Some Thoughts on Fritz Peters’ Finistère

Full Disclosure: Hirsch Giovanni were nice enough to contact me, having looked at my review of A Single Man, to see if I was interested in receiving an ARC of Finistère, an early LGTBTQIA+ novel by one of Isherwood’s contemporaries, and that they are republishing. I said yes. I haven’t received any payment or entered into any kind of agreement with them. What follows are my otherwise unvarnished thoughts. You get the drill.

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As I read Finistère I couldn’t help but be reminded of The Catcher in the Rye, because they’re both novels about what happens when you treat a young man as a problem to solve and pack him off to boarding school.

It was really quite upsetting. More upsetting than the inevitably tragic ending (inevitable because it’s a gay novel from the mid 20^th century), I thought. Matthew, the protagonist, is exploited, manipulated, ignored, brushed aside, and otherwise just considered to be something that’s messing up the lives of all the adults around him, and his high crime? Being upset that his parents have separated. He’s unlikeable himself at times, but find me a teenage boy who is always likeable and I’ll find you a gay novel from the ‘50s with a happy ending.

Gore Vidal is blurbed on the front cover of this edition thus: “His great theme: the corruption and murder of innocence.” Oh yeah.

This novel is a very slow starter. You get a hundred-odd pages of Matthew sulking, his mother fretting, his early school life in France, that kind of thing, elongated by alternating chapters that follow Matthew’s perspective, then his mother’s, then Matthew again, then his friend Scott. You realise later than Peters is setting up this heteronormative upper-class family life as a structure, but in the moment it is a bit dull. The latter stuff wouldn’t have nearly the same effect without it, though. If nothing else, Peters has to establish how emotionally unintelligent Matthew’s mother Catherine is, but more on that later.

Everything changes with the introduction of Michel Garnier, the games teacher, in to Matthew’s life. Now, I can’t shy away from it any longer, this a novel about a fifteen year old boy (who turns sixteen in the course of the narrative), and his relationship with a man in a position of authority over him who is also more than twice his age. That said, I think Peters makes it really clear how we’re supposed to feel about it. The first thing we see Michel do, watching Matthew swimming in the Seine, before the dramatic drowning and rescue scene, is this: he picks up a beetle, a small thing he has complete power over and that poses no threat to him, and he crushes it.

This is where the novel pivots, and we realise that in the first half Peters has been creating a container for steadily increasing pressure once Matthew’s relationship with Michel begins. The plot begins moving much faster and it’s just much more engaging. This narrative structure also enhances the impact of all the emotional blows in the second half. We are a bit bored and sad, like Matthew, before being inducted in to the Homo-Sexual Underground (sorry, I’ve been playing Disco Elysium) just like Matthew.

Some of the saddest stuff in this novel is during the most ostensibly happy parts. Catherine is happy that Matthew seems to have come out of his shell a bit, but I got the feeling she was just happy that he wasn’t being difficult any more. There are points during this bit where you can’t help but wonder if everybody in this novel is too stupid to realise what is going on between Michel and Matthew, but actually it kinda tracks if you consider that they’re all just relieved and content to rationalise away any difficult feelings. Like real people, I guess.

Catherine doesn’t notice what’s happening until Matthew explicitly tells her, and she’s in fact so dense that I wondered whether there was an undercurrent of misogyny; but Scott, Matthew’s old best friend, is very similar. All the American characters are, actually. And all the French people are super-empaths who then use their abilities to suit themselves and manipulate other people. Nobody comes out particularly well.

Michel’s rationalisations are just grim. But believable, in their way.

One thing I noticed that I can’t fit in to this wider criticism but that I want to mention; after Matthew has his first encounter with Michel, Peters literally introduces the word gay into the narrative. Matthew’s mood is gay; he does things gayly. I know it’s the kind of thing you might have said unironically in 1951 but within the context of this novel it’s pretty funny – some much needed comic relief compared to the dark water of the plot.

I’ve mentioned the structure; the narrative voice takes some getting used to as a modern reader as well, I’d say. The third person omniscient is fine, but this is one of those stories where the author has very clearly decided to tell you what’s happening, not show you. You are told what characters are thinking, how they’re feeling. There are little bits of elision and obfuscation but mostly it gets told to you straight, without a touch of irony. I think this is fine, but reader beware. I mean,show don’t tell,this is a bit of writing advice I’ve never been 100% comfortable with. You *tell* someone a story, right? That’s the verb.

It is unlikely I would have ever picked this book up without being prompted, but I’m glad someone did prompt me because (apart from some superficial similarities) it’s not like anything else I’ve ever read, and really did a masterful job of pulling me in and then pushing me away. There’s a lot of queer fiction from the 20^th century I’ve been aware of but haven’t read (if I’m honest with myself because I don’t always have the stomach for those tragic endings.) Now I know I can get through it, there’s a load of fiction opened up to me.

