Le Morte d'Arthur

Sir Thomas Malory Le Morte d'Arthur volume one (1485)
I spent two whole weeks on this one and still only made it to Book VIII, and that's of the nine books assembled in this collection, which is only the first volume. I really don't like giving up on a book, and it's not something I do very often, but considering all of the things I could read from which I might get something, there simply didn't seem to be much point forcing myself. It's not that I found Le Morte d'Arthur impenetrable, because I've read and enjoyed plenty of material of similar vintage. It's not even that it was necessarily either boring or completely lacking anything I found interesting.

That said, I've never been particularly gripped by Arthurian legend in a general sense, at least not until Philip Purser-Hallard's Devices trilogy. Prior to that, it made for a decent Monty Python film but was otherwise - so far as I'm concerned - just one of those things upon which hippies and new age types tended to fixate, and usually the very worst kind of hippie or new age type. I'm thinking here of a specific individual, author of all sorts of dubious Shamanic material with a particular interest in Camelot last seen ranting about how them muzzies are killing our kids but we ain't even allowed to say nuffink because of political correctness innit. What a lovely day that wasn't.

Philip Purser-Hallard convinced me there was something interesting there, so I began working my way backwards. I didn't really get on too well with The Once and Future King, and so assumed I probably needed to go right back to the source. Anyway, it turns out that even Le Morte d'Arthur isn't it, but is rather a number of earlier vaguely related works retold and welded together by someone who lived very near where my father grew up five hundred years or so later.

As I got started, I began to wonder how much of this material might be historical, because it has the feel of something historical. Page after page of knights engaging with other knights reminded me of similarly repetitive passages in Mexican texts of roughly the same era, culturally speaking, and equivalent scraps in their texts tend to serve as metaphor for broader dynastic or regional conflict. Along similar lines, the passage describing competition between opponents identified only as a green, red, or black knight suggested a symbolic record of something which may actually have happened; but whatever the case may be, a quick pog at J.R. Green's A Short History of the English People convinced me of Arthur's entirely mythical composition, there being very few corners of the historical record into which one might shoehorn all that stuff about Camelot. So page after page after fucking page of lists of knights scrapping was presumably written for an audience who enjoy page after page after fucking page of lists of knights scrapping.

Certain passages hold the attention, whereas others tend towards repetitive examples of chivalry, swearing of oaths, loyalty, true love, breasts heaving with admiration for something of a generally chivalrous nature; and I am reliably informed that there are jokes in this text, but I'm fucked if I was able to spot any. What with all the noble brows held aloft and swearing fealty to someone a bit kingy, reading this was like listening to an early Laibach album with a playing time of two weeks; and so I suspect this sort of thing may be what Cervantes was taking the piss out of when he wrote Don Quixote. I suppose it might be said that I'm simply too thick to appreciate Malory, but fuck you - I breezed through the two volume Oklahoma edition of Codex Chimalpahin without breaking a sweat, and I really think this one is just a bit of a dud unless you have some hardcore investment in the subject.

The Once and Future King

T.H. White The Once and Future King (1958)
I was about to read Philip Purser-Hallard's Trojans, the final part of his thus far exceptional Devices trilogy, when I saw this in the second-hand book store and bought it with the idea that a little homework couldn't hurt. Devices refers to large chunks of Arthurian legend, and I seem to recall White's book having been described as the definitive work bringing it all together into roughly the shape we recognise today; except it turns out that I was actually thinking of Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur of 1485 to which The Once and Future King itself refers and which I am similarly yet to read; but I've started so I may as well finish.

The Once and Future King, rather than being the definitive version, brings Arthurian legend into the twentieth century in so much as that it's a modern novel written in a contemporary style whilst relating a tale set in the twelfth century or thereabouts. All those Arthurian occurrences are traditionally dated to times prior to even Egbert of Wessex, the first Saxon king and arguably the first English king by some definition; so the six-hundred year relocation initially unsettled me. At first it seemed like White just needed a way of bringing Robin Hood into the Arthurverse - curiously something which likewise occurs in Philip Purser-Hallard's The Locksley Exploit albeit with more satisfying purpose, to my mind - which demands the reader avoid thinking too hard about what Richard the Lionheart may or may not have been up to around the same time.

Even more disconcerting, at least for me, was that the first of the four books of The Once and Future King turns out to be The Sword in the Stone, as famously adapted by Walt Disney. I've never seen the animated film but would guess it's probably fairly true to the book, given that the tone of the book, occasionally harking back to the absurdity of Cervantes as it does, somewhat foreshadows Harry Potter and even the Monty Python version of this tale. Try to read this without thinking of John Cleese and the rest:

Sir Ector blushed deeply and called out: 'Ah, Grummore, come over here a minute, will you? I want to introduce a friend of mine, old chap, a chap called Wood, old chap—Wood with a W, you know, not an H. Yes, and this is King Pellinore, Master Wood—King Pellinore.'

'Hail,' said King Pellinore, who had not quite got out of the habit when nervous.

'How do?' said Sir Grummore. 'No relation to Robin Hood, I suppose?'

