Published: Pan, 2002
Edited: Peter Gazzardi
I remember when I heard about Douglas Adams' death, but I was surprised to realise that it was now seven years ago that it happened. I didn't want to pick up this book when it came out, less than a year later, for several reasons, and it is only now that I am finally reading and enjoying it.
The main reason for not wanting to acknowledge the existence of The Salmon of Doubt before is that I just didn't want Douglas Adams to be dead. I was just old enough to appreciate The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when the novel first appeared (I missed the original broadcast of the first radio series, but caught repeats). By the time I went to university, I could quote large chunks and still can, and own copies of the books, recordings of the radio and TV series and Neil Gaiman's guide. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy played a important role in my life, quite similar to Adams' own discovery of the Beatles which is described in one of the pieces included in The Salmon of Doubt.
The one exception to this is Mostly Harmless. As pretty much the last writing by Adams I read before The Salmon of Doubt, I found it very off putting and didn't want to read more of the same. (Mostly Harmless is now the only book by Douglas Adams which I do not possess.) It was so wilfully downbeat, not just ending unhappily, but seemingly revelling in undoing previous happy endings (notably the relationship between Arthur and Fenchurch). According to information in the Salmon of Doubt, it reflects a bleak time in Adams' own life, and I gathered when I listened to the radio version that he later wanted to change the ending, a wish that was carried out when it was dramatised. Relatively little of The Salmon of Doubt is fiction, so there is little chance that the book overall will give the same impression as Mostly Harmless, but even the fiction that is there clearly reflects a happier time.
The other reason that I didn't rush to read Salmon of Doubt is because some of what I heard about it suggested that it was scraping the barrel. Apart from the incomplete fiction, which always has the potential to be frustrating, the idea of resurrecting a letter sent by the twelve year old Adams to Eagle comic seemed bizarre. (In fact, it is probably the most amusing letter ever written to a comic by a twelve year old.) Fragmentary the pieces in The Salmon of Doubt may be, but they are all uniformly well written (with one exception), often thought provoking, and mostly pretty funny.
The book is divided into three sections: Life, containing autobiographical fragments, The Universe, about Adams' wide-ranging interests, and Everything, fiction. The first section is perhaps the most successful. The second includes a lot of Apple Mac related material, which had to be included because that computer system was one of Adams' best known obsessions, but which is now (and would have been five years ago) rather out of date; at least this means that the Douglas Adams fanatic doesn't need to hoard quite so many back copies of Mac User. His own favourite of his books was Last Chance to See, about endangered animals, and that is well worth reading in his memory, and there is more here from his interest in ecology for those who enjoyed that.
The first fictional piece, Young Zaphod Pulls it Off, was previously published in book form in a collected edition of the Hitchhiker's novels and is a poor piece of political satire, clichéd and obvious. However, the story which gives its title (or, more strictly speaking, one of its titles) to the whole collection is much better. It is one of the most confusing pieces in the whole book, however, as it was put together from three very different incomplete drafts of the story: although the main one used here is a Dirk Gently story, not even this was finalised. For me, the middle draft, which is definitely Dirk Gently, works best. I like the idea that Dirk's philosophy that all things are interconnected leads him to try to solve a case by tailing random people. It's the longest piece in the book, and because it is so incomplete, the most frustrating; Adams' drafts were obviously finely finished and perfectly readable (no notes to self, for example), but he obviously kept getting so far and then becoming stuck and the only indication of how the story would continue is a one paragraph fax to his agent which is not very illuminating.
While it was inevitable that there would be both the desire to produce a book containing Adams' odds and ends, and a desire from fans to read it, The Salmon of Doubt cannot be considered the true legacy of Douglas Adams. It raises the profile of important aspects of both his personality and his writing which were not accessible to most of his fans, particularly the computing articles, but there is nothing in the book to match the classic status of The Hitchhiker's Guide in its many forms.
Thursday, 15 May 2008
Wednesday, 7 May 2008
William Gibson: Pattern Recognition (2003)
Published: Viking, 2003
One of the oddest feelings when reading (or, even more, re-reading) science fiction from the past is when time has often caught up with it, and you are reading a novel of the future set at at date which is in your past. This is particularly the case with novels which were important to you personally, which were influential, and which contain much accurate prediction, as is the case for me with Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer. Almost thirty years after its publication, Gibson produced Pattern Recognition, his seventh novel and the first which is not really intended to be science fiction. (I would bet that most libraries, like the one from which I borrowed the copy I read, shelve it with that genre, however.) Five years later still, it is Neuromancer which seems to me the more contemporary of the two novels; much of the detail in Pattern Recognition seems to have dated quite quickly.
The novel is an Internet Age thriller, but unlike Neuromancer or most other novels that might be slotted into that subgenre (such as Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, or Jeffrey Deaver's The Blue Nowhere), it is not about hackers, programmers or geeks. Its central character, Cayce Pollard, works as a marketing consuultant, a guru on what is cool who has a phobia about logos. Her hobby is the study of a series of film clips, mysteriously appearing one by one on the Internet, which she discusses with fellow obsessives on the Fetish:Footage:Forum (F:F:F). Where do they come from? Are they meant to form part of a single narrative film? Do they have any particular order? what are the motives and influences which govern their production? Do they have any meaning and if so what? When Cayce realises that someone else has been in the flat where she is staying on a visit to London and used her computer, she begins to feel that there might be a bigger picture behind the film segments. The discussions on the F:F:F don't seem to be dominated by conspiracy theorists, but she finds it hard not to connect the films aand the break in with the disappearance of her father on September 11 2001.
