Published: Faber and Faber, 2004
In all the history of literature, the number of central characters in novels who are tax inspectors can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. And of these, four will be satirical, leaving The Cryptographer unique as a thriller with a tax inspector heroine. Anna Moore is good at her job, and when the UK Inland Revenue discovers discrepancies in the accounting of John Law, the richest man on the planet, she is chosen to investigate. The novel is set a little in the future, and John Law became rich beyond even Bill Gates' wildest dreams after inventing the electronic money software that caught on. So why has he set up a clumsy accounting scam for what is by his scale peanuts, a few million dollars? Her investigation seems to be successful, the money owed to the Revenue paid, butt with the question about motive unanswered Anna herself is left unsatisfied, and she becomes as fascinated by Law as he seems to be by her.
Billed as a thriller, The Cryptographer is far more gentle than that suggests. While the plot is basically that of a science fiction thriller, it is not really what the novel is about; Hill is much more interested in the characters. This interest is shared by Anna herself. She wants to understand Law to the extent that she loses satisfaction in her work. It is clear from the way the novel is written that the author was an established poet as well as - and indeed before - a novelist. However, The Cryptographer is not as self consciously literary as the work of another author where this is also apparent, Lawrence Durrell; it is actually reminiscent of recent work by William Gibson, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country.
The title most clearly refers to the way in which Law made his fortune. The architecture for his software currency is, to someone who works with computers, not particularly convincing, on either the security or usability fronts. There is no provision mentioned, for example, for a portable equivalent to cash, just software that is installed on each user's computer. The software is supposedly kept secure by periodic updates which change the security, distributed from a central server which updates the security without human intervention. This immediately suggests attacking the central server, and finding a way to subvert the update process as a means of breaking the security. Alternatively, work on persuading your own local client software to accept a spurious update, because then you have another way to subvert the updating mechanism. It is unlikely that such a system, when at the centre of something as high profile and valuable as a widely used currency, would stand up to large scale hacking for long.
This literal interpretation of the title is not the only possibility nor the most important. The Cryptographer is not a book about technology, but about the connections between people, like an Iris Murdoch novel. Language is itself a kind of code, a representation of what we mean to say that is decoded by our interlocutor, and this is especially the case when the discussion is not really about what we want to talk about. In this case, both Anna and Law have professional lives intimately connected with money, even more so than is usual, and yet neither is particularly interested in money itself. Their initial contact is entirely professional, yet each is drawn to the other. And they quickly understand each other well, even though there are important aspects of their lives that the other does not know: when Law goes missing, Anna is able to find him even though she doesn't know that he is divorced from the wife he was still living with.
Overall, I found this an impressive novel, though I am at something of a loss to explain why. Gentle, with hidden depths and attractive central characters, it is not a demanding read but still a genuine work of literary art.
Tuesday, 15 July 2008
Wednesday, 18 June 2008
James Wilson: The Dark Clue: A Novel of Suspense (2001)
Published: Faber & Faber, 2001
The Dark Clue is a sequel, of sorts, to Wilkie Collins' classic The Woman in White. It has the same central characters: artist Walter Harkwright, and his sister-in-law Marion. Rich from his marriage but still relatively unsuccessful as an artist, Walter is approached to write a biography of JMW Turner, as a counterblast from still-living friends of the famous artist to a scurrilous biography raking up scandal (the actual first biography of Turner by Walter Thornbury). But as he and Marion investigate, they discover that Turner did indeed have a dark side, and the truth about the revolutionary painter is at the least going to be more complicated than Walter's initial assessment that his "life of him will be quick work indeed".
The Dark Clue re-uses the narrative technique of The Woman in White, purporting to be a collection of letters and diary entries, with Marion's diary being probably the chief source. While Laura, Walter's beloved in Collins' novel and now his wife, was absent from the stage for most of The Woman in White, she appears only as the author of a handful of letters in The Dark Clue, which mostly are complaints that Walter is neglecting her and their children. Wilson picks up on the feeling that must strike most readers of Collin's novel, that Walter and Marion would be extremely well suited to each other, while Laura is an abstraction for which he unfortunately develops a romantic passion. For Collins, Laura is a personification of persecuted innocent beauty (a very Victorian female character); for Wilson, she is a personification of a dutiful wife and mother. For both, she is a cipher, at best a passive plot device, and not really a character at all.
