‘The Northman’ (dir. Robert Eggers, 2022)

 The Northman consists of a great many widescreen shots of primal forests, of Icelandic hills and mountains, of vast unpopulated wildernesses and hugely star-thronged skies, sublimity in topographic form, across which move various Viking characters, sometimes dwarfed by the scenery in longshot, more often shot in close-ups that dwell on the gym-built musculatures of stripped-to-the-waist, or starkers, Alexander Skarsgård, Claes Bang, Ethan Hawke and others. For much of the movie these musculatures are smeared with blood and grime and engaged in the strenuous work of cutting and dismembering other bodies. There is a lot of shouting—really, many instances of people standing, mouth-wide, howling and gurning at one another—and a good deal of hacking, hewing and chopping with swords and axes, each blow carefully staged to maximise its visceral horribleness (sound effects play a large part here).

The story is a thinned-down, yet somehow also elongated, version of Hamlet: young Amleth sees his father (Hawke) murdered by his uncle Fjölnir (Bang). He escapes the scene and grows to swole and violent Skarsgårdian manhood in Russia as part of a band that spends its time Berserker-raiding fortified villages. When he hears that Fjölnir the Brotherless has married his (that is, Amleth's) mother, and moved to Iceland, he pretends to be a slave, infiltrating a shipment of serfs so as to work incognito for his uncle, and thereby get to a place where he can rescue his mother (and his new half-brother), kill his uncle and so avenge his father.

In addition to all the artfully mounted shots of Icelandic scenery there is some knowingly staged (a little too knowingly, I felt) pseudo-Viking weirdness: midnight meetings in stables and inside firelit caves with a Seeress played by Björk and a beardy mage played by somebody I didn’t recognise. There are mystic encounters, visions of Yggdrasil decorated with many dangling bodies like a psycho Christmas tree, hallucinations of Amleth being ridden up the night-sky by a screaming Valkyrie as Valhal swings wide its gigantic luminous sky-doors. Eggers also throws-in a couple of knowing (again: a touch too knowing, I thought) references to Shakespeare’s play: a fool played by Willem Dafoe who spends most of the film as a decapitated head, a sly bit of magic mushroom added to the stew that turns everyone except Amleth mad, and so on. There is a scene in which Amleth confronts his mother, who mocks him and then snogs him, which struck me as a touch too ‘psychoanalytic crit’ Literature 101 Hamlet-in-Gertrude's-bedchamber, really. But mostly this film is the brooding sublimity of Icelandic landscapes and the ick and shock of close-combat, decapitation, cutting off noses, slicing throats, spinning and sinking a handaxe in the shrieking body of your enemy etc etc.

For me the question is: why didn’t I like this movie more? I mean, I liked it fine, I guess. I watched it, the time passed, it was OK. But something was missing. It's a movie that works strenuously towards something that doesn't really come-off, leaving behind the impression only of that strain. I wondered, briefly, if it was aiming for a ‘300 with Vikings instead of Spartans’ vibe (“This! Is! VÍKINGR!” and so on) but actually that's a comparison that isolates what this newer movie lacks. Don’t get me wrong: there are lots of things about 300 that are objectionable: the neo-fascistic militarism by which the US marine corps is allegorised as the last macho bastion of handsomely buff dudes holding back the orientalised hordes of corrupt, violent, perverse and bizarre ‘eastern’ (that is, Arab, Muslim, Chinese) invaders. I mean, at the same time there is a compelling cod-Zizekian take on the film that would read the Persians as, precisely, the decadent West (all sexual excess and deformity) and the Spartans as, let’s say, the Taliban on a suicide mission.

I don’t mean to get bogged-down on the Snyder/Miller flick, except to make one point: 300 isn’t an ironic film, exactly, but it is a camp one, and camp is one of the ways contemporary American popular culture approaches irony. It is both ludicrous and aware of its ludicrousness, using it to leverage its more pompously earnest stuff about masculine strength and heroism and self-sacrifice. There is something savingly joyous in this, despite all the grunting and fighting and oiled, gym-sculpted musculatures, and it is exactly what The Northman lacks. It is doing similar masculine strength and heroism and self-sacrifice things, and is as liable to being adopted by today’s neo-Nazis as was the Snyder flick, but it is trying ingenuously for ‘grandeur’, and lacking the leaven of irony that effort becomes, merely, effortful, grinding, wearying. It didn’t have to be that way—the movie gives Björk a cameo, after all, in a bonkers costume. And yet it is: humourless, self-important, struggling, with every sound-effect-enhanced knife stabbing into a shoulder-blade, or sword pushing right through a head, or handaxe thwunking into a chest, to amplify its gnarly pomposity.