Even though Pattern Recognition is not science fiction, it is still ahead of the pack: this must be one of the earliest treatments of what is now called viral marketing (a term I am pretty sure I hadn't heard myself in 2003). There are people being paid to go round bars and mention products approvingly to strangers: I don't know if this actually happens in the physical world, but there are certainly bloggers who are paid to give good press by marketing departments. However, other details seem behind the times: did people still rely so much on physical media for swapping data as recently as five years ago?
Cayce is quite a passive heroine, but her odd phobia makes her quirky and interesting. A reaction to logos does not seem to me to be a very believable problem, as the processing required to recognise the nature of an image is surely too high level for such a visceral reaction as an allergy. Its origins are left unexplained, which makes it seem more divorced from reality. Clearly it is a satirical element, pointing to the emptiness of modern life, where such banal symbols are held in high regard, whether or not the products they adorn are worthwhile. They are such a clever concept, making customers pay a premium to advertise for the producer. Such manipulation seems miles away from the quirkiness of the film footage: but is it?
The film clips themselves are slightly odd as the focus of a novel which doesn't exist in a multimedia format. Of course, the reader can imagine them, though Gibson leaves the exact content of the clips pretty vague other than to tell you things that they don't do - for example, the clothing and backgrounds are sufficiently generic for it to be impossible to work out when they are set. This vagueness is obviously part of the reason why people want to argue about the clips, but it does make them rather lacking as the central focus of a novel, being both timeless and plotless. The passiveness of the heroine together with this indirect focus means that despite the plot of the novel suggesting a thriller, it is not really in that genre - not necessarily a bad thing, but indicating that my initial assessment of Pattern Recognition was not quite right. Since other novels by Gibson succeed very wel lin this department, the diffuseness of this one must be deliberate. However, I still felt that though Pattern Recognition is interesting and worth reading, it is not classic Gibson by any means.
One of the oddest feelings when reading (or, even more, re-reading) science fiction from the past is when time has often caught up with it, and you are reading a novel of the future set at at date which is in your past. This is particularly the case with novels which were important to you personally, which were influential, and which contain much accurate prediction, as is the case for me with Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer. Almost thirty years after its publication, Gibson produced Pattern Recognition, his seventh novel and the first which is not really intended to be science fiction. (I would bet that most libraries, like the one from which I borrowed the copy I read, shelve it with that genre, however.) Five years later still, it is Neuromancer which seems to me the more contemporary of the two novels; much of the detail in Pattern Recognition seems to have dated quite quickly.
The novel is an Internet Age thriller, but unlike Neuromancer or most other novels that might be slotted into that subgenre (such as Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, or Jeffrey Deaver's The Blue Nowhere), it is not about hackers, programmers or geeks. Its central character, Cayce Pollard, works as a marketing consuultant, a guru on what is cool who has a phobia about logos. Her hobby is the study of a series of film clips, mysteriously appearing one by one on the Internet, which she discusses with fellow obsessives on the Fetish:Footage:Forum (F:F:F). Where do they come from? Are they meant to form part of a single narrative film? Do they have any particular order? what are the motives and influences which govern their production? Do they have any meaning and if so what? When Cayce realises that someone else has been in the flat where she is staying on a visit to London and used her computer, she begins to feel that there might be a bigger picture behind the film segments. The discussions on the F:F:F don't seem to be dominated by conspiracy theorists, but she finds it hard not to connect the films aand the break in with the disappearance of her father on September 11 2001.
Even though Pattern Recognition is not science fiction, it is still ahead of the pack: this must be one of the earliest treatments of what is now called viral marketing (a term I am pretty sure I hadn't heard myself in 2003). There are people being paid to go round bars and mention products approvingly to strangers: I don't know if this actually happens in the physical world, but there are certainly bloggers who are paid to give good press by marketing departments. However, other details seem behind the times: did people still rely so much on physical media for swapping data as recently as five years ago?
Cayce is quite a passive heroine, but her odd phobia makes her quirky and interesting. A reaction to logos does not seem to me to be a very believable problem, as the processing required to recognise the nature of an image is surely too high level for such a visceral reaction as an allergy. Its origins are left unexplained, which makes it seem more divorced from reality. Clearly it is a satirical element, pointing to the emptiness of modern life, where such banal symbols are held in high regard, whether or not the products they adorn are worthwhile. They are such a clever concept, making customers pay a premium to advertise for the producer. Such manipulation seems miles away from the quirkiness of the film footage: but is it?
The film clips themselves are slightly odd as the focus of a novel which doesn't exist in a multimedia format. Of course, the reader can imagine them, though Gibson leaves the exact content of the clips pretty vague other than to tell you things that they don't do - for example, the clothing and backgrounds are sufficiently generic for it to be impossible to work out when they are set. This vagueness is obviously part of the reason why people want to argue about the clips, but it does make them rather lacking as the central focus of a novel, being both timeless and plotless. The passiveness of the heroine together with this indirect focus means that despite the plot of the novel suggesting a thriller, it is not really in that genre - not necessarily a bad thing, but indicating that my initial assessment of Pattern Recognition was not quite right. Since other novels by Gibson succeed very wel lin this department, the diffuseness of this one must be deliberate. However, I still felt that though Pattern Recognition is interesting and worth reading, it is not classic Gibson by any means.