The differences between the two writers is perhaps best seen in their handling of the relationship between Walter and Marion. Collins, as far as I remember, leaves their interest in each other unspoken, unacknowledged even by the characters themselves. Wilson, more direct, engineers a moment of self revelation for Marion which beings a new dark note to their research together. Writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Wilson can obviously be far more graphic than Collins, about this and other aspects of the novel as well. This makes The Dark Clue more immediate, but much less subtle than The Woman in White. For much of the earlier novel, Collins sets up an air of menace that seems far beyond what Wilson's straightforwardness can do. Even so, he manages to leave the exact nature of Turner's scandalous activities frustratingly unspecified, preferring to concentrate on the effect that learning about them has on Walter's morals; I found this very unsatisfying indeed. The consequent lack of impact makes the subtitle "a novel of suspense" seem rather inaccurate; I assumed that it was one more item inherited from Collins' novel, but this is not the case.
Turner clearly would be a great subject for a biography, whether the biographer believed the more scandalous stories or not. But the structure of The Dark Clue is not really suited to a biography in the way that it is to the unravelling of the murky plots in The Woman in White. This is a novel where the initial idea is more interesting than its execution; it could have been another French Lieutenant's Woman but isn't well enough done to reach anywhere near that level.
While it is fairly obvious to compare a sequel to a classic novel with the original, this is not always something which the reader feels inclined to do. There are, for example, many sequels to Pride and Prejudice which make no attempt to be anything other than humorous romantic novels, and it is perfectly reasonable for them to succeed on that level without approaching the greatness of Jane Austen. But Wilson fairly clearly sets out to write a novel which is a worthy partner to The Woman in White (and the blurb and reviews on the cover reinforce this). This means that, in my view, it becomes reasonable to criticise Wilson because he is not as good a writer as Collins, who is, after all, not himself a master in the class of (say) Dickens or Tolstoy, so a modest target compared with some that could have been chosen. For a "novel of suspense", The Dark Clue is unpardonably dull, for a biographical, historical novel, it is insufficiently focused on its subject.
The Dark Clue is a sequel, of sorts, to Wilkie Collins' classic The Woman in White. It has the same central characters: artist Walter Harkwright, and his sister-in-law Marion. Rich from his marriage but still relatively unsuccessful as an artist, Walter is approached to write a biography of JMW Turner, as a counterblast from still-living friends of the famous artist to a scurrilous biography raking up scandal (the actual first biography of Turner by Walter Thornbury). But as he and Marion investigate, they discover that Turner did indeed have a dark side, and the truth about the revolutionary painter is at the least going to be more complicated than Walter's initial assessment that his "life of him will be quick work indeed".
The Dark Clue re-uses the narrative technique of The Woman in White, purporting to be a collection of letters and diary entries, with Marion's diary being probably the chief source. While Laura, Walter's beloved in Collins' novel and now his wife, was absent from the stage for most of The Woman in White, she appears only as the author of a handful of letters in The Dark Clue, which mostly are complaints that Walter is neglecting her and their children. Wilson picks up on the feeling that must strike most readers of Collin's novel, that Walter and Marion would be extremely well suited to each other, while Laura is an abstraction for which he unfortunately develops a romantic passion. For Collins, Laura is a personification of persecuted innocent beauty (a very Victorian female character); for Wilson, she is a personification of a dutiful wife and mother. For both, she is a cipher, at best a passive plot device, and not really a character at all.
The differences between the two writers is perhaps best seen in their handling of the relationship between Walter and Marion. Collins, as far as I remember, leaves their interest in each other unspoken, unacknowledged even by the characters themselves. Wilson, more direct, engineers a moment of self revelation for Marion which beings a new dark note to their research together. Writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Wilson can obviously be far more graphic than Collins, about this and other aspects of the novel as well. This makes The Dark Clue more immediate, but much less subtle than The Woman in White. For much of the earlier novel, Collins sets up an air of menace that seems far beyond what Wilson's straightforwardness can do. Even so, he manages to leave the exact nature of Turner's scandalous activities frustratingly unspecified, preferring to concentrate on the effect that learning about them has on Walter's morals; I found this very unsatisfying indeed. The consequent lack of impact makes the subtitle "a novel of suspense" seem rather inaccurate; I assumed that it was one more item inherited from Collins' novel, but this is not the case.