'Oh, not in the least,' interrupted Sir Ector hastily. 'Double you, double owe, dee, you know, like the stuff they make furniture out of—furniture, you know, and spears, and—well—spears, you know, and furniture.'

I was expecting more frowning, more grunting, more faces set sternly against the northern wind, which isn't to say I was necessarily disappointed so much as that it took more getting used to than I had anticipated. White talks quite directly to his audience as though we're sat before him upon the hearth rug, and so we have references such as to Merlyn putting his fingers together like Sherlock Holmes, and we are left with a strong impression of The Once and Future King having been written for English school boys at the upper end of the 1950s educational ladder.

Children believe such things to this day, and think that they will only be able to bowl well in the cricket match tomorrow, provided that they are good today.

As an aside, even without the references to Merlyn and his unsettling knowledge of centuries to come, anyone who enjoyed Marc Platt's Lungbarrow as I did might appreciate why I should raise an eyebrow at this passage:

'Would you show me your home?'

'Certainly,' said the badger, 'though, of course, I don't use it all. It is a rambling old place, much too big for a single man. I suppose some parts of it may be a thousand years old. There are about four families of us in it, here and there, take it by and large from cellar to attics, and sometimes we don't meet for months. A crazy old place, I suppose it must seem to you modern people—but there, it's cosy.'

At the risk of committing what is probably literary treason, there's a problem with The Once and Future King, or at least I experienced one. It's nothing to do with kids turning into Disney owls, the twelfth century remodelling, the disconcerting contemporary asides, or any of White's screwing around with the source material, all of which is done with a purpose which becomes gradually apparent. The problem is that said purpose takes so long to emerge from the narrative. I can understand the writer not wanting to play all of his cards at once, but as soon as we're past The Sword in the Stone it really gets to rambling and bumbling to itself with no clear indication of where we might be heading, and while the book remains readable throughout, personally I was a little bored in places. I'm putting this down to my never having read Le Morte D'Arthur.

That said, the point of it all is beautifully expressed once it becomes apparent why White felt compelled to write in the first place. The Once and Future King evokes the age of chivalry in contrast to White's era, and unfortunately also to our own - it might be argued. His invocation of Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich, and the pseudo-Darwinian cult of power as its own justification, as given by Agravaine during the first chapter of the fourth book, is hard to miss.

'We could say that we were in favour of a national movement. For that matter, we could join them together and call it national communism. But it has to be something broad and popular, which everybody can feel. It must be against large numbers of people, like the Jews or the Normans or the Saxons, so that everybody can be angry.'

White also seemingly predicted Death in June and other neofolk types who have built careers on simply exploring controversial ideas and imagery, such as the controversial idea and image of Adolf Hitler as a great bloke who was only saying what everybody was thinking.

Mordred had begun dressing with this dramatic simplicity since the time when he had become a leader of the popular party. Their aims were some kind of nationalism, with Gaelic autonomy, and a massacre of the Jews as well, in revenge for a mythical saint called Hugh of Lincoln. There were already thousands, spread over the country, who carried the badge of a scarlet fist clenching a whip, and who called themselves Thrashers.

Once this novel stops messing about and gets down to the business of what is on its mind, it becomes a formidable work, and so much so as to oblige me to forget having been bored; and given the chilling accuracy of White's analysis of the rise of the Nazis, his argument seems unfortunately well-suited to our own era, and to how we respond to what is happening in our world.

At last he had sought to make a map of force, as it were, to bind it down by laws. He had tried to codify the evil uses of might by individuals, so that he might set bounds to them by the impersonal justice of the state. He had been prepared to sacrifice his wife and his best friend, to the impersonality of Justice. And then, even as the might of the individual seemed to have been curbed, the Principle of Might had sprung up behind him in another shape—in the shape of collective might, of banded ferocity, of numerous armies insusceptible to individual laws. He had bound the might of units, only to find that it was assumed by pluralities. He had conquered murder, to be faced with war. There were no Laws for that.

I suppose now I need to read Le Morte D'Arthur.

Selected Short Stories

H.G. Wells Selected Short Stories (1958)
Wells' reputation has become such that I feel almost guilty in finding myself disliking anything he's written, although I suppose some of that which constitutes his reputation comes from less than reputable sources. I'll discount any recent resurgence of interest generated by the steampunk phenomenon on the grounds that anyone who glues a cog wheel onto a top hat is by definition an arsehole and is therefore incapable of forming any opinion worth hearing, which still leaves us with Wells as the father of modern science-fiction...

My view is that he is and he isn't. In Trillion Year Spree Brian Aldiss suggests that it was probably Mary Shelley - what with Frankenstein referencing then-cutting edge scientific principals relating to what happens when you run an electric current through a dead frog; except Aldiss then goes on to argue that science isn't really what science-fiction is about, despite already having dismissed Gulliver's Travels and the like. Personally I believe you may as well include Gulliver's Travels, or even Cervantes, because there's probably not much joy to be had in attempting to identify the first science-fiction novel. You just end up going around in circles. Whilst Wells was often pretty sciencey - at least in the stories everyone has heard of - he frequently verges off into fantasy, allegory, or just plain weird, at least as much as anything invoking steam or electricity - which is doubtless partially why Jules Verne apparently regarded him as a bit of a lightweight.

