Monty - His Part in My Victory

Spike Milligan Monty - His Part in My Victory (1976)
I needed something light after On the Road, and this was funny when I was fourteen - or whatever age I would have been when I first read it - so here I am again. Monty is part three of Milligan's memoir of the second world war, reading more like the second part of Rommel? Gunner Who? than a book by its own terms, accounting for just four relatively uneventful months of 1943 in what is a distinctly slender volume. Spike and his khaki pals spend most of Monty bumming around North Africa prior to their posting to Italy, as described in the fourth volume and requiring a much darker tone; so I guess the point of this volume was mostly to round things up and keep it all tidy. Most of this occurs on the periphery of the war so there's no combat, mostly just getting by in a foreign land, missing home, and so on. As with the previous volume, the story is told through a blend of text, hastily drawn cartoons, stock photos embellished with ludicrous captions, and sheer fantasy presumably capturing the spirit of Spike's experience better than would a more sober and rigidly autobiographical monologue.

The weirdest thing for me has been that it's essentially a much shorter, funnier On the Road, with consequence being something only ever occurring over the next hill and the same jazz obsession - although frankly I prefer Spike's wacky populist version to Kerouac's hipster cat bollocksarooni. Beyond a few admittedly solid chuckles, Monty doesn't really do a whole lot, but the modest page count doesn't allow time for boredom to set in so complaints would seem churlish; plus knowing what the next book has in store for the poor bastard, only a twat would have a problem with this volume.

On the Road

Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957)
One of the most important and powerful novels of our time, it says here and, although I know at least a couple of people who might agree, I also seem to have heard On the Road written off as a massive pile of wank on a number of occasions - and by persons whose opinions I generally value.

On the Road is Jack Kerouac's approximately autobiographical account of travelling around America in the company of friends who share his interests in titties and beer, with the occasional syringe full of marijuanas thrown in where available. Some readers may recall having once attended a house party - usually during the teenage years - only to find oneself cornered in the kitchen by a dope enthusiast who insists on relating more or less his entire life story up to that point, usually opening with the otherwise innocuous promise of something hilarious he did with his mate whilst partaking, if you know what I'm saying, bruv. On the Road is, for better or worse, that same story, mostly less annoying but about a million times longer.

I'd be seeing old Denver at last. I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who was walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only word I had was 'Wow!'

Kerouc had many, many, many words more than just that one - and some might even say too many - but most of them amount to wow. This is probably a good thing in that a more acerbic account of all that happens here would probably be unreadable, but the wow factor does tend to even out the natural up and down of the narrative to a seemingly endless flow of undifferentiated what we did next, somewhat reducing the potential for consequence.

Kerouac's prose is beautiful, but certain passages inevitably bore, I found, just as others better hold the attention - notably hanging out with William Burroughs and his wife and the excursion down to San Antonio and then Mexico City near the end. I found the jazz references a little mannered and hence annoying, as teenage fixations tend to become with the passage of time, particularly the use of -arooni as a suffix, and referring to people as cats.

It's a bit of a slog, albeit with some value beyond the merely historical, but I really don't know if it deserves its reputation. Burroughs was funnier too.

Palm Sunday

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Palm Sunday (1981)
Most of Vonnegut's novels constitute autobiography of one form or another. Palm Sunday goes a little further, being an assemblage of essays, reviews, newspaper articles, speeches, unpublished introductions to other people's books, and notes reminding the milkman that no further yoghurt will be required until the weekend; so it's the same sort of deal as Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, except ordered as a chronology with added material framing most of the reprints in the wider context of Vonnegut's existence.

There are several problems with this as a collection. Firstly the fifty pages of Vonnegut dynastic history covering four generations - or what felt like four generations - written by a distant relative is almost certainly more fun to read if you're actually a Vonnegut. Secondly, despite much of Vonnegut's oeuvre being approximately autobiographical, it's rare that he talks about his career as a writer - excepting parodies by way of Kilgour Trout - and I guess that was a good thing. Here he talks about the art of writing, about the business aspect, and about hanging out with other writers. Some of it's sort of interesting - notably what an arsehole Jack Kerouac obviously was - but somehow this daylight cast upon magic seems counterproductive, suggesting a Vonnegut with more than a touch of the Richard Stilgoe or Ronnie Corbett about him. There's a whole blogging genre out there born from young, slightly clueless university educated men who've decided to pursue careers as authors of Doctor Who novels, having somehow failed to make the distinction between the world of Camus and Genet and exciting telly adventures featuring outer space robot people; and whilst these young lads may well be as harmless and amiable as their work, their online musings are purest grade one ballsache.

