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Book review

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, 1962

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of those novels (such as The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind) where the film of the book is better known than the book itself. In this case that is completely understandable – Jack Nicholson’s Oscar winning performance in the 1975 film is truly memorable, there are loads of other wonderful performances, and the editorial choices are really well thought through. It must be almost 30 years since I last saw the film, but I still remember certain scenes vividly, such is the impact it made. It also made an impact on wider society and an important contribution to the discussion on the treatment of the mentally-ill.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest (cuckoo being a pejorative term for the mentally-unwell) is set on an Oregon hospital ward. The patients are all settled in their secure environment, bullied by the senior nurse Ratched and her orderlies, but relatively comfortable. The narrator is Chief Bromden, a native American who pretends through most of the novel to be deaf and dumb, even though he is perfectly capable of speaking and hearing. His silence is effectively a protest about the way he and his people are ignored in modern America. The discovery that he can actually speak is a minor development in the novel, but in the film it is presented as a significant moment.

Into this environment bursts Randle MacMurphy, transferred into the hospital from prison. It is suggested, by MacMurphy himself, that he has engineered this transfer to serve his sentence in greater comfort, although the precise extent of his illness, if any, is never completely resolved. MacMurphy sets about challenging the autocracy of Nurse Ratched, and a battle of wills ensues. When MacMurphy eventually realises that Ratched has the power to extend his detention indefinitely, it looks as if he is going to knuckle down, take his medicine, literally, and serve his time, but that fragile peace is never going to hold for long.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest can be read on a number of different levels. Superficially it is a protest about the treatment of the mentally ill in America. In portraying the patients as largely normal, perhaps a little quirky, and with a central character, MacMurphy, who at time seems saner than anyone, Kesey weights the argument heavily in favour of his call for the more humane, liberal treatment of the mentally unwell. In so far as the novel (and the film) moved America and the west to this position then it had a positive effect, but the novel’s portrayal of electro-convulsive therapy as being akin to torture, and being used by the hospital as a form of punishment, gave this treatment (which is still used effectively to this day) a terrible reputation from which it continues to suffer. The use of lobotomy was already in steady decline by the time this book was written and published, but if One Flew gave this operation a final shove down the stairs of history then obviously it made a significant contribution. There is still a long way to go in the process of removing the stigma from mental illness, but this novel was an important step on the way, making us think of the mentally ill as people not threateningly alien.

The novel is not just a treatise on the treatment of the mentally ill. On another level it is a parable of the story of Christ, his life and crucifixion. MacMurphy is brought amongst the poorest and weakest in society, and goes about healing them and making them whole. He makes them fishers of men, (the chapters where the inmates are allowed out of the hospital to go on a fishing trip are so profoundly improbable that they can really only serve to contribute to the narrative if we accept their metaphorical significance). MacMurphy consorts with fallen women, and eventually sacrifices himself (his sadness, which the Chief notices on the fishing trip, suggests he is aware that this is going to be his fate) for the sake of his friends after a riotous last supper, and after being betrayed by Billy Bibbitt, who goes on to kill himself after having accepted his metaphorical pieces of silver. When accepting his electro-convulsive treatment MacMurphy even explicitly makes this association himself, asking if he is going to be given a crown of thorns. MacMurphy is brought into the world, suffers and dies so that our sins may be forgiven.

The novel concludes with a crushing loss but also with freedom, a refusal to accept oppression. It argues that the revolution will not be without cost, but also suggests that the ultimate prize may be worth the price. This makes One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest one of the most important texts of the 1960’s counter-revolution.

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Book review

The Discworld Companion by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs, 1994

By a wonderful act of synchronicity, I stumbled across this £1 charity bookstore treasure very shortly after completing Soul Music. This edition of the Companion (later editions being called the New Discworld Companion, followed by The Turtles Moves..The Discworld Companion…So Far) was published in 1994, ending with the publication of – and therefore fully describing the known Discworld up to – Soul Music.

This is much more than a guide to the Pratchett universe, although it is a very comprehensive one at that, obviously only comprehensive up to 1994 that is. This partiality is in itself is fascinating, as this snapshot of the DW universe reveal that at this point it is surprisingly complete – certainly all the main features you would expect – the Watch, Vetinari, the Witches, Death, a fully developed concept of how magic works, and so on – are all there, fully formed. In one sense the final 25 or so books were about filling in the detail and backstory rather than reinventing DW, and the genesis of several of the later novels are clearly present here. Examples of this include the references to the mysterious world of XXXX, later explored in the Last Continent (Discworld 22) or the writer William de Worde and the fact that moving type has not yet been fully embraced in Ankh-Morpork. de Worde’s entry in the Companion ends with the this sentence:

“It could well be that the future holds great things for young Mr de Worde…”

You really couldn’t ask for a clearer indication that Sir Terry had The Truth, the DW novel about the introduction of printing, planned out in his head, even though it wasn’t to eventually appear until 2000 as DW 25.

