Utopia

Thomas More Utopia (1516)
I tried this many years ago, prompted by curiosity arisen from reading Lorraine Stobbart's Utopia – Fact or Fiction?, an academic text found in the Mesoamerican section of Foyles. Stobbart's book - which I believe was originally composed as a dissertation for some degree course, either literary or anthropological - examines the possibility of Utopia having been inspired by obscure accounts of Mayan society in the Yucatan.

It is hard to believe that in more than four-hundred-and-seventy years which have passed since the book first appeared, no-one has seriously challenged the interpretation of Utopia as a work of fiction.

So that's what drew me to More's book, and specifically to a Dover edition edited, and presumably translated, by Ronald Herder. Unfortunately it bordered on unreadable, so I abandoned it after about fifteen pages, gave it to Andy Martin, and was thusly left with an unfavourable impression of More's great work:

...events transpiring to bring characters together in order that lengthy speeches may be delivered. I read something similar in Thomas More's Utopia in which some geezer bores his friends shitless with an exhaustive account of what he saw in a mythic foreign land where no-one goes hungry and Sting is president or something - I don't remember it too well, the details weren't overly riveting. Anyway, I never finished Utopia.*

I think I bought this edition mainly because it was there, or perhaps some misplaced sense of either guilt or unfinished business. Anyway, this one is translated by one Paul Turner and is frankly gripping, which just goes to show what damage can be wrought by a dull translation; and just to get it out of the way, whilst Cortés and his band of enterprising ruffians were the first Europeans to arrive in and report upon Mexico and its people, it's true that they weren't absolutely the first. There were at least two individuals shipwrecked and integrated to a greater or lesser degree into Mayan society years before Cortés, as mentioned in early accounts by Bernal Díaz and others. I suppose there may have been others we've forgotten who somehow managed to get some subsequently buried relación back to Europe, but it really doesn't seem very likely. Furthermore, I'm reasonably familiar with the ins and outs of Mayan society as were around the start of the sixteenth century, and not only is Utopia distinctly lacking in parallels, but for the most part it quite obviously describes something both allegorical and completely different, and that would be my guess as to why no-one has seriously challenged the interpretation of Utopia as a work of fiction, Lorraine Stobbart. Just because you've stuck a question mark on the end and made a spooky face, doesn't mean there's an actual mystery.

Thomas More, as much older readers may recall, was Henry VIII's consigliere, the man with the unenviable job of pointing out when his Royal Highness was taking the piss, which, it could be argued, occurred on at least five occasions. Paul Turner's introduction paints More as having been highly intelligent, good humoured, principled, and with a keen understanding of when it was probably best to keep his thoughts to himself. Henry eventually had him wacked for failing to display sufficiently explosive enthusiasm in regard to all those divorces and beheadings, rather than for anything More actually said. Utopia therefore tactfully sets forth a model of civilisation which certain countries might like to adopt, or at least take notes, not mentioning no names or nuffink; because had More made such proposals directly, it probably wouldn't have gone very well for him. The narrative pretends to take a vaguely autobiographical course with More meeting his real life friend, Peter Gilles, a magistrate of Antwerp whilst overseas on official business.

'There's this bloke you should meet,' says Gilles. 'He's really interesting. He's just got back from this place called Utopia.'

'Sure,' says More agreeably. 'Whatevers.'

'I just come back from this place called Utopia,' says the really interesting man once an introduction is effected. 'Blinding, it was.'

'Tell me more,' says More, and thus does the really interesting man embark upon a sentence of one-hundred pages duration telling of all the things seen in Utopia, most of which seem one fuck of a lot more civilised than what you have in certain countries, not mentioning no names or nuffink. More occasionally interjects with something like, 'well, I don't know if I agree with that and I'd say the government of our own amazing king back in England probably has the right idea,' but you can tell he's just being diplomatic.