More than anything, Wells seemed to enjoy novelty. Of course there is an element of prophecy to the best of his tales, but from this lot, I'm inclined to wonder whether this might not have simply been the natural development of a writer elaborating on whatever core idea he was working with at the time. The twenty-one mostly short stories in this collection suggest the creative process of an author expanding on a series of quirky ideas, the sort of thing which might occur to you as you wash the dishes or stroll to the shop on the corner for a packet of fags.

A recipe which renders the diner weightless...

A hidden land of blind people...

A prehistoric bird hatches from a mysteriously preserved egg...

Space creatures intrude upon us just as we intrude upon lesser nations...

I assume that some of these ideas either had legs or simply caught Wells on a good day, resulting in the classics upon which his reputation was justifiably founded - The War of the Worlds and the rest. Perhaps the others either never really required novel length or just weren't very good. I may simply have detected a pattern which isn't there, and this might all be down to personal taste; but that said, once done with The Time Machine and The Country of the Blind - both of which I found enjoyable, there followed a run of nine stories ranging from either dull to barely comprehensible, with the bewildering Lord of the Dynamos representing the lowest ebb. Having read The Food of the Gods I was already aware of the possibility of not everything written by Wells having been a masterpiece, but I was surprised at how tough going this collection became so early on. Happily, for whatever reason, it picks up around halfway through with In the Abyss and remains more or less consistent up to the last page from that point on; but I'm still puzzled as to how these stories were selected, particularly given that he must surely have churned out a million of the things.

Whilst we're frowning, I could also have done without use of the term nigger in quite so many instances, but I suppose it comes with the era and the attitudes of the time, as probably exemplified in the aforementioned Lord of the Dynamos. Wells, lest we forget, held some initial sympathies with that whole eugenics deal, so I suppose we should at least be glad that he appears to have revised such views to the contrary in later years. He's still written some of the greatest science-fiction novels of all time so the reputation is justified, but I suppose they can't all be classics.

Labyrinths

Jorge Luis Borges Labyrinths (1964)
I was beginning to get the feeling that almost everything I've ever read might either be traced back to Borges or else somehow prefigure his writing, but I never actually located any of his writing in the usual book stores and, in any case, probably wasn't in a huge hurry to do so due to a niggling fear of finding myself way out of my depth. Almost everything I've ever read is admittedly something of an exaggeration here, when really I mean certain things I've read which have made a significant and particular kind of impression on me - Philip K. Dick and certain looser strains of science-fiction, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, and a few other comic strip authors. Borges seems either an originator or an otherwise significant name in the history of books within books, seemingly self-aware narratives reflecting  the readers' existence as potentially no less a fiction than that which appears on the page. His central point seems to be that reality is a function of language, or something of the sort, and he illustrates this over and over in a series of surprisingly succinct short stories and essays. Curiously, the dividing line between what constitutes fiction and what constitutes an essay in Borges' oeuvre is ambiguous as he tends to employ each form towards similar ends, whether it's an analysis of Cervantes' Don Quixote, or the fiction of the writer who strives to rewrite the same.

He did not want to compose another Quixote—which is easy—but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.

Peculiarly, there are points at which Borges reminds me of Woody Allen, specifically the absurdity of Without Feathers.

Do I believe in God? I did until Mother's accident. She fell on some meat loaf, and it penetrated her spleen. She lay in a coma for months, unable to do anything but sing  "Granada" to an imaginary herring.

Compare, for example, the tone of the above with that of Borges' The Library of Babel:

The mystics claim that their ecstacy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.

This actually reminded me of laughing until my sides hurt over an article in an old issue of Brian Moore's Head football fanzine presenting a fictitious history of the introduction of football to colonial Africa: our Livingstonian narrator arrives at the remote village and realises that the locals have failed to grasp the point of the game once he sees their circular pitch with its single set of goalposts erected at the centre. I'm not trying to denigrate Borges here so much as illustrate his finely-tuned sense of the absurd, albeit in an informally Surrealist or Symbolist context, and how this renders some seriously headachey philosophical points as entirely more readable than they probably have a right to be, even compellingly so.

Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1883, Carlyle observed that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they are also written.

Which would be more or less the same as the point at which Grant Morrison has Animal Man look out of the page at his reader and exclaim 'I can see you!', except Borges states his case in clearer terms which are much more difficult to refute - I would argue - not least in the essay in which he more or less proves - at least in philosophical terms - that words constitute reality; unless I imagined that one.

There's much more in Labyrinths than I could hope to summarise, even had I understood all of it, so I'll close by stating that it has depths within depths and yet remains mostly as clear as an unmuddied lake. His reputation seems entirely warranted.

Micronauts

Steve Lyons Micronauts (2002)
I find it kind of depressing that for all the hypothetically good work I've undertaken in the expansion of my own literary horizons, reading Rabelais and Cervantes and Plato and all of those guys as signified by my intermittent sneering along the lines of this or that novel being significantly less sophisticated than the writings of Schopenhauer - despite that I've never actually read the writings of Schopenhauer; for all of this, all it apparently takes is for someone to write a novel about some toy I had as a kid, and I may as well be drooling in line for One Direction tickets.