The Companion also has lots of canonical additional content found nowhere else – there is a very comprehensive description of the history, working and traditions of the Unseen University for example, in which Unseen Academicals is hinted at in the description of the DW version of football:

“UU records suggest that students from the University have no participated recently, but street football with various rules is still an Ankh-Morpork tradition”.

The sections on magic, DW units of measurement/standards, and Morporkian law, equally all give plenty of background to the DW universe only hinted at in the novels.

At the end of the Companion, after the A-Z section, is some fascinating additional content. In a chapter apparently written by Stephen Briggs, there is what I feel is one of the best summaries of the reasons why the novels are so loved:

“There is a certain quiet optimism (in the books). If there is a struggle, the good win – but not easily, and at some cost. There is a strong dislike of coercion of people, either by other people or gods or some concept of fate or destiny. There’s a very frequent theme which says that what people happen to be doing does not define what they actually are.”

Elsewhere a long and comprehensive interview with Sir Terry reveals that in the mid-90’s in response to the question:

“Do you see yourself still writing Discworld books in ten years’ time?”

he gave a very definitive

“No. Not even in five years time. Certainly not on a regular basis, anyway. There’s only so much I can do with it.”

I am so glad he changed his mind!

P.S. In the very final section of the Companion Briggs write about Pratchett fandom:

“Fan activity is available to anyone with a computer and a modem. There is a Pratchett forum on CIX….and a rather larger one known as alt.an.pratchett on the Internet (the huge worldwide computer network which shifts megabytes of information around the planet”.

Oh so that’s what the Internet is!! Gotta love 1995.

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Book review

Soul Music (Discworld 16) by Terry Pratchett,1994

There’s a disappointing, cut and paste feel to Soul Music which for me makes it the weakest of the Discworld novels thus far (i.e. of the 16 published up to this point). And it is still wonderful! How come? I’ll come to the mitigation, but first this is the plot outline:

A young harpist, Imp Y Celyn, (bud of holly, get it?) from Llamedos seeks fame and fortune in Ankh-Morpork. He forms a band with Lias Bluestone (a troll percussionist) and Glod Glodsson (a dwarf hornblower) along the way acquiring a magical guitar with mysterious powers, more specifically an entity comprising the primordial music which brought the universe into existence. As one does.

Meanwhile, Death, upset at the death of his adopted daughter Ysabell and her husband, Mort, takes another impromptu break from his day job, leaving his granddaughter, Susan Sto Helit to fulfil his soul-gathering function. She fluffs her first job by failing to reap the soul of Buddy when he is scheduled to die while performing at the Mended Drum.

Thus the novel’s two primary threads are established – death takes a break and a family members steps in to cope as best they can, a plotline Pratchett had already used before (Mort and Reaper Man); and in a parallel storyline a new phenomenon/innovation (in this case rock music) takes the Discworld by storm, causing chaos and ultimately threatening the existence of the universe, a theme already explored in some detail in Moving Pictures.

That’s pretty much it – although there are a lot more events, they all fall within this basic template. And that was what I found disappointing by Soul Music, its writing by numbers feel. To be fair to Pratchett he was writing a phenomenal amount of Discworld novels at the time, feeding our voracious appetites for all things DW. (The Colour of Magic was published in 1986,  just 8 years and 15 DIscworld novels earlier. In addition to the eventual count of 41 novels there are also any number of books and other material including short stories, cookery books, maps, guides etc). So it is hardly surprising that to meet deadlines he had to dial it in from time to time.

Fans of dad jokes and clever popular culture references will be spoilt for choice here, beginning with the original cover illustration which echoes the Meat Loaf album Bat out of Hell, rapidly followed by a steady stream of allusions to groups and records, in particular cheesy examples from the seventies and eighties, such as “Pathway to Paradise” (“Stairway to Heaven”) and ”Sex and drugs and Music With Rocks In” (“Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll“). At first the game of spot the reference is fun, but after a while it palls – it is after all essentially the same joke time after time, however cleverly done. Having said that even I had to applaud the way the groanworthy reference to “There’s a Guy Works Down the Chipshop swears he’s Elvish” is worked in.

