity to technology and resource availability. You may still get serial killers on occasions and there will still be people who talk to the trees and spout poetry but what Tweedy seems to think is psychopathy will simply be the same types of mind doing better things because that is how things are set up. There is nothing more dangerous in our current times than the emergent war between personality types which is the almost inevitable concomitant of a war of cultures under a total networked society without national and other fire breaks. And this is what this book seems to represent. The very extreme right hemisphere without any ethical base and without impulse control is a threat no doubt and it might be nice if more people considered the consequences of their actions in their social roles but the first are aberrant and the second are normal because that is how evolution works. As for the neuro-diverse and autistic, their demonisation (by strong implication in this case) is a moral wrong, as much as demonising someone for the genetic colour of their skin, physical disability or gender. There is no call for it. I have no time for those who do it. I would like to have read on but I was already bored. At this point, I realised that the socio-cultural and political conclusions being drawn from what might have been a scholarly review of Blake's thought were heading into personal fantasy based on slender reasoning. This a shame because I suspect the comprehension of William Blake's way of thinking was insightful and did not need the attempt to draw it into a quasi-religious critique of contemporary humanity. It would have been better to have let us draw our own conclusions about another way of human being. ...more |
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| 0192833944
| 9780192833945
| 0192833944
| 3.84
| 29,739
| 1796
| May 14, 1998
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it was amazing
| Gosh, where to start? This late eighteenth century (1796) shocker by Matthew Lewis is still surprisingly readable. It rattles along at quite a pace de Gosh, where to start? This late eighteenth century (1796) shocker by Matthew Lewis is still surprisingly readable. It rattles along at quite a pace despite the occasional weird meandering to insert a horror or new angle. Altogether not bad for a bored nineteen year old acting as a diplomatic intern. Given that William Beckford's 'Vathek' (1782), another lush horror though orientalist in tone, was begun by a rich youngster at 22 and that Mary Shelley knocked out 'Frankenstein' (1818) before she was 21, we have a phenomenon here of youthful imagination exorcising its anxieties in gothick mode. As Beckford used the world of the Arabian Nights so Lewis goes into the collective imagination of the English in order to express strangeness and horror - the alien Spain of the Catholic Church and the Inquisition which held the same fearful fascination as the red peril of communism would do later. Beckford is writing well over a century after the panic over the Popish Plot and two centuries after the Armada but Spanish Catholicism, its 'superstition' and its alleged totalitarian cruelties could still send a shiver down the spines of any Englishman. There but for the grace of God and all that. Underlying the text is an Anglo-Saxon empiricist's sense of superiority over a culture that believes in saints' relics and uses incense which he then subverts by using it to play on the equally superstitious sensibilities of his readers with tales of ghosts and examples of sorcery. An amazing sequence (written for a cinema that could not exist) has a religious procession cascading into mayhem, an assault on a convent, the tearing to shreds of an errant prioress and the burning of nuns guilty and innocent alike. On this atavistic framework, Lewis builds a story of aristocratic honour and love, of the sin of pride and the roots of hypocrisy, of cruel superstition and of dark magic in which a rather Catholic conception of the Devil and Hell plays its role to deliver a true horror novel. Subversion lies in using a ready-made atmosphere of cultural fear to introduce more basic fears - of the mob, of the hypocrisy of evil (the other minds problem), premature burial, seduction in a shame culture, ghosts, loss of sexual control, rape, entrapment in a totalitarian institution and more. But what struck this reader was not so much how Lewis took the Gothick to new levels of extremity for the time (and introduced fairly transgressive sexual themes) but how mature his reading of human psychology was beneath the formal literary narrative expectations we might have. At one point we get a detailed account of a woman waking in a sepulchre amongst suppurating corpses and at another a carefully drawn account of how a naive woman might be captured by a seducer and how the women around her work to protect her. We get an interpolated ghost story after a conventional tale of banditti in the German forest but within this again we see an almost filmic interplay of our hero Lorenzo and the attempt of the bandit leader's wife to warn him of the plot to murder him. There is a lot of this interplay between a melodramatic story line and acute understanding (remarkable given the age of the author) of human psychology. By the end of the book I came to feel that it had been underrated and deserved much more attention. The book is certainly not classically proportioned. The tormented super villain of the story (also treated with sophistication in regard to his complex inner life) disappears for a huge chunk of the book after his introduction in order to permit more sensation. However, somehow it all hangs together. Its sheer momentum gives us a series of succeeding climaxes of increasing horror. Its reception was to be much like that of the video nasties of the early 1980s. Quite a bit of self censorship was necessary for later editions especially as Lewis was to become an MP (in the age of rotten boroughs) not too long after. He, like Beckford, was from a slave-owning family whose wealth came from sugar. He died in 1818 of yellow fever returning from Jamaica. Nevertheless, the book was immensely popular on publication. It set the tone (if later muted) for the rise of the Gothick as horror rather than terror. It might perhaps even be seen as an inventor of the 'jump scare' that is now a cliche in cinema. It is the subject matter that sustains the horror. The Gothick tropes are intensified beyond the clanking chain, sins of the past, dungeons and moonlight (with owls hooting) into rape, incest, carefully described murder, starvation, sex (surprisingly explicit), corpses and demonology. With many characters excellently drawn and feeling very real despite the fantastic framework, Lewis' adolescent sensibility seems itself to be expressed in the passions of the characters. He seems to be imagining himself into extreme situations in a most remarkable way. The character of Ambrosio, the monk of the title, is of course central and critical. At one level conventional (his fall comes from the sin of pride from which all else springs), this perpetrator of evil is far from one dimensional. He has a rich internal life if a self-deluding one. His pride makes him lack self awareness. He slides from dark act to dark act with the unleashing of his 'shadow', passions that he ultimately cannot control while periodically recognising his predicament. And yet he is also manipulated - victim almost as much as perpetrator. The cause of his doom lies in Rosario/Matilda who seems not to be a demon (but who may be) but more a sorcerer in the dark arts with a prodigious and manipulative libido whose transgressive sexuality has a certain libertarian integrity to it. She personifies absolute moral rebellion. As to the other characters (Don Lorenzo, his sister Agnes (imprisoned in a sepulchre with her dead child) and lover of Lorenzo's friend Don Raymond, Lorenzo's love Antonia (raped and murdered) and her family network), these are interweaved artfully. You care about their condition. Yes, the boys can appear exceptionally dim and self-absorbed at the expense of the girls (always the victims, our scream queens) but this is a group of young adults - the eighteenth century version of the world of the High School. Antonia has been criticised as just too perfect but she is only 15. Of course, Ambrosio gets his comeuppance in ways that might genuinely have frightened its audience far more than the more visceral body horror but the book's conclusion is pragmatically cynical just we might expect in the period of Choderlos de Laclos and the Barber of Seville. Let us not do any more detailed spoiler here. Let us just say that Lorenzo does rather well for himself, possibly better than if Ambrosio had never existed, and leave it like that. The young aristocrats (barring one who lost her honour and had to be dealt with accordingly by Lewis) survive and prosper. ...more |
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| May 01, 2018
| May 01, 2018
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really liked it
| The British Library has long since turned entrepreneurial with extensive and relatively cheap collections of classic British crime novels and collecti The British Library has long since turned entrepreneurial with extensive and relatively cheap collections of classic British crime novels and collections of weird tales. Its science fiction efforts have not paid off so well, possibly because the genre ages far too fast for the general reader. The cosy mystery set in a nostalgic English past and the frisson of the weird and the occult still appeal, as we know from re-runs of tales of Hercule Poirot and the fashion for folk horror, but the dystopianism and clunky technologies of British golden age science fiction much less so. If the Science Fiction Classics series seems to have died a death (I am glad now that I snapped up three of them), the experiment left behind Luckhurst's literary history of the genre (2017) which is very much above the average for this sort of general guide. Eight relatively short yet full and well written essays take us chronologically from the precursors of the genre through to the current century in an orderly way that is surprisingly seamless albeit with somewhat eclectic further reading suggestions. The first half of the story through to the American-dominated Golden Age is well known although there are insights that make the tale fresh. It is the second half that adds most value - the curious dialectic between 'conservative' and 'new wave' forms of science fiction and its unfolding. Luckhurst's own contribution on the late Victorian and Edwardian era manages to introduce H. Rider Haggard without patronising him which is a rare pleasure nowadays. He succinctly contextualises H. G. Wells and explains why he is important. Caroline Edwards of Birkbeck also gives us a solid presentation of utopianism and dystopianism in the first half of the twentieth century including pre-Soviet and Soviet Russian attempts to imagine the future under communist ideological conditions. The following chapter on pulp science fiction, mostly in the US, by Mark Bould is precisely how such history should be done, dealing with issues of war, politics, race, feminism and the market on terms that respect the world of the work rather than imposing anything on that world from today. If there is a fault to the book it is that editorial direction enabled the subsequent story of ideological wars within post war science fiction to be told well but failed to stop those wars infecting some of the contributions, especially towards the end. Some contributors edged into implied polemic. Given that the worst offenders are American-based contributors (two of them female academics) then, as a British reader, I came away a little depressed at the insistent over-egging of diversity and the obvious preference for progressive examples of science fiction at the expense of its complexity. Ideology could be seen triumphing over objectivity. Of course, the final contribution must have the completely unnecessary to us (but necessary to our anxious and troubled university elite) reference to Brexit and 2016 as well as the usual over-excitable references to climate change. We just have to live with this now, much as older wise heads once had to live with the hegemony of the nonsense of Social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century and a pig-headed Marxism in the middle of the last century. But it does become tiresome after a while. Nevertheless, if Luckhurst is a little lazy in not weeding out these inherent prejudices, and the propensity of one contributor just to list diversity-friendly story lines, he still manages to produce an excellent guide which teaches a lot even while we grit our teeth in places. Where the book scores is in linking