Turner clearly would be a great subject for a biography, whether the biographer believed the more scandalous stories or not. But the structure of The Dark Clue is not really suited to a biography in the way that it is to the unravelling of the murky plots in The Woman in White. This is a novel where the initial idea is more interesting than its execution; it could have been another French Lieutenant's Woman but isn't well enough done to reach anywhere near that level.
While it is fairly obvious to compare a sequel to a classic novel with the original, this is not always something which the reader feels inclined to do. There are, for example, many sequels to Pride and Prejudice which make no attempt to be anything other than humorous romantic novels, and it is perfectly reasonable for them to succeed on that level without approaching the greatness of Jane Austen. But Wilson fairly clearly sets out to write a novel which is a worthy partner to The Woman in White (and the blurb and reviews on the cover reinforce this). This means that, in my view, it becomes reasonable to criticise Wilson because he is not as good a writer as Collins, who is, after all, not himself a master in the class of (say) Dickens or Tolstoy, so a modest target compared with some that could have been chosen. For a "novel of suspense", The Dark Clue is unpardonably dull, for a biographical, historical novel, it is insufficiently focused on its subject.
Wednesday, 11 June 2008
Arthur C. Clarke: The City and the Stars (1956)
Published: Gollancz, 2001
I had the impression that in my teenage years I read pretty much all of Arthur C. Clarke's output to that date. Yet I managed to miss The City and the Stars, one of his best known novels, until I picked up a copy in a secondhand bookshop recently. (I went off Clarke after a while, which explains not picking up on this omission earlier.)
Far in the future, when humanity's galactic empire has risen and fallen, and alien invaders have pushed us back to the Earth alone. Those who remain live in the eternal city of Diaspar, living lives of everlasting leisure, docile and without interest in the universe beyond the city walls. After a thousand or so years of life, the citizens return their "patterns" to the computer banks while others come back to life from these same memory stores. Diaspar has remained essentially unchanging for millennia, but then Alvin, the central character of The City and the Stars, comes along. Alvin is a Unique, a person who has never before been activated, and he is different from all the other people in Diaspar. He finds that he needs ot know what the outside is like, and eventually finds a way to leave the city.
The story is effectively a polemic for two of Clarke's philosophical positions: that what makes us human is our curiousity about the world, and that organised religious belief holds back our ability to understand the universe. To Clarke, these ideas are related, as he believed that the certainties of faith extinguish the desire to find out. In The City and the Stars, Alvin's quest to escape the city is a version of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, complete with guru figure in the form of the "jester" appointed to shake Diaspar's complacency through practical joking. But Alvin is contrasted so strongly with the other citizens that the hidden agenda becomes blatant, and the story less interesting: it seems unlikely that he would ever have been able to live in the city for as long as he does.
When Clarke died recently, one of the pieces I read about him was by Michael Moorcock, not really an author with whom he might be expected to have had much in common, even if they were both writers in the same genre. However, that they knew each other in Moorcock's early days as a professional writer in London appears not to be the only link between them, for there seem to be definite connections between The City and the Stars and one of Moorcock's best known series, The Dancers at the End of Time, which is also one of my favourites from the whole science fiction genre. Moorcock's trilogy is better, as far as I am concerned, for several reasons. (I should point out that Moorcock says he was unfamiliar with most of Clarke's writing, so may well not have read The City and the Stars.) The decadence it portrays is more convincing than that of the dwellers in Diaspar. Moorcock's characters party desperately to stave off world weary boredom worthy of Huysmans, while the inhabitants of Diaspar are far more conservatively portrayed, as effete artists as opposed to the vigorous Alvin. Given the resources at their control, the actions of the Diasparans are really too rooted in the twentieth century: a little virtual reality on top of conventional art. This is, to me, a major failure of the imagination at the centre of the book when compared to Moorcock's baroque creations. Clarke's attitude to sexuality also causes problems, though of course the limitations placed on genre authors in the fifties were much stricter than those faced almost twenty years later by Moorcock; a book as explicit as The Dancers at the End of Time would never have been published. But even so, prudishness is taken to an extreme. There are just two or three minor female characters, and The City and the Stars is even more male dominated and asexual than The Lord of the Rings, another novel where almost all the significant relationships are about male companionship. Women are pretty obviously excluded from the heroics of scientific discovery about the universe. Moorcock is able to have a more egalitarian background, in which lust (if not love) is commonplace. Moorcock also introduces an extra theme with time travel. But the most important difference is that Moorcock's writing has a sense of humour, a concept which is alien to the earnestness of much fifties science fiction.