Pratchett was at this point over a third of the way into the Discworld saga, and he was still refining his craft. This novel would not have disappointed any DW fan, but neither can it be said to take the series to a new height or in a new direction in the way books such as The Night Watch did. It’s fun, and the jokes consistently work, but I am not sure we care that much about the characters (except Susan perhaps), and the eventual happy-ever-after ending is never in any doubt. The scenes of the band on the road felt like padding, an effort to reach a minimum word-length target. So perhaps I need a Pratchett holiday – but I really don’t want one, because I know what great novels are coming up.

 

 

 

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Book review

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry, 2016

When Cora Seaborne’s bully of a husband thankfully dies, she begins her new life as a widow with a sense of relief. Cora is our story’s heroine, an intelligent free-thinker, interested in the ideas of Marx and Darwin, ill-suited for the role of society wiEssex serpent 2fe. Seeking a change of scenery following the funeral, Cora moves to Essex, first Colchester then coastal Aldwinter, accompanied by her eleven-year old son, Francis, and his nanny, Martha.

Here we are introduced to the legend of the titular serpent, a wonderfully ambiguous and flexible metaphor for the unknown, sexuality, and more. The serpent is rumoured to have returned to haunt the coast after an earthquake brought it back to the surface, a folk-tale which has just enough plausibility to intrigue Cora. She becomes convinced that what the local people think is a mythical sea beast may be a previously undiscovered species. This is a time when the undiscovered was being explored and pinned down by hyper-active Victorians all the time.

The romantic element to the story is introduced when she meets the local vicar Will Ransome, who has a different, faith-based interpretation of the serpent legend. To Will and his flock the serpent has strong echoes of an earlier satanic snake. A strong wider cast slowly introduced to us, and one of the many pleasures of the novel is getting to know the people of Aldwinter and Cora’s other friends and relatives.

There’s much to admire in this novel, a late Victorian Gothic horror/romance. It fizzes with ideas and incident, interesting characters and accurately evoked settings.  Set in 1893, a time in which the ideas of Marx and Darwin were moving from being shocking and challenging to much more accepted and mainstream, but where superstition still governed the lives of many; where human relationships begin to test the boundaries of the constraints of marriage (for example shown here in the relationship between Martha and Edward Burton). Martha can be introduced as a socialist in company without that causing shock or dismay.

This is a society in flux, approaching the end of the Victorian era and the nineteenth century, set just two years before the trials of Oscar Wilde, and where social activism on the state of the slums in East London is much more than a matter of public health. Medicine is also leaping forward into the twentieth century, with Luke Garrett, jokingly (?) nicknamed “the imp”. a surgeon and suitor of Cora’s who begins to explore the possibilities of heart surgery.Essex serpent

The writing is strong. The point of view narration sweeps between characters seamlessly so we can tell from moment to moment how each is feeling as each scene unfolds, something that only novels can really do this well. The influence of Dickens and Hardy in particular is pervasive and explicitly acknowledged. Take this paragraph for example which to my mind is almost heroically Dickensian in its use of pairings and contrasts:

One o’clock on a dreary day and the time ball dropped at the Greenwich Observatory. There was ice on the prime meridian, and ice on the rigging of the broad-beamed barges down on the busy Thames. . . . Time was being served behind the walls of Newgate jail, and wasted by philosophers in cafes on the Strand; it was lost by those who wished the past were present, and loathed by those who wished the present past. . .

In Lincoln’s Inn and Middle Temple lawyers eyed their calendars and saw statues of limitations expire; in rooms in Camden and Woolwich time was cruel to lovers wondering how it got so late so soon, and in due course was kind to their ordinary wounds. Across the city in terraces and tenements, in high society and low company and in the middle classes, time was spent and squandered, eked out and wished away; and all the time it rained an icy rain.

If I have a criticism of this novel, churlish though it may be, it is that the ending is weak. The serpent itself was always going to be a disappointment, but the resolution is anti-climactic, to say the least, and a little ludicrous (the scene with ‘Gracie’). The resolution of the interwoven relationships is also a little disappointing – almost as if the ground is being laid for a sequel. Certainly I felt as if Cora, Michael, Martha and families had more stories to tell, and I would happily read more about their lives. I am equally convinced that this would make a hugely popular television series in the right hands.