Some have interpreted More's proposed perfect society as a nascent form of Communism, although probably for the same reason one might regard Christianity as a nascent form of Communism in terms of not acting an arsehole, refraining from stealing things, and avoiding undue emphasis placed on material property. Also it should be kept in mind that this was a perfect society as envisioned by a sixteenth century man with certain prejudices of his own, and is thus better read as a stimulus to thought than as a manifesto; but most significantly, it's a genuinely wonderful book - at least in this translation - and one which should be read more widely today, given that the popularity of certain orange presidents has rudely proven how much we, as a society, have still to learn.

*: Taken from my review of something or other on a long extinct forum and reprinted in this amazing collection, which you should definitely buy, what with Christmas coming up and everything.

Seaton Point

Robert Dellar, Ted Curtis, Rob Colson etc.
Seaton Point (1998)
This is a collaborative novel cooked up between seven different authors, each presumably contributing a passage here, a passage there, editing each other's work and so on. The process of its creation hasn't exactly made for a smooth narrative, but then that's the whole point, relating more to oral traditions of storytelling because it is forgotten that the modern novel of single authorship came into being only in the modern era, as we are told in the introduction.

I thought it might be stranger than it was to read this now. Robert Dellar, who instigated this enterprise, was a good friend who recently passed on at the age of fifty-two, someone I've known for decades. It was odd to realise that I'd never read this book while he was alive, and when we last spoke and the subject came up he was surprised that he'd never got around to slipping me a copy. I think it was simply that my attention had been elsewhere when the thing saw print. I knew of it mainly through the involvement of Rob Colson, with whom I travelled to Mexico in 2005, and I've known all but two of the other writers in a social context at various points of our respective lives. So I suppose there has always been the worry that I might hate the thing for whatever reason.

Roughly speaking, Seaton Point captures the psychological landscape in which a few of us were living for much of the eighties, nineties, and beyond. I was never quite part of a gang, but a lot of my friends seemed to be people who had fallen into the orbit of the Brougham Road squatting community in Hackney, London - loosely coalesced around bands such as the Apostles and the Assassins of Hope and numerous fanzines. They were, I suppose, my Andy Warhol's Factory crowd, my beat poets, my Bromley contingent - but hopefully without too many of the wankier associations summoned by any of those references - so, even in 2017 with me living on a different side of the planet, these are probably my people in so much as I ever had people. Andy of the Apostles would have called us the dispossessed, which seems as good a term as any; and so Seaton Point is inhabited by those left behind, the horrible fuckers who couldn't fit in if they tried, those rejected as lacking redeeming or interesting artistic qualities even by those making arts council funded punk documentaries, the working class as we were known in less aspirational times, the nutters, the weirdos, the alkies, the transexual vampires...

The narrative lurches in and out of reality, much in the same way as reality itself tends to do if you're paying attention, and so we have drugs, sex, violence, toilet humour, and psychogeography drafted in to tell of an ancient demon imprisoned in the basement of a tower block, a man trapped in an elevator in the same surviving on mystic yoghurt dispensed from a spigot, and their bid for freedom. With seven authors at the wheel, there are a lot of characters flying around, not all of them entirely likeable and it's easy to get lost, but I'm not sure it matters whether or not one is able to keep track of every last name, because the point still works despite the confusion.

Blokey sat in flat 67, his earplugs partly protecting him from the onslaught of industrial electronic bollocks about fascist barbarian armies rolling across the icy wastes of Northern Europe. As one million decibels of tripe by Coil vomited mercilessly from the speakers, the dice man stroked the sawn-off shotgun lying across his lap as if it were a furry animal.

That's my favourite paragraph, and I suspect it came from Dellar given his generally poor regard of industrial electronic bollocks. I've  read a few things by Ted Curtis, notably the exceptional Darkening Light, as well as Rob Colson's brilliant - at least from what I can remember - Descent of a Man, which he really needs to get into print one of these days; so I recognise occasional elements which remind me of specific contributors, but the focus remains, as ever, on the story which may be taken as an explanation as to why everything is shit, if you like, or if you don't like, then there are plenty of chuckles, albeit often unusually dark chuckles. My first thought was that this is Rachel Redhead rewriting Lawrence Miles' This Town Will Never Let Us Go as a sequel to Trainspotting, which as a recommendation should probably be taken all three ways, assuming you can appreciate that as a recommendation. Martin Amis is invoked in the introduction, although not in particularly glowing terms. I haven't actually read any Martin Amis, but I've read plenty of Will Self and I'm told it's the same thing; so if you like, this is Will Self with less public school and more diarrhoea blah blah Rabelais blah blah Hogarth blah blah Reader's Wives - I'm sure it can't be too hard to work out what I'm saying here; and it has the greatest closing sentence of any novel I've ever read, which I won't give away for obvious reasons.