The worst fault of The City and the Stars is that the second half of the book, when Alvin escapes the city, is less interesting than the beginning. The thesis that curiousity about the universe is what makes us human, and Clarke's consequent need to make the scientific endeavour heroic, should mean that Alvin's exploration of the universe is made really gripping. Yet the puzzle of how to get out of Diaspar is much more interesting, and told in such a way that it is clear that Clarke found it more interesting himself. Alvin's trip is hackneyed space exploration from the pulp era, complete with outlandish monsters, and would have been old fashioned even in 1956, particularly as it isn't accompanied by character development: Alvin and his companion travel across the galaxy, yet remain just the same as they did before they set out.
The parallels with on of my favourite books make me sure I have not read The City and the Stars before, because the similarities are such that I am convinced that I would remember it. It's not, to my mind, one of Clarke's best, particularly given the second half. What it does remind me is why I had no particular urge to return to Clarke after binging on his stories in the early eighties.
I had the impression that in my teenage years I read pretty much all of Arthur C. Clarke's output to that date. Yet I managed to miss The City and the Stars, one of his best known novels, until I picked up a copy in a secondhand bookshop recently. (I went off Clarke after a while, which explains not picking up on this omission earlier.)
Far in the future, when humanity's galactic empire has risen and fallen, and alien invaders have pushed us back to the Earth alone. Those who remain live in the eternal city of Diaspar, living lives of everlasting leisure, docile and without interest in the universe beyond the city walls. After a thousand or so years of life, the citizens return their "patterns" to the computer banks while others come back to life from these same memory stores. Diaspar has remained essentially unchanging for millennia, but then Alvin, the central character of The City and the Stars, comes along. Alvin is a Unique, a person who has never before been activated, and he is different from all the other people in Diaspar. He finds that he needs ot know what the outside is like, and eventually finds a way to leave the city.
The story is effectively a polemic for two of Clarke's philosophical positions: that what makes us human is our curiousity about the world, and that organised religious belief holds back our ability to understand the universe. To Clarke, these ideas are related, as he believed that the certainties of faith extinguish the desire to find out. In The City and the Stars, Alvin's quest to escape the city is a version of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, complete with guru figure in the form of the "jester" appointed to shake Diaspar's complacency through practical joking. But Alvin is contrasted so strongly with the other citizens that the hidden agenda becomes blatant, and the story less interesting: it seems unlikely that he would ever have been able to live in the city for as long as he does.
When Clarke died recently, one of the pieces I read about him was by Michael Moorcock, not really an author with whom he might be expected to have had much in common, even if they were both writers in the same genre. However, that they knew each other in Moorcock's early days as a professional writer in London appears not to be the only link between them, for there seem to be definite connections between The City and the Stars and one of Moorcock's best known series, The Dancers at the End of Time, which is also one of my favourites from the whole science fiction genre. Moorcock's trilogy is better, as far as I am concerned, for several reasons. (I should point out that Moorcock says he was unfamiliar with most of Clarke's writing, so may well not have read The City and the Stars.) The decadence it portrays is more convincing than that of the dwellers in Diaspar. Moorcock's characters party desperately to stave off world weary boredom worthy of Huysmans, while the inhabitants of Diaspar are far more conservatively portrayed, as effete artists as opposed to the vigorous Alvin. Given the resources at their control, the actions of the Diasparans are really too rooted in the twentieth century: a little virtual reality on top of conventional art. This is, to me, a major failure of the imagination at the centre of the book when compared to Moorcock's baroque creations. Clarke's attitude to sexuality also causes problems, though of course the limitations placed on genre authors in the fifties were much stricter than those faced almost twenty years later by Moorcock; a book as explicit as The Dancers at the End of Time would never have been published. But even so, prudishness is taken to an extreme. There are just two or three minor female characters, and The City and the Stars is even more male dominated and asexual than The Lord of the Rings, another novel where almost all the significant relationships are about male companionship. Women are pretty obviously excluded from the heroics of scientific discovery about the universe. Moorcock is able to have a more egalitarian background, in which lust (if not love) is commonplace. Moorcock also introduces an extra theme with time travel. But the most important difference is that Moorcock's writing has a sense of humour, a concept which is alien to the earnestness of much fifties science fiction.