Some (More) Thoughts on Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

A few weeks ago I finished reading Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare and then put up a review on this blog that was a bit cold. Then, I decided to go back through the book to pick stuff out of it for my commonplace book, and discovered that I’d actually really enjoyed the first half, but bounced off an essay around the midpoint, and then had my impressions coloured by the weaker second half and my fading memories of the first.

Let this be a lesson in recency bias. Let this also be a lesson that if you’re going to keep a commonplace book and a blog, it’s probably best to finish a book, transfer stuff to your commonplace, and then write the review.

If I’m a fast learner it’s because I’m generally quick to find the absolutely wrongest way to do something and then work my way backwards.

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The Air-Conditioned Nightmare contains a couple of gems that I wanted to share with you. Writing at the time that the modern world was being born, and particularly at a time when the world was mechanically gearing up to slaughter millions of people for the second time that century, Miller couldn’t help but consider the role of technology in society. Here’s what he had say,

“Inventions which would throw millions more out of work, since by the queer irony of our system, every potential boon to the human race is converted in to an evil, lie idle on the shelves of the patent office, or are bought up and destroyed by the powers that control our destiny.”

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, pg. 30

I couldn’t help but feel this rings particularly true in our current moment. Why do computers get to paint and write poetry while we keep having to work shit jobs, indeed.

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Here’s another one. Mind the, uh, out of date language.

“I used to think that perhaps one day I’d own a little apparatus which by turning a dial would enable me to see [an outdated word referring to people from China] walking through the streets of Peking or Shanghai!”

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, pg. 44

God bless you, Henry Miller, you’d have loved YouTube.

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I’m also reminded of one of my favourite tweets that I now sadly can’t find. I’ll paraphrase it for you. If you know the source please do let me know.

“If James Joyce had access to pornography on the same device he used to write, he’d never have written a word.”

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All quotes taken from the New Directions paperback edition of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, ISBN: 978-0-8112-0106-3

Some Thoughts on Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost

The Rebecca Solnit I really want to read is Wanderlust: A History of Walking, (because I’m finally entering my psychogeography era), but when I was in Waterstones the other day and had cash in my pocket I saw A Field Guide to Getting Lost and couldn’t leave it there. What a title, for a start.

(The first Solnit I’d read was her piece about autonomous cars and San Francisco in the LRB, which I thought was great.)

I’m not sure how to talk about A Field Guide, which is fitting with its theme, I think. There are through lines but it mostly functions as a mood piece and a meditation. Solnit is wonderfully multidisciplinary; she uses memories to prise open and examine history, and history to unearth and interrogate memory. All of it is within her scope. She talks about lost tribes, lost people, lost objects, lost relationships. She talks about actually being lost, and the difficulty of finding yourself.

In structure it’s a series of essays; some of them on more specific things like the history of European settlers integrating with Indigenous cultures in America, or a dear friend’s passing (the chapter on Marine is a beautiful portrait and heartbreaking), and sometimes they are interstitial, The Blue of Distance, a talking over and around the theme. It’s a good rhythm that, ironically, stops you getting too lost in the text. She always knows when to bring you back, when to talk about something concrete.

The vibe was at once strange and familiar and I spent a lot of the book trying to place where I’d felt it before, a feeling that meant this book absolutely succeeded, and I realised it was in reading some of Roland Barthes’ more personal works, like Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, and, A Lover’s Discourse. That’s a great mood to be able to evoke. If I could do that I’d never do anything else.

I can only do this book an injury by trying to describe it any further. It’s about 200 pages, the perfect length for something like this. If you’re reading this review you’ll already know whether you’ll dig it or not. If you haven’t read it, just go do it.

Quick Writing Update May 2024

I submitted a couple of poems to the Peterborough True Voices Anthology being developed by final year English students at University Centre Peterborough, and they selected one of them to appear in The Moment Magazine Peterborough to help promote the coming pub date in June. I’m super happy; they picked a poem I wrote about going to my first Posh match that really means a lot to me.

You can read it at the link below. There’s some other preview pieces from the True Voices anthology as well. I’ll keep you up to date; I’m looking forward to reading the whole thing!

https://www.calameo.com/read/006979459c7ada2117edd?page=77

Some Thoughts on Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

I think the most remarkable thing about this book is that it’s a Henry Miller without any sex in it, although I can’t recall there being much, if any, in The Colossus of Maroussi, either. I started The Air-Conditioned Nightmare pretty directly after having put down Colossus because I was expecting them to be of a piece, but I was a little bit disappointed.

Colossus was fantastic, I thought, chronicling as it does some of Miller’s journeys around the Mediterranean while the rest of Europe is getting engulfed in what would become World War 2. I was reading it not long after the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia reached the milestone of a year, and the resonance was hard to ignore. I’ve read the Tropics, and while they go in to some detail about Miller’s feelings on the contrast between America and Europe, Colossus focuses on it. Otherwise he travels, carouses, writes, mixes with interesting locals. As far as I can tell the difference between a Henry Miller novel and a Henry Miller piece of non-fiction is that in the non-fiction, he leaves out the sex.