As a rule I try to avoid tie-in novels on the grounds that they're probably mostly crap, and no-one has yet given me sufficient reason to care about whether or not this is an unnecessarily dismissive position to take. I've done my time. I read four-million Doctor Who novels, and there were a handful I might conceivably read again at some point; but on principal I would prefer to avoid any book that wishes it were a television show, a film, or - God forbid - a fucking console game. Whilst this may seem an unforgivably high-handed attitude, considering all the millions upon millions of books out there which you've never read, and may never find time to read even if you live to be two-hundred, why settle for something which secretly wishes it had been made in another medium? If you don't really enjoy books as books - I dunno - why bother reading at all? Just watch the fucking telly instead. Do what you like.

Nevertheless, here I am because I loved the absolute shit out of my Micronaut action figures and related toys when I was a kid, and because this was written by Steve Lyons. I seems to recall Steve Lyons having chugged out a couple of the better Doctor Who novels - at least amongst the aforementioned few I would consider re-reading at some point - as well as a couple of reasonably side-splitting volumes of something called The Completely Useless Encyclopedia. Sadly, lifting up the internet and having a look inside I notice Lyons has also written Sapphire & Steel audio dramas and novels based on something called Warhammer 40,000, which I assume to be one of those children's computer games, but never mind. Given that my previous review was of a Superman comic, I'm probably in no position to start getting sniffy on the grounds of Micronauts being a lesser work than Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.

Mego's Micronaut toys were originally fictionalised as stars of their own Marvel comic by Bill Mantlo and Michael Golden, and spectacularly so until Michael Golden stopped turning up and the title went somewhat down the toilet. Then someone revived the comic in 2002, or maybe before, probably with everyone drawn looking as though they need to take a shit and with at least one major character raped in him batty by his own dad in issue two, but I never saw the revived version; and then there was this, the first of a trilogy of novels.

The story carries some resemblance to that which appeared in the original Marvel run - specifically some teenager with a scientist father discovering a rift in the fabric of reality through which tiny Micronauts spew forth, followed by generic adventures of the kind involving rebel leaders and evil emperors. This version of the tale has the diminutive explorers from another universe arriving in the town of Angel's Gift, which capitalises on their tourist potential by featuring them as both carnival attraction and inspiration for a series of action figures. This goes some way towards smoothing over the discomfort of anyone who, like myself, feels a little self-conscious as a fully grown man reading a novel about toys I played with as a kid; some way, but maybe not all of the way.

'How? There'll be guards on the door—both sides!'

'The same way I got in here. The obvious way.' I look at him blankly, until he grins and says: 'Don't you have any story books on your world? In the fiction of my galaxy, buildings like this always, always have handy air-conditioning ducts!'

Oh yes. Here we are running down a corridor as though we were on some shit TV show whilst drawing attention to the fact of our running down a corridor. Ha ha.

You see, comedic asides pointing out clichés work better when the narrative doesn't keep on committing said clichés over and over, because this reduces the asides to an excuse for not bothering to tell a proper story.

The Harriers catch me, and I look up into Nova's face as she moves in, her energy wings flaring behind her. I haven't seen her up close before, and I'm surprised at how young she looks. Young and beautiful. Her eyebrows arc gracefully beneath her sprouting purple hair, and her slender nose has an attractive curve—but her eyes are cold, and a cruel sneer twists her pursed lips.

As opposed to an amiable or kindly sneer, I suppose, and young and beautiful is not in itself sufficient for a fucking sentence. I really wish people would stop doing that, splattering around fullstops regardless of syntax in the belief that the resulting pause - which would work just as well with an altogether more grammatical comma - gives whatever is said the gravity of an Orson Welles voice-over, when it actually furthers the impression that the author would rather be writing something other than a novel.

Ice cream fandango. Typewriter summer's day Charlie. Bob. Stegosaurus on heat. And Bob again.

Those aren't fucking sentences either.

To be fair, aside from all of the above, Steve Lyons does a decent job, such as it is. The story is told as a reasonably engaging first person present tense narrative, and there's plenty of evidence of Lyon's ability to hold a sentence together, and to write something which at least does more than simply help you to imagine what it would look like if it were on the telly. The problem is that Lyons' telling seems to be significantly superior to that which is told, which is roughly the usual story of a plucky teenager and tiny aliens running along corridors, and with the local mayor's greed drawing them all into a war which no-one can win, and no amount of references to it all feeling a bit like an episode of Quantum Leap can save the turd from toiletdom. This one really feels like a decent writer struggling to make good with a story he's been given by a committee.

Some of the background material is drawn from earlier comic book incarnations, which is in some way unfortunate because it means I had no idea who Azura Nova is supposed to be, and because it doesn't actually compare that well to the Mantlo and Golden version in which the bulk of clichés seemed better concealed and which was simply a more interesting tale, focussing as it did on the Micronauts and their universe rather than a generically plucky teenager who wishes his dad was less of a dick.

Yeah - I know, the Micronauts novel was probably aimed at teenagers or at least at the emotionally and developmentally teenage, but I still say it could have aimed just a little higher; and being as it didn't, it hasn't inspired me with any interest in reading the second or third part of the trilogy.