Seaton Point is both horrible and brilliant, and arguably a record of an era of human experience presently getting airbrushed from history as the nostalgia industry grows and grows, replacing more and more of what actually happened with Stewart Maconie chortling away over how they changed the name of Opal Fruits to Starburst. In this sense it's probably also an important book, but you wouldn't want to say it to its face.

The Black Cloud

Fred Hoyle The Black Cloud (1957)
I had been trying to get hold of this one ever since I saw Dawkins rate it on one of those books you read as a kid shows, back when Dawkins was less annoying. The one I ordered from Amazon turned out to be an abridged effort printed for schools, about as thick as an After Eight mint and with half of the already reduced page count taken up by teachers notes and questions along the lines of why did the scientist think the Earth would become colder when the Black Cloud arrived? My friend Andy told me there was no point reading an abridged Black Cloud, so I didn't.

Nevertheless I kept looking because I'd promised myself I would find the thing, and was buoyed along by a vague childhood memory of my granny having fetched another Fred Hoyle science-fiction novel from the mobile library for me to read when I was ill. Only recently have I positively identified said novel as having been Into Deepest Space, not Neutron Star as I remember for some peculiar reason given that the latter title refers to a collection of short stories by Larry Niven. Anyway, I enjoyed Into Deepest Space immensely, so it was probably the first science-fiction novel I read, not counting Doctor Who books based on television shows.

Of course, Fred Hoyle was primarily a scientist, and one who now seems best known for having duffed up Stephen Hawking around the back of the bike sheds on occasions when the latter failed to cough up his dinner money, although the psychological underpinning of the battering was probably something to do with Hawking's theories supplanting Hoyle's steady state model of the universe. Hoyle seems to have been somewhat discredited in recent years, which is a shame as I still think the steady state is a nice idea and not entirely without merit, although some of the stuff he cooked up with that Chandra Wickramasinghe was obviously complete bollocks.

Anyway, I kept an eye open and thus made purchase of two cowritten novels - The Andromeda Breakthrough with John Elliott, and Seven Steps to the Sun with his offspring, Geoffrey Hoyle. They're pretty much unreadable, hard science diluted with a load of crap which I suspect some editor may have suggested would help sell the books - Ian Flemingisms and unconvincing references to the manly pursuit of smoking a pipe whilst making lurve to a beautiful woman. In spite of this, my search continued and has at last been rewarded.

Hard science-fiction is sort of the Paul Weller of science-fiction literature, I suppose - plenty of clenching and suggestions of commitment and less of the prancing around in dresses or talking about feelings; or page after page of top scientists having conversations about different kinds of proton, if you prefer - the kind of thing by which Isaac Asimov made his name. That said, in hard science-fiction terms, Asimov reads like one of Michael Moorcock's more inscrutably peculiar efforts compared to The Black Cloud.

The story is fairly simple - a massive cloud of dark gas approaches the solar system and comes to rest, blocking out the sun. The Earth freezes, everything begins to die, and it looks as though we're fucked until the point at which a group of plucky scientists realise that the cloud is intelligent and that communication is possible, and I won't spoil the rest. Most of this is told in a fashion which I would describe as plodding were I a less patient man, alternating passages reading more like essays than fiction, and droning conversations about protons and temperature differentials amongst numerous tweedy scientists, with the occasional light-hearted cricketing reference just to break it up a bit. It should be terrible, but the reader is quickly accustomed to this somewhat stilted style because that which is discussed, if not quite gripping, is certainly interesting.