If I am honest it was the awkward portrayal of sex in the novel that troubled me the most. The descriptions creep close to being a pastiche or parody of the way Hardy would have written them. Here for example is the time towards the end of the novel (spoiler alert) where Will and Cora finally consummate their relationship:

“moving aside the folds of her coat he tugged her shirt where it was tucked into the waist, in the place where once he’d touched her and been disgraced by it. But the disgrace this time kept its distance: it seemed to him that to keep apart from her now would be obscene; how could it be possible to seek out each fold and turn of her mind and not grow familiar with the particular patina of her skin, the scent and taste of it. Not to touch her now would be to breach a natural law. Back she lay against the soft green stair in the thickening dusk and fixed her eyes on his, unsurprised, daring him: he raised he short and there in the split between the black cloth of her clothes he found her soft belly, very white, marked with the silver lines her son had made: he kissed it once and could not stop, and rolled against him in delight.

The sun slid down….She met his gaze then, levelly as she always had, and felt herself go rushing to meet him like a river in spate; ‘Please,’ she said, pulling at her skirt:’Please’, and he heard it like a command. He found her easily, and his hand slipped and moved in her, and her bright head drooped, and she was silent. He showed her his hand, and how she gleamed there; he put a forefinger to his mouth and hers, and they had an equal share”. 

Ignoring the fact that her shirt gets pulled out twice, which I suppose I can forgive, my main reaction to reading this paragraph was – really? They had an equal share?? That’s my nominee for the Bad Sex in Literature Award sorted. I was also irked by the deliberate archaism of “back she lay” rather than “she lay back” – why?

Earlier, Will goes for a long walk, the traditional remedy for sexual frustration, his mind boiling with thoughts of Cora:

He walked on to the mouth of the estuary, not knowing what to do with his desire, only that he could not take it to Stella; he knew he’d touch her and find her for the first time slight and insubstantial – he had in mind something more like fighting, and it appalled him; he went out to the water’s edge and with quick movements spent himself on the black marsh with something like a bark and with a dog’s joy”

The boatload of day-trippers from Clacton would have had something to talk about on the way back that day!

Or here:

“The windows in her room were open and light was fading on the wall. She said, ‘There may be blood,’ and he said, ‘Better that way – better’; and it was Cora’s mouth he kissed, and Cora’s hand he placed where she wanted it most. Each was only second best: they wore each other like hand-me-down coats.”

I am not sure if this is beautiful or over the top. ‘There may be blood’ sounds like a bad western, or an ominous line from a Tarantino film, but the reference to wearing one another like hand-me-down coats is lovely, and picks up on the constant references to Cora wearing a man’s coat (and many other references to the coats people wear – in fact there is probably a whole essay to be teased out of clothing in this novel alone, such is its depth and richness).

This is not the only example of overwriting, spectacular though it is. 

“He felt his faith deeply, and above all out of doors, where the vaulted sky was his cathedral nave and the oaks its transept pillars: when faith failed, as it sometimes did, he saw the heavens declare the glory of God and heard the stones cry out.”

But I am being churlish. Writing of this nature always tiptoes on the edge of hyperbole, and it is easily forgiven. I will close with a positive example of how the author evokes the Essex countryside – has it ever been described with such affection?

“Then it carried me in spate to the Essex shore, to all the marsh and shingle, and I tasted on my lips the salt air which is also like the flesh of oysters, and I felt my heart cleaving, as I felt it there in the dark wood on the green stair and as I feel it now: something severed, and something joined.”

Perry is a writer of enormous promise. The Essex Serpent was massively popular throughout 2016 and beyond, and has won prizes and sold huge amounts of copies – at times you couldn’t turn around in a bookshop without bumping into piles of it. One of the benefits of such ubiquity is that second hand copies are easy to find, and my £1 charity bookshop copy was a gleefully pounced upon treasure.

 

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Book review

This Census-Taker by China Miéville, 2016

I’m usually pretty comfortable with novels that ask the reader to do all the heavy-lifting; that only give the barest context and leave it to us to fill in the gaps. Mieville takes this idea close to if not beyond its limits in This Census-Taker, a 2016 novella in which almost all of the details that a reviewer would normally set out in this point in a review are missing.

This is a first-person story where the narrator unsettlingly changes voice (from third to first person) and tense, but eventually settles down to a more conventional narrative about an unnamed child (the narrator) and a series of disturbing incidents from his childhood. Throughout the tale we are left with a series of unresolved questions – what has happened to his mother, is his father a murderer and what are the mysterious, quasi-magical keys that his father makes all about? The novella uses a combination of the fantastical, such as the scenes where the inhabitants of the local town suck mildly narcotic blood from the legs of giant beetles, or what one reviewer described as

“an unspecific but eerily well-realised terrain of soft apocalypse”

and a more realistic element in which the boy’s experience are recognisably those of a sad, lonely refugee or perhaps survivor. There is a lot of narrative incident, but little of it serves much apparent purpose – things just happen, then other things happen; in particular people disappear regularly, with the father looming menacingly over all events. If he is a murderer nothing can be proven, so after the mother disappears things return to a strange version of normal. The protagonist finds a substitute family of street children but they cannot replace his missing mother, and he remains trapped with his father. This is bleak indeed. The entrance of the enigmatic census taker at the close of the novel does little to resolve this mystery or sense of tension.