The Pilgrim's Progress

John Bunyan The Pilgrim's Progress (1684)
This book is among the greatest literary masterpieces in the world, writes Dr. Ronald Johnson of something called Accelerated Christian Education. Few books so captivate attention while provoking insight into Christian character.

Bunyan was an English puritan living in an age when it was pretty tough being an English puritan, and thus was he locked up for continuing to preach his beliefs. Whilst in the stripy hole he wrote principally so as to keep himself from going batty, to keep himself on the straight and narrow:

...but yet I do not think
To show all the world my pen and ink
In such a mode; I only thought to make
I knew not what: nor did I undertake
Thereby to please my neighbour: no, not I;
I did it my own self to gratify.

Neither did I but vacant seasons spend
In this my scribble; nor did I intend
But to divert myself in doing this
From worser thoughts which make me do amiss.

Amongst those works written during his years of porridge we find The Pilgrim's Progress, describing the allegorical journey of a Christian man travelling to the kingdom of Heaven with emphasis on that which might impede his getting there. The tone of The Pilgrim's Progress is determined by Bunyan's desire for absolute clarity of meaning. Whilst the work may well have been written entirely for his own pleasure, he left no room for misinterpretation by any third party:

Wouldst thou read riddles and their explanation?
Or else be drowned in thy contemplation?
Dost thou love picking meat? Or wouldst thou see
A man i' the clouds and hear him speak to thee?

Whilst this speaks well of Bunyan's desire to communicate, I'm really not sure what it does for the book as a supposed literary masterpiece, an honour which I would argue applies more to its cultural impact than to the actual content. The principal character of part one is named Christian, and those he encounters on his journey tend to be identified with a similarly heavy hand, and so much so that it's kind of on a level with a seventeenth century Dora the Explorer as our boy meets Boastful and Selfish and turns to the imaginary camera to ask, I wonder what sort of fellows these will be? Perhaps they shall be fine and generous companions who speak with much modesty, before blinking a couple of times and then repeating the sentence.

It's not that the story is in any sense badly written, but with every possible outcome of each interaction a foregone conclusion based upon the relative and well-advertised piety of those involved, you kind of know what's going to happen, which kind of sucks some of the fun out of reading. I appreciate that it was 1684, but I'm not a complete stranger to literature of that general period, and Cervantes, Aphra Behn, Rabelais, and Cyrano de Bergerac all managed considerably better, or at least gave their readers something to chew over with a bit more substance than that of a rusk. I know Gulliver's Travels came a couple of decades later, but the contrast between the two makes this one read as though written by an idiot.

Clearly it wasn't written by an idiot given that simplicity was Bunyan's stated intention, and it remains a fairly engaging read for something in which everything is spelled out in ten foot high block capitals. As for the insight into Christian character promised by the nice man from Accelerated Christian Education, the insight is mostly on the level of how a Christian man likes God, enjoys praying and being honest, but he certainly does not appreciate the devil, temptation, or telling lies.

'Do you like the devil?,' we might ask him.

'No sir, I do not!' he would probably reply in strident tones.

Who would have fucking thunk it, eh?

Then again, Accelerated Christian Education is an organisation of biblically literalist nutcases responsible for schoolbooks claiming that the Loch Ness monster can be explained by Noah having a few baby dinosaurs on the ark. It makes perfect sense that Bunyan's masterpiece should hold such appeal for fundamentalist types with their profound distrust of grey areas, complex arguments and facts.

Accordingly, our Christian leaves a wife and four children in order to seek God, and yet nowhere is it suggested that this abandonment of his family could signify any degree of negligence, vanity, or self-interest, because he's doing it for the right reasons.

'Indeed, Cain hated his brother, because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous; and if thy wife and children have been offended with thee for this, they thereby show themselves to be implacable to good, and thou hast delivered thy soul from their blood.'

Well, that's all sorted then. As is typical of the fundamentalist, good deeds don't count for shit unless you're a fully paid-up club member and subscriber to the right periodicals. The nicest guy in the world is still going to hell if he fails to abase himself before the proper authorities for no reason given other than that it's all a joyous mystery and that this is simply the right way; and it's true because it's true, as Christian points out to the cunningly named Ignorance:

But thou camest not in at the Wicket-gate that is at the head of this way; thou camest in hither through that same crooked lane, and therefore I fear, however thou mayest think of thyself, when the reckoning day shall come, thou wilt have laid to thy charge that thou art a thief and a robber, instead of getting admittance into the city.

Christian arrives in God's city at the end of the first book - the allegory specifically being that his pilgrimage represents acceptance of Christ and all that good stuff. Christian's abandoned and presumably less righteous wife and four children get to redeem themselves in book two, which initially kicks off as a repeat of book one as they come to their senses and decide to follow in Christian's shoes. On the way they are joined by characters with names such as Mercy and Great-Heart, then are eventually relegated to non-speaking roles in their own tale as their manly companions and protectors stand around pontificating upon biblical lore and how it is easier for camels to pass through the eyes of needles. I suppose a more active role in the exchange of opinions might have interfered with said wife's admirable womanly meekness or something. I wouldn't say that failing the Bechdel test or unnecessary sneering at Catholics - as occurs in a couple of instances - determines a piece of fiction as necessarily worthless, but forgetting to include a fucking story really doesn't help.