the genre to modes of production - turn of the century periodicals, the fan magazines of the post-war period, the rise of the book and then the blockbuster - as well as to events outside the often closed world of the creators. Gerry Canavan, who comes under my general definition of 'cause of gritted teeth', nevertheless makes an excellent point in his opening to his contribution that little predicted by science fiction ever actually happened as proposed. Perhaps he should have taken this on board in the rest of his essay. Science fiction, heavily anglophone in its historical orientation despite attempts to globalise or 'indigenise' it by the diversity crowd, cannot be divorced from its environment. It does not dictate to society but reflects its rebellions, fears and anxieties (liberal) or aspirations (right wing or socialist). It is also dynamic. Even if it rarely tells us what the world is actually like or going to be like, its attempt to do so can make people behave as if they may have the power to reshape the world on its lines. The cash-fuelled fantasies of Elon Musk can be linked directly to his reading of Heinlein. Science fiction is thus very important culturally even if it quickly becomes redundant having left behind only a few canonical examples. It is not the truth of the matter but its noble lies and fantasy are culture-shaping. Hence the concern to capture it for any currently prevailing ideology. The struggles (well explained in this book) between the American version of the 'New Wave' (culturally progressive) and the determined traditionalism of the American Right, economically libertarian and yet militaristic and progressive in a very different sense, are indicative of this. The British 'New Wave' was more introvert and literary and much less interested in politics but, proportionately, unable to build a large mass base. Here was a common situation where a short period of intense innovation influenced much of what followed but could not sustain itself for long. At a certain point, we have a synthesis. The passions subside but the struggle meant that, instead of science fiction reflecting a social consensus of reader requirements, it became a matter of self-conscious 'auteurs' and then of attempts to impose an implicit world view that spoke to anxieties. This has always been a part of science fiction - although Wells became duller the more he became didactic - but the threat of nuclear war and the experience of the individual (which writers tend to accentuate as type) in an age of conformity created the seeds of dissent that became sixties rebellion. As the decades have rolled on, the politics of identity, especially feminism, and fear of what is now called techno-feudalism and the machines (leading to the hysteria around the coming 'singularity') have driven tales of science fantasy. Eco-fears have now added to the mix. Cyberpunk remains an excellent case study of a writer with little practical knowledge of what he was writing about (William Gibson) using a fertile imagination to extrapolate reality into a science fantasy that came to define what many people would think was reality or a coming reality. Still (although you might not know it from this book), not everything is about ideology and anxiety. There are still solid old-fashioned space operas out there as well as thrillers with a strong science fiction coating (Michael Crichton is not mentioned which is odd and yet in character with the book). We must not make the mistake (as some contributors in this book seem to do) of thinking what science fiction should be and then reading back its story in order to make it what we think it ought to have been. A literary history is useful but science fiction is sociology as much as literature. Nevertheless this is a worthy and useful addition to the mounting numbers of popular academic books on the genre since Amis and Alldiss had attempted to create the first definitions and canons. There are discoveries and ideas in here. The book is also an easy and relaxed read. ...more |
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| Mar 31, 2022
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really liked it
| 'Damnable Tales is a worthy effort at a folk horror anthology. If it falls down, it is not in its intention but on the fact that historic literary fol 'Damnable Tales is a worthy effort at a folk horror anthology. If it falls down, it is not in its intention but on the fact that historic literary folk horror (as opposed to its later television and cinematic versions) is not, in fact, very inspiring and rarely truly horrific. Richard Wells has delivered, in broadly chronological sequence, 23 tales that might be regarded as within the genre but, while some are important in framing it, they are often rather disappointing in purely literary terms. It might have been better to refer to Folk Unease. Yes, we have Machen's 'The Shining Pyramid' and M. R. James' 'The Ash Tree' but these are already much anthologised and, I argue below, may be outside authentic folk horror though rural witchery might reasonably be included in the genre. Many of the remainder are rather weak potboilers by famous writers (Stevenson, Hardy) or stories that helped create the genre but are otherwise not remarkable. Others are more interested in the idea of Pan and the old gods or in historical survivals and ghosts. This is mostly literary source material and so useful in defining the style (so worth having in the library) but it also reminds us that folk horror was a relatively minor part of English literature, a variant of the modernised folk tale, the ghost story and the fascination with Pan and rural mystery. What does make a difference are Wells' illustrations. These are done in a rough woodcut style, one for each story. These help tell us that the book was a labour of love which is confirmed by the over 12 pages of small print 'supporters' who helped make the book happen. The stories range from 1872 to 1964. The vast majority were written for periodicals which helps us to understand their often ephemeral nature and the tendency to entertain more than to explore what they are addressing in depth. There is nothing bad in here, just fairly ordinary and unsurprising. Having said that, as in all anthologies, there are some works that stretch beyond being interesting just because they shape a now-established genre or as literary expansions of folk tales into horror. Of the latter, 'The Sin Eater' (1895) and 'The Black Reaper' (1899) may be the best. Of the later works, Margery Lawrence's 'How Pan Came to Ingleton' (1926) has a charm to it that has nothing of the horrible, Walters De La Mare's 'All Hallows' (1926) exudes menace and Rolt's 'Cwm Garon' (1948) captures a common intuition that some landscapes can be evil by their very nature. The problem here is that all three represent tales that drift away from folk horror. Lawrence's is not horror, De La Mare's is more about evil or the cosmic and is Gothick in tone and Rolt's, though it does have a legitimate folk element, concentrates on a landscape. The last probably counts. Two of the three last works are superior. Shirley Jackson's 'The Summer People'(1950), an American addition, offers us the essence of folk horror which is the educated urban middle class out of place in the country. The horror is the insidious truth that summer visitors do not matter to locals. Finally the inconclusive 'Bind Your Hair' (1964) by Robert Aikman is possibly the most interesting because of its realism in depicting its characters (too many protagonists in these stories are cardboard cut-out sterotypes). It leaves us with a sense of unease yet not quite knowing why we are uneasy. Rolt and Aikman, Scott's 'Randall's Round' (1929) and the grim 'The First Sheaf' (1940) by Wakefield certainly pass muster. Others too perhaps but I should explain why I am reluctant to allow folk horror to be defined too broadly and be too inclusive. As a compendium of themes to be plundered in popular culture by a full-blown genre as it stands today,'Damnable Tales' is useful but there is not a lot of true horror here. The folk aspect constantly feels like urban literary types inventing memes for their own type of person who reads periodicals. If much of this does not persuade as horror and only a few works as 'unease', it does not persuade as authentically related to folk either. If the concern is to show the unease of the urban middle class, then some of the work does that but very few cut to the chase of an essential cultural clash. To make folk horror work it either has to be set well within the 'other' (the rural world) and be horrible (like Nevill's 'The Reddening') or the incomer needs to show some emotional engagement with being at the margin of the 'other' that creates unease if not outright horror. Telling a story about rum doings by peasants might be included as folk horror but not re-telling their own stories in literary ways. We also need to be clear that unease or horror at nature or 'rurality' (as Pan) is not the same as unease or horror at rum doings. 'The First Sheaf' is grim because the urban type is confronted not with nature but another type of person's relationship to nature. This is also the case with the unease in the Aickman story. Nature is a source of horror only indirectly as belief system. The nature of the 'folk' is what should interest us. Folk horror should be anthropological horror first and existential or cosmic horror second. If it is historical horror, the folk must be like us and embedded in the knowable past but not Neanderthals or degenerate cave dwellers under the moors. Even Adam Nevill in 'The Reddening' makes sure his story is centred on the realism of a corrupt folk on the surface of things that taps into something dark rather than having the primary focus being on something dark that erupts from below that is not human (though his ambiguities here are clever). Unease or horror at some prehistoric atavistic and supernatural force (like the fairies) is thus a different kettle of fish from unease and horror at nature or the 'volk'. 'Ballinghurst Barrow' (1892) and 'The Shining Pyramid' (1895) fall into this category. So, folk horror (in this anthology) seems to confuse three different 'others' under the same label- our past selves (which was very much a late Victorian post-Darwinian concern), nature as 'being' (Pan) and others who live a very different life closer to nature and often interpreting it through ritual. Yes, these can be interconnected - the 'folk' seem to have a different relationship to 'nature' than us and this relationship may seem atavistic (again, Nevill's 'The Reddening' brilliantly merges these three conceptions) - but if they are not melded folk horror should just be about the 'folk' in its relations. The cinematic and television variants of the genre tend to get this more right because things have moved on from the era of literary concerns with Pan and Darwinism. Atavism is now a matter for science fiction and the relationship with nature has become eco-horror (Vandermeer). The atavistic branch of horror dragged on into the work of Nigel Kneale and Dr Who. Given 'Quatermass and the Pit' and 'Quatermass IV', Kneal was in the world of science fiction and not that of anthro-horror. A true folk horror film like 'The Wicker Man' is still about a (albeit fake) 'folk' cult. Even 'The Children of the Stones' is set more in a science fiction environment though it scrapes in as folk horror because of the village atmosphere. We have to go to 'Blood on Satan's claw' or even 'Witchfinder General' to find again this concern with the horror that arises from the 'folk' out there. Those stories that have an urban middle class type entering into the nearby unknown or which describe the behaviours of the unknowns in their own country must be regarded as authentic. Ghost stories, literary folk tales, 'Pan tales' or tales of degenerated or atavistic primitives need not apply. ...more |