Four days earlier in London a remarkable meeting had been held in the rooms of the Royal Astronomical Society. The meeting had been called, not by the Royal Astronomical Society itself, but by the British Astronomical Association, an association essentially of amateur astronomers.

Charles Kingsley, Professor of Astronomy in the University of Cambridge, travelled by train in the early afternoon to London for the meeting. It was unusual for him, the most theoretical of theoreticians, to be attending a meeting of amateur observers. But there had been rumours of unaccounted discrepancies in the positions of the planets Jupiter and Saturn. Kingsley didn't believe it, but he felt that scepticism should rest on solid ground, so he ought to hear what the chaps had to say about it.

Hold onto your hats, kids, because here we fucking go!!!

Seriously, in spite of itself, there's something in the tone and pacing of The Black Cloud which holds it all together. Despite the tweedier qualities, the somewhat predictable subtext of how everything would be better if we let scientists run the show, the suggestion of worldly experience which doesn't go much beyond handing in end of term papers and then enjoying a jolly old spot of cricket, despite all of its crankier qualities, The Black Cloud is an impressively solid novel, and - much to my surprise - one that has been worth every second of the wait. I suppose this is because, rather than having someone else come along to strip in details which might appeal to those who didn't actually want to read a science-fiction novel in the first place, Hoyle writes to his own strengths. There are some wonderful engrossing passages, not least the thoroughly convincing speculation on how intelligent life might develop within a cloud of interstellar gas, and even a few amusing steady state gags incorporated into discussion of the anthropic principal and even religion - one in the eye for the exploding-universe boys, as Hoyle puts it. The sobriety of the narrative lends the events of the story a greater and more chilling weight than one might experience were the tale to be told in more poetic terms. This shit could actually happen.

So Dawkins was right - The Black Cloud really is a classic.

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866)

Well, I suppose it serves me right for trying to broaden my horizons, to branch out and generally embiggen myself through the magic of proper literature sans airbrushed spacecraft on the covers. Crime and Punishment may well be deserving of its reputation, but I was bored shitless for the most part. I suppose it must be me, because no-one on the internet seems to have a bad word to say about this particular translation, the work of one Sidney Monas - indeed, this version is praised as definitive in a few places I've looked. I'm no stranger to the long-haired books section of the library, so I'm fairly certain of my not being entirely stupid, at least in so much as I can tell that there are readers considerably less perceptive than myself out there, but nevertheless I found Crime and Punishment a tremendous bore.

I spoke to my mother who told me that she had found it similarly turgid.

'I'm just not enjoying it,' I said.

'I don't think you're supposed to enjoy it,' she suggested.

Similarly, my friend Andy Martin opined that Dostoyevsky, like Gogol and Pushkin, is one huge yawn from start to finish, and Andy is both well and widely read.

I'm not saying either that Crime and Punishment is without merit or that I hated every minute, but some chapters were distinctly more engaging than others, and the more yawnsome sections became such a slog as to mean that it became pointless my reading them during the bedtime shift. I generally read for an hour after I get up each morning, and then for another hour before I go to bed. For some reason I am better able to appreciate detail in the morning, although the difference is rarely so pronounced as to make for books which I can't read at all in the evening, but this was one of them; and so it really began to drag out as I took to reading Danny Baker's autobiography and then an L.Ron Hubbard novella before bed - you know, reading for pleasure.

I've enjoyed Danny Baker's radio shows for many years, and have appeared on one of them at least twice. Going to Sea in a Sieve (2012) relates the best part of his younger years growing up in and around Bermondsey and Deptford in south-east London up until his first television appearances. It retains his typically ripe turn of phrase as heard on the wireless, and makes for a genuinely fascinating read even beyond the wisecracks, not least because it turns out that I know a few of the places in which he grew up; and I'd even go so far as to say that Going to Sea in a Sieve represents a valuable time capsule of both an era and a specific kind of childhood which probably doesn't happen any longer, what with your downloads and your pornotubes and what have you. Belly laughs alternate with moments of surprising profundity.

It was George Currie, the fantastic wiry guitarist from Dundee that now stepped forward as spokesman for the band.