John Bunyan's great talent as a writer can be found in the fact that he actually made a fairly engaging read of this tale for all its flaws, its repetitive and sanctimonious observations, and its seemingly regarding the reader as a simpleton. The Pilgrim's Progress is an historically important book, just not a very good one.

The Coming Race

Edward Bulwer-Lytton The Coming Race (1871)
The Coming Race was hardly the first science-fiction novel to  rummage around within a hollow Earth. Journey to the Center of the Earth - to name but one of many - was published seven years earlier, and the general conceit probably goes back at least so far as Don Quixote's descent into the Caves of Montesinos in Cervantes' 1615 novel. The Coming Race would nevertheless appear to represent a seminal work of its type, and its popularity was once such as to seed public imagination with vril, the novel's mysterious energy source falling somewhere between nuclear power, electricity, telepathy, and the force from Star Wars. Mastery of vril is the reason for the technological superiority of that lot down there, as Bulwer-Lytton explained, inadvertently inspiring numerous occult types - Madam Blavatsky for one - seemingly ranging from those regarding vril as a metaphor for some existing esoteric force, to those apparently taking The Coming Race for fact disguised as fiction. Of the latter group one might arguably include Richard S. Shaver whose peculiar subterranean ramblings might be deemed heir to Bulwer-Lytton were they not so obviously sourced from a more personal, psychological mania, and vril seems to have become a totem for some of the weirder expressions of Nazism. Weirder still, at least to me, is that the name of Bovril, the popular pseudo-Marmitic English meat based drink derives from the idea of vril as life enhancing.

Anyway, before we go too far down that particular rabbit hole, it should be noted that Bulwer-Lytton's novel belongs more significantly to the utopian tradition, but taps into subterranean folk myth to a greater extent than others of its kind. The underworld as hell, if not uniquely Christian, seems to have been the exception to a general global rule. Most underworlds were traditionally a source of life, development, culture and so on, with the world as a metaphorical womb giving birth to the people and all which sustains them. This basic idea is found in Norse mythology, Sumer, Mexico, and pretty much everywhere else to greater or lesser degrees. Bulwer-Lytton's utopia is therefore home to a more developed race than our own, although the precise details of the warning delivered appear fairly loosely defined, or at least they did to me. Unfortunately I have a feeling this may be down to my own prejudices, specifically that which I expect to have been the sort of thing that would have mattered to a Victorian author of Bulwer-Lytton's credentials.

The Coming Race references ancient deluges in terms which suggest scientific foundations in the sort of catastrophism which squared fairly well with the emerging ideas of Darwinian evolution. Yet, whilst the novel appears to embrace Darwin up to a point, the Vril-ya - this being the name of the coming race in question - claim descent from frogs, which reads somewhat like a Christian parody of Darwin, not a million miles from the sort of critique asking where amongst its relatives was the orang-outang to be found. On the other hand, there's also the strong possibility that the supposed war between Church and Darwin has become somewhat exaggerated in recent times by the usual tub-thumping bores on both sides, and may not have been quite such a partisan affair as we have been led to believe. I suspect Bulwer-Lytton may not have given a great deal of thought to those aspects of his narrative which, with hindsight, seem as though they should be making some more strident observation, for he seems to find no contradiction in evolution discussed with such frequent references made to faith, and is more likely presenting a warning of the notion of progress as a virtue in itself. Progress was hardly a new idea in 1871, but the developed, or at least developing world was clearly still coming to terms with the idea of progress as something which could achieve such momentum as it did in the 1800s, and which had begun to reach into every aspect of modern life. Even humanity, so it seemed, was subject to progress, hence the disturbing possibility of more advanced expressions of humanity who might come to regard us as we did the less technologically orientated colonial subjects of the empire. Supermen and their mighty works would become popular during the century to come, notably with a great many folks who also enjoyed shouting and wearing uniforms, so it is interesting and possibly ironic on some level that Bulwer-Lytton describes the racial characteristics of the Vril-ya as close to Native American type, presumably by virtue of their having been the least understood ethnic group to have achieved levels of civilisation comparable to those of classical antiquity at the time of writing. Happily, the utopia of The Coming Race therefore constitutes relatively slim pickings for nutcases seeking Aryan material, excepting I suppose a few of the more obsessive Death In June types who could probably find some sort of ariosophic subtext in an episode of Dora the Explorer.

Established expressions of bullshit aside, The Coming Race is a fairly straightforward prompt towards the conclusion implied by Victorian notions of progress, that we might not necessarily be the pinnacle of God's creation, and that this is worth keeping in mind. Oddly I find this echoes Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in that it too makes a lesson of the perils of ideology becoming too far divorced from the reality it endeavours to inform, which is of course the big problem with most versions of utopia. I personally found this one a little more readable than Crime and Punishment, although I can see why it has failed to remain quite so popular as at least a few of its contemporaries, lacking as it does the wit and verve of Verne, Wells, Shelley and others - not a bad novel by any stretch, but one that was quite definitively of its time; and although I'm sceptical that Bulwer-Lytton can really have been said to have predicted nuclear energy, the appearance of robots in a novel published in 1871 is not unimpressive.