Sunday, 27 April 2008
Olivia Manning: The Great Fortune (1960)
Published: Mandarin, 1990
Olivia Manning's two trilogies featuring Harriet Pringle make up one of my favourite reading experiences of the last couple of years. The Great Fortune is the first book of the earlier Balkan Trilogy, set in Roumania in 1940 during what was known as the Phoney War. The book covers more or less the period from the British declaration of war on Germany to the fall of Paris, during which time Roumania went from being an ally of Britain who guaranteed protection to being a rather reluctant friend of Germany. Naive English newly web Harriet travels to Bucharest with her husband Guy, who teaches English under the auspices of the British Council. She does not speak the language; she has no work; she does not yet know Guy all that well - it was a whirlwind romance. So she is a lonely outsider, standing at the fringes and observing.
Indeed, no important character in the novel is really on the inside. Roumania itself is affected by, but on the fringes of, events in Western Europe; the expatriate British community become more and more isolated as German victories lead up to Dunkirk and the fall of Paris; Guy and Harriet are not really part of the English community, which is split between the British legation and journalists; other characters, such as Prince Yakimov, are excluded by poverty. This last mirrors the condition of the chorus of the Roumanian peasantry, who appear in the guises of mobs and groups of beggars, driven to the city by hunger and exploited by the upper class. (It is the behaviour of the ruling class in the country which provides the novel's title, as they are described as having squandered the "great fortune" of Roumanian natural resources.)
The characters are none of them without faults, naturally - and in some cases, these are what have led to their exclusion from the in crowd. Yakimov is greedy and perpetually whining; Harriet is over-critical. But Guy is portrayed, through his wife's eyes, in the most unflattering way. Charming he may be (and that is a very difficult quality for a writer to portray), but self-centred to an extreme: so much that it is hard to believe that anyone would get to the point of marriage to him without perceiving it and pulling out. The picture is so strong that it quickly becomes clear that part of Harriet's character is involved as well as Guy's: she is an exasperated, bored spouse, tired of being taken for granted when there are new people for Guy to captivate, new projects for him to keep himself in the limelight. Harriet feels that she has a closer relationship with a stray kitten than with the people around her, she is so lonely.
While the theme of exclusion is a major one in The Great Fortune, and indeed flows through the whole of both trilogies, this is not a sad read. The tone of the story is anecdotal, like a memoir rather than a fictional account, despite the third person narrative convention used: this is a woman telling you what she did in the war (even if the fighting is offstage throughout). And Manning is an expert storyteller, putting together a series of set pieces which are amusing vignettes in themselves but which add up to a picture of a lost world - as Roumania under the monarchy in 1940 is far more different from England then or now than any European country is today. The Great Fortune climaxes with a performance of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, directed by Guy, from which only Harriet is excluded (Guy deciding that wives and husbands should not work together, and casting a former girlfriend as Cressida instead). Despite the war situation, and despite Guy's rather naive Communist sympathies, the production is completely apolitical in nature. Even in the amateur dramatic field, it is today commonplace to make productions of plays comment on current affairs, and this particular play is one that lends itself to such treatment, with the very different portrayal of the Trojan and Greek characters. To me, the lack of a political theme in the production is at least as telling a political statement (in the circumstances) as the use of an obvious one would have been, and suggests a lack of involvement which underlines the outsider theme. I don't know whether this would have been Manning's intent, as a straightforward presentation of the play like Guy's would have been more common and certainly expected of a British Council production.
In some ways, The Great Fortune reminds me of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time novels, with the same satirical air; but for me Manning is more successful. The interest provided by the background is sadly lacking in Powell's novels, even the ones set during wartime, and Manning is able to solve the plotting problem Powell had with coincidence (both having a small group of characters constantly running into one another by chance) by setting her work in the small emigré community. The absurdities caused by the culture clash between the English and the Roumanians, particularly during the rehearsals for Troilus and Cressida, are to me much more felicitously reminiscent of some of my favourite humourous short stories, Lawrence Durrell's Antrobus collections.
The Great Fortune lays out the ground for the rest of the series of novels in the two trilogies. Understated in a very British way, it is a rather overlooked classic and an antidote to the more melodramatic portrayals of heroism and extreme suffering in the way, though these too have a place.
Olivia Manning's two trilogies featuring Harriet Pringle make up one of my favourite reading experiences of the last couple of years. The Great Fortune is the first book of the earlier Balkan Trilogy, set in Roumania in 1940 during what was known as the Phoney War. The book covers more or less the period from the British declaration of war on Germany to the fall of Paris, during which time Roumania went from being an ally of Britain who guaranteed protection to being a rather reluctant friend of Germany. Naive English newly web Harriet travels to Bucharest with her husband Guy, who teaches English under the auspices of the British Council. She does not speak the language; she has no work; she does not yet know Guy all that well - it was a whirlwind romance. So she is a lonely outsider, standing at the fringes and observing.