'Why don't you fuck off?' he reasoned.

Obviously I'm quoting that as an example of the former.

If I have any criticism, it is that the tone occasionally veers into the as told to territory of the ghostwritten celebrity footballer biography, as I said to my famous friend, Adge Cutler of the chart topping Wurzels pop band; but I suspect this may be just a natural interference pattern resulting from what is essentially a conversation set down as prose. In any case, it's not a massive problem, and Going to Sea in a Sieve makes for one hell of a livelier read than Crime and Punishment.

Returning to which, I got through Crime and Punishment in the end, which at least suggests it has some discernible value above those few novels on which I've given up with just a hundred or so pages left, Robert Heinlein's fucking abominable Stranger in a Strange Land for example. Cheating, I consulted Wikipedia every few days in order to work out what I had just read:

Crime and Punishment focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in St. Petersburg who formulates and executes a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her cash. Raskolnikov argues that with the pawnbroker's money he can perform good deeds to counterbalance the crime, while ridding the world of a worthless vermin. He also commits this murder to test his own hypothesis that some people are naturally capable of such things, and even have the right to do them. Several times throughout the novel, Raskolnikov justifies his actions by comparing himself with Napoleon Bonaparte, believing that murder is permissible in pursuit of a higher purpose.

Most of this I already knew. Some of it seemed unclear, and I remained unable to see quite how the novel was doing that which it supposedly does for about three quarters of the book. The translator's afterword suggest this to be a novel concerned with the gulf between ideology and human nature, which makes it sound a lot more interesting than I found it. I can see it in passages such as:

'I'll show you their books. It's always the influence of the environment with them, that's all they know! They love that phrase! If society were constructed normally, therefore, all crimes would disappear at once because there would be nothing to protest against and we'd all become righteous in a flash. Nature doesn't count; nature gets chased away; nature's not supposed to exist! They won't have mankind developing along some living historical path to the end, turning finally of itself into normal society; but on the contrary, a social system emerging from some kind of mathematical brain that's going to reconstruct mankind and make it in one moment righteous and sinless, quicker than any life process, no living or historical path needed! Instinctively they don't like history, and that's why.'

Unfortunately I found instances of such clarity few and far between, islands amongst page after page of rambling dialogue of ambiguous consequence, sometimes with one person holding forth before another for the duration of an entire chapter, complete with aggravating self-conscious digressions of are you still listening? or you must think I'm going on a bit, old fruit and the like - no fucking kidding.

Oddly, just as some modern novels read like television drama - the work of authors who would rather be writing for their favourite medium, but can't either because they're too shit even for television or all this time they've been sucking the wrong dicks; Crime and Punishment reads in part like a stage production set down as print due to prohibitive length, and in a couple of places it reads as though the narrative is aware of this to some extent. There is a scene in part one, chapter four wherein Raskolnikov encounters a vulnerable and obviously drunken girl in a park, and notices a seemingly villainous dandy lurking nearby with apparent ignoble intent. Raskolnikov discusses both the girl and the dandy with a policeman even as said dandy continues to lurk as though stood to one side of a stage, ready to resume his advances on the destitute girl. In part three, chapter five Razumikhin is described standing with his back to the audience, which feels like a theatrical allusion. Of course, unless I'm just imagining this layer of artificiality, it may itself be a deliberate evocation of the theme of ideology or hypothetical structure imposed over that which exists.

The above may of course all be complete bollocks, given that I'm reading a translation, and that I failed to really engage with it after the first few chapters. There are some interesting and arguably quite important ideas, poorly expressed - in my possibly limited view - which is a shame because they might also serve to explain why the Soviet Union went tits up once they made Joseph Stalin head boy, so it's a pity some of those guys apparently couldn't get to grips with this one either.

You're better off with Danny Baker.

At least I was.