Where I get my amazing ideas...

Analysing the genius of Stephen Moffat…

A day in the life of an unpublished author...

Wish me luck! I'm thinking of pitching a story pitting the first Doctor against the Sontarans…

Oh look, yet another charity anthology…

I suppose it's my own fault that I'm even aware of such twattery; but to return to the point, Vonnegut's reportage of certain aspects of his writing career unfortunately convey a similarly sense of indulgence, as though he's just got settled in his favourite armchair, pipe at the ready, and a wry wink as we embark on the first anecdote of many. You don't have to be crazy to write these books, but it helps!

On the other hand, even at his cosiest, Vonnegut mostly remains at least self aware and disinclined to brag.

I would add that novelists are not only unusually depressed, by and large, but have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetics consultants at Bloomingdale's department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

There's just about sufficient quality material laced through the collection to justify ploughing on through the cosier sections, observations regarding Dresden, Joseph Heller and Louis-Ferdinand Céline being of particular note.

Now is as good a time as any to mention White House prayer breakfasts, I guess. I think we all know now that religion of that sort is about as nourishing to the human spirit as potassium cyanide. We have been experimenting with it. Every guinea pig died. We are up to our necks in dead guinea pigs.

Palm Sunday is unmistakeably the work of the guy who wrote Slaughterhouse Five and the rest, with that same scathing wit and ability to cut to the chase; but it's nowhere near so good as the novels, and there's a seam of schmaltz running through it which jars almost as much as its peculiarly Stilgoe-esque cover.

Jupiter's Circle

Mark Millar & others Jupiter's Circle (2015)
Here's another revisionist superhero book, a prequel to Jupiter's Legacy, about which I couldn't actually remember much aside from having liked it; and it's another revisionist superhero book building on the back story of contemporary characters by impersonating the forties and fifties. Just like Watchmen, one might well observe, and so it's probably no coincidence that the tale should open with our heroes battling a telepathic octopus from outer space. However, this one feels quite different to most variations on this theme which I've read, and I like it more. It's essentially hokey pipe-smoking caped escapades in a world of Leave It to Beaver and J. Edgar Hoover, more or less Justice Society of America with consequences. The twist is that the dark psychological underbelly of Jupiter's Circle is relatively mild in comic book terms, more Harvey Pekar than Rick Veitch's Bratpack wherein the masks conceal fetishism and personality disorders. The lightness of touch makes for a massively refreshing change and allows Millar to set an authentic tone with big, colourful stories powered by mad science and special kinds of ray, the contrast of which gives all the more weight to how these people relate to the real world and each other. We even get walk-on parts by Bill Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Ayn Rand without so much as the faintest trace of showing off; and Rand doesn't come out of it very well, which is gratifying. We've now clocked up nearly eighty years worth of superhero comics, a genre with certain very obvious limitations, and yet I don't think I've ever read one quite like this. I know Mark Millar's shot himself in the foot a couple of times, but Jesus - hats off to the man when he can still come up with stuff such as we have here.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

Jack Kerouac & William S. Burroughs
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (1945)
I walked right past this one when I first saw it in the used book store. I'd heard the title from it being listed amongst a vague group of Burroughs' lesser works and related oddities, but had never really considered it as something which would interest me, which is partially due to the involvement of Kerouac. I have nothing against Kerouac, but neither have I ever felt a strong desire to read anything he wrote, which is possibly an adverse reaction to people who don't really know me telling me to read On the Road because it's just the sort of thing I would like. Such recommendations further foster my impression of Kerouac as a sort of written equivalent of Jim Morrison - great singles and a decent voice, but I probably wouldn't want a whole album, and anyone who seriously regards all that frowning and glowering as indicative of something profound is probably an idiot.