Indeed, no important character in the novel is really on the inside. Roumania itself is affected by, but on the fringes of, events in Western Europe; the expatriate British community become more and more isolated as German victories lead up to Dunkirk and the fall of Paris; Guy and Harriet are not really part of the English community, which is split between the British legation and journalists; other characters, such as Prince Yakimov, are excluded by poverty. This last mirrors the condition of the chorus of the Roumanian peasantry, who appear in the guises of mobs and groups of beggars, driven to the city by hunger and exploited by the upper class. (It is the behaviour of the ruling class in the country which provides the novel's title, as they are described as having squandered the "great fortune" of Roumanian natural resources.)
The characters are none of them without faults, naturally - and in some cases, these are what have led to their exclusion from the in crowd. Yakimov is greedy and perpetually whining; Harriet is over-critical. But Guy is portrayed, through his wife's eyes, in the most unflattering way. Charming he may be (and that is a very difficult quality for a writer to portray), but self-centred to an extreme: so much that it is hard to believe that anyone would get to the point of marriage to him without perceiving it and pulling out. The picture is so strong that it quickly becomes clear that part of Harriet's character is involved as well as Guy's: she is an exasperated, bored spouse, tired of being taken for granted when there are new people for Guy to captivate, new projects for him to keep himself in the limelight. Harriet feels that she has a closer relationship with a stray kitten than with the people around her, she is so lonely.
While the theme of exclusion is a major one in The Great Fortune, and indeed flows through the whole of both trilogies, this is not a sad read. The tone of the story is anecdotal, like a memoir rather than a fictional account, despite the third person narrative convention used: this is a woman telling you what she did in the war (even if the fighting is offstage throughout). And Manning is an expert storyteller, putting together a series of set pieces which are amusing vignettes in themselves but which add up to a picture of a lost world - as Roumania under the monarchy in 1940 is far more different from England then or now than any European country is today. The Great Fortune climaxes with a performance of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, directed by Guy, from which only Harriet is excluded (Guy deciding that wives and husbands should not work together, and casting a former girlfriend as Cressida instead). Despite the war situation, and despite Guy's rather naive Communist sympathies, the production is completely apolitical in nature. Even in the amateur dramatic field, it is today commonplace to make productions of plays comment on current affairs, and this particular play is one that lends itself to such treatment, with the very different portrayal of the Trojan and Greek characters. To me, the lack of a political theme in the production is at least as telling a political statement (in the circumstances) as the use of an obvious one would have been, and suggests a lack of involvement which underlines the outsider theme. I don't know whether this would have been Manning's intent, as a straightforward presentation of the play like Guy's would have been more common and certainly expected of a British Council production.
In some ways, The Great Fortune reminds me of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time novels, with the same satirical air; but for me Manning is more successful. The interest provided by the background is sadly lacking in Powell's novels, even the ones set during wartime, and Manning is able to solve the plotting problem Powell had with coincidence (both having a small group of characters constantly running into one another by chance) by setting her work in the small emigré community. The absurdities caused by the culture clash between the English and the Roumanians, particularly during the rehearsals for Troilus and Cressida, are to me much more felicitously reminiscent of some of my favourite humourous short stories, Lawrence Durrell's Antrobus collections.
The Great Fortune lays out the ground for the rest of the series of novels in the two trilogies. Understated in a very British way, it is a rather overlooked classic and an antidote to the more melodramatic portrayals of heroism and extreme suffering in the way, though these too have a place.
Monday, 10 March 2008
Iain Banks: The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007)
Published: Little, Brown (2007)
My impression on reading The Steep Approach to Garbadale was that it was more a mixture of elements and ideas from Iain Banks' previous non-Culture novels (that is, those published without a middle initial) than a new story in its own right. The Wopuld family are rich on the back of a Victorian boardgame, now a successful computer game, but they are as dysfunctional as the Simpsons. When the novel opens, the protagonist, Alban, whose mother was a Wopuld, is estranged from the family and living on a Scottish council estate, not too close to the family's Highland estate at Garbadale. His problems with the family (and vice versa) started when his uncle and grandmother (the matriarch of the clan) found him having sex with his cousin Sophie, both being underage. The book, half flashback, tells how this happened and how the rest of Alban's life was affected (obviously Sophie's was too, but she is not the centre of the novel), up to the climactic event of the novel, an extraordinary general meeting of the Wopulds (as company shareholders) to decide whether to sell the company to an American corporation that wants to take over the game.
Comparing The Steep Approach to Garbadale to earlier novels, there is the anti-American-Imperialism, anti-Iraq War sentiment of Dead Air, with Spraight Corp perhaps partly a symbol of American domination: the real winner of the game of Empire!. There is a Scottish family with dark secrets, like the one in The Crow Road (and Alban is a very similar character to Prentice McHoan). The tone of the novel, the affluence of the characters and the corporate politics are like The Business. There are even links to Banks' first novel, The Wasp Factory.