Tristram Shandy

Laurence Sterne Tristram Shandy (1767)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman—to give the collection its full title—is a satirical—possibly depending upon one's—and yes, I am indeed aware that the habit of author's referring to one when they really mean I is itself satirised in the novel, which is perhaps ironic—unlike Alanis Morissette's hit single of that name, which is in itself ironic, it might be argued—definition of satire—novel by Laurence Sterne, published—if this doesn't seem too conspicuous a theft from Wikipedia—in nine volumes, the first two—and God forbid that anyone should suggest he might have done well to leave it at that—appearing in 1759 with the rest following over the next seven years; which is why I've stalled for the first time since Iain M. Banks' bloody awful The Algebraist back in 2008.

To start at the beginning, Sterne draws inspiration from both Cervantes and Rabelais, both of whom I've read and enjoyed very much without any significant problems. Following the general spirit of his predecessors, Sterne takes similarly satirical pot-shots at the institutions of his day, albeit with a gentler tone than that of at least Rabelais. Tristram Shandy is on occasion cited as one of the earliest metafictional novels, a story populated with characters who are aware of being in a story, and it was really this promise which drew my interest; but having made it so far as the fifth of the full nine volumes I really don't see it; or at least I really don't see how Tristram Shandy does anything which hadn't already been done by any sotto voiced Shakespeare character turning to the audience to explain that the bloke who just arrived on stage is a bit of a tosser. More significantly the novel's theme, and that which dictates its structure, is that its narrator is unable to explain anything without nesting his account in layer upon layer of digression, reason being that this is how life is:

Upon looking into my mother's marriage settlement, in order to satisfy myself and reader in a point necessary to be cleared up, before we could proceed any farther in this history;—I had the good fortune to pop upon the very thing I wanted before I had read a day and a half straight forwards,—it might have taken me up a month;—which shews plainly, that when a man sits down to write a history,—tho' it be but the history of Jack Hickathrift or Tom Thumb, he knows no more than his heels what lets and confounded hindrances he is to meet with in his way,—or what a dance he may be led, by one excursion or another, before all is over. Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule,—straight forward;—for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside, either to the right hand or to the left,—he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey's end;—but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly.

Fair enough and all highly entertaining, as are numerous asides to the reader suggesting we go back a chapter and read something again, or just that we imagine how a certain passage might read had the author got around to writing it, promises of forthcoming chapters on the subject of chambermaids, buttonholes or whatever, none of which ever arrive.

The first four parts are reasonably entertaining with their rambling account of events leading up to the birth of the narrator in volume four, and of what he is to be named, how long it is hoped his nose will be and so on. The trouble is that all these digressions really wear you down after a couple of hundred pages, particularly as there's a fair amount which would, I suspect, make a lot more sense to someone who had benefited from a slightly better education than I received, or at least a more thorough grounding in the classics - mine comprising about three books. I made it some of the way into volume five, then skipped ahead, and all I could see was another two-hundred pages—of paragraphs speckled—with these fucking—dashes, five—or—six to a—sentence, over—and over, and—I—knew I—just couldn't do—it. I skipped to the end, to Gerald Weales' afterword and found that even he considers the first four volumes to be the ones that matter. I decided that enough was enough. I conceded defeat.

I'd distinguish Tristram Shandy quite clearly from other novels I've abandoned. The Algebraist was just unbelievably dull, and Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land - the last hundred or so pages skimmed in about thirty minutes - was simply utter shite. Tristram Shandy is justifiably regarded as an important novel, and taken one paragraph at a time, it's erudite, wonderfully written, and very funny, but as a whole, it's five-hundred fucking pages of Ronnie Corbett telling one of those as my producer said to me jokes.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Mark Twain A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
Before I get started, and so as to throw a juicy marrowbone of peace and reconciliation to those needled by my recent admittedly provocative assertion of Doctor Who being a festering pile of poop produced by twats and enjoyed by arseholes since its return in 2005 with an Easter Island statue in the lead, I offer this startling find:

'I've known Merlin seven hundred years, and he—'

'Seven hun—'

'Don't interrupt me. He has died and come alive again thirteen times, and travelled under a new name every time: Smith, Jones, Robinson, Jackson, Peters, Haskins, Merlin—a new alias every time he turns up.'

I don't really wish to ruin yet another corner of the internet with protracted discussion of something that doesn't matter, but those failing to see the significance should recall Ben Aaronovitch's Battlefield and note that Merlin is the seventh name here listed by Hank Morgan, time travelling narrator and protagonist of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

Ahhhh...

Anyway, Twain's roughly groundbreaking satirical time travel novel, the premise of which is explained in the title, ambles along vaguely in the tradition of Gulliver's Travels as investigation by means of absurdity. It initially does a Don Quixote, pulling apart  myths of chivalry and monarchy from a distinctly American perspective, namely that of a writer quite happy to have been born in a country which rejects the European traditions of hereditary and inheritance:

It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and honour king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honour the lash, or a dog has to love and honour the stranger that kicks him!