Anyway, I bought it on my second visit to said book store because I realised that I would have been pissed off had I gone back to the rarities shelf and seen that someone else had beat me to it; and I'm glad I did because it's a fascinating curio, you might almost say Burroughs' first novel. In 1944, he and Kerouac were unpublished writers, or aspiring writers, hanging around together, drinking beer, taking on the occasional dead end job and generally just drifting. When one of their loose assemblage of friends murdered another, they decided to write a novel about it, each fictionalising the tale in alternate chapters told from his own point of view. It's fascinating as a period piece of life amongst not quite Bohemian types in New York as the second world war grumbled towards its conclusion across the other side of the horizon, and it's decent as a novel in its own right, even beyond the element of curiosity.

I gather both Kerouac and Burroughs had agreed to stick to a fairly basic, stripped down form of narrative so as to maintain a certain consistency; and although I'm not familiar with Kerouac, Burroughs' voice is already beginning to take shape:

Later, when we were sitting in Riker's at the counter eating eggs, Ryko told me that Betty-Lou had taken a great dislike to Philip.

'There's something rotten about him,' she had said. 'He has the smell of death about him.'

'That's one for the book all right,' I said.

The title derives from a news report coming over the radio during a conversation between Kerouac and others, with alternate lines of unrelated dialogue mashed together in a way which prefigures Burroughs' later use of cut-up technique - which probably indicates the intimacy of the collaboration given that it isn't Burroughs writing it in this instance.

Most of the detail of daily life falls somewhere between Hemingway and Bukowski, albeit a Bukowski who hangs out with poets or occasionally considers paintings by Modigliani. It is vivid and well-paced, with Kerouac's efforts to find work on a ship and travel to Europe providing a backbone of narrative across which is framed the complicated relationship of David Kammerer and Lucien Carr, leading to the murder of the latter by the former. An odd note is struck by the defining of the Kammerer-Carr relationship as homosexual in contrast to whatever else the other characters have going on, which isn't really given a name beyond a heterosexual default suggested by occasional use of the term fag as applied to David Kammerer, or Ramsay Allen as he is named in the novel. Initially some of this read a little like self-loathing on the part of the authors - at least to me - but given that neither of them were otherwise particularly reticent regarding expression of their respective sexual preferences, I'm guessing they simply may have felt it prudent to tone things down to some extent in hope of getting published; and it is clear that this was written in hope of publication, but then forgotten following a series of rejections.

Additionally there seems to be a theme tantamount to the random, meaningless interactions of wild animals gathered at a waterhole, and the occasional frictions which might arise: the hippos boiling in their tanks, one lion killing another over a piece of meat, or Lucien braining the obsessive David before pushing him from the top of a tall building. I suppose that might be the existential element of the narrative, as promised by James Grauerholz in the afterword.

The fact of this remaining unpublished for over half a century says more about the publishing industry than the formative talents of its authors, although I suppose had it seen print they might both have ended up on very different paths.

... and it's great, by the way - seeing as I haven't actually yet said that out loud; which means I should probably read me some Kerouac.

Granta 128: American Wild

Sigrid Rausing (editor) Granta 128: American Wild (2014)
I picked this up out of simple curiosity, and have ended up enjoying it so much as to prompt the uneasy suspicion that I have perhaps tired of science-fiction as a genre, science-fiction being the section of the book store in which the majority of my reading material is generally found. It's not that I ever regarded science-fiction as necessarily superior to anything else, just that it has held a particular fascination for me over the years. The absurdity of such a bias were it to be based on qualitative terms is demonstrated by moronic internet arguments about whether fantasy is better than reality as the substance of written fiction, and unfortunately I have seen such arguments. Those who say yes often state cases amounting to because real life is boring innit, which probably says more about them and their lives than it does about literature of any form.

I would rather gouge out my own eyes out with a spoon than sit through the tedium of a Mike Leigh film, opined one facebook dwelling Doctor Who fan in defence of a recent episode of the shit kids' show in which actors had spent an entire hour holding torches beneath each other's faces whilst delivering portentous lines such as the time is upon us and the future changes now because no-one had bothered to write a script that week.