It’s part of a larger thing. In a recent Lawyers Guns & Money post, Erik Loomis trolled his readership (it’s increasingly becoming Loomis's USP as a writer, this) by asserting, without evidence or argument: ‘Queen is one of the biggest bullshit bands in the history of rock and roll, just complete overwrought garbage’. Various people challenge this dismissal in the comments below the post, causing Loomis to double-down on his take, at the same time as insisting that he likes good bands like The Who and The Band. De gustibus, sure: but I absolutely love Queen and one of the things that elevates them above the common herd of stadium-filling megastar rock bands is precisely their campness. Their irony. It is absolutely integral to what they are about, especially in their early albums, filled as they are with elaborate prog-rock, Mercury's pseudo-operatic vocals, Brian May’s flute-clear guitar licks and curlicues (many of which are hard rock and blues) lifted out of the rut by a properly Sontagian campness and play. They were a band who revelled in pomp that never becomes merely pompous, able to articulate heartfelt sincerities of affect (‘Love of my Life’, say) not despite but because they are so unashamedly ironic, so playful, funny and camp—in a word, so queer. The Northman is not nearly queer enough, in any of the senses of that term.

Since we're ambling down memory lane: I remember all the way back in 1995, when various artists contributed music to a charity record called The Help Album to raise funds for war-stricken Bosnia and Herzegovina. The album is full of famous (or famous in 1995) musicians recording earnest songs about war being bad, or covers of appropriate rock classics (Suede doing ‘Shipbuilding’ for instance). The one exception to this is a gleeful track by the KLF called ‘The Magnificent’, in which a voice, notionally from Serbian radio, is intercut with a remix of the theme from The Magnificent Seven while some dude yells ‘The Magnificent!’ over and over. It is jarring, because it is so utterly at odds with the earnest, pious-priggish tone of the rest of the album (‘humans against killing—that sounds like junkies against dope’ mutters the Serbian voice). It was criticised at the time for being flippant about a terribly grave matter. That one mode of engaging with the horrors of the wars being fought across the former Jugoslavia might be to embrace irony did not, it seems, occur to people back then. Irony was on its way out, and it remains, to this day, out in the cold, culturally speaking. A pity.

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” (dir. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, aka ‘Daniels’ 2022)

 

Every review everywhere all-at-the-moment agrees on the excellence of this movie, and I'm certainly not going to disagree. It is (maybe) a tad over-long, and in particular the penultimate staircase-up-to-the-bagel-of-doom sequence is over-extended. But the film's two hours ten minutes running time is so restless, so crammed with action, ideas, visual wit and panache, and the cast do such a great job delivering the material, that the time fair rushes past. Rushes rather frantically and exhaustingly past. But you certainly won't be bored. It's an absolutely spanking movie, sometimes literally so.

Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang, wife, mother and small-businesswoman, is in almost every shot, and the movie really stands or falls (or gongfu-leaps or falls) on her performance. Fortunately, said performance is amazing—capturing at once Evelyn’s determination, her energy, her querulousness, her exhaustion, her ADHD and her many moods. The movie in effect narrates in exteriorised SFnal mode a woman going through both the breakdown of her marriage and personal psychological collapse, and Yeoh does a compelling job with this story. That said, I thought Stephanie Hsu, playing her daughter Joy, delivered in some ways an even more impressive performance, covering the emotional highs and lows of the role with panache, all the time wearing a series of endearingly bonkers Lady Gaga style costumes, whilst also pulling-off a convincing Gen Z sarcastic-nihilistic mode that speaks effectively to today’s generational divide.

Evelyn runs a coin-op launderette but her tax affairs are in disarray, and the movie opens with her and her wimpy husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) porting a pantechnicon-ful of receipts and loose paper to the IRS office. Here Jamie Lee Curtis’s sinister tax officer is looking to wreck Evelyn’s financial life and repossess her business. But actually unwitting Evelyn is the one hope to defeat a multiverse villain threatening to destroy all realities. In the tax office an alt-reality Waymond from a more macho version of the multiverse does a Morpheus-from-The-Matrix act on her, whereupon the movie explodes into a frantic string of settings and worlds, fists furying and kicks flying, as Evelyn first learns the identity of and then confronts the cosmic menace, the story zipping along on and ornamenting its narrative with a series of brilliant, witty, bizarre and ingenious grace-notes.