There is a balance to be struck by any writer who has a career more than a few novels long, between offering something new each time and retaining the familiar elements which are part of his or her style. Usually, there is a fair amount of variation between Iain Banks' novels (ignoring for the moment the series of science fiction stories with a shared background published with-an-M: challenges for a writer who sticks with a single series are rather different); more at the beginning of his career perhaps, but still some change in recent years. This time, there is nothing really recognisably new, and the re-used old ideas seemed to me to be somewhat too intrusive, almost as though a lack of originality were being flaunted at the reader. One particular problem was that Alban failed to grab my attention as a protagonist: the biggest difference from Prentice McHoan is that he's not as interesting.
So The Steep Approach to Garbadale is likely to disappoint long term fans of Banks' work, but there is much to enjoy in the novel particularly if read in an uncritical spirit.
My impression on reading The Steep Approach to Garbadale was that it was more a mixture of elements and ideas from Iain Banks' previous non-Culture novels (that is, those published without a middle initial) than a new story in its own right. The Wopuld family are rich on the back of a Victorian boardgame, now a successful computer game, but they are as dysfunctional as the Simpsons. When the novel opens, the protagonist, Alban, whose mother was a Wopuld, is estranged from the family and living on a Scottish council estate, not too close to the family's Highland estate at Garbadale. His problems with the family (and vice versa) started when his uncle and grandmother (the matriarch of the clan) found him having sex with his cousin Sophie, both being underage. The book, half flashback, tells how this happened and how the rest of Alban's life was affected (obviously Sophie's was too, but she is not the centre of the novel), up to the climactic event of the novel, an extraordinary general meeting of the Wopulds (as company shareholders) to decide whether to sell the company to an American corporation that wants to take over the game.
Comparing The Steep Approach to Garbadale to earlier novels, there is the anti-American-Imperialism, anti-Iraq War sentiment of Dead Air, with Spraight Corp perhaps partly a symbol of American domination: the real winner of the game of Empire!. There is a Scottish family with dark secrets, like the one in The Crow Road (and Alban is a very similar character to Prentice McHoan). The tone of the novel, the affluence of the characters and the corporate politics are like The Business. There are even links to Banks' first novel, The Wasp Factory.
There is a balance to be struck by any writer who has a career more than a few novels long, between offering something new each time and retaining the familiar elements which are part of his or her style. Usually, there is a fair amount of variation between Iain Banks' novels (ignoring for the moment the series of science fiction stories with a shared background published with-an-M: challenges for a writer who sticks with a single series are rather different); more at the beginning of his career perhaps, but still some change in recent years. This time, there is nothing really recognisably new, and the re-used old ideas seemed to me to be somewhat too intrusive, almost as though a lack of originality were being flaunted at the reader. One particular problem was that Alban failed to grab my attention as a protagonist: the biggest difference from Prentice McHoan is that he's not as interesting.
So The Steep Approach to Garbadale is likely to disappoint long term fans of Banks' work, but there is much to enjoy in the novel particularly if read in an uncritical spirit.
Tuesday, 4 March 2008
Robert M. Pirsig: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (An Enquiry into Values) (1974)
Published: Vintage, 2004.
I have been intending to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for over twenty years, but have never got round to it until this February. Though famously influential, there are still surprisingly few books at all like it, with its combination of fictionalised travelogue and philosophical speculation. The nearest equivalent I can think of is Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World, which aims more at teaching the basics of philosophical thought rather than taking a polemical approach as Pirsig does here.
The narrator tells the story of a motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California, initially with friends but eventually just with his son Chris. This kind of trip obviously provides a lot of time for solitary thought, and the narrator does just that: musing about how philosophy relates to the world around us. To the narrator, the journey is also about finding and at the same time escaping the person he names Phaedrus (after a character in one of Plato's Socratic dialogues). Phaedrus turns out to be his own self, the university lecturer who suffered a breakdown and had his mind almost wiped by "Annihilation ECS", also (and to me at least, better) known as electroconvulsive therapy.
What fascinated Phaedrus, and continues to interest the narrator, is the difference - indeed, conflict - between two ways of looking at the world. The "Classic" mode is intellectual, analytical, reductionist and concerned with underlying processes; while the "Romantic" mode is emotional, artistic, holistic and concerned with surface beauty. Pirsig seems to overstate broadness of the division between the two: I would say that most people probably use a mixture, depending on context (a sports fan is likely to be more analytical about a football game, for example, but might respond to music on an emotional level, not really sure why particular songs appeal to them). It does seem reasonable that background, education and personality would make most of us use one mode in preference to the other. Phaedrus sought to bring back unity between the two viewpoints by giving the concept of "Quality" pre-eminent status, the idea being that everyone can recognise "good work" on a non-rational level and so gain an understanding of the thought mode which is more alien to their personality. Pirsig spends quite a lot of effort on the argument that Quality is non- (or more accurately, pre-) rational, but does not convince me. I think it probably can be analysed, though any analysis would need to take into account factors such as culture and personality which influence an individual's recognition of Quality on a subconscious level. Leaving that aside, the one thing I did not find clear about the philosophical discussion in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is just how the concept brings about a union between the Classical and the Romantic. It's obvious that "quality" is an element of both, but then so are other concepts (beauty, for example).