The worst fault of The City and the Stars is that the second half of the book, when Alvin escapes the city, is less interesting than the beginning. The thesis that curiousity about the universe is what makes us human, and Clarke's consequent need to make the scientific endeavour heroic, should mean that Alvin's exploration of the universe is made really gripping. Yet the puzzle of how to get out of Diaspar is much more interesting, and told in such a way that it is clear that Clarke found it more interesting himself. Alvin's trip is hackneyed space exploration from the pulp era, complete with outlandish monsters, and would have been old fashioned even in 1956, particularly as it isn't accompanied by character development: Alvin and his companion travel across the galaxy, yet remain just the same as they did before they set out.
The parallels with on of my favourite books make me sure I have not read The City and the Stars before, because the similarities are such that I am convinced that I would remember it. It's not, to my mind, one of Clarke's best, particularly given the second half. What it does remind me is why I had no particular urge to return to Clarke after binging on his stories in the early eighties.
Saturday, 24 May 2008
China Miéville: Un Lun Dun (2007)
Published: Macmillan, (2008)
Billed as "the comfort blanket" for "devastated Potter fans", Un Lun Dun is a fantasy novel aimed at older children but with plenty to amuse adult readers. It tells of two normal London schoolgirls' discovery that animals seem to be obsessed with one of them. This leads them to find a way through to UnLondon, where the broken objects from London turn up endowed with a literal new life: broken umbrellas are like large birds, and one of the most endearing characters is a puppy-like milk carton. UnLondon is threatened by "the Smog", a cloud of pollution which has developed an evil mind of its own and which aims to take over the uncity. To the inhabitants of UnLondon, one of the girls, Zanna, is a prophesied champion, the Swazzy, who will lead them to victory over the Smog; but, in the most original touch in the book, Zanna is defeated in her first battle with it, and the UnLondoners turn to a man who can control the unbrellas (as the living, broken umbrellas are called). Zanna, made ill by inhaling Smog, and her companion Deeba return to our world. While Zanna forgets, as most Londoners do when not directly in contact with UnLondon, Deeba continues to be obsessed with the uncity, and when she discovers that things are not what they seem there she seeks to return to warn the inhabitants.
There are digs at Harry Potter here: the prophecies about the Swazzy talk about two companions, the Clever Sidekick and the Funny Sidekick, for example. Rowling has a tendency to use clichéd plot devices of the fantasy genre. For example, there is an element slavish following of accurate prophecy and the necessary tasks that seem like parts of computer game scenarios (you need to complete one to get an item that will enable you to complete the next) in some of the Harry Potter stories. Here, though, such conventions are ignored or satirised: Deeba short circuits this by deciding it makes more sense to go straight for the last one and save time). The idea of battling the Smog in a city of recycled rubbish picks up an environmental theme in fantasy that goes back to Tolkien, of course, but is obviously something likely to interest today's children. The puns and interest in language suggest Jasper Fforde or, perhaps more an influence, Norman Juster (whose book The Phantom Tollbooth may seem a bit dated now, but is one that many fantasy fans my age loved as children). Lewis Carroll is never far away, and Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere is a major influence, of which more later.
I recently listened to the Brakes 2005 album, Give Blood. It's pretty good, but at least part of the pleasure it gives is in recognising who influences which part: Roxy Music, the Clash, Talking Heads, Blur, or any one of the other influential rock musicians of the last thirty five years. Originality aside, this kind of collage needs to be done very well, or it won't come across to the listener as a unified whole. And of course part of the game is to see how close you can come to a copyright suit - copying a style may not be an infringement, but get too close and lawyers will be after you.
In book terms Un Lun Dun is a bit like Give Blood. It's very good, but indebted to a wide range of other writers, as Miéville indeed acknowledges in the afterword. The list is not precisely the same as I have given, but it is fitting that Neil Gaiman is singled out; indeed, his contribution is described not just as an influence present in the author's library but as an active helper. Un Lun Dun has taken the setting from Neverwhere, lightened the tone and added much more humour, to make a novel not just suitable for children but one which will be enjoyed by adults too. The wide ranging references, environmental message and digs at fantasy genre clichés provide interest for aficionados and the innumerable puns will produce laughs and groans from all readers.