The through-line, if we are disposed to stop and isolate it for a moment, is maybe a little pat: the importance of family, respecting your elders, accepting your offspring, all the anti-Seinfeld hugging and learning gubbins. There is perhaps a confusion too, over the movie’s moral: viz., that Evelyn has to ‘let her daughter go’. This is styled both as a (healthy) acceptance of Joy’s independence and individuality—her gayness, for instance, acknowledgement of which Evelyn initially resists—and as a more psychopathological desire on Joy’s part to commit suicide, to give up and die. For Evelyn to ‘let go’ in the latter sense would be an abdication of her love and duty for her daughter, surely; where ‘letting go’ in the first sense is a healthy and needful part of mutual growth. Eliding these, as the story seems to me to do, flirts with wrongness. But the movie as a whole is such a blast that it hardly matters.

Anyway I’m not really here to review this film, concerning which you will already have heard many good things, and which you’ve probably already seen. Instead I’m interested in the word ‘multiverse’. This is what Clute, Nicholls and Langford’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says about it:

Its best known early use was in an 1895 speech by US philosopher-psychologist William James (1842-1910), collected in his Will to Believe (1897): ‘Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe.’ This was anticipated by the scientist and science writer William Denovan, who in a published letter contributing to debate over planetary motion in our Solar System asserted (of God) that ‘the Great Mechanic presides over a universe, and not merely a cohering multiverse.’ (22 November 1873 Scientific American). 

Michael Moorcock reinvented the word for sf in ‘The Blood Red Game’ (May 1963 Science Fiction Adventures), where it stands for the totality of all possible alternate universes or Parallel Worlds. Placing such worlds in the common framework of the multiverse implies the possibility of contact, interaction and travel between alternate realities or Dimensions. This meaning, reinforced by very frequent restatement in Moorcock's later sf and even more in his Fantasy, is now commonly used in both sf and sf criticism.

This, I suppose, is the consensus. In the words of Michael Wood: ‘the word “multiverse” was coined by William James in 1895, but he was only talking about the one universe that kept failing to get its act together. (The OED says it was first used in its present sense by Michael Moorcock in 1963.)’ Is this right though?

I'd say the original Jamesian sense had already, before Moorcock, come under the pressure of physicists' and mathmeticians' speculations to come to mean something more like the modern sense of the word. J A Kennedy's The Triuneverse: A Scientific Romance (1912) spins a tale of, as its title suggests, three linked cosmoses. Cosmoi. Cosmim. Whatever the correct plural is. Kennedy's story starts with Earthly astronomers watching as Mars splits in two, afterwards fragmenting into myriad pieces that swarm out and destroy Jupiter and Saturn. Then the sun explodes. Our heroes escape destruction by diverting through an alternate universe, the ‘infratronic’ (that is, smaller than electronic) world, to arrive eventually at Alpha Centauri where life can begin again.

The term Kennedy brackets under his triuneverse concept is “multiverse”. Indeed the book's opening chapter is called ‘The Multiverse’, and the narrator argues that ‘the Universe displays the organization of the Multiverse, the life of the Organiverse, and the permanance of the Spirituverse’ [204] (hence Triuneverse, you see). A quick Google Books search reveals loads of pre-1963 hits for Multiverse, by no means all Jamesian, as well as plenty of hits for Organiverse and, indeed, Infiniverse.

I'm not trying to rob Moorcock of the credit for reintroducing the term. Kennedy's is, clearly, an obscure and little-known text, and it's with Moorcock that the term starts on its jorney to the mainstream, and today's Star Trek/Spiderman/Doctor Strange ubiquity. But I would insist that pretty much all the story-beats and conventions of ‘The Multiverse’ were in place before Moorcock slapped that moninker on it. 

For instance: Sam Merwin's House of Many Worlds (1951) sends its can-do hero Mack on a rollicking adventure through a sprig of parallel worlds, all accessible via a portal in Florida's Spindrift Key, for some reason:

Indeed, loads of Pulp SF parallel worlds adventures were published in the 1940s and 1950s. 

Raymond Jones’s Renaissance (originally serialized in Astounding, Jul-Oct 1944, later reissued in book form under the title Man of Two Worlds) opens in a utopia called Kronweld. We discover how this Utopia was created: Earth scientists, having discovered time travel, used it to go back and not only kill Hitler, but all the Hitlers: ‘we pointed out what changes there would have been in the world if such as Alexander, Nero, Attila, Hitler, Michoven, Drurila and the hosts like them could have been examined at birth and their criminal tendencies discovered and destroyed without giving them a chance at life.’ [138]. But there’s a hitch. Utopia proves sterile, so the population is maintained by Kronweldians raiding parallel realities and kidnapping their babies. ‘There exist parallel worlds,’ the novel informs us, ‘in which the oscillation rates of the component particles making up their atoms differ’ (the character who tells us this rather dismissively adds: ‘you won’t understand that, neither do I’). 