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| Mark Fisher's fairly slim 2016 exploration of the weird and eerie (as two separate if related concepts in culture) reads as a series of very long blog Mark Fisher's fairly slim 2016 exploration of the weird and eerie (as two separate if related concepts in culture) reads as a series of very long blog articles on representative figures rather than a sustained argument but, at that level, it contains insights and is a relaxed read. The problem is that he could probably have defined both his terms in a single article or perhaps pamphlet so the explorations become like a lot of cherries on a rather basic cake. There is also some Lacanian theory added on as unnecessary cream. Nevertheless, I would not discourage anyone from reading it. It may introduce the reader (especially the young reader) to new sources and films or books that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Fisher's judgements are generally sensible and informative and he clearly cared about his subjects. As to the core definitions, he gets these about right without actually needing the examples. The weird involves the irruption into this world of something from outside. The eerie is when there is something where there should be nothing or nothing where there should be something. Taken as set of interlinked essays that create a mood or understanding of a psychological reality that culture represents, something to be read alongside Burke's 'Philosophical Enquiry' of 1757 on the Sublime and Beautiful, the book has merit as a footnote to aesthetics. Tragically Fisher, who suffered severe depression, killed himself just after publication and it is hard not to read a diffident slightly melancholy perspective into the book. There is a constant skirting of theory as if already he was giving up on it and going through the motions. There is a desultory anti-capitalism and an unfashionable engagement with Freud (albeit via Lacan) but the book reads as if the concrete, the work, is what is to be investigated as a facet of something of which the weird and eerie are just symptoms. He writes of the 'death drive' in touching terms. Perhaps there is a danger of reading too much into this book in this sad context. It is certainly not an emotional work but rather a quite clinical exploration of authors and auteurs that perhaps he had hoped might have offered some salvation through 'art'. This leads one to the thought that perhaps we have here an intellectual who was going through the same crisis about aesthetics, the salvatory role of the artist, as Nietzsche had done but whose own disposition did not enable him to overcome or explore his situation in the same way. The critique of capitalism for which he had been best known is present but only barely. His artists are now observing a 'reality' (it would seem) that may no longer be challengable except negatively through an escape into an unreality that perhaps casts light on that reality. This is all speculation, of course. The book is cool more than it is melancholy, the very lack of emotion in itself disturbing in the light of his irrevocable decision. And an opportunity was lost perhaps to take the plunge and look more existentially at the weird and eerie. If the weird and eerie are just artistic responses to the existential question of why there is something rather than nothing through either 'irruption' of something or something or nothing being present when things should be otherwise, then this is certainly worth exploring. The book describes the symptoms of the disease of imagining a fantastic reality through the artists the author admires and who perhaps gave him solace and meaning or perhaps adventure and distraction as they do many of us. Why many of us need them is not explored however. The underlying situation that gives rise to the weird and eerie also seems to be skirted whereas a Burke or a Nietzsche at either ends of the philosophical spectrum might have dug deeper whether analytically or to pass through a dark night of the soul into something new. As a result the book is a stepping stone that is full of interesting data towards solving a problem rather than a resolution of a problem. The weird and eerie are 'professionally' defined but what all this means is rather skimmed over even if we see the lineaments of where an argument may go. Knowing what happened yet with my prejudice never to see a man and his work as identical - as much in the case of rogues like 'Gary Glitter' as in apparent intellectual saints - it is still impossible not to mourn this man who one feels might have overcome his situation with more help. ...more |
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| 'The Young Fur Traders' was R. M Ballantyne's first novel (1856), preceding the more famous 'The Coral Island' by a year. It would probably be classed 'The Young Fur Traders' was R. M Ballantyne's first novel (1856), preceding the more famous 'The Coral Island' by a year. It would probably be classed as Young Adult fiction today although, of course, any romance is perfunctory and limited to a few final chapters. A group of young men are stuck in clerical work at first and yearn to be part of a Hudson Bay fur trading network 'in the field'. They get their wish in different ways. Many adventures ensue alongside representatives of the noble Indian warrior and an experienced French-Canadian trapper. It is certainly an adventure novel, albeit somewhat wordy in the way that popular Victorian fiction can be but sincere enough. Ballantyne is undoubtedly excellent at description and character. It is not going to be a popular read today but we can see why it would have been enjoyed at the time. The book is very much based on that old dictum for first novelists - 'write about what you know'. When he was 16 Ballantyne had joined the Hudson Bay Company in Canada and had traded furs with the indigenous Americans until he was 22. He started writing about his experiences as non-fiction soon after and then took up a full time literary career on the far side of 30. This first book was thus a distillation of his adolescent experiences in the wilds of Canada expressed as fiction. The tone is kindly and often humorous. In effect, it is a tale of young men adventuring for profit at the edge of empire under often harsh conditions which they bear with Christian fortitude. A type of muscular universal Christanity is a constant presence throughout the book. Like so many forgotten novels, the value to us has shifted from excitement and immediacy (and perhaps inspiration) towards providing an insight into the normal patterns of thought of another country - the past more than Canada itself. What is striking is that our young traders may be patronising to the indigenous Indians but no more than they would be to the working class at home. I detected barely any sign of the racism that would later emerge with the arrival of social darwinism and formal empire. Traders have to rub along with each other to their mutual benefit and the Indians are just another type of human who have their heroes - the heroic and upstanding Redfeather - and their villains and ordinary folk. If gentlemen do not mate with Indian women, it is a social caste thing not one of race. And, of course, the Indian who becomes a Christian has seen the light and is equal to any white man, to be invited most honourably alongside the brave French trader to a young hero's wedding. This is a world where religion is central to who you are, not the colour of your skin or culture. Indeed, there are several speeches which indicate a determination to press the point - that a man is judged by his conduct and beliefs and a man of good conduct with the wrong beliefs can still be a good man, only to be made better by the right beliefs. The gender relations are also those of the different but equal. Boys want to adventure in adverse circumstances. Girls want to create secure households. The harsh environment and the need for physical resilience dictates that balance but still a girl rides her horse with the best of the men. The story itself unfolds as many interconnected adventures that are brought to a satisfying conclusion but these adventures are much less interesting that what we learn about life in a world of packed snow, frozen lakes, floods, canoes, Indian villagers, animal hunting and frost bite. These are people who have chosen this life. They entirely depend on each other for survival but yet there is room for the lone trapper who knows his environment to disappear for weeks and months on end living off the land. The secure freedom is much of what would have appealed to a young reader. Of course, the freedom is qualified not only by the environment but by the codes of Victorian culture so perhaps is not quite what we would consider freedom. Nevertheless, assuming you believed in work and God, then there would certainly be more freedom from constraint and equality than back home. There are probably no worlds any more where quasi-indigenous life styles are simultaneously culturally sufficient unto themselves and closely reliant on the global market - in this case, the civilised demand for furs. Perhaps they are now only imagined in science fiction. There is no sentimentality about nature here. It is there to be exploited. Animals are just moving meat and tradeable product when they are not threats. The beauty of nature is appreciated but also seen as a harsh mistress to be tamed. It is a backdrop to the human. For an easy-going if somewhat sanitised picture of largely unregulated life on the American (Canadian) frontier in the 1840s, this fictionalisation is entertaining and informative enough to enjoy but perhaps only if you do not mind Victorian sentimentality expressed for a tad too long. ...more |
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really liked it
| Ramsey Campbell's relatively recent (2020) novel of the occult is a slow burner and it is no worse for that. It is almost gentle in its exploration of Ramsey Campbell's relatively recent (2020) novel of the occult is a slow burner and it is no worse for that. It is almost gentle in its exploration of nature magic invading a middle class family in the English North West. It sits at the very edge of the recently fashionable folk horror genre but translates it back into urban Liverpool, getting to the root of what folk horror meant at its peak - urban middle class fear of nature and the natural. Its climax is in a Cumbrian valley that might never have seen human feet. The bulk of the novel is about three generations of a family. The occult initially intrudes only slightly and indirectly. A creepy girl friend appears to the son of the narrator, a man soon out of his depth but driven to save his son from the uncertain fate that this creature may have in store for him. This half-broken family of artists, accountants and academics is embedded in the classic English middle class inability to get beyond petty micro-aggressions. The men seem weaker than the women (the abiding curse of English culture today) and the women are stubborn. The novel starts with the obsessions of the wild card in the novel - that of a well regarded surrealist artist, aunt to the narrator, who got in over her head under the influence of a creature who seems to be the same as the one that appears in the life of the son of her nephew. The strong role given to the narrator's son and his new friend gave us a brief sense of it being a Young Adult novel but it is not. It is actually a fine novel of manners in which Campbell is at his best in introducing the occult not as 'shock and horror' but as an insidious possible alternative reality. The elemental - perhaps the sort of spirit associated with faery, perhaps something even darker and never fully explained - is ambiguous in itself, transgender to some degree, and possibly to be sympathised with a little as something that simply wants to grow and survive at human expense. Campbell's restraint is what matters here. In fact, everything is restrained - the paranoia, the horror, the process by which the elemental outplays the narrator and exploits adolescent desire. This restraint matches the closed-in psychological inhibitions of the family and its misunderstandings. Perhaps there would be no chance of the story if the narrator was a bit more clever in understanding his situation and more determined to reveal it but it is true to the man's character. Such a man would never have married his negative ex-wife if he had been other than he was. How he resolves his own weaknesses (including the caution that probably saved him from the fate of aunt and son in not pursuing an obsession with a 'work' as magicians might term it) to become a potentially self-sacrificing hero in order to save his son represents the trajectory of the novel. The aunt who inadvertently triggers the horror and who appears to have killed herself or perhaps been murdered in the last stages of a previous elemental emergence may be the only truly free spirit in the family (although her grand nephew has potential which the elemental seeks to exploit). The sub-text here seems to be that being a free spirit or being interested in desire is dangerous and that, when obsession appears, the normality represented by family simply cannot cope. Our narrator had once been close to obsession and so understands it well enough to take a threat seriously. What takes time to engage with becomes worth, with time, persisting with. We see here the irruption of the fantastic and weird into normality and normality's blindness to the irruption. There is no need for too much horror when the purpose is evidently unease, disquiet and paranoid anxiety. Campbell has, over many decades, matured into a very fine novelist who should be taken more seriously by mainstream critics and allowed out of the box of genre horror. To convey so well middle class family life and its compromises and limitations through an occult tale is itself an achievement. ...more |