The key word here is fan. The fan is a person who makes choices based on the logo or identification of a product, on whether that which is chosen belongs to an established canon or series of related - even interchangeable - products. In terms of fancy pants books without pictures, the fan will not prioritise great literature over literature featuring specific familiar characters or ideas which will hopefully seem great, or great-ish, or at least not too pants-shittingly awful. Fan has been grasped as a status of which one should be proud, which is partially taking the piss out of oneself before anyone else gets around to it, and partially dressing up insular tendencies as something clannish and somehow indicative of effort or dedication; because no-one likes to think of themselves as a sad, wilfully ignorant fucker. This is aided by a cultural climate in which it is no longer seen as permissable to quantify anything as definitively shite or worthless just in case it causes someone somewhere to feel a little bit inadequate and have themselves a sad. Boo hoo.

Unfortunately, some things just are definitively shite and worthless whichever way you look at them. Terrance Dicks may well be an efficient - if not necessarily great - writer if you're eight, but if you're stood in front of me gushing over Doctor Who and the Face of Evil at the age of anything over twenty, then I have no resource by which I can summon benefit of the doubt in sufficient quantities to view you as anything other than a bit of a berk, which apparently means I have an elitist attitude. This applies equally if you're dressed as Batman, or if you have more opinions about Torchwood than can be encapsulated within a single sentence of just three words; and as for games are really sophisticated these days with storylines and everything - oh piss off, you stupid wanker.

Anyway, my point is that it's really not what you write as how you write about it which matters, and that spacecraft are not in and of themselves interesting, and that whilst I try to avoid anything that's too obviously generically hacked-out science-fiction landfill, sometimes I feel like I may as well be reading one of Junior's fucking Pokémon books; or at least this was the thought which came to me when I started reading this, the American Wild themed edition of Granta. Being a bit thick, I had always assumed Granta was probably not for me, an eggheady boffinfest of Hampstead based tales of Guradnia subscribers experiencing existential nausea over a Waitrose kumquat, or something, but really it's mostly just short stories, albeit extraordinarily well-written short stories.

River So Close by Melinda Moustakis relates the almost surreally miserable lot of a worker in an Alaskan canning factory, and is probably the most startling and visceral thing I've read since The Darkening Light by Ted Curtis earlier this year, albeit without the orange diarrhoea. I found Callan Wink's Exotics particularly enjoyable for its being set in the very familiar territory of rural Texas, and it was nice to recognise so much of the landscape and its people; and nearly everything else here within these 256 pages is of equal calibre. The voices are dynamic, seemingly incapable of cliché or generic sentiment. This is what writing is supposed to do but so rarely does. The standard is so high that it borders on exhausting.

That said, I personally found two of the stories less satisfactory than the rest, and I could have lived without both Andrew Motion's contribution and the pointless Kerouac talk show thing - both the work of poetic types and of no real interest to me; besides which, I'm not sure why anyone would care what Andrew Motion thinks about the great American wilderness. I suspect it's just one of those deals where we assume that an Oxford graduate will always have something fascinating and insightful to tell us, regardless of the subject we set before him. Then again, the few less engaging contributions doubtless make sense to someone, and with such an otherwise thoroughly gripping collection, I'm not complaining. It seems a little worrying that one of the two stories I failed to enjoy might be deemed speculative if not actually full-blown science-fiction. Hopefully I haven't outgrown my own reading habits.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier

Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier (2007)
I initially found this volume of Moore's continuing revision of  characters from literary history into a single fictional continuum a wee bit underwhelming. Each block of narrative is punctuated with numerous pages of vaguely related text which somewhat disrupts the overall flow, not so much because comics necessarily make for easier reading than unalloyed prose but rather because page after comic book sized page of such small print can be quite off-putting. Additionally, it isn't always immediately obvious how these textual digressions relate to the rest of what's happening besides joining up a load of continuity for the sake of it.

However, my friend Steve suggested I persist with the book, pretend I'm on holiday, stuck in a caravan in the rain with only Black Dossier to keep me occupied. So I knuckled down and I'm sort of glad I did, although the five page stream of consciousness Kerouac pastiche was just a little too unreadable for my tastes, so I settled for the online summary which explained that, had I bothered to read it, I would have found it to be a canny exploration of the Burroughsian idea of language as a virus which itself relates directly to the theme of Black Dossier as a whole. Personally I think Moore would have been better off writing it as a direct pastiche of Burroughs, but never mind.