Every other novel that I have read by Miéville, I have appreciated the quality without actually enjoying very much. Maybe because it is more accessible, less relentless and less nasty, I really liked Un Lun Dun, despite being well outside the target age range. (That range is about the same as the early Harry Potter novels, by the way.) It will inevitably be compared to Rowling's work (and I've mentioned the connections several times so far...): no new fantasy for children can escape that now. But at least Un Lun Dun seems to have escaped being compared to the dreadful His Dark Materials. One important thing about Miéville and Rowling is that in this book Miéville doesn't appear to have deliberately tried to be the new Rowling, which is probably a reason for the success of the story. The strengths of Miéville's writing are different, but like Rowling, he has produced an enjoyable, amusing fantasy story.
Billed as "the comfort blanket" for "devastated Potter fans", Un Lun Dun is a fantasy novel aimed at older children but with plenty to amuse adult readers. It tells of two normal London schoolgirls' discovery that animals seem to be obsessed with one of them. This leads them to find a way through to UnLondon, where the broken objects from London turn up endowed with a literal new life: broken umbrellas are like large birds, and one of the most endearing characters is a puppy-like milk carton. UnLondon is threatened by "the Smog", a cloud of pollution which has developed an evil mind of its own and which aims to take over the uncity. To the inhabitants of UnLondon, one of the girls, Zanna, is a prophesied champion, the Swazzy, who will lead them to victory over the Smog; but, in the most original touch in the book, Zanna is defeated in her first battle with it, and the UnLondoners turn to a man who can control the unbrellas (as the living, broken umbrellas are called). Zanna, made ill by inhaling Smog, and her companion Deeba return to our world. While Zanna forgets, as most Londoners do when not directly in contact with UnLondon, Deeba continues to be obsessed with the uncity, and when she discovers that things are not what they seem there she seeks to return to warn the inhabitants.
There are digs at Harry Potter here: the prophecies about the Swazzy talk about two companions, the Clever Sidekick and the Funny Sidekick, for example. Rowling has a tendency to use clichéd plot devices of the fantasy genre. For example, there is an element slavish following of accurate prophecy and the necessary tasks that seem like parts of computer game scenarios (you need to complete one to get an item that will enable you to complete the next) in some of the Harry Potter stories. Here, though, such conventions are ignored or satirised: Deeba short circuits this by deciding it makes more sense to go straight for the last one and save time). The idea of battling the Smog in a city of recycled rubbish picks up an environmental theme in fantasy that goes back to Tolkien, of course, but is obviously something likely to interest today's children. The puns and interest in language suggest Jasper Fforde or, perhaps more an influence, Norman Juster (whose book The Phantom Tollbooth may seem a bit dated now, but is one that many fantasy fans my age loved as children). Lewis Carroll is never far away, and Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere is a major influence, of which more later.
I recently listened to the Brakes 2005 album, Give Blood. It's pretty good, but at least part of the pleasure it gives is in recognising who influences which part: Roxy Music, the Clash, Talking Heads, Blur, or any one of the other influential rock musicians of the last thirty five years. Originality aside, this kind of collage needs to be done very well, or it won't come across to the listener as a unified whole. And of course part of the game is to see how close you can come to a copyright suit - copying a style may not be an infringement, but get too close and lawyers will be after you.
In book terms Un Lun Dun is a bit like Give Blood. It's very good, but indebted to a wide range of other writers, as Miéville indeed acknowledges in the afterword. The list is not precisely the same as I have given, but it is fitting that Neil Gaiman is singled out; indeed, his contribution is described not just as an influence present in the author's library but as an active helper. Un Lun Dun has taken the setting from Neverwhere, lightened the tone and added much more humour, to make a novel not just suitable for children but one which will be enjoyed by adults too. The wide ranging references, environmental message and digs at fantasy genre clichés provide interest for aficionados and the innumerable puns will produce laughs and groans from all readers.
Every other novel that I have read by Miéville, I have appreciated the quality without actually enjoying very much. Maybe because it is more accessible, less relentless and less nasty, I really liked Un Lun Dun, despite being well outside the target age range. (That range is about the same as the early Harry Potter novels, by the way.) It will inevitably be compared to Rowling's work (and I've mentioned the connections several times so far...): no new fantasy for children can escape that now. But at least Un Lun Dun seems to have escaped being compared to the dreadful His Dark Materials. One important thing about Miéville and Rowling is that in this book Miéville doesn't appear to have deliberately tried to be the new Rowling, which is probably a reason for the success of the story. The strengths of Miéville's writing are different, but like Rowling, he has produced an enjoyable, amusing fantasy story.
Thursday, 15 May 2008
Douglas Adams: The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
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.
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.
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.
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