Splitting In Two

Robert Dellar Splitting In Two (2014)
I first encountered the name of Robert Dellar back in 1983 or thereabouts as one half of Cult of the Supreme Being whose song Chlorine Fills My Lungs particularly impressed me when I heard it on a compilation tape on the Cause For Concern label; which was around the same time I first began writing to Andy Martin, then of an unusually tuneful punk group called The Apostles. Robert's name turned up time and again under various guises on cassettes put out by Dead Hedgehog Enterprises of Watford, and eventually I met him in person as I ended up playing guitar in one of Andy Martin's later bands and it transpired that they knew each other quite well.

That said, I was never quite sure what to make of him. He always seemed too busy to talk, or just about to go somewhere, and I got the impression he regarded me as merely one of Andy's many drooling acolytes. I attended a Mad Pride live event which Robert had organised at The Garage in Islington in 2003 - in part because I was amongst the performers and was scheduled to appear on stage with the Ceramic Hobs - and I was surprised when Robert came up to me, asking if I had paid to get in. His point was that my name had been on the guest list so I shouldn't have handed over any quids, but I was more taken aback by his actually knowing who I was, as it had been a few years by that point.

Splitting In Two is Robert's autobiographical account of the Mad Pride movement he helped instigate, his life, and his often fraught dealings with the mental health authorities. I know quite a few of the people in this book, and appeared on stage at two of the live musical events described herein. One of people described by Robert regularly slept on my couch every other weekend up to the point at which he started going on about buying rare Skrewdriver albums and thusly somewhat pissed on his chips where I was concerned; and I'm familiar with a few of the more unpleasant stories of psychiatric brutality related in Splitting In Two through having already heard them from Andy Martin, who was also there, and who has by various peculiar twists of fate come to number amongst my bestest friends.

The point to my mentioning any of this is that it will be virtually impossible for me to offer an objective view of this book, because I was either there, or at least stood just around the corner for some of it; although I suppose this at least means I can offer some sort of confirmation that Robert hasn't just made this shit up for chuckles.

It seems initially an uneven read, literally split between lively if occasionally harrowing autobiographical details, and the dryer tone of discussion regarding psychiatric matters, doubtless informed by the number of reports Robert has been required to submit to hospital authorities over the years. This is probably acknowledged, perhaps unwittingly, in the title, taken from an Alternative TV song, more consciously chosen as an allusion to the dialectical model of philosophical and political analysis first elucidated by Hegel and then developed by Marx, amongst other things; which is stated on the third page and probably shouldn't put you off. However, this initially uneven quality becomes less apparent as the book goes on, and I'm not sure it even matters; although I have no idea whether I would find the contents quite so fascinating were I unable to recognise at least a few of the persons and situations involved.

Well anyway, from my entirely unreliable position, I would tentatively suggest this is potentially quite an important book. Dellar's beef - as has been that of the Mad Pride movement - is that those diagnosed as clinically insane remain the last group in western society whose human rights may be legally withdrawn without explanation or accountability, who can be pumped full of dangerous mind-altering substances on the say so of someone whose stated justification requires no more medical rigour than it might work, so let's see what happens. The psychiatric system, Robert argues, might therefore be seen as authoritarian and capitalist society in microcosm, stripped free of all window dressing. He further argues that mental illness is itself more often than not either an inevitable by-product of our society, or at very least a condition which is significantly exacerbated by the same.

I'd decided on this course of action because I'd been reminded of the theoretical difficulties I had with the discipline of psychiatry, which saw distress and mad behaviour as an illness caused by genetic and biochemical factors, rather than as a legitimate response to a sad world in which sane responses had proved themselves inadequate.

Having myself briefly gone bonkers back in 2004, the blame for which I lay entirely on an employer concerned more with shareholders than those either doing or being served by the job in question, I'd say that Robert Dellar's assessment seems about right; and even my doctor told me I wasn't mad but was simply responding quite logically to a ridiculous and impossible situation.

Splitting In Two stumbles along, splattering refutations of psychiatric theory left right and centre amongst all the tales of mad stuff and far too much drink, and is a lot more fun than anything with quite so many suicides probably has a right to be, but concludes as a quietly inspiring panoramic view of our society and everything that's wrong with it; and for all the fits and starts with which it kicks off, the closing chapter, is one of the finest, most elegant summaries I've read anywhere, or at least it left me with the impression of my having read something much greater than the sum of its parts.