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| Apr 16, 2007
| Apr 17, 2007
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really liked it
| Professor Michael Trimble (University of London) employs his professional expertise to tease out what the bicamerality of the brain might mean for wha Professor Michael Trimble (University of London) employs his professional expertise to tease out what the bicamerality of the brain might mean for what it is to be human. His efforts are plausible and intellectually stimulating. He remains a materialist through and through. He emphasises that we have evolved (as other researchers have shown) a dominant and a non-dominant hemisphere with the non-dominant being older in evolutionary terms. His interest is in the latter and how it expresses itself in a world dominated by the former. Popular views of the bicameral nature of the brain have tended to circle around Julian Jaynes' work which always struck me as fundamentally absurd, based on an over-emphasis on ancient texts to come up with internal 'god voices'. Trimble moves us on from such suggestive nonsense. His more sophisticated approach takes aspects of being human not as irrational but simply as not purely cognitive, based on other ways of seeing the world which may be older biologically and which impact on certain uses of language. These tend to metaphor, music, poetry and 'spirituality'. This is not about religion as new found truth or music or poetry as superior value but rather pointing out why such modes of language and thinking are so widespread to the point of 'normality. He is good on disconnecting these modes of thought from some extreme claims about mental illness. The human brain is a material entity that tends to follow certain patterns and has certain shared physical limitations but which has evolved into a fair range of difference which can ultimately (though much has yet to be done) be traced to our neurons, our 'wiring'. This does not diminish humanity in its relation to belief and artistic expression but rather makes humanity only comprehensible as inclusive of this diversity of responses to reality. The mind is truly complex and bicamerality is no simple aspect of it. Quite the contrary. The neurology in the book takes no prisoners. Like many such books, the author is torn between ensuring the respect of his professional peers (which will make some of it hard-going) and making his arguments clear (which he does) to the more general reader. In the end the general reader has to trust to his scientific authority, which is always a little awkward when great claims are being made, but a lot of what he claims just seems to work in the light of common experience. I found myself taking it seriously. Personally, I do not have a spiritual bone in my body, tend not to think metaphorically, got bored with poetry in my early twenties (though I loved the easy-to-read romantics) and certainly do not have the passion of many contemporaries for music although I can enjoy it well enough in passing. On the other hand, I read widely in religious history without believing any of it, can understand the rules of poetry without caring too much about them and have a wide knowledge of musical history. In other words, my brain is geared against the non-dominant hemisphere and I am just fine with that. What Trimble is teaching me and others is that the conformation of my brain and others' brains is the grounding of my and others' minds and there is no reason to consider any mind superior to another except in relation to the survival and happiness of the organism. If religious beliefs and experiences are grounded in the biology of the non-dominant hemisphere (which strikes me as increasingly self-evident) and certain types of creativity arise out of that grounding then this adds to the sum of resources available to some individuals and the species alike. Perhaps what is most interesting philosophically is how the non-philosopher author returns us to Nietzsche as the most insightful into the phenomenon he is describing. None of what he writes of is a matter of truth but only of individual approaches to truth that then get socialised. Of course, some cognitive truths are unanswerable - the bridge or aircraft that will fall without the application of correct cognition in advance - but it is quite possible that humanity will find that such cognitive truths will soon be better handled by machines in any case. Human truths derived from the huge variation in human brains, albeit limited by a certain biological framework, are going to be far more interesting in the coming age of AI but none of these truths are truly absolute. All are social negotiations within a struggle for power between minds (brains). The non-dominant hemisphere, with certain types (though not all types) of creativity as its territory, may well be competing more vigorously soon, as cold and clinical basic analytical cognition weakens in value, with the creativities, the superpowers, of the dominant hemisphere. This will bring out into the open, with neurological and many other studies providing more understanding, the fundamentals of cultural and social conflict and force us to live with 'other minds' or perhaps positively decide to declare war on them, a rather futile human civil war to be sure. At the moment, we have ferocious cultural wars spilling over into political violence in a world of limited resources and of a general fear of the 'other' not entirely without justification. While poets and musicians are no danger, the spiritual can prove truly murderous in their own drive to power. Disconnected from false assumptions about mental illness (an entirely different matter), some human ways of thinking drawn from our distant evolutionary past are both frighteningly normal (at least to those defending themselves from them) and unable to see themselves for what they are. The value of this book is like that of a book on autism to an intelligent high-functioning autist or on sexual difference to a homosexual - it should both endorse the right to a position and, if it is to be of any use, warn us of the limitations of that position in relation to other forms of 'normality'. It might be said that there is no 'normal' humanity, no essence of Man, but only a competing network of evolutionarily useful 'normalities' that operate alongside true abnormalities (such as dysfunctional schizophrenia) and create the very viability of our species so long as we let no one of them dominate. We know now that the symptoms of madness are often much more 'normal' than we think with more people hearing voices, for example, than anyone has wanted to admit in the past and that mental breakdown is an extremity of human 'being'. In the same way, extreme analytical cognition or religious mania or poetic obscurity may also be radicalisations of normality. Trimble provides interesting data on the link between poetic extremity and manic-depression in one of the few evident links between mental issues and creativity. He also explores a probable link between religious ekstasis and epilepsy so that we find particular modes of experience linked to quite precise types of brain dysfunction rather than a more general breakdown of madness as it is commonly understood. The non-dominant hemisphere is not irrational. It does not break down into nonsense. It constructs a different reasoning about what it sees in the world. At the core of this is the metaphorical approach to describing reality. This metaphorical approach hangs together very well conceptually. My personal complaint about metaphorical ways of thinking or metaphorical expression is only that they strike me as wasteful when things can generally (though not all things admittedly) be told more simply in prose or need not be said at all, merely felt. This book feels quite tentative at times. Trimble is not afraid to speak of the 'soul' (I think he is right) but also of lodging it not in Descartes pineal gland but in brain processes, implying that it dies when the brain dies and has been created out of genes and environment individual by individual. 'The Soul in the Brain' is not going to be the last word on the subject but it is an excellent intellectual launching pad both for more research and for bringing general readers to the point where they can see the outlines of the new science of the mind and draw their own conclusions. There is no necessity for God or transmigration of souls or guiding hands here. Our creativity arises out of the dynamic between our brains and social and cultural learning. Instincts for certain types of feeling and expression then gain form from a dialectical relationship with social and material reality. ...more |
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it was amazing
| This is undoubtedly a work of genius although it has its longeurs and self indulgent moments but I have a recommendation - do not read it first, liste This is undoubtedly a work of genius although it has its longeurs and self indulgent moments but I have a recommendation - do not read it first, listen to it as dramatised by Irish actors on RTE in 1982, which you can find on the RTE web site or on Spotify, and then start reading it. The book comes alive when it is spoken, both the authorial voice and that of the various protagonists. The RTE team manage to make even Joyce's 'lists' seem essential to the whole. The spoken word, the narration and the streams of thought from within begin to make much more sense. The work is such a peculiar mix of astute observation and high intellectual endeavour that it is uncategorisable and probably unrepeatable. It is a massive literary experiment. The broadcast will take nearly 30 hours of your time but you will be enriched by it and then by the book. This is one of those cases where one either has to give a short immediate recommendation or produce a massively lengthy analysis to do the book justice. There is so much good commentary out there that mine would be unnecessary so I have just a few comments. The first is that the book is almost flawless - even the boring bits have a function within the whole - but the final chapter ('Penelope') which allows Leopold Bloom's wife, Molly, a final say seems the least authentic. This is what a man thinks a woman thinks. The second is that, since nearly all human life and nearly all forms of English language expression are here, sexuality is here too but at an intensity that can only be called pornographic. Buried in the text are descriptions of sex that could only be broadcast if the book had become an Irish sacred text. How did Joyce get away with this? Well, he didn't. Once the prurient had ploughed through the text or had the naughty bits pointed out to them, a great deal of effort was made to stop the public from reading it. The Irish themselves could not access their national epic directly until the 1960s. Given that this Odyssey takes place on just one day in the life of a cosmopolitan Irish Jew, the concentration of effort in writer and reader is quite remarkable. That it is also concentrated on a Dublin journey on foot that can be traced on a map to this day adds to the power of the work. Sometimes Joyce's descriptions of very small things have the ability to conjure the world of around 1904 as if it was our memory and not the invention of a writer. The lack of concession to the future with his account of the materiality of that world only presses us to know more of the background. This book (1918-1922) in its final form was asking to be annotated and made the subject of academic literary obsession but it also defies its own learning by being a phenomenological experience different from but analogous to the near-contemporary work of Proust (writing 1913-1927). It is also interesting how this phenomenological approach describes the past (memory) rather than contemporary life as if 'modernism' needed existence to settle down so that it could be objectified, not as truth but as a sufficient truth for artist and reader. Joyce left Dublin in 1904 (the year in which the book is set) to become a cosmopolitan European himself, a 'wandering Jew' if you like, and the humane liberal sentiments of Leopold Bloom seem to cast an olympian glow over the rest of the cast of Irish actors. Ireland is set in aspic in that year. The Boer War is recent in the narrative. The British Empire (whether seen as matter of pride or occupation) still lives in Ireland. Home Rule scandals are still recalled but the revolutionaries are a marginal twinkle in the eye of history like Lenin on holiday in Switzerland. This gap between the post-war writing of the novel and the pre-war world ignores both subsequent war and revolution (highly relevant to the Irish case) in order to remind its readers of what once was without foreknowledge of what was to be. This restraint is truly striking. Joyce goes further by allowing his characters their own memories (most obviously in Molly Bloom's rather sexualised orientalist memories of her young days in Gibraltar as what Americans might call a 'military brat'). Memories of the dead play an important subsidiary role in the narrative. This is not just memory but an attempt at the creation of an invented past that once was lived in a different form by the author and is now transmuted into an alternative experience that a reader can share, entering into the illusion that this was reality. Should the Irish be so proud of the work? Yes and no. It is about Ireland and the Irish so 'yes' but its tone remains distant, that of a 'European' who preferred Trieste, Rome, Paris and Zurich to Dublin and whose politics were moderately nationalist and socialist but at a distance. Joyce was clear that Dublin was a means to an end. This city was just a way of getting to the truth of all urban cosmopolitan culture. It was directed at the universal much as Homer is now 'universal'. Ireland may be quite incidental, simply 'what the author knew' to reach his ends. ...more |