As the title suggests, much of the philosophical speculation is illustrated with reference to motorbike mechanics. The mechanics is rather more simplified than the philosophy, but it is Pirsig's big selling point and leads to some nice clear exposition. The references also underline a major point of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which is that philosophy should underpin the way we act in everyday life. (Of course, it is easy to argue that it does, albeit unconsciously, but Pirsig obviously means something more deliberate and, indeed, life-changing.) A drawback of the use of mechanics to illustrate his points is that it sometimes makes the key idea of Quality seem very closely related to the Protestant work ethic: put something into everything you do and you will produce Quality outputs.
The most novelistic aspect of the book is the psychological journey made by the narrator, retracing the footsteps of his former self with an increasingly reluctant companion. The tension builds well (even if the philosophy is likely to deflate it every time it is introduced, for many readers) to a final scene which, according to Pirsig's introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition which is reprinted here, has been frequently misunderstood over the years. As Pirsig points out, the narrator of a story has the opportunity to paint himself in a favourable light, which means that nothing he says about himself (or his alter ego, Phaedrus) can be taken at face value. But even if the reader ignores this advice, it seems to me that it would be quite hard to feel that the narrator is a nice person, particularly considering his behaviour to his son. Phaedrus is rather more congenial, though his obsessive search for philosophical truth might make him a rather disconcerting person to spend time with. The ending still feels a little contrived to me, but this is partly because it is the kind of event that seems to mark an end rather than because it is intrinsically unconvincing.
In the afterword, Pirsig describes Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a "culture-bearing" book, using a term derived from a Swedish word which has no direct English equivalent. What this means is that it appeared at the time of a cultural shift, and by being a head of the curve, became incredibly successful as a result. I think this is perhaps undervaluing the book: people did find their lives changed by it, and it has continued to find a readership ever since. In other ways, it is a good description of a book which is very much of its time, something which is probably an important reason for my feeling that the philosophy was less than convincing. (The other book Pirsig mentions as a culture-bearer, Uncle Tom's Cabin, is similarly not going to be as effective now as it was when it appeared, because the issues it addresses are less in the mind than they were then.) While it remains a fascinating read, particularly to anyone interested in philosophy or cultural history, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is no longer likely to change your life.
I have been intending to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for over twenty years, but have never got round to it until this February. Though famously influential, there are still surprisingly few books at all like it, with its combination of fictionalised travelogue and philosophical speculation. The nearest equivalent I can think of is Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World, which aims more at teaching the basics of philosophical thought rather than taking a polemical approach as Pirsig does here.
The narrator tells the story of a motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California, initially with friends but eventually just with his son Chris. This kind of trip obviously provides a lot of time for solitary thought, and the narrator does just that: musing about how philosophy relates to the world around us. To the narrator, the journey is also about finding and at the same time escaping the person he names Phaedrus (after a character in one of Plato's Socratic dialogues). Phaedrus turns out to be his own self, the university lecturer who suffered a breakdown and had his mind almost wiped by "Annihilation ECS", also (and to me at least, better) known as electroconvulsive therapy.
What fascinated Phaedrus, and continues to interest the narrator, is the difference - indeed, conflict - between two ways of looking at the world. The "Classic" mode is intellectual, analytical, reductionist and concerned with underlying processes; while the "Romantic" mode is emotional, artistic, holistic and concerned with surface beauty. Pirsig seems to overstate broadness of the division between the two: I would say that most people probably use a mixture, depending on context (a sports fan is likely to be more analytical about a football game, for example, but might respond to music on an emotional level, not really sure why particular songs appeal to them). It does seem reasonable that background, education and personality would make most of us use one mode in preference to the other. Phaedrus sought to bring back unity between the two viewpoints by giving the concept of "Quality" pre-eminent status, the idea being that everyone can recognise "good work" on a non-rational level and so gain an understanding of the thought mode which is more alien to their personality. Pirsig spends quite a lot of effort on the argument that Quality is non- (or more accurately, pre-) rational, but does not convince me. I think it probably can be analysed, though any analysis would need to take into account factors such as culture and personality which influence an individual's recognition of Quality on a subconscious level. Leaving that aside, the one thing I did not find clear about the philosophical discussion in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is just how the concept brings about a union between the Classical and the Romantic. It's obvious that "quality" is an element of both, but then so are other concepts (beauty, for example).
As the title suggests, much of the philosophical speculation is illustrated with reference to motorbike mechanics. The mechanics is rather more simplified than the philosophy, but it is Pirsig's big selling point and leads to some nice clear exposition. The references also underline a major point of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which is that philosophy should underpin the way we act in everyday life. (Of course, it is easy to argue that it does, albeit unconsciously, but Pirsig obviously means something more deliberate and, indeed, life-changing.) A drawback of the use of mechanics to illustrate his points is that it sometimes makes the key idea of Quality seem very closely related to the Protestant work ethic: put something into everything you do and you will produce Quality outputs.
The most novelistic aspect of the book is the psychological journey made by the narrator, retracing the footsteps of his former self with an increasingly reluctant companion. The tension builds well (even if the philosophy is likely to deflate it every time it is introduced, for many readers) to a final scene which, according to Pirsig's introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition which is reprinted here, has been frequently misunderstood over the years. As Pirsig points out, the narrator of a story has the opportunity to paint himself in a favourable light, which means that nothing he says about himself (or his alter ego, Phaedrus) can be taken at face value. But even if the reader ignores this advice, it seems to me that it would be quite hard to feel that the narrator is a nice person, particularly considering his behaviour to his son. Phaedrus is rather more congenial, though his obsessive search for philosophical truth might make him a rather disconcerting person to spend time with. The ending still feels a little contrived to me, but this is partly because it is the kind of event that seems to mark an end rather than because it is intrinsically unconvincing.