And in Fritz Leiber's Destiny Times Three (Astounding, March-April 1945: published in book form 1957) our protagonist Thorn rattles quickly through three alternative universes:

In three days he had seen three worlds, and none of them were good. World 3, wrecked by subtronic power, cold battlefield for a hopeless last stand. World 2, warped by paternalistic tyranny, smoldering with hate and boredom. World 1, a utopia in appearance, but lacking real stamina or inward worth, not better than the others — only luckier. [119]

This is merely the tip of the multiverseberg, there being, we are told, an ‘infinitude of infinitude’ of such dimensions. Thorn's access is provided by a ‘Probability Engine’ super-computer: ‘every point was adjacent to every other point, and so infinity was everywhere, and all paths led everywhere, and only thought could impose order or differentiate’. Leiber's preferred term for this multiverse is ‘transtime’. It seems to me that might just as easily have caught on as Moorcock's usage.

So there are multiple multiverses, and vice-versa multi-manyverse transtimes, all before Moorcock dispersed his diverse multiverses in nineteen sixty-three/which is rather late for me. 

-------

Postscript: 29-05-22. A couple of reactions to this post online. Here, my mate Rich Puchalsky thinks I've got the focus of the (second part of the) post wrong:

Why did Moorcock create a multiverse? Someone who does actual biographically informed criticism can give a real answer, but he is a prolific writer who had written a large number of fantasy and SF novels that used the same ideas but had different characters.

The concept of a multiverse joins all of these books together into a more or less coherent whole. Instead of being scattered books where Moorcock repeats himself with variations, they are retrospectively about different multiversal versions of the Eternal Champion. The Eternal Champion cycle begins (if that is a meaningful term in a multiverse) in the Moorcock book The Eternal Champion, which itself is a fix-up. Notably, the short references to other Moorcock works which make it multiversal only were added at the fix-up stage. Rather than write about the content of the Moorcock multiverse, I'll mention that as a publishing device it often took fans who read his Elric books and convinced them that the rest of his sprawling, prolific oeuvre was connected to them and that they should read the whole thing. Therefore, the precursor of Moorcock's multiverse was in an important sense not the various little-known books that used similar ideas, but James Branch Cabell's Storisende edition, which has many similar qualities

James Branch Cabell was a prolific and very good fantasy writer (although he did not call himself one: he was influenced by earlier genres), who decided to join up his books into one edition, and in the process put in little rewrites to connect them as the Lives of Manuel. Manuel is, basically, The Eternal Champion. His lives are spread out into pseudo-historical eras rather than a multiverse because Cabell saw himself as writing in the style of Walter Scott rather than as with Moorcock in the style of pulp SF or sword-and-sorcery. But the publishing effect was similar. Cabell gathered up everything he'd ever written, including his poetry, into an 18 book limited edition which he convinced a publisher to put out. He supposedly spent a year personally signing every book. More to the point, he not only modified the works slightly, he wrote new introductions for each of them that framed them as part of this overarching work, which did not exist until after most of them were written. The multiverse, then, is a way of restating one's artistic tics -- ideas that someone keeps coming back to, reused stylistic bits -- as not repetitions, but as the bones of a work. As such, it's perfect for contemporary media franchises. Marvel vaguely understands, as an amoeba does, that all of its products seem rather the same, so in makes a TV series Loki in which all of these repetitions are really part of its universe and therefore intended

This is very interesting to me, although I wonder if James Branch Cabell isn't rather better known on the other side of the Atlantic than over here. But I don't doubt I should read more of him. Then my old friend Abraham Kawa makes this suggestion: ‘one influential addition to pre-Moorcock multiverses is Gardner Fox's The Flash Of Two Worlds from 1961, which not only posits parallel timeline earths with variants of people, but posits the notion that one reality's people experience the others as dreams.’

A Trove of Triffids

John Wyndham's 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids manages the impressive task of making vegetables scary. It requires a degree of contrivance, but Wyndham pulls it off. First he posits bioengineered carnivorous plants that can walk about on three stumpy legs and sting their prey with whip-like tentacles. Then he adds-in a second disaster: a spectacular meteor shower, which may actually be an orbiting weapons platform, that happens to have the effect of blinding all who watch it, leaving whole populations helpless before the perambulating plants. The result is one of the masterpieces of British ‘cosy catastophe’ science fiction. 