I have no way of telling how much sense this will make to anyone other than myself, but I hope it will make a lot, because I would tentatively suggest this is one of those rare books which really everyone needs to read.

The Darkening Light

Ted Curtis The Darkening Light (2014)
Many centuries ago I printed The Devil Lives in Hackney, a short story by Ted Curtis in some fanzine or other, and still regard it as easily amongst the better things I've ever helped foist upon a largely indifferent public, so I am possibly not the most impartial critic. I knew Ted, or at least knew of Ted as someone living in the same house as Dave Fanning and Andy Martin, best known as formerly of The Apostles who were by that point members of a band called Academy 23, which I'd just joined. I was sat in Dave's room, watching him draw and talking about comics as Ted maintained a silent mohicaned presence on the other side of the room. I'll be honest, it was odd. He didn't seem hostile, but it was like being in a room with an aquarium containing a fish of such volume that you couldn't help but wonder what it might be thinking.

'That Ted is a bit quiet, isn't he?' I later remarked.

'A bit pissed more like,' Dave explained.

I was surprised, because Ted had neither said nor done anything I would have identified as the actions of someone under the refreshing influence of cold drinks. I hadn't even noticed a tell-tale can or bottle, and Dave's hypothesis was illustrated on another, similar occasion, identical to the first but for Ted somehow falling out of the chair without having apparently made any preliminary effort to stand, before departing with think I might go back to bed for a bit, which is possibly the most I've ever heard him say in one go. Once again, I hadn't even realised he'd had a few, and I'd found it impossible to assess the situation, or to imagine what he could have been thinking.

I suspect he may have been thinking thoughts that felt like this novel, a couple of days in the life of vegan anarchist punks in 1986 as they visit that London to attend a Concrete Sox, Eat Shit and Heresy gig, and their van breaks down. It's almost a stream of consciousness that probably could have been written as one continuous hundred page sentence without too much difference to the tone - crappy homebrew, crappy vans, wrists cut on broken windows, self-loathing, amyl nitrate, hangovers, bright orange diarrhoea with no toilet paper, and sharing a glue bag with the bloke out of Conflict. It could have gone horribly wrong, as novels with any sort of musical or subcultural element often do - here thinking mainly of Irvine Welsh rushing to tell the members of his writers' group about the junkie he met in the pub and all the great new material he's harvested - but Ted Curtis doesn't appear to give a shit about impressing the reader with his arcane knowledge, or waving used needles under the noses of whoever is likely to take the most lucrative offence; rather, he just gets on with it and tells the story, and the rest is up to us.

It isn't exactly Bukowski or Billy Childish in tone, but it makes similar moves in describing extreme situations without the hysterics that might get in the way of our understanding them, regardless of how well we may or may not identify. It's not so much Thoreau's men leading lives of quiet desperation, as lives of extremely noisy desperation, seasoned with a reasonable dose of humour of the kind that doesn't need to stick on a red nose and pull faces in order to get its point across; and it feels quite profound, in that even if you've never had an argument about burnt tofu burgers or shat yourself in the corner of a beaten up van, then you should nevertheless still be able to appreciate what The Darkening Light says about the bullshit we all put ourselves through, sometimes because it seems like the only option. It's the best thing I've read in a while by quite some margin, and it's nice to know that at least someone is still writing real books. Buy this fucker immediately!

And buy this fucker immediately from here.

Project Pope

Clifford D. Simak Project Pope (1981)
A year or so ago I read and reviewed Simak's A Choice of Gods, one of the author's supposedly mystic novels - although that wasn't a term of his choosing - exploring ideas of religion and a spiritual dimension which might be viewed as a sort of cosmic kinship of living things. The review provoked the apparent indignation of Bongo Smallpiece, a member of an online community of Simak fans in which I occasionally participate - that's not actually his name, but let's pretend it is. My review was stuffy, Bongo told me without feeling the need to  explain quite what he meant, and I got the impression he was annoyed at my having formed an opinion of the novel without consulting him first. He offered some further nebulous comment about things you would better understand had you grown up in nature's bosom, as did I, or words to that effect, which seemed faintly ludicrous given that I grew up on a farm which is the same fucking thing so far as I'm concerned; but when people pull cloaks over their heads and talk at me, a torch held beneath the chin so as to create a scary face just like in a Tim Burton film, I find it difficult to take them seriously, particularly when they claim understanding of forces that don't actually exist as part of some weirdly misjudged exercise in oneupmanship.