Eventually through a brief reversion to a future present, we are shown that the events of the novel are being recorded by a a much older version of the narrator, although what his future holds is frustratingly ambiguous, like so much else of this novel. This is not the grand reveal or resolution we may have optimistically been hoping for.

Fantasy is a wonderfully flexible genre, that can accommodate novels such as this at its fringes, and at the extreme the work of a much more mainstream writer such as Terry Pratchett, who I will be returning to next with, I admit, a small and undignified sense of relief after the challenges of This Census Taker.

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Book review

Upheaval, how nations cope with crisis and change, by Jared Diamond, 2019

Diamond wrote the excellent Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, so I had high hopes and expectations of Upheaval. I have found myself repeating in conversation some of the points Diamond makes in these earlier books, not least the axiom that guns, germs and steel were the central components of the conquest of much of the world by the European powers in the later centuries of the second millennium. But sadly Upheaval is fundamentally and quite seriously flawed. That’s not to say that there aren’t interesting things to be found here, but before I go on to identify these I need to explain this central point.

Diamond argues that nations (and he doesn’t spend sufficient time in identifying what he means by this concept, which to my mind is much more fluid than he suggests) go through crises from time to time, and the way those nations respond to those crises can be compared to the way individuals respond to similar situations in their personal lives (e.g divorce, bereavement, etc). Using the work of psychiatrists he breaks these responses into twelve different categories. Just to offer one example, he argues that people who are able to isolate the problematic issues in their lives – building a psychological fence around the issue – move on more successfully than people who don’t. Similarly, countries bounce back from national crises and prove more resilient if they deploy similar responses.

I think I have represented Diamond’s thesis accurately. I hope so. He spends the bulk of the book considering crises in a series of seven countries. These potted histories – of the military coup against Allende in Chile, the Suharto anti-communist atrocities in Indonesia and the experience of Finland during and after the Second World War to give three examples – are interesting. I learned something. After each of these accounts Diamond then laboriously goes through the 12 techniques he identified at the beginning of the book, and tries manfully to explain in what way they can be applied to the case study. It goes without saying that very quickly he find the analysis pointless – either it is simply a way of categorising the response (so for example Finland could not rely on its neighbours for help in the Winter War against the Soviet Union, unlike people who turn to their friends when they are going through a divorce) without adding anything in the way of understanding, or the comparison does work but is trite. These analytical sections are without doubt the weakest part of the book, and I quickly learned to skim read them. Here’s an example of the knots he finds himself tied in:

“Individuals in crisis often receive help from friends, just as nations in crisis may recruit help from allied nations. Individuals in crisis may model their solutions on ways in which they see other individuals addressing similar crises; nations in crisis may borrow and adapt solutions already devised by other nations facing similar problems. Individuals in crisis may derive self-confidence from having survived previous crises; so do nations.” 

Do these parallels help at all? Do you feel you know more about how nations respond to crises because of these points? “These things are like these things but not like these other things” seems to be the sum total of the analysis.

Even had Diamond’s thesis been accurate, and national crises could usefully be compared to individual crises, there would still have been a massive “so what” to overcome. But nations aren’t people, and Diamond is forced to acknowledge that many of the typical responses he identifies simply don’t and can’t apply on a national or global scale. For example, countries respond more successfully to crises if the population is united in its response – this just doesn’t have a counterpoint in individual situations.

There were other issues. Diamond’s prose is often clumsy and laboured. He often appears to be working backward from a predetermined position. His defence of Finlandization for example, whereby Finland has aligned itself with the USSR and allowed Russian meddling in domestic Finnish political issues, is obviously driven by his affection for the country rather than any serious pretence that this is a successful strategy. Russian has plenty of other neighbours that don’t adopt this craven submission and seem to survive.

Diamond constantly assumes his readers are all Americans. I found this so irritating. It is understandable that an author’s work should reflect their national prejudices and perspectives. But I don’t think I have ever seen this done so openly and yet unthinkingly. And by the way Jared, the claim that the USA is responsible for the invention of the television and the internet is tenuous to say the least!