The original Michael Joseph cover by Welsh artist John Griffiths (at the head of this post) imagines the triffid as a sort of giraffe-shaped artichoke on tuberous legs. Since ‘gigantic artichokes’ rather undersells how tense and scary Wyndham's novel actually is, Griffiths has superimposed spiraling green lines to convey alarm. Still, his conception of triffid was iconic enough for it to be copied across to the 1961 Penguin first paperback edition with only minimal changes:

There's something about the neatness of Penguin's orange-and-white livery that adds menace to the clear-line drawing of the plant in the middle; an effect enhanced by the way the penguin logo itself appears to be giving us an alarmed side-eye at the proximity of the monster. The cover art for the first US edition (1951), by New York artist Whitney Bender, reworks the British cover by adding turmoil in the sky:

The splendour of the rendering of city and sky rather dwarfs the poor little triffid, who looks more like an overgrown lampost than a monster. Bender was in his day a respected painter for whom book illustration was a sideline, and there's something a little too stately about his terror-plants. By way of contrast this Earle Bergey cover for the ‘Popular Library’ paperback of 1959 is much more kinetic and vivid, even if it relies for its effect on the titillation of partially undressing the books' heroine:

‘Revolt ...’ was clearly considered a grabbier title than ‘Day ...’, although that shout line is a little strange. Hard to read it, now, without inserting a tentative pause between the first and second words. ‘An  ... unusual science fiction novel’. Still the triffid itself is painted with impressive force and dynamism. And here's Gary Visikupic's cover-art for the 1979 Doubleday edition:

 Three of the things, I suppose, because of the tri- in triffid, athough the crazy sunflower hairdos and the grumpy-looking woman scurrying by bottom right, like Mrs Cut-Out in that Python sketch, perhaps add-up to a more ludicrous effect than this genuinely unsettling novel deserves. 

Anthony Burgess, "Puma" (2018)

 This new Burgess science-fiction novel is actually old-new, or twice-old-new: new in the sense that it has never been published before now, but old because it was actually written long ago, and old-old in the sense that original draft was chopped-about, reworked and amalgamated with other material to make Burgess’s 1982 novel The End of the World News. Back in 1975 Richard Zanuck and David Brown, producers of Jaws, decided their next blockbuster would be a reboot or reworking of When Worlds Collide, and they hired Burgess to come up with a story. With characteristic industry Burgess completed a book-length prose treatment of the idea by January 1976, calling the world-ending object hurtling towards the Earth on a killing trajectory ‘Puma’ and naming the novel after it. The movie, though, was never made.

Then, in 1980, came the success, commercial and critical, of Burgess’s Earthly Powers. It seems his UK and US publishers asked for something comparable, a ‘big’ novel as a follow-up. Burgess responded by welding together a trimmed down version of Puma (with the rogue planet renamed ‘Lynx’) with two other book-length projects he had sitting around in his desk drawer: a novel about the life of Sigmund Freud, originally written at the instigation of Canadian television (who contemplated a TV series on the subject) and the libretto to an unproduced opera about Leon Trotsky visiting New York in 1917. These components were, Burgess conceded with rather devastating offhandedness in an author’s note, ‘shuffled together’ to make End of the World News, cut into chunks and distributed across the whole—the intention, Burgess claimed, was to mimic the choppiness of channel-hopping whilst watching TV.

Burgess aficionados, in other words, have seen this work before, and may be tempted to regard Puma’s standalone publication, a quarter century after its author’s death, as doubly refried beans. That would be a mistake, though. This is a good SF novel, in many ways better than the version included so choppily in the 1982 publication. Here, freed of its adulterations, the story acquires genuine narrative momentum, and its worldbuilding, though designedly schlocky, builds an impressive heft. It is the kind of story that needs to barrel along, interruption-free, and in this version it is allowed to do precisely that.

The disaster, first impending and then actual, is parsed through more than a dozen main characters, Towering Inferno style—1974’s biggest movie and a manifest influence on Burgess’s approach. There are some splendid set-pieces, especially towards the end, and several of them were not included in End of the World News. Governments lie to their populations assuring them that Puma will pass, but they know the impact will destroy the earth, and work in secret to build a space-ark to carry a workable population of humans away from the disaster. The puritanically eugenicist process by which potential crewmembers are chosen (by a computer called VOZ) facilitates a deal of plunging Burgessian satire at the wickedness of calibrating human beings by criteria of absolute efficiency. Vanessa Frame, a pneumatic genius scientist who happens to be the daughter of the designer of the spaceship project is chosen, but her unfaithful, potbellied husband Val Frame finds himself excluded—in the End of the World News version he is deliberately left off the roster; here he is included at his wife’s insistence but gets stranded in a storm-wracked and flooded New York as the rest of the crew fly to Colorado to join the craft.