Anyway, Bongo's other favourite Simak novel was Project Pope, so I approached it with some trepidation - wouldn't want to anger the wise one after all; but first, by way of an authorial recap, here's what Andy Martin of UNIT had to say, quoted here simply because it's so nicely put:

In the early 1980s I read three books by Clifford Simak yet I have absolutely no recollection of their titles. They were all rather thin (page count) but thick (in ideas and characters). Oddly, I read them one after another as almost three facets of the same book.

I do know I enjoyed them because I recommended them to Dave - I gave them to him as a present circa 1985 shortly after the release of the fifth Apostles EP. When I read them I imagined a soundtrack by Aaron Copland with occasional incursions by Carl Ruggles for those curious, slightly surreal sections that require more atonal music.

For me, Simak is the acceptable face of American ruralism - his characters really ought to be clichés and yet somehow they aren't - at least not in my opinion. Certainly it's not the kind of science fiction I normally enjoy but not once do I remember becoming irritated, impatient or offended by his style or content. He also has an ear for dialogue - I gained the impression he really liked most of his characters.

Anyway, Project Pope was written towards the end of Simak's life, and it's tempting to see this novel as an examination of mortality and  thoughts regarding death, which it may well be, although it's probably more significant that it further investigates themes explored a decade earlier in A Choice of Gods, itself expanding on ideas of universal kinship that had been running through Simak's fiction right from the beginning. I found A Choice of Gods a little underwhelming in that it didn't seem to communicate its ideas well - at least not to an intemallectual scientistic square divorced from the spirits of the Earth such as what I am. Although Project Pope seems similarly lacking in plot, it does a little better, or at least pulls together in the closing chapters.

The scenario here concerns a group of theologically inclined robots who have founded the institution of Vatican-17 on a remote planet called End of Everything. As ever, Simak's robots are probably unique in the history of science-fiction, as amiable as those of Asimov, but also thoughtful and effectively a race in their own right long divorced from mechanical servitor ancestry. In essence they can be regarded as innocent humans, enquiring spirits unburdened by the belligerent baggage of humanity. The enquiring spirits have in this case constructed a Pope, a machine designed to evolve and so to achieve such profoundly deep thought as to equal the ageless wisdom of even Bongo Smallpiece become a true intermediary between God and His creation. The true nature of that creation is similarly under investigation with the help of Vatican-17's human Listeners who telepathically explore other dimensions in search of Heaven, and it all takes a weird turn about half way through the book when it seems one of them has found it. We encounter mathematical entities strongly suggestive of those encountered by Asher Sutton in Simak's Time and Again, and a last minute revelation as Vatican-17 is attacked by Smoky and the Plopper. Smoky and the Plopper are alien inhabitants of the dimension initially believed to be Heaven. If you want to read that sentence again just to be sure, please be my guest.

The thing is, none of this is played for chuckles, and Project Pope ambles along in typical Simakian fashion, unassuming and yet endlessly thought provoking, and ultimately adding up to something much greater than the sum of its parts. I doubt there's been another author who could really have carried this story off without it all going horribly wrong, I mean seriously - Smoky and the Plopper - I'm still not sure if it's the most ridiculous thing I've ever read or a stroke of genius, although given my having to resort to such stock phraseology, it's probably the latter.

As with A Choice of Gods, the conclusion seems to be nothing more profound than that a person who claims to understand religion cannot by definition have understood religion, and so the search continues. Project Pope falls some way short of Simak's greatest, but nevertheless serves as a fine example of what made him so unique as a writer.