Diamond is quite open about that fact that the seven countries he chooses to analyse in this book are those he has lived in and knows extensively. In order to justify his case study choices he has to pretend that Australia has gone through a crisis comparable to that of Chile or Indonesia, when of course it hasn’t. Diamond has form here – in Collapse he argued that the Australian economy was on the brink of disaster, and while of course the country has some challenges to face, its economy is very resilient and it hasn’t been through a recession since the early 1990s.

I said earlier that despite some serious issues there were some positives in the book. The case studies are interesting, even if you have to wade through a lot to find the nuggets of value. The insights in the history of Japan in particular were new to me. Diamond is concerned about the prospects for his home country, rightly so, although his statistics lacked conviction and he didn’t seem to be up to date with the progress that has been made in third world economies for example. Ultimately this was a disappointing book, made all the worse by the strength of Diamond’s earlier work. The New York Times reviewer demolished it pretty comprehensively here if you are interested in another perspective.

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Book review

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, 1996

I don’t think you would be able to guess that Neverwhere is a novelisation of a television series – it has a dramatic range and scope ideally suited to the novel form, and must have been a challenge to film. It is rare for novelisations to be more than their original format, but here it is almost as if the novel was existing in concept all along, and it just took the development of the television series for it to come out.Neverwhere

In the introduction to this edition, which was published to coincide with the publication of American Gods, Gaiman describes editing the text to make it more accessible to American readers – explaining that Oxford Street is a main shopping thoroughfare for example. I suspect he was wasting his time, because this is a novel firmly rooted in place, written by a writer with considerable and obvious affection for the London landmarks that appear in the book: Blackfriars, Baron’s Court, the Angel Islington and Old Bailey, among many others.

Three years in London had not changed Richard, although it had changed the way he perceived the city. Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from pictures he had seen, and he was surprised to find it filled with color. It was a city of red brick and white stone, red buses and large black taxis, bright red mailboxes and green grassy parks and cemeteries. It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names – Crouch End, Chalk Farm, Earl’s Court, Marble Arch – and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, dirty, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or, more recently, motorized, and the need of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind.” 

The novel’s springboard is the hidden issue of homelessness – how rough sleepers can live in cities such as London and be effectively invisible to the rest of the population. Gaiman takes this idea and has the homeless become residents of ‘London Under’ – a city existing in plain sight alongside London Above. I was reminded of China Meiville’s The City and the City  which is based on a very similar concept. But Gaiman’s hidden world is magical, peopled by fantastical characters and where the normal rules of time and space do not apply. In this it is closer to the Rivers of London series which I believe it directly inspired.

Neverwhere’s central character is the Arthur Dent-like everyman beloved of fantasy writers. Richard Mayhew is a young businessman, who one day helps a mysterious young girl, Door, who appears before him, bleeding and weak, on a London street. Gaiman makes Richard a Scotsman exiled in London – he already feels a sense of alienation from his environment, so when his contact with the people of the Underworld makes him effectively invisible to other Londoners the process is complete. Door, only surviving member of a family of underworlders with the power to open any door, sends Richard to find the Marquis de Carabas who in turn can help her escape her pursuers. They hire a bodyguard, the Amazonian Hunter, and set off to find out why Door’s family was slain by the infamous assassins Croup and Vandemar, who are now on their trail. They criss-cross London Under in their quest, meeting a series of fantastical characters in extraordinary places. This is an action-packed adventure full of twists and turns and incident – it’s a great story.

I was a little uncertain as to Gaiman’s target audience with this novel. There is a horrific element to the novel’s casual and brutal violence, particularly that of Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, the former all refinement and elegance, the latter the complete opposite, usually to be found munching on the remains of a puppy or a pigeon. Some characters die and don’t come back, and the happy ever after ending is not guaranteed. But while the peril in the novel is serious it is resolved quickly, and the one main character who is killed is resurrected with minimum suspense that it is not going to happen.

There’s a lot to enjoy in Neverwhere. The dialogue is outstanding, if fizzes with ideas, the aesthetic as evoked in Gaiman’s prose is wonderful, and the central relationship between Door and Richard is sweet, understated, and touching. There is a darkness to much of the humour (“Do you like cat?” she said. “Yes,” said Richard. “I quite like cats.” Anaesthesia looked relieved. “Thigh?” she asked, “or breast?” ) that is entirely unsentimental. Gaiman has promised a sequel, which would be fantastic although this novel stands up well on its own. Highly recommended if you enjoy fantasy.