Val falls-in with the larger-than-life Courtland Willett, a hugely fat and rambunctious actor, once a Shakespearian player, now reduced to dressing up as Santa Claus in shopping malls. There’s a certain amount of verve to the way Burgess writes Willett—fierce, gluttonous, kindly, bold, lecherous, as easily moved to tears as anger, a drinker and smoker and roisterdoister—though, frankly, he loves and so indulges his creation a little too much. Comparisons with Falstaff are invited by the novel itself, but Burgess knows he’s pastiche Shakespeare rather than the real thing (he’s a Will-ette, rather than the full Will) and perhaps as a result overcompensates with long stretches of tiresome Elizabethan swearing: ‘snotnosed bastard … and now that I have leisure and breath, I might add that you are a slabberdegullion druggel, a doddipol jolthead, a blockish grutnol and a turdgut’ [48]. A little of this sort of thing goes a long way and, I’m sorry to say, Burgess gives us great scads of it.

Anyway: Val and Willett become friends, and trek across the disintegrating USA trying to reach the space-ark before it takes-off. They are, as it turns out, heading for an interestingly different novel’s-end than the one Burgess decided on for End of the World News.

Val is that most venal of figures, a writer of science fiction who supplements his income by teaching university courses on the genre; and Burgess takes this pretext to unload some de haut en bas sneering at the genre he is himself writing. Copies of Val’s ‘well-made but trivial fantasies’, we are told, ‘were to be found in airports, tobacconists and pornoshops, and they existed also in cassette adaptations and microfiche’ [34]—a nice example of how rapidly visions of the near future (Burgess in 1975 imagining America in 1999) tend to date. We’re given samples of Val’s fiction, including a number of fruity-sounding titles: ‘Eyelid of Slumber, Maenefa the Mountain, Cuspclasp and Flukefang, Desirable Sight, The Moon Dwindled’ [34]—a rather pleasing Jack Vance vibe to these, I’d say (actually the titles are all lifted from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems, a favourite of Burgess's). But Val himself loathes his own chosen genre, and unloads on his students.

‘Science fiction is, let’s be honest, ultimately a triviality,’ said Val. ‘It’s brain-tickling, no more. The American cult of mediocrity, which rejects Shakespeare, Milton, Harrison and Abramovitz, had led us to the nonsense of running university courses in science fiction. Christ, we should be studying Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins.’ This was indiscrete, he was also surprised at the vehemence with which he condemned the very thing he was being paid to promote. [37]

Burgess’s ostentatious flashing his cloven-hoof, here, is more endearing than shocking, the closest this honestly foursquare disaster novel comes to irony. Indeed, it is placed in a complicating context by editor Paul Wake’s inclusion, as appendices, of various accounts of 1970s SF titles from Burgess’s prodigious backlist of book-reviews. Some of these are as dismissive as Burgess’s Val: of Herbert’s Dune Burgess says ‘there is very little intellectual content in SF; neo-technological gimmicks don’t really tickle the higher centres’, and reviewing Gollancz’s 1978 list of genre titles he indulges in some satire at the expense of the gobbledygook he considers SF to be. Not only is it ‘a category of near-popular sub-art, meaning bad typewriterese on coarse paper’, but

SF plots are easily devised. We are a million years in the future, and the world is run by the Krompire, who have police robots called patates under the grim chief with the grafted cybernetic cerebrum whose name is Peruna. There is a forbidden phoneme. If you utter it you divide into two entities which continue to subdivide until you become a million microessences used to feed the life system of Aardappel, the disembodied head of the Krompir. But there is a phonemic cancellant called a burgonya, obtainable on the planet Kartoffel. You can get there by Besterian teleportation, but the device for initiating the process is in the hands of Tapuch Adamah, two-headed head of the underground Jagwaimo, Man must resist the System. The Lovers, who amate according to banned traditional edicts of Terpomo, proclaim Love. [241]

‘Type it out,’ Burgess instructs us, ‘and correct nothing: you will find yourself in the Gollancz SF constellation.’ But the reference to Alfred Bester in amongst all that potato-themed knockabout speaks to a man more familiar with the genre than he is letting-on. And other appendices included here, not least a lengthy, astute and enthusiastic introduction to J G Ballard’s collected short stories, gives the lie to his curmudgeon mode: where SF was concerned, Burgess both knew whereof he spoke and appreciated the things that the genre could do that mimetic fiction could not. I mean: look again at that sketched-out parody—let’s call it A Clockwork Potato—and confess: doesn’t it sound that a rather wonderful book? I’d certainly read it.