In the afterword, Pirsig describes Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a "culture-bearing" book, using a term derived from a Swedish word which has no direct English equivalent. What this means is that it appeared at the time of a cultural shift, and by being a head of the curve, became incredibly successful as a result. I think this is perhaps undervaluing the book: people did find their lives changed by it, and it has continued to find a readership ever since. In other ways, it is a good description of a book which is very much of its time, something which is probably an important reason for my feeling that the philosophy was less than convincing. (The other book Pirsig mentions as a culture-bearer, Uncle Tom's Cabin, is similarly not going to be as effective now as it was when it appeared, because the issues it addresses are less in the mind than they were then.) While it remains a fascinating read, particularly to anyone interested in philosophy or cultural history, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is no longer likely to change your life.
Tuesday, 15 January 2008
Ursula K Le Guin: The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
Published: Panther, 1974
This short novel by Ursula Le Guin - over 850 pages less than the other book I was reading alongside it, Peter F. Hamilton's Pandora's Star - is quite untypical of the work for which she is best known: her anthropologically based examinations of alien societies such as The Left Hand of Darkness, or the young adult fantasy of The Wizard of Earthsea. While most of Le Guin's science fiction is original and unusual, particularly for its time, The Lathe of Heaven directly recalls two authors that one would not necessarily associate with her. These are Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny, both interested in the mind and the nature of reality.
The two major characters in The Lathe of Heaven are psychiatric patient George Orr and his therapist, Dr Haber. Orr believes that his dreams sometimes alter reality, and the effects of dreams produced under Haber's post-hypnotic suggestion convinces the psychiatrist that this is not a delusion. Haber sets out to improve the world, admittedly an unpleasant place: overpopulated, polluted, and violent. Orr becomes increasingly reluctant to dream under Haber's direction, mainly because of the guilt caused by some changes (such as his response to a suggestion that over-population be solved, which leads to the deaths of billions in a plague of environmentally related cancers: an event that only he and Haber remember not occurring some years earlier). He was involuntarily referred to Haber in the first place, so he can't just ask to stop the treatment.
This could very easily be an idea used by Philip K. Dick, touching on his common theme of the nature of reality. This is particularly important here, as the suggestion that the whole of Orr's dreaming might itself be a dream, as the end of the original dystopian world approaches. The lack of the profusion of secondary ideas that fill Dick's work is the main difference.
Zelazny's influence is more obvious, but perhaps more superficial: there is a clear relationship with The Dream Master, which also deals with psychiatric therapy using directed dreaming. However, Zelazny's story is less about the nature of reality - though the psychiatrists are effectively creating their own worlds to share with their patients. The points of view of patient (in The Lathe of Heaven) and therapist (in The Dream Master) make the novels quite different in emphasis. The Lathe of Heaven ends up feeling more like Dick than Zelazny - or, indeed, Le Guin. This last is because it isn't as different from the mainstream of the genre as Le Guin's Hainish novels: it is unusual in her output by not being particularly unusual.
This short novel by Ursula Le Guin - over 850 pages less than the other book I was reading alongside it, Peter F. Hamilton's Pandora's Star - is quite untypical of the work for which she is best known: her anthropologically based examinations of alien societies such as The Left Hand of Darkness, or the young adult fantasy of The Wizard of Earthsea. While most of Le Guin's science fiction is original and unusual, particularly for its time, The Lathe of Heaven directly recalls two authors that one would not necessarily associate with her. These are Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny, both interested in the mind and the nature of reality.
The two major characters in The Lathe of Heaven are psychiatric patient George Orr and his therapist, Dr Haber. Orr believes that his dreams sometimes alter reality, and the effects of dreams produced under Haber's post-hypnotic suggestion convinces the psychiatrist that this is not a delusion. Haber sets out to improve the world, admittedly an unpleasant place: overpopulated, polluted, and violent. Orr becomes increasingly reluctant to dream under Haber's direction, mainly because of the guilt caused by some changes (such as his response to a suggestion that over-population be solved, which leads to the deaths of billions in a plague of environmentally related cancers: an event that only he and Haber remember not occurring some years earlier). He was involuntarily referred to Haber in the first place, so he can't just ask to stop the treatment.
This could very easily be an idea used by Philip K. Dick, touching on his common theme of the nature of reality. This is particularly important here, as the suggestion that the whole of Orr's dreaming might itself be a dream, as the end of the original dystopian world approaches. The lack of the profusion of secondary ideas that fill Dick's work is the main difference.
Zelazny's influence is more obvious, but perhaps more superficial: there is a clear relationship with The Dream Master, which also deals with psychiatric therapy using directed dreaming. However, Zelazny's story is less about the nature of reality - though the psychiatrists are effectively creating their own worlds to share with their patients. The points of view of patient (in The Lathe of Heaven) and therapist (in The Dream Master) make the novels quite different in emphasis. The Lathe of Heaven ends up feeling more like Dick than Zelazny - or, indeed, Le Guin. This last is because it isn't as different from the mainstream of the genre as Le Guin's Hainish novels: it is unusual in her output by not being particularly unusual.