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Book review

Supplemental – Dystopian fiction and a quick quiz

My local Waterstone’s (a UK bookstore, in case you were wondering) runs a monthly competition asking readers to identify four books from their opening lines. To make it easier the novelists’ initials are also given. Each month there is a different genre, and the lines this month are from “Early Dystopian Fiction”. The novels’ opening lines are:

a) “The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.” (HGW)

Not one to break sweat over I think you would agree.

b) “Someone must have been spreading lies about Josef K, for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning” (FK)

A fantastic opening line, which I think is even better when the earlier translation for “spreading lies” “traduced” is used.

c) “The handsome dining room of the Hotel Wessex, with its gilded plaster shields and the mural depicting the Green Mountains, had been reserved for the Ladies’ Night Dinner of the Fort Beulah Rotary Club.” (SL)

This line has really grown on me – the accumulated detail of the small-town America it describes seems so deceptively stable and secure.

d) “COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.” (AH)

Once you work out the initials the novel will come to you quickly enough.

My initial impression was that this selection stretches if not abuses the term ‘dystopian fiction’. Sure it has a fairly flexible definition, but are these novels really dystopias?

Dystopian fiction imagines an world in which society is grim and frightening. By that definition The Time Machine certainly meets the criteria. The future in Wells’ novel is one in which man has degenerated into two distinct species, one predating the other.

Kafka is hard to align to a specific genre, but I have never considered The Trial (b) as dystopian. Nightmarish without doubt, but far too strongly rooted in the real world. The Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here, (c) which by coincidence I read and reviewed earlier this month, is set in the immediate future and again is firmly fixed in the real world of American and European politics – unlike say the 2004 Philip Roth novel The Plot Against America which imagines an alternative USA in which the aviator, anti-semite and proto-fascist Charles Lindbergh is elected President, which is more speculative despite the obvious parallels with the Lewis novel.

Finally I am sure you will have worked out that (d) is from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, probably the only purely dystopian novel here, although they have cheated and given the end of the opening sentence only rather than the whole thing, (“A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State’s motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.” Two sentences, I know) presumably on the basis that giving just the first sentence it would have made it much too hard, and the first two sentences too easy.

I don’t think we need to try and squeeze novels into constricting boxes with genre labels on them and I appreciate the quiz was just a bit of fun. If it gets people reading these books then great.

For what it is worth my four dystopian novels would have been:

“It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen” (GO).

Easy I know, but quite possibly one of the greatest opening lines in literature, full stop.

“What’s it going to be then, eh?’ That was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.” (AB)

Not getting any harder are they?

My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. (KI)

This one I think is genuinely tricky but I did review it quite recently.

“All this happened, more or less” (KV)

Good luck! What would be your choices?

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Book review

It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, 1935

It Can’t Happen Here was Lewis’s response to the much-repeated political assertion of the novel’s title, which in turn was a common reaction to the rise of fascism in Europe and the parallel rise of American demagogues. Lewis believed that American complacency about the robustness of its constitution and political institutions was dangerous and issued this novel as a wake-up call.

Set in the (then) very near future, the novel sees charismatic Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, elected President of the United States on a brazenly populist platform. Ostensibly a Democrat, Windrip is uninterested in party politics. He freely promises things he knows he cannot deliver, such as $5,000 a year for each citizen. On election he declares an emergency and effectively suspends the constitution. Following the rapid take-over of all institutions, an approach modelled on that used by the Nazis in 1933, Windrip outlaws dissent, incarcerates his political enemies in concentration camps, and trains and arms a paramilitary force to act as his enforcers. He curtails women and minority rights and removes any opposition by individual states by dividing the country into administrative sectors managed by “Corpo” authorities. The surviving opposition members flee to Canada where a Government in exile is formed.

The events of the novel are told from the perspective of Doremus Jessup, a small-town newspaper editor. Jessup is a familiar archetype – a paternal figure, well-known and respected in his community in Vermont, near the border with Canada. He is a liberal figure instinctively sceptical of the easy solutions offered by Windrup, but equally questioning the communist ideas of a local trade union activist. He is an early prototype of Atticus Finch, determined to do the right thing even at a huge personal cost. He bravely prints an editorial critical of the new President, which quickly leads to him being arrested and his paper seized by the authorities. His son-in-law attempts to intercede on his behalf and is summarily executed, in one of the novel’s most brutal and unsettling scenes.