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liked it
| An extended short story by Mishima from his 1961 collection of the same name, 'Star' reflects his own unhappy recent experience as an actor in a gangs An extended short story by Mishima from his 1961 collection of the same name, 'Star' reflects his own unhappy recent experience as an actor in a gangster (yakuza) movie. Perhaps it is an exorcism of that experience. It has the expected themes of Mishima - love, death, suicide and so forth - but it has been over-praised in the past perhaps because Mishima is himself a 'star' and is 'owed' praise. In fact, it is a lucid but lightweight piece that would not be so interesting if it was not by him. ...more |
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liked it
| I had some difficulty reviewing this book and not just because the author (Paul Green) is a friend. I thought his 'The Qlipoth' was a masterpiece and I had some difficulty reviewing this book and not just because the author (Paul Green) is a friend. I thought his 'The Qlipoth' was a masterpiece and I greatly admire his plays (collected in 'Babalon and Other Plays') and 'The Rupture' (the first volume of 'Beneath the Pleasure Zone'). 'Dream Clips of the Archons' is a continuation of the novel cycle to its natural conclusion but, unfortunately, it comes across as a tidying up exercise with a lot of the original verve and vim gone as if trying to get the job done and dusted in order to move on to other things. This is not to say that it is not enjoyable or at least enjoyable once one gets past an early and unusually self-indulgent density of language and use of far too much semi-coherent modernist poetry in what you soon come to see is perhaps a kindly satire on himself as much as on society. 'Dream Clips' contains much of the same wry humour that marked out the previous books and his targets have moved on to new territory - Eurasianism, Russian Cosmism, the Secret Police, Modern Poetry, American Evangelism, Transhumanism, Popular Culture and Avant-Garde Soviet Art. Green has always been good at satirising popular culture, mashing up things into new often dark extensions - the zombies who take themselves too seriously and enter the world of folk horror, the appropriation of celebrities reaching 'Black Mirror' proportions. The strong Russian theme is nostalgic and provides the best element. Britain has been conquered after the total implosion of America and is now occupied by a ramshackle and not entirely malign Russia which has to cope with the British and all their flaccid and sullen ways. This Britain is grey and gloomy with rationing but the Russians seem not to be responsible for anything truly evil. Even their secret police seem to be no more dangerous than Special Branch and the whole structure is largely being run by colonised and pliable Brits. The story weaves around some amusing either fanatical or half-hearted attempts to build something like a hybrid British-Russian culture on an amalgam of wartime Britain and early Soviet enthusiasm. The Russians merely displace the British State and make no better fist of things. The satire of the trans-humanist Cosmists with their Eurasian ideology is a nice change from the usual concentration on Silicon Valley autists although we also have a quite separate story line (drawn from the previous novels) about the sinister Quantum brothers. The Cosmists are mad but basically humanists - they want to go to the stars although their plans are nixed by the folk horror cannibalism of fake zombies. The Quantum Brothers, however, represent an anti-humanist reasoning approach to the future with no time for the chaos we humans represent. To his credit, the author can perhaps laugh sideways at himself as Lucas Beardsley, an aging intellectual Everyman surviving crisis after crisis, trying to be true to himself and his calling as poet as he scrapes a living as a scribbler in the interstices of power. The future AI Qubit who is trying to control history after the fact and not doing a great job of it writes of him: 'Let him continue scribbling in his shadowy sub world for an indefinite period, subject to revision'. Thus, the path of all humans in the coming age of artificial intelligence. The book comes alive about a third of the way with the arrival of the obnoxious Joseph Nizzard, the sociopathic televangelist, not because he is interesting but because the writing is superb, evoking a monstrous personality in a long lucid passage about a born hypocrite. This not only triggers some coherence to the story but is precursor to other excellent set-pieces - Lead Designer Archenko's turning up at an old British secret space research station straight out of Poliakoff or a vision of the unhinged Macgregor Mathers in Paris meeting the Secret Chiefs. Green can certainly write well so my lack of enthusiasm is only relative in that that the tale seems to be a vehicle for expressive satire and wry amusement but, as I have said, to conclude with a dystopian vision whose cruel bluntness seems like a final giving up on our species without explanation. That is not a problem in itself but Green, instead of subordinating his wit and imagination to the story has allowed the story too often to be subordinated to his wit and imagination. The times when it collapses into poetic language do not help the book as a novel. Perhaps he expresses the mood of our time amongst sensitive liberal intellectuals. A general abandonment of the expectation of any progress as we trundle towards a world run by Archons - superhuman artificial intelligences with scant interest in our survival except as their creators. The wry nostalgic look at at the wartime spirit (Britain under the Russians seems to gives us the 1940s and 1970s restored as a gloomy amalgam) and the sclerotic and inefficient bureaucratism of the Soviets that does little harm and little good except hold things together emphasise this mood. This is a writer who can remember the 1970s and the Soviet era and would have been raised on the myth of the 1940s and 1950s and of the secret state so it might not have the same resonance for younger readers but the message seems to be that solidarity and progressive ideas have now decayed. When the ending comes, it is quite perfunctory without any real drama. It is just a final full stop to the human experiment, a dead end. It is all well within the classic British dystopian tradition and a thousands of miles from that old American optimism that has crashed and burned in chaos. America sits in the background as the dream that failed much as the Soviet experiment is looked upon albeit that the occupier is Russian with Communist rhetorical characteristics rather than truly Soviet. It is the lack of America in the story that is as interesting as the presence of Russia. Whether America the 'beacon on the hill', the progressive proletarianism of Soviet Russia or the communal solidarity of Blighty, all have crumbled to ashes as we look back from the twenty-first century and forward to our trans-human future, a future possibly without humans at all. My suggestion is that you plan to read this book but go to 'The Qlipoth' and the two 'Beneath the Pleasure Zone' novels first and try not to leave too great a gap between this last in the series and those texts. This last will probably make more sense if you can get the flow of Green's story arc. Green has been sadly neglected and publishers have not flocked to print and distribute him but my suspicion is that, one day, he will be rediscovered as an authentic wry commentator on our troubled early twenty-first century and as bridge between ancient hope and contemporary despair. ...more |
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| Aug 24, 2001
| Aug 31, 2003
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really liked it
| 'Platform' (2001) was Houllebecq's fourth novel. It may be more famous for a rather ridiculous scandal about his alleged (almost certainly actual) Isl 'Platform' (2001) was Houllebecq's fourth novel. It may be more famous for a rather ridiculous scandal about his alleged (almost certainly actual) Islamophobia in an era of terrorism than its content but its content is worth considering. This is the writer just coming into his forties with three novels under his belt. The maturation shows but, in maturing and producing a classically structured novel, he also, it must be admitted, has lost some of his pungent verve. It is a bitter-sweet book rather than an existentially desperate one. This is still the Houllebecq of the 1990s, detached, reminiscent of Camus' Meursault, fascinated by sexual expression and hanging on to a cultural traditionalism that is both highly political and which has abandoned conventional liberal democratic politics. It is perhaps one of the few novels from the literary class that treats capitalism and entrepreneurialism not only without condemnation but with a certain distant approval. He seems only to regret that 'culture' (society) gets in the way of it granting our true desires. The story centres on three individuals. The bitter sweetness comes from the fact that the protagonist, a time-serving civil servant in the Ministry of Culture, actually finds true emotional and sexual happiness with a woman who acts as business aide to the third. Houllebecque thankfully avoids any temptation to create some hackneyed menage a trois and has the three of them simply engage in a shared project with a shared vision and shared respect - an attempt to create a viable sex tourism business within the mainstream tourist industry. As we would expect, Houllebecq writes well and gives us a strong sense of what it is like to go on a package holiday, to Thailand or to Cuba but also what it is like to be detached from your father or slowly and inevitably detaching from an unsuitable wife. His ability to say the unsayable is undiminished not only with the sex scenes and cultural sterotyping but even with the third character's desperate short sexual laison with an under-age girl. The story is one of male desperation, the girl is willing and the issue is the law and not morality. A variant of this desperation is the meaning one of the dying victims of the atrocity, a working class guy, got from the happiness of his time with a Thai prostitute as if even his death was worth the brief moment of time when he was happy. The fact that the Thai prostitute is not invested in him at all and perhaps that one day such happiness may come from a well-formed robot is not the point. He is not an intellectual. He felt as if he was loved and experienced something in himself greater than being a cog in a wheel. The sex will not surprise those who know Houllebecq. It is graphic and fairly frequent, presented without all the moral or romantic gilding we have come to expect in literature, and yet the sex is not without love or respect even when it is purchased. What is framed in our world today as exploitation is interpreted differently here as a trade between people who are agents on their own account according to their desires, needs and situation. No wonder the book was loathed as much as admired by the 'bien-pensants'. It is a different conservative-libertarian way of looking at the world. It was unfashionable when the book was published and, now, nearly a quarter of a century on, it is tantamount to being forbidden. The fashionable philosophers are determined on not merely denying the self but controlling it. Houllebecq's