Twain seems to be at his most eloquent when explaining why nineteenth century America is better than sixth century England, and so the novel gets off to a promising start.

As Morgan acclimatises to life in the middle ages, he enlists supporters and creates a hidden society with steam technology, buried telephone lines and so on. Oddly, this is where the story seems to lose direction, or at least did for me. The imposition of a nineteenth century economy destabilises the country and represents Twain's striving for narrative balance - acknowledging that his own time is no less rife with problems, albeit different problems to those of a feudal monarchy. I'm sure he communicates his points very well to those more versed in political science - even delivering one section as rhetoric in the style of Socratic dialogues - but I found it all a little mystifying and hence unengaging. This coupled with the anachronistic introduction of nineteenth century technology as something peripheral, mostly referred to in passing, made for a slightly unsatisfying read during the last third of the novel.

I realise this may constitute blasphemy but A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court feels like a good idea that ran out of steam leaving one with the impression that whilst Twain was clearly a great writer, this could not have been his best book.

Out of Their Minds

Clifford D. Simak Out of Their Minds (1970)
...and whilst we're on the subject of reality as a function of consciousness, here we have one of Simak's Marmite books, so I have been led to understand, the novel besides which The Goblin Reservation reads like Of Mice and Men, the one where Cliff really went for it, throwing his main guy into a world populated by dinosaurs, demons, and cartoon characters - notably Mickey Mouse, Pluto, and good old Charlie Brown.

Or not as the case may be, for Out of Their Minds actually turns out to be a sober and surprisingly philosophical narrative on the nature of folklore and imagination, amongst other things. Fictional characters - and I mean fictional even within the context of the story - are introduced without so much as a whiff of post-modern novelty, and it seems particularly apposite that one of these characters should be a faithful and uncommonly sympathetic rendering of Don Quixote, himself a response to the literary traditions of Cervantes' time.

Out of Their Minds treats folklore as a by-product of human evolution crossed roughly with reality found in the eye of the beholder, or at least the eye of the one who gets to tell the story. It's spelled out in analogue rather than digital terms as with much of Simaks's writing, ideas offered for consideration rather than carved in stone. This is, I suspect, the secret of Simak's success, namely that he leaves the reader something to do; actually with a lot to do in the case of Out of Their Minds which is nothing if not multi-layered. This feels like one of those novels which delivers some new perspective each time you pick it up, and whilst I can see how it might not be to everyone's taste, I can also most certainly see why it has its fans.

The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel

François Rabelais The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1553)
A pedant might point out that the satirical writings of sixteenth century Franciscan monk François Rabelais might not really qualify as science-fiction in quite the same way as, for example, an episode of Blake's 7; but persons bringing Blake's 7 to the table have already betrayed themselves as simpletons and forfeited their stake in the argument so far as I'm concerned. Blake's 7 was bollocks even at the time, and Gargantua and Pantagruel features both giants and toilet humour, which is good enough for me. Some might say that's an unfair or even ludicrous comparison, but they're wrong.

No-one seems quite able to agree on the identity of the first modern novel, and the works of both Cervantes and Swift have been suggested as candidates presumably on the grounds of their having some sort of narrative progression. Whatever the case may be, it probably wasn't Gargantua and Pantagruel, the collected tales of a giant and his son belonging firmly in the tradition of early novels wherein people have long conversations about stuff. True, our heroes - mainly the giant Pantagruel and his human sidekick, Panurge - embark upon a series of adventures, visiting islands populated by the sort of beings which kept sixteenth century monks awake at night, notably a giant who eats windmills - but the ensuing japes and scrapes remain secondary to the discourse they inspire, representing a subtle difference of emphasis to the somewhat more dynamic Gulliver's Travels. This isn't a criticism. Simply an acknowledgement of this being an earlier work reflecting the efforts of an entirely different author.

Like Swift, Rabelais found endless entertainment in jokes about things plopping out of arses and landing upon human heads. Thus do we have the term Rabelaisian which may be applied equally well to both Gulliver's Travels and Viz comic, or at least Viz comic when it was funny. This was all something of a revelation for me, my previous experience of sixteenth century monks (which is more extensive than you might suspect) very much typecasting them as pious sorts with an abiding love for both Jesus and the Pope. Rabelais spends a lot of time chuckling over turds thrown as missiles, people drowning in lakes of piss, couples rubbing their bacon together, as he calls it, and taking the St. Michael out of God's alleged Earthly representative. He also spends a great deal of time discussing human concerns, society, morality and so on, and with an insight that seems refreshingly honest and open considering the writing of at least some of his contemporaries. I'm looking at you here, Fr. Sahagún.

Gargantua and Pantagruel is alternately both gripping and hilarious whilst at other times being somewhat repetitive and lacking in the energy which made Swift so engrossing, although in all fairness I  suspect this may be down to my being something of a thickie where the classics are concerned, so jokes about Pythagoras or Roman emperors tend to be wasted on me. As a satirical novel, it's pleasantly devoid of the misanthropy which infects the later books of Gulliver's Travels and is probably funnier in places, but despite all there may be in its favour, sadly it just hasn't aged as well.