Jessup’s joins and begins to organise the resistance, printing in secret the “Vermont Vigilance”. But it is only a matter of time before his role is exposed and he is thrown into a concentration camp, beaten and tortured along with many of his friends and companions. Lewis cleverly includes several extracts from articles by European journalists who claim to have inspected these camps and found them harmless centres for the unemployed and homeless, re-education camps, in a chilling echo of the white-washing of the Nazis camps in Germany. He further anchors his narrative in the recent American political landscape by introducing characters from the real world.

Shad Ledue, the local district commissioner and Jessup’s former hired man, is a menacing threat throughout the novel. He resents his employer and menaces his daughter Sissy. However the women in this novel are not just passive victims. She discovers evidence of his corruption and exposes him, leading to his imprisonment in the same camp as her father, where the other inmates waste no time in murdering him. Jessup’s other daughter takes revenge on her husband’s executioner by crashing into his plane in mid-flight.

Windrup’s administration crumbles and he is deposed by his deputy, who in turn doesn’t last long. The novel closes with America in chaos but with the opposition to the Corpo-Government fighting back and Jessup still doing what he can to organise resistance.

In marketing the novel in 2019 the publishers are understandably emphasising the parallels between Windrup and Trump, a populist idiot, “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected.” While their personal qualities are indeed similar, Trump has not yet suspended the Supreme Court, arrested members of Congress or abolished states. (I’m sure he has considered all of these at one point or another!) The point is that It Can’t Happen Here was a response to the rise of 1930’s fascism, and we aren’t quite there yet in the 21st Century, however scary some of the parallels might be.   Hopefully I won’t look back on this review one day when President for Life Trump is inaugurated, and wonder how I could have been so complacent.

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Book review

Smiley’s People by John le Carre 1979

Smiley’s People by John le Carre 1979

I’ve written previously about how I prefer not to read too much about a novel in advance of reading the novel itself – how it can prejudice the reader, shaping their expectations one way or another. But you can take that approach too far, and I think I did here. I knew Smiley’s People was one of le Carre’s series of novels about espionage during the Cold War, but it wasn’t until I glanced at the back cover after completing the novel that I found out it was the seventh in the Smiley series. Each of these novels are capable in theory of being read independently of one another, of course, but they accumulate a depth of background that over time makes the idea of them being stand-alone novels harder to sustain.

Smiley’s People, as well as being the seventh Smiley novel, is also the third and final novel in what is known as the Karla trilogy, the others being Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy. Smiley’s People presents itself as a novel of byzantine complexity, with plots within plots. But if you take a step back in some respects it is quite simple. Karla, Smiley’s Russian nemesis, has a daughter who needs psychiatric treatment not available inside the Soviet bloc. Through an admittedly complex route Smiley eventually discovers the identity of this daughter, and the rest is relatively simple –  Karla is blackmailed into defecting to the West, the alternative being the loss of both his and his daughter’s safety and security.

What I can’t be sure about is whether reading this novel out of order, as I did, would have made much difference to my appreciation and understanding of the complexities of the plot. I suspect it might have made things easier, although now I have committed this mistake I don’t think reading the earlier novels in the series would remedy the situation.

Is the novel any good? Did I enjoy reading it? Well Smiley is an enigmatic, closed down character – we really only get glimpses of his personality in, for example, his relationship with his ex-wife. He is not all-powerful – while he comes out on top in the struggle with Karla, there are avoidable losses along the way. Without giving too much away, there are deaths in the novel which are foreseeable and avoidable. If you enjoy complex novels where staying one step ahead of the protagonists is a challenge then this is one to definitely add to your TBR list. Stylistically I noticed little of the prose which made The Spy Who Came in from the Cold stand out. Here’s a scene setting from the later novel:

The café was the last in the street, if not in all Paris, to lack both a juke-box and neon lighting – and to remain open in August – though there were bagatelle tables that bumped and flashed from dawn till night. For the rest, there was the usual mid-morning hubbub, of grand politics, and horses, and whatever else Parisians talked; there was the usual trio of prostitutes murmuring among themselves, and a sullen young waiter in a soiled shirt who led them to a table in a corner that was reserved with a grimy Campari sign.

And this is from the earlier novel:

They walked to her flat through the rain and they might have been anywhere—Berlin, London, any town where paving stones turn to lakes of light in the evening rain, and the traffic shuffles despondently through wet streets.

For me there is no question as to which excerpt captures the atmosphere more effectively and concisely. I appreciate you could do the same with just about any two novels using selected quotes, but I think my point is that in the later novel le Carre gets bogged down with the procedural elements of the plot and overlooks the need to capture the moment.

To do le Carre justice I probably need to read more of his work, but one as always comes up against the conundrum of there being so many books, and so little time.

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