vision of sex is thus totally counter-cultural, especially in this age of political correctness and wokery. He dismisses narratives of exploitation. The world is as it is, what looks like exploitation to the protagonist looks like fair trade under the circumstances. He may be right. What will surprise the Houllebecquians is how much not only sex but love based on sex, an unconditional and powerful love, is presented not as a trade but as a glorious thing in itself. It ends not because of decay but because of the violence of Islamic terrorism. Our protagonist, Michel, finds perfect happiness with Valerie but his world collapses him into becoming the Houellebecq hero we know from the past on the chance shot of a sex negative religious maniac and the subsequent posturing of Western, in this case French, society. The subsequent scandal was not so much about the book as about statements made by Houllebecq outside the text that then got read back into the text. Fortunately, French judges asserted the right of a man to criticise religion against the spurious claims of the human rights industry. The cultural attacks on Houllebecq are simply the defensive posturing of a lesser minds terrified of his exposure of the hollow at the centre of their lives, of the value of raw sex and its role in finding love and his brutal truths about the world that feeds them The ruthlessness of capitalism is a sub-text of the book but even this is not treated with the usual moral affectation of the literary set. When everything crumbles and Jean-Yves' high-flying career takes a dive there is no anger, just sorrow at the way of the world, the human condition. Houllebecq writes sympathetically of all his characters. There are no villains other than faceless maniacs. There is certainly no racism. His Arabs are treated as persons as much as Africans, Germans and Thais. Maybe a slight disdain for the Anglo-Saxon can be detected but he is French after all. The structure of the book is also interesting. The sexually graphic scenes appear at almost rhythmic intervals but what I was most struck by was his slight parodying of the airport thriller (he critiques three best selling authors in short didactic segments). The story is set in the world of global tourism which represents brief moments of exoticism for people living fairly meaningless lives of drudgery in roles imposed on them by chance and necessity. Thrillers are brief moments of dreamed excitement in those same lives. Houllebecq tells his story straight and chronologically without tiresome post-modern trickery but periodically inserts factual accounts of, say, management techniques in the tourism industry or some other bit of 'education' in the way that thriller writers explain the intricacies of weaponry. What struck this reader was that Houellebecq's honesty about the world and our position in it is not feigned or calculated for effect but rather structured with great art to provoke us into recognition. If we do not recognise what is being claimed or said, this will be down to our personality. He never preaches even about those things he clearly does not like - sex-negativity, intrusion into private life and choices, denial of pleasures, moral affectation. He presents us with an alternative way of seeing our situation, then gets sad that our situation is just how it is and probably always will be. ...more |
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really liked it
| Whitney Chadwick is a well regarded scholar of women in art with a strong interest in Surrealism. 'The Militant Muse' might be regarded as a sequel to Whitney Chadwick is a well regarded scholar of women in art with a strong interest in Surrealism. 'The Militant Muse' might be regarded as a sequel to her 'Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement'. It is not a straight narrative history but rather a series of essays on a theme. That theme is less some feminist attempt to recover women's role in Surrealism (although there is that aspect) and more an assertion of uniquely feminine responses to friendship set in a period of artistic change and war. It is a humane book but very much one for women about women. One has to step back a little from the currently fashionable determination to promote female, black or LGBTQ contributions to history. These are enlightening at best but often severely distorting at worst. The Academy as a whole has tended to distort rather than enlighten in recent years. Finding black relatively minor composers in the eighteenth century or concentrating attention on Artemesia Gentileschi and her castrating art or creating some idea of gayness long before it existed is all very well but has ended up with Jane Austen performed by black actors in a travesty of history. Chadwick is better than that. She does not make outrageous claims but presents the facts based on the documents and letters that she can get access to. Although we see a tendency to will an interpretation that suits an agenda on occasions, this is a work of history and not ideology. Nevertheless, we must not be seduced. The gender approach to art history (like the racial and the sexual) is a fashion. It derives in part from the market fact that, as with crime fiction and romance, women are disproportionately interested in art history. There is a drive to validation here. Looked at more dispassionately, Surrealism did produce some very significant women artists (less so literary figures), notably Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning and Remedios Varo although only Meret Oppenheim can claim to be part of the initiating group. This is more than women being a simple muse although it is equally true that men had the driving thoughts and energy that created the space for these women. Is that simply a matter of a 'patriarchal society' or is it perhaps true that women often do not initiate revolutions but can exploit them? The master literary and intellectual initiator of Surrealism, Andre Breton, was not accidentally someone who radicalised thought from experience of the front line in World War I. The preceding movements of Futurism and Dada were also related to war (for and against). Chadwick has something to say here about how war might drive a feminine sensibility under the conditions of the Second World War (and the Spanish Civil War) where violence and disruption affected both genders with far more equality than in the previous war. Unfortunately her story ends to all intents and purposes in 1945. There is no evidence of some upsurge in new ideas from women outside the contribution to Abstract Expressionism. Similarly Frida Kahlo is not really a Surrealist and neither was Lee Miller, both subjects of Chadwick. So, the task of capturing Surrealism for feminism does not quite work here but what does work is profound insight into female-to-female relationships (not necessarily but sometimes Lesbian) and the shattering effect of war on mostly very young but not exclusively so, women. Chadwick does this by taking five sets of interwar friendship broadly chronologically with the 'muse' aspect of women almost inevitably emerging as several of the women are as much known as the wives or lovers of 'great men' (Breton, Ernst, De Rivera and Penrose) as achievers in their own right. Indeed, one of the emergent themes is that interwar artistic women still tended to domesticity (and nothing wrong that) while trying to carve out an individual artistic expression and some sense of personal autonomy. Cooking and food emerge more than once as solace to no surprise. The first set is the quasi-Lesbian (or possibly fully Lesbian) romantic friendship of Valentine Penrose (first wife of Roland) and Alice Palen. There is not too much to say about this. It is sweet but reads like a romantic Lesbian novel and seems based on slender material. The second is the relationship between Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini which actually says little about the latter but a great deal that is valuable about the former and how her art was formed - and how she coped or did not with the brutal incarceration of her lover Max Ernst during the phony war. Carrington was almost broken by the experience. The suggestion is that she was supportive and loyal during the temporary incarceration by the French authorities but the relationship did not survive long after. What is interesting is how Surrealism acted for her as psychotherapy through art. The third set explores the relationships of the surrealist and left-wing circles in which Frida Kahlo lived in Mexico as European political exiles arrived in the 1930s to create a vibrant artistic and cultural centre in Mexico City equal to those of (say) Bloomsbury or Paris. The central friendship is that of Kahlo (who easily surmounts her role as Diego de Rivera's wife) and Jacqueline Lamba ('Mrs Breton') but the tale is broader than that involving not only artists and surrealists but the circle around Trotsky in exile. The fourth set is for me the most interesting and powerful - less gossip perhaps and more solid history. It is the story of two long-loving Lesbians, Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe, on the island of Jersey during the war with a rather weak link to 'Mrs Breton' coming for a holiday. One of the great posturings of the intelligentsia is that 'resistance' is writing a tract or poem against an oppressor or talking about resistance in a cafe and then having it added to one's own CV after others have fought with blood and gold to liberate you. Cahun and Malherbe's story (Cahun was an interesting surrealist and political actor in her own right duriing the interwar period) looks as if it might head in the same direction and then rapidly shifts into a story of radical action against the German occupiers at enormous personal risk. The two women, no longer young, become the epitome of a courage, their actions perhaps not changing the course of the war by one jot but demonstrating that even the littlest person can do what they can to destabilise rule by monsters and thugs. These are both true heroines. They got caught and underwent a terrifying trial and imprisonment escaping death by a hair's breadth and demonstrating that cliche 'the indomitability of the human spirit' to the nth degree. This story should be abstracted from this book and, at the least, made into an inspiring Netflix docudrama. The final set explores the kindly 'menage a trois' of Roland Penrose, his first divorced wife Valentine in exile from France (returning only once a year to Paris for a Lesbian romance) and Roland's generous and interesting (and war-traumatised) second wife, the renowned photographer Lee Miller. It is an oddly heart-warming story of dysfunctionality and polyamorous survival that could be happily mangled into some BBC drama. Of course, you do not get Roland's view on his ex-wife and current wife in situ with him on a Sussex farm but one suspects that he was tolerantly happy. We can add that the book is well illustrated with images that alone make it worth holding in the library. It should comfort female readers. Male readers should not ignore it. These are profound friendships and there are insights here for any man who wants to plumb the mysteries of woman. ...more |
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| 3.36
| 1,069
| 1940
| Dec 22, 2009
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really liked it