Andrew Biswell, director of Manchester’s ‘International Anthony Burgess Foundation’, and Paul Wake, of Manchester Metropolitan University, are general editors of the ongoing collected edition of Burgess’s complete works, the ‘Irwell edition’. Handsome comprehensively-annotated editions of 1965’s A Vision of Battlements 1986’s The Pianoplayers and 1976’s Beard’s Roman Women have already appeared; other titles are in the proverbial pipeline, or perhaps we should say (since Burgess never smoked a pipe) in the metaphorical cigarillo box. 

And notwithstanding his occasional grumpy animadversions against the genre, science fiction fans have good reason to be interested in Burgess. He wrote near future dystopia in A Clockwork Orange (1962) of course, as well as an influential overpopulation yarn The Wanting Seed (1962)—in fact Burgess complained that Harry Harrison stole both the idea and the reveal of Make Room! Make Room! from this novel—and 1985 (1978) is a reworking of Orwell’s celebrated novel. Moreover, Burgess novels not usually considered SF turn out, on closer inspection, to have key genre elements: the husband in One Hand Clapping (1961) is a telepath who has visions of impending global apocalypse, Inside Mr Enderby (1963) is narrated by time-travellers from the future (who in one scene manifest and creep around sleeping Enderby’s bedroom) and Burgess’s last published novel Byrne (1995) returns to near-future dystopian territory. Puma makes a fascinating companion piece to his lifelong, conflicted engagement with genre, quite apart from being an extremely good read in its own right.

[This review originally appeared in Foundation, 2018]

John Masefield Has Prostate Trouble

 

I must go down for a wee again, to the lonely porcelain bowl,
And all I ask is a strong stream and the aim to strike my goal;
And a quick shake and a tuck-in and a clean hand-washing,
And not to wake the wife up with my pre-dawn flushing.

I must get out of bed again, for the pressure calls inside
And my sloshy old sack of a bladder just will not be denied;
And all I ask is a quick slash with the light off, and away
And a simple shuffle back to bed, and a warm duvet.

I must to the GP again for a prescription of some kind
A pill or op or poultice, make my streaming more streamlined;
And all I ask is a few hours of uninterrupted snooze
And a good sleep, and a lie-in, and no midnight loos.

Some Five-Year-Old Titles

Must reviews be bang-up-to-date? Must blog-posts expend their attention upon century-old classics? What about the in-betweens? Here are some brief notes on books published in that dead-zone, five years since. I mean, I say five years ago. Anything from before Covid and Lockdown might as well be a century old to me. But there you are.

Peter Newman, The Deathless (HarperVoyager 2018) 

Some years ago I posted a series of online reviews of the Wheel of Time novels in which, amongst other things, I lamented the awfulness of Robert Jordan's prose. Some fans reacted crossly to this, one memorably telling me that Jordan was a better prose stylist than Flaubert. My suggestion, only half-jokingly made, that novels should be sold like wine—£4.99 for the supermarket plonk of Robert Jordan or Dan Brown, £29.99 a book for the finer flavours of, say, Vladimir Nabokov—was vilified. The prose of contemporary Fantasy was, I was assured, just fine, fit for purpose, a brilliant story-and-worldbuilding-delivering medium.

Which brings me to The Deathless, a chunk of neo-Gothic folderol set in ‘the endless forests of the Wild’, where humanity ekes out a precarious existence protected by magic crystals that ward off the myriad demons of the woods, all watched over by a chilly cast of immortals living in huge crystal castles. It’s quite a promising premise, but Newman assiduously rinses all the negative capability out of it with an unbroken stream of explain-y narrative, shining the torchlight of banality into every last corner of his concept. Still, there are consolations for the reader, not least the ingenuous badness of Newman’s prose: ‘The servant looked familiar in a way that suggested Vasin has seen him before’ [3]; ‘Though the pillars were as dull to look at as the walls, each one was double her girth.’ [46]; ‘She had sprained muscles in her shoulders, thighs and ankles’ [83]. That's: the muscles in her ankles. ‘Pits parted the sinewy hair’ [108]; ‘His face was ripe with anger, his body radiated it.’ [132]; ‘The fear in his voice was palpable.’ [193]. Excuse me for a moment whilst I palpate your voice. And finally: ‘She glared into his armpit, appalled.’ [251]. Well. Indeed.