Thursday, 6 December 2007
Laurie R. King: The Beekeeper's Apprentice (1994)
Published: HarperCollins, 2000
The number of novels which have purported to be lost Sherlock Holmes stories is immense, many times more pages than make up "the canon", as Holmes fanatics denote the tales of Arthur Conan Doyle. Like most literary pastiches, few of these can be said to be worth reading. Definitely forming part of this small minority are the Mary Russell series by Laurie R. King, of which this is the first.
Mary Russell, at the start of the novel, is an intellectual fifteen year old, studying while walking across the Sussex Downs during the First World War. She is concentrating so hard that she almost steps on a man watching bees. In the ensuing conversation, it becomes clear that she has met Sherlock Holmes himself, retired into Sussex to take up beekeeping (a detail taken straight from "the canon"). Impressed by her intelligence, Holmes takes Mary under his wing, and begins to train her in his investigative methods, culminating in a shared investigation into concerted attempts to kill Holmes.
King is rather cavalier in her attitude to the canon when it suits her, though this and others of her novels (not all in this series) indicate that she knows it extremely well. The most obvious deviation is in the age of Holmes, who becomes about a generation younger than Doyle makes him, which would make him barely out of his teens in the earliest stories. (This change, Holmes tells Mary, was made so that readers of Watson's tales would take the detective seriously.) From King's point of view, this change makes the novel and its successors possible, as Holmes is now in early middle age rather than in his late sixties when he meets Mary. This alone might put off Holmes purists, but King goes on to make more subtle but far-reaching changes: not so much from the facts of the canon, but to the character of Holmes himself.
Doyle's original Holmes is cold and analytical, with quirks such as the violin playing added to give a certain amount of humanity to what is essentially a detecting machine. King changes this slightly, rejecting the attributes which are not so acceptable today (drug addiction, and a modified attitude to women) and deepens the character farther, in a rather more convincing way. But he is not the Sherlock Holmes that fans have known for over a century, even if he can still distinguish the different types of cigar ash left by criminals. Clearly, she wants to buy into the Holmes background without the encumbrances of the original character; if this is a problem, then this novel and the series as a whole is not for you. I personally am in two minds about it; I like the way that others have taken the same characteristics rejected by King and made them the peg on which to hang their own re-interpretation of Sherlock Holmes (such as Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Percent Solution), but on the other hand, King's character makes for a more rounded novel and makes her ideas possible - in particular, the relationship with Mary Russell.
Ignoring the questionable nature of the Mary Russell series' relationship with the Holmes canon, The Beekeeper's Apprentice and its sequels are satisfying crime novels in their own right.
The number of novels which have purported to be lost Sherlock Holmes stories is immense, many times more pages than make up "the canon", as Holmes fanatics denote the tales of Arthur Conan Doyle. Like most literary pastiches, few of these can be said to be worth reading. Definitely forming part of this small minority are the Mary Russell series by Laurie R. King, of which this is the first.
Mary Russell, at the start of the novel, is an intellectual fifteen year old, studying while walking across the Sussex Downs during the First World War. She is concentrating so hard that she almost steps on a man watching bees. In the ensuing conversation, it becomes clear that she has met Sherlock Holmes himself, retired into Sussex to take up beekeeping (a detail taken straight from "the canon"). Impressed by her intelligence, Holmes takes Mary under his wing, and begins to train her in his investigative methods, culminating in a shared investigation into concerted attempts to kill Holmes.
King is rather cavalier in her attitude to the canon when it suits her, though this and others of her novels (not all in this series) indicate that she knows it extremely well. The most obvious deviation is in the age of Holmes, who becomes about a generation younger than Doyle makes him, which would make him barely out of his teens in the earliest stories. (This change, Holmes tells Mary, was made so that readers of Watson's tales would take the detective seriously.) From King's point of view, this change makes the novel and its successors possible, as Holmes is now in early middle age rather than in his late sixties when he meets Mary. This alone might put off Holmes purists, but King goes on to make more subtle but far-reaching changes: not so much from the facts of the canon, but to the character of Holmes himself.
Doyle's original Holmes is cold and analytical, with quirks such as the violin playing added to give a certain amount of humanity to what is essentially a detecting machine. King changes this slightly, rejecting the attributes which are not so acceptable today (drug addiction, and a modified attitude to women) and deepens the character farther, in a rather more convincing way. But he is not the Sherlock Holmes that fans have known for over a century, even if he can still distinguish the different types of cigar ash left by criminals. Clearly, she wants to buy into the Holmes background without the encumbrances of the original character; if this is a problem, then this novel and the series as a whole is not for you. I personally am in two minds about it; I like the way that others have taken the same characteristics rejected by King and made them the peg on which to hang their own re-interpretation of Sherlock Holmes (such as Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Percent Solution), but on the other hand, King's character makes for a more rounded novel and makes her ideas possible - in particular, the relationship with Mary Russell.
Ignoring the questionable nature of the Mary Russell series' relationship with the Holmes canon, The Beekeeper's Apprentice and its sequels are satisfying crime novels in their own right.
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