| 'Miss Hargreaves' (1940) is a strange book. It starts as a light-hearted and apparently lightweight comedy but steadily morphs into something much dar 'Miss Hargreaves' (1940) is a strange book. It starts as a light-hearted and apparently lightweight comedy but steadily morphs into something much darker while retaining its humorous tone. With its High Anglican undertone, It reminded me of the far more serious fantasy work of Charles Williams. The narrator and his father are, quite literally, congenital liars albeit without apparent malice, although Frank Baker makes his youthful protagonist into a far from nice person with a strong streak of unthinking cruelty and considerable irresponsibility. The 'lie', conjured up by Norman Huntley and his pal Henry, at the expense of an Irish sexton results in the conjuring up of a 'Miss Hargreaves' who is a phantasm of their own making and yet who proves all-too-physically real. She proceeds to create total mayhem for Norman in his home town. Miss Hargreaves is not just the physical embodiement of the lie in her own right but in her accoutrements which include a dog, a parrot, a harp, a bath (a result of the joke extending itself too far) and, it would seem, unlimited resources and connections. Reality is warped across the board. It is interesting that, as soon as she achieves an accidental autonomy of will, she jettisons all the objects imposed on her by Norman and Henry including her poetry (which appears in an Appendix) except the money and the title and furnishings appropriate to her acquired station. The existence of an independent will on her part is one of the mysteries and ambiguities that riddle the book and cannot help but raise the question whether any of us have any more or less autonomy of will as subjects of the social than she does. Maybe we are all social phantasms created by the will and imaginations of others. In this respect, Baker, the small town English Anglican writer, seems to be hurtling into the world of continental philosophy by literary accident. This should all be funny (a fantasy made manifest in a small town) - and it became a play with Margaret Rutherford wholly appropriate for the role of Hargreaves -but the realised phantasm is a bit of a monster even as she inspires a form of affectionate love simply as the creation of her creator. The novel ceases to be lightweight after a while. It becomes a much more complex, hard to pin down, morality tale where it is hard to find out what exactly is being regarded as moral and what is not. The ambiguities make the reading not a little unnerving in this respect. Is she a ghost? This is dismissed quite summarily. She is an imaginative creation of an imagination out of control. She is not bound by social norms any more than her creator secretly allows himself to be bound by social norms as a young Cathedral organist within a class-ridden small English town. Baker gives us a reading of class that is as ambiguous as everything else in the book. Social snobbery and 'mob' culture are caricatured but not in any sense that we would call socially critical - this is a conservative book in questioning little in its satire. Is the book, a fantasy that emulates Charles Williams only in a minor key, trying to say something? If so, you might struggle to find out what. Perhaps it is a version of the Frankenstein myth - do not meddle beyond the norm lest something happen that might destroy you. But there are other themes as well. Huntley's affection for Hargreaves is as ambiguous as everything else - it is a form of vampirism as control over her ebbs and flows to the degree that she controls him and his emotional reactions. Is it sincere affection or manipulation? Huntley's propensity to making errors of control simply by saying the wrong words moves the plot along. Words of power are, of course, a very magickal concept but are also inherent in religious ideas of prayer and worship. Magick is a-foot here and perhaps to be contrasted with religious restraint. Is Hargreaves good, evil or neither? Does she exist in some way as an autonomous individual at any time in the story or is she bound entirely to her creative invention? Would killing her be a moral wrong? Would it be murder? Is such a dubious murder justified as self-defence? The passing reference to J W Dunne suggests that Baker might be engaged here in a thought experiment about time and the nature of the soul that relates very much to its period. Hargreaves sometimes seems to be a memory of something as much as a creation. Baker sets his tale in a very particular milieu of Trollopian church politics, town resentments, music, small bookshops, middle class family life and difficult girlfriends and, as such, for all the satire and fantasy, it is a nice reflection of interwar life in the comfortable middle class away from London. The book misses greatness and must be classed as an oddity of literature but it should not be forgotten entirely. I suspect you will come out of it as I did wondering still about what exactly Miss Hargreaves was and just how bad things might have got if she had not been brought under control. ...more |
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| Jun 11, 2013
| Jun 11, 2013
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it was ok
| The 'Crazy Rich Asians' franchise appeared at just the right time, much like Peter York's 'The Sloane Ranger Handbook' in 1982, reporting on a real ph The 'Crazy Rich Asians' franchise appeared at just the right time, much like Peter York's 'The Sloane Ranger Handbook' in 1982, reporting on a real phenomenon, re-creating and extending what had been observed for the market where it blossomed into rising middle class aspiration. There really are Crazy Rich Asians as much as there really were Sloane Rangers (I dated a few of the latter back in the day so I have evidence of their existence). My East Asian wife has testified to the existence of the former although they are by no means as extreme as Kevin Kwan's satirical creations. This is a shallow world in which vast sums of money are expended on status, style, fashion, food, interior design and expensive travel. It is a book about Rich People's Problems and so should not engage us too much as mere mortals. Yet it is well crafted and entertaining as light reading. The author knows his audience. This is not the subject of his satire but the comfortably off middle classes who circulate the rich like dust motes around a lamp. They need to feel morally superior while not condemning too much what they not-so-secretly fantasise about becoming. Kwan does this by creating a love story of class tension between two thoroughly Westernised young Asian professional people (Michael and Rachel) who are plunged into the crazy rich world of East Asia when Rachel visits Michael's family for the first time just as their relationship becomes 'serious'. The romantic model here is an old one - Jane Austen's shade can be seen flitting around in the background. Of course, we all know that the solid, ethically grounded and serious two little 'bourgeois' will triump over an ethically challenged and shallow East Asian environment. Kwan writes well when he wants to. The final chapters of misunderstanding and reconciliation represent a sensitive understanding of human psychology yet the bulk of the book remains a catalogue of lists of brands, foods, the interiors of houses, ambition and posturing. There is quite a bit of nastiness here but no one is presented as truly evil. Kwan's satire is quite muted whenever there is any risk of it slipping over into a critique of how these Asians got their wealth, of capitalism and exploitation and so on and so forth. It is just a shallow entertainment. He does get in a nice crack about the Opium Wars at one point and the book is riddled with ethnic snobberies but, while we do see that not everyone is rich very occasionally, the situation is taken as read. This is just how the world is and is it not fun?! It is comfort food for the Asian-origin wing of the Western upper middle classes filling that age old need for validation of their own status by demonstrating moral superiority to those with more than they have while never questioning their material position in relation to those who have less. But there is no point in getting overly serious about what is the literary equivalent of one of the ornate sweet foodstuffs about which the protagonists may enthuse. It was written for the market and it works at the level. When Kwan can get off the ride and the theme is exhausted (there are at least two more sequels and, of course, his rights from the movie), it will be interesting to see if he can use the literary talent that sometimes emerges despite the tale to create something different and more interesting. However, like Peter York, even if he does nothing else, Kwan has created a memorable meme and encapsulated in this book at least one classic phenomenon of globalisation that needed its satirical voice without frightening the horses. In that, he has succeeded. ...more |
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| Mar 24, 2011
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really liked it
| Grant Allen was a Canadian-origin science writer who, at the age of 36, put his heart and soul into his first novel 'Philistia' (1884). It got panned. Grant Allen was a Canadian-origin science writer who, at the age of 36, put his heart and soul into his first novel 'Philistia' (1884). It got panned. This did not stop him from becoming a popular writer of 'sensational novels' and speculative fiction for the next fifteen years. His turn from serious literature towards popular entertainment should not be regretted because he produced some fine genre work that made him at times the contemporary equal of Conan Doyle but this first effort bears re-visiting. It is, I think, better than most first novels that I have read. The main reason that it was criticised stands up. It is a novel of ideas and, I am afraid, too frequently the ideas (while cogently expressed) are too often delivered as lengthy speeches by the protagonists (at least in the first third) but I suspect there was more to the dislike than this. It is in fact a satire on the high Victorian class system and especially on the upper middle classes that happens to be both cynical and kindly at the same time. It is no accident that this was a colonial with a scientific mind enjoying the hypocrisies and complexities of the English class system. I suspect some of the satirical strikes - especially at the expense of journalism and popular radicalism more than at the expense of the Church and aristocracy - hit home. There would be something here to displease every reader without a sense of humour. In fact, while I could not say that this novel should be added to the syllabus of literary studies classes, it could, with profit, be read by anyone interested in high Victorian culture and even history . It could be used as a primer on almost everything that drove the ideology of the day. The characters also prove to be surprisingly likeable even when they are foolish (which is often in some cases) while the 'hypocrites' and the conventional are allowed to condemn themselves by their speech and actions rather than be tagged by the author. The 'socialism' in the novel is hidden in plain sight. Although Max Schurz, the old revolutionary, is clearly modelled on someone like Karl Marx, the kindly intellectual is clearly offering us something closer to Christian Socialism with added class struggle. Indeed, a very British left-wing link betwen traditional Christian values (as opposed to established Church values) and the emerging secular socialism pushing up against the hypocrisies of Victorian radicalism is evident here. The ambience is unusual - the interface between religious fervour, early idealistic socialism, the workings of the market (specifically journalism) and the idiosyncrasies of all classes which are treated as often the more absurd the higher they are in the pecking order. The passionate cause of Ernest Le Breton walking out of his job in an aristocratic household - the moral wrongness of shooting pigeons - is a delightful bit of humour. The sharp caricature of the aristocracy sometimes has bite when it comes to the matter of the London slums. And yet the most attractive and intriguing character is Lady Hilda Tregellis, a society beauty who is determined not to marry an Algy or Bertie or a Montie, has no theoretical ethics whatsoever but does the most practical good in cahoots with the likeable working class origin aesthete Arthur Berkeley. Perhaps this is the indirect message of the book. Life is about how you deal with the people you care about and who are in your circle, grand ideas are all very well but success in life depends on having 'pals' and love will eventually conquer all. The women in general are very much treated as interesting characters in their own right with another strong character in Selah, the Hastings lower middle class girl who stands her ground against one reprobate Le Breton brother and marries a nicer one. Class is everything in this novel. The working classes are treated perhaps too comically or as 'other' but it is the lower middles and the wilful aristocratic woman who triumph and marry for love into the coterie of upper middle class intellectuals around whom the book is built. Nor is Allen unwilling to shock the reader - a key character very surprisingly dies), The cynical reality of power and patronage and the impossibility of truly 'bucking the system' is made crystal clear. Although happiness breaks out for the deserving, it is quite definitely an authorial 'fix'. So many aspects of Victorian life and ideas are covered in this novel that it would be tiresome to go much further. It is simultaneously a caricature of that society and a fond reaffirmation of the values of the best of the age - especially a mock-Dickensian compassion, good done through deeds. No, it is not a masterpiece of English literature but it is amusingly written - only a couple of places removed from Wodehouse at times - and keeps the reader entertained with only very rare quasi-philosophical longeurs. The satire is biting but never cruel. ...more |
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| 3.70