Peter McLean, Priest of Bones (Ace 2018)

A quick check on Goodreads tells me that McLean's Rose Throne series has a large and enthusiastic fanbase, but it's a not a group to which I can claim membership I'm afraid. Priest of Bones is a sweary, very violent low-fantasy that ticks all the hackneyed grimdark boxes whilst also levering-in a series of, in this context, utterly unconvincing right-on postures about how awful rape is, how unsmiley-face is childhood abuse, how uncool homophobia. I did not buy this latter component one iota: a story that fucking loves its fucking stabby-stabby violence as much as this fucking story fucking does loses the right to pretend to righteousness on the topic of violation more broadly conceived. Story: a gang return from a Fantasyland war and settle into the mafia life in the city, using violence and murder to jockey for their position: a sort of magicland Peaky Blinders, or perhaps a Fantasy Boardwalk Empire. But it's very in your face, crudely written and I bounced hard, hard I say, off it. One final note: as a name, ‘Kant the Cunt’ is not funny the first time it is mentioned, and moves further into negative funny the more it is repeated.

Leslye Walton, The Price Guide to the Occult (Candlewick Press 2018)

A decently-enough written YA story concerning the various adventures of a young witch in the Pacific North West with the unusual name of ‘Nor Blackburn’. The novel charts the ups and downs of youth, a family curse, love etc, but I have to say I found it twee, uninvolving, and often platitudinous. I warmed to neither the magic nor Nor.

Catriona Ward, Little Eve (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2018)

This book won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the August Derleth Prize for Best Horror, so hasn't lacked for plaudits. Two sisters, part of a sect run by their inverted-commas ‘uncle’ on a remote Scottish island, sink deeper into either supernatural terror or perhaps only into the group-psychopathy of their strange, hermetic, violent cultic neo-religion. The whole story is written in a deliberately claustrophobic, vivid prose that alternates the eerie/uncanny with the ultraviolent and repulsive—two rather different modes, I think, that don’t actually mesh well together, such that the latter dissipates the former and the former serves only to mute the shock value of the latter. The descriptions of remote and desolate Scottish scenery are certainly well-written and effective, and the way the story takes us deeper into ‘uncle’s weird beliefs and rituals has a certain grisly power. But overall I found myself not really buying the vibe of this novel, and its twist-ending felt a bit scoobydoo. That said, this is clearly one of those occasions when you can safely ignore my reservations, go with the flow of the widespread praise, and pick up a copy.

Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan (Canongate 2018)

In The Book of Joan we're only twenty years into the future, but wars have rendered Earth a radioactive hell, and devolved genitalless humans have moved to a giant space-station known as CIEL. Cruel cult-leader Jean de Men has turned CIEL into a violent police state, and the novel spends quite a lot of time on the torture, dismemberment, sexualized asexuality and body scarification that goes on there. But then again, there's the titular Joan, a holy child with a blue-light in her head, who sings a song of healing, until she is murdered, or rather until she sacrifices herself Aslan-like (Joan of Arc, you see). 

There is stuff in this novel to like, or at least to admire: some valiant championing of otherness, weirdness and gender fluidity and a general why-can't-we-just-get-along war-is-hell love-the-planet sexism-and-bigotry-is-bad earnestness. But it’s too much of a mess: the various elements in its (schematic, generic) worldbuilding don't make sense, and I wearied of the violence, the underbaked characters, the bloat. It's a short novel but felt interminable, as Sadean torture scene followed Sadean torture scene. 

More, I was struck that Yuknavitch didn't seem to be able to distinguish between expressive, vivid writing (of which there's a good deal in the book) and ludicrous, inadvertently-comical writing of the ‘a pang stings my throat at the memory of pigs’ and ‘as a genital entrepreneur I’d be delighted to talk with you’ kind. Conceivably that is the point: which is to say, conceivably this is a deliberate refusal to abide by the canons of quote-unquote good taste, a deliberate blurring of the beautiful and the crass-and-dumb. Perhaps A pang stings my throat at the memory of pigs is, quite deliberately, an alexandrine (this is a retelling of the Joan of Arc story, after all). Maybe ‘I stare at her little head. Why are young adults’ heads so little?’ isn't a ludicrous thing to write. ‘What kind of population emerges up among the stars? A wad of alabaster meated things driven only by appearance and entertainment’ works as satire, but ‘Jean de Men stares at her. Is his smile losing its sureness, are his eyes starting to boil?’ is just bad writing, surely. Boiling eyes indeed. Of the Saintly Joan's martyrdom one character declares: ‘we'd cry great waves of love and rage for this young woman, whose resistance made our own lives look empty as nadless ball sacks.’ You certainly don't get that in George Bernard Shaw.