Anyway, this third volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is enjoyable enough, although it really doesn't have a story so much as a sequence of events sagging under the weight of references to everything from Coronation Street to Dan Dare to Enid Blyton's Adventures of the Wishing Chair - imagine a washing line hung with the underwear of every fictional character ever to grace a page - although many of said references are quite obscure, requiring one to be looking in the right place at the right time. There's a danger of the story amounting to who would win in a fight between Cybermen and Klingons? although it's intent is clearly more ambitious even if it lacks overt expression. It seems significant that James Bond is here shown as a hero of the establishment: brutal, cowardly, misogynist and anti-intellectual - a revised Bulldog Drummond lacking even the honesty of said reactionary forebear - and hence the enemy and bowdlerisation of earlier, arguably more imaginative heroes and heroines. In this respect Black Dossier seems to be a criticism of the history of fiction itself, how that which once inspired the imagination has devolved to unit-shifting logos with moral content included only where it suits the genre. This may be how Moore viewed the mainstream movie adaptation of his first League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, with all the finer points ironed out and homogenised for the big screen; and I'm probably not the first person to notice how many times James Bond gets his arse kicked in Black Dossier - unless the Sean Connery association is simply coincidence.

The conclusion, revealed in a line about Verne's Nautilus and Wells' cavorite inspiring submarines and rocket ships, would seem to be that there's no such thing as just a story, that it all comes back into our collective consciousness whilst perhaps also serving as barometer for the same, and that we should take a bit more care over the sort of stories we tell because fact and fiction tend to be related. Unfortunately I have a feeling this message may not be obvious unless you're looking for it, which it might be argued defeats the point of the message in terms of communicating to those who most need to hear it, but never mind.

Anyway, my second, more considered reading of Black Dossier was certainly more rewarding than the first, and the pastiches of William Shakespeare and P.G. Wodehouse were in particular a delight. Bit lumpy in places but undeniably nourishing.

Laikonik Express

Nick Sweeney Laikonik Express (2011)
Not entirely sure what to make of this debut, and my views faltered during reading, ranging from bored to amused to entirely engaged. The narrative follows writer Nolan Kennedy to Poland where he tries to coax Don Darius, his friend and also a writer, into completing an unpublished and apparently amazing novel he's been sitting on for far too long. I'd say Laikonik Express is Kerouac's On the Road except for the fact that it's set on a Polish train, and never having read On the Road there's a danger I might actually be talking out of my arse.

Much of what transpires is low on incident, largely conversational and anecdotal, inspiring the thought that this may  represent characters as much in search of a story as their author; and whilst much of the Polish detail is fascinating, I was never quite convinced that Kennedy or Darius were ever entirely engaged with their surroundings, but for all I know this may well have been the point. Clearly it is a novel which to some extent concerns itself with the process of writing a novel, possibly an examination of the relationship between the terrain and that which ends up on the printed page. When, towards the end of the book, the lads meet Krystyna and learn that she is dying of cancer it seems the harsh reality of the situation obliges them to at last engage on a level beyond that of scenes viewed from the window of a railway carriage.

Possibly.

I suspect there may be a great deal that I missed in Laikonik Express, and certainly it seems pregnant with the possibilities of what it might be saying, if it really is saying any one specific thing. If the point is the journey rather than the destination, I may have appreciated more focus on the journey itself, with a little less on the anecdotes of our travellers which tended to unbalance the narrative a little in my view. Yet in the final quarter it all seemingly adds up by means suggestive of a purpose to the rambling of previous chapters.

At this point I should perhaps stress that I did enjoy Laikonik Express even if I wasn't always sure of where it was going or why. Those online reviews I've checked out mostly heap glowing praise on the quality of Nick Sweeney's narrative, and rightly so. The man is clearly incapable of a dull sentence, with even the most prosaic of observations sparkling with an effortless wit that puts most of Nick Sweeney's contemporaries to shame.

Possibly an unusual debut - says the man who rarely picks up anything that doesn't have a picture of a robot on the cover - but one that may prove more rewarding with time, and one that hints very strongly at better to come.