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| 1757
| Nov 19, 1998
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it was amazing
| Edmund Burke's influential 'Philosophical Enquiry' (1757) should be considered as an early attempt at phenomenology and the psychology of aesthetics r Edmund Burke's influential 'Philosophical Enquiry' (1757) should be considered as an early attempt at phenomenology and the psychology of aesthetics rather than as a full-blown philosophical work. He addresses language, for example, only briefly as a somewhat desultory if fruitful coda. Still, Burke's description of the 'sublime' (the human response to external stimuli that evoke awe, terror or reverence) still stands as a stimulating insight into what remains a psychological mystery - intense feeling that exists without language although it can be triggered by language. His description of 'beauty' is perhaps less successful because he is describing the norms of his time far more than he is doing in the case of the 'sublime'. The modern mind will naturally baulk at the negative associations he gives to 'blackness' and at his essentialist view of simpering women. Philosophy generally only works when it describes things regardless of contingent cultural conditions unless (as in the case of Heidegger) it is fully aware of that contingency and factors it in as part of the philosophy - in other words that the thinker is maximally aware of the conditions of his thinking. Burke is clearly not aware of the conditioning of his thinking. So, for all the acute analysis of the 'sublime ' which has been so influential in Western cultural history, I am afraid we have to say that Burke as philosopher does not quite stand the test of time. Where he does stand the test of time is as a source of insight into the eighteenth century mind as it turns a little from the Enlightenment towards recognising that our responses to the world cannot be encompassed by pure reason but have other more emotional drivers. To his credit, he does not try to rationalise the sentiments underpinning and surrounding both the sublime and the beautiful. He allows them to 'be' as experiences that we can all recognise (even if they are more culturally variable than he seems to think) and then he investigates them. This is the work of an ambitious young man - he was only 28 at the time. A certain earnestness of enquiry is present through the work. He knows he does not know. He is trying to think his way to some sort of understanding that he knows is incomplete. The book is definitely exploratory. The work remains reasonably readable today because eighteenth century prose tends to clarity more than obscurity. The longeurs only come when you see him puzzling through thoughts that were hard to clarify for himself as much as for us. Yet when he lets rip with descriptions of our actual emotional responses to the sublime and the beautiful, then the two and a half centuries that separate us from him drift away. Much that he writes is embedded not in his century but in us. And he writes well when he needs to. Curiously, based on Adam Phillips' notes (it is appropriate that the Editor is a psychotherapist and not a philosopher), the vast majority of Burke's many classical and literary quotations are marked out as 'misquoted'. Evidently Burke was churning this out in his lodgings without access to a library and from memory. One assumes that the bulk of his readers were also school classicists from memory and not from the academy or else this might have been used against him. There is perhaps an insight here into a fluidity in the use of texts that would not be tolerable in later ages and that misquotation was probably regarded as fine so long as it was not the Bible. His audience could read the Latin and scan a line. The misremembered word was not relevant to the project. Phillips refers to the eroticism of the 'Philosophical Enquiry' but that it is too strong. Burke is simply culturally enabled to describe some truths without the dead weight of the Victorian age and still retain some delicacy. Although not a great work of philosophy, this is still worth reading for its cultural importance. It enables reason to be balanced by sentiment but, more importantly, it opens the door to experimental psychology ... exactly what is happening when an external object excites an emotion? He does not answer that question adequately - there is no cause given for the effect beyond the phenomena themselves - but he is asking the right questions. He is also providing clear and credible descriptions of the relationships between observer and phenomena. His 'philosophy of language' is also not stupid. It too asks an important question which he cannot adequately answer. How is it that words alone, which have no necessary link to the reality they describe, can be formed to excite emotions such as awe, delight, desire and pleasure? This is an important question which still has no satisfactory answer. He contributes by pointing out the mystery that we read without forming clear pictures as we read and yet we 'understand' something from the linking of the words rather than any deep consideration of what they portray. Read any line of 'literature' and ask yourself if you actually envision each word and each event clearly rather than construct a meaning internally that, on careful consideration, is seemingly disconnected from the 'pictures' the language should represent and you will see what I mean. These final observations by Burke on language are worth dwelling on although having described the mystery he has only the most limited account of what is going on. As before, he asks the right question, supplies the evidence of the problem and then moves on. The science and philosophy he uses may be state of the art in 1757 (he knows his Locke) and he is a philosopher to the degree that he does what helps to define philosophy (asking awkward questions of the facts of the matter) but he does not do much more than that. What he does manage to do is get his readers to see that abstract ratiocination can only go so far in describing our responses to the world and that our emotional life, especially in relation to core underlying drives like fear and erotic desire, needs to be observed more closely in order to understand it. ...more |
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| 4.15
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| Jan 1935
| Mar 25, 2014
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it was amazing
| Penguin and S T Joshi, foremost literary historian of Anglo-Saxon weird fiction and biographer of H P Lovecraft, have done Clark Ashton Smith [CAS] co Penguin and S T Joshi, foremost literary historian of Anglo-Saxon weird fiction and biographer of H P Lovecraft, have done Clark Ashton Smith [CAS] considerable service with this finely selected anthology of not only his stories but of his prose poems and poetry. Does this mean that CAS is a great and notable figure in literature? Yes and no. The idea (as Leiber claimed) that he was 'uninfluenced' is certainly absurd - read this collection and you see a great deal of literary influence ranging from the classics through Baudelaire to contemporaries like Lovecraft. If we are to position him in 'Literature' is almost certainly as an anti-modernist survival of the mental world of the symbolists and the decadents sentenced to genre fiction because his way of seeing the world had fallen out of fashion and he was beached in the provincial backwater of California. Within the genre fiction of fantasy, horror and science fiction, we must conclude that he was as great as genre fiction allows a writer to be and certainly notable and that he had a unique and surprisingly consistent mental vision - rich in language and allusion. He wrote to be published and there is (as Lovecraft often found) no more demanding field than the fast-moving world of popular fiction in the interwar period. An author was writing for capricious editors and experiencing direct fan criticism in magazines designed for the relatively uneducated. To maintain any sort of literary and imaginative integrity when food had to be put on the table was no mean achievement. We can say that CAS tended to get the balance right. His stories are rich in language and yet remain readable and full of 'thrills'. Joshi selects intelligently to cover a chronology of representative tales from 1929 to 1937 (with an excellent scifi outlier from 1953) that give examples from all of his story cycles (such as the Averoigne and Zothaire series) and nearly all originally appearing in that ur-weird journal 'Weird Tales'. CAS weaved worlds from Dunsanian fantasy, Lovecraftian mythology and his own dark and timeless sense of cosmic horror with an awareness that science fiction had created a break with the symbolist and decadent world that represented his core instincts as far as literature was concerned. Between the symbolists and 1930s America lay the shadow of H G Wells. The dream world of hashish eaters now had to contend with new vistas of space and time, with, in short, the cosmic. Lovecraft and CAS (and others such as Moore and Kuttner) wanted to express the imaginative implications of this. Of course, the stories are not always faultless - the demands of magazine fiction sometimes saw the magical-fantastic prose descend into a mere horrific thrill, shock or 'chase' towards the end - but we should read them for the atmosphere a little more than for the content. If 'The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis' (1931) appears to be an immediate derivation from Lovecraft's 'The Mountains of Madness' (read in manuscript the month before writing) but translated to Mars, it still stands on its own two feet regardless and it cannot be called pastiche. Re-reading after many years 'The Maze of the Enchanter' (1932) I was reminded of the original effect of its alien lushness as an implicitly science fiction reinterpretation of the world that 'Vathek' had introduced to us as orientalism but now made yet more alien. The real discovery for me in this collection was the collection of prose poems which are simply small expressions of the mood that CAS was evidently trying to create in his stories but which sometimes get vitiated by the need to be coherent and have a 'plot'. These are little masterpieces of the alien and the fantastic, dream worlds expressing a cosmic perception that hints at vistas far beyond human comprehension and meditate on vast tracts of inhuman or post-human space and time. If the cosmic starts with Wells and is expressed in quasi-didactic terms by Stapledon, it is refined as a particularly horrific vision of incomprehensible alien forces in the hands of Lovecraft. CAS refines it further into tightly drawn alien worlds that are, if you like, the future looking backwards. There is, finally, a selection of poetry which I find less impressive and comes from an era when, in conservative literary circles, poetry was still regarded as popular and was publishable at the margins in genre journals. Lovecraft privileged poetry himself as did many amateurs in his circle. Unfortunately, unlike the prose poems which use clear language to create mystery and the alien, the poems are trapped in their late Victorian corsets. The technique (which is highly capable) gets in the way of our more modern emotional engagement with the subject matter. However, when CAS allows himself to create mood through an extended piece, the magic returns - and, for example, his 'Satan Unrepentant' (1912) and, to a lesser extent, 'The Hashish Eater, or, The Apocalypse of Evil' (1920) should be better known. We might also note his valedictory 'To Howard Phillips Lovecraft' (1937) which is testament to the regard and friendship between two men who never actually met but whose correspondence over fifteen years was immensely valuable to both - two 'weird' geniuses in their way. Unlike many writers of the weird boom in the interwar period, there are still many copyright restrictions on CAS's work (he died in 1961) so we are unlikely to see a cheap Complete Works along Delphi lines for many years yet. This is a shame because CAS' tales in particular should be more widely known. It may be uncharitable to say this but the explosion of Lovecraftian popular culture in recent years may owe as much to the fact that Lovecraft's corpus is easily and cheaply available as to its undoubted quality. If you search (2023) you can get the tales but they are not always cheap and are scattered or divided into a multi-volume set and so relatively expensive although the situation has improved over the last decade so. You can certainly get the entertaining Averoigne cycle in paperback for under £20. ...more |
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May 01, 2023
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