Miller doesn’t really say anything new in Colossus, but that doesn’t matter. As far as I can recall (I read it a year ago), he draws a distinction between a Europe with a real, ancient, tangible history, and an America that has paved over anything you might call history and indigenous culture and thrown up shopping centres and TV antennas. Not the first guy to make the point, I’m sure, but he has a kind of lyrical way of making it when he’s in full flow, and he can go from a record of a dinner party where he met interesting people to a free-flowing, prose-poetic meditation on the relevance of ancient Greece today. It’s some range and some performance.

(As an aside, here’s my paperback copy of Colossus. I think it’s the rattiest paperback I have, or close to it, anyway. I bought this on the used book stall at Peterborough City Market. Back when we had a market.)

Just look at it. No, I can’t get the sticker off.

Maybe you won’t care if you don’t like Henry Miller already; I like Henry Miller a lot and to me it’s just fine, like listening to a favourite dirty uncle talk about politics. Fundamentally you agree with him, but you’d never put it the way he does.

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is ostensibly more of the same, picking up where Colossus left off as Miller gets deposited on a dockside in New York. If Colossus is Miller taking a last look at a Europe going up in flames, Nightmare is Miller getting reacquainted with a country he’s not seen in a decade. It’s an intriguing premise.

It just doesn’t quite come off the same way. Whether it’s the change of locale or a change in mood, the same frisson just isn’t there. I mean, at its very simplest, Miller’s idea is that Europe is a place where things (good, bad, otherwise) happen, and America is a stultified, sanitised place. It’s borne out in his work about it as well.

There is a disconnected feeling where Colossus follows a thread. The chapters of prose poetry are as marvellous as ever, but contrasted with some essays on his mates and their artistic practises, it just doesn’t hit the same. The fault might be with me; if I had more of an interest in American visual art during the war I’d probably be in love with it, but I think he wrote in a more penetrating, interesting way when he was in Europe encountering poets.

He’s still brilliant by turns, though. One of the later chapters, Soirée in Hollywood is an account of a boozy, upper class dinner party he kind of falls into when he gets to LA. The conversation is hilarious, the paranoia is thick, and Miller plays the straight man beautifully. It has the same energy as this James Acaster bit. If you know, you know:

Nightmare is still worth reading if you’re a Miller fan, but definitely read Colossus first, and before that read the two Tropics. I haven’t read the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy yet but it’s on the list.

The Proust Questionnaire Revisited

I’ve noticed my original responses to the Proust Questionnaire from October 2015 (!!!) keeps getting the odd view. I went and had a re-read of my responses and thought hey, I’ve appreciably changed in the last nine years! Surprising, I know. I’m going to leave the original post up for posterity’s sake, but I’m also gonna do it again, for fun and profit.

Maybe I’ll do it every ten years or so?

Since I published the original post, I still haven’t read Proust. I’m lost in the depths of that first book. I’ve bounced off it a couple of times. I’ll get there in the end, I’m sure. I did with Ulysses. Maybe a lengthy prison stay, or a spell on the moon, will do it.

Find below my original answers and my updated ones in italics.

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• What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Bereavement. | Yeah, still bereavement.

• Where would you like to live?

Holland. | Haha, probably not. I’d pick London now, I think. Not forever. But I’d like to have lived in London.

• What is your idea of earthly happiness?

Peace, quiet, an engaging activity. | Still this, absolutely.

• To what faults do you feel most indulgent?

Indolence, overindulgence, impatience. | I’ve worked really hard on at least two of these faults! I’ll let you guess which ones. Now I would say I feel other people’s pain too keenly, and try to fix things where I should actually be sitting with the discomfort.

• Who are your favourite heroes of fiction?

Leopold Bloom. Stephen Dedalus. Sherlock Holmes. | Hell yeah, still these guys. I’ve read a lot of fantasy recently, so I’d probably add Conan the Cimerian and Severian from The Book of the New Sun.

• Who are your favourite characters in history?

Sigmund Freud. Jacques Derrida. Malcolm X. | What was I thinking? Malcolm X I’d still put on this list I think. How odd these questions are. Fiction gets heroes, real life gets characters? In terms of… character, maybe I’d pick this lad, Daniel Lambert.

• Who are your favourite heroines in real life?

My mother. | Such a cop-out answer, James. Dead, probably Boudica. Living, I actually can’t believe Diane Abbott stands up under what gets piled on her.

• Who are your favourite heroines of fiction?

Jane Eyre. Molly Bloom. Ophelia. | Still true. The eponymous Gwilan from the Le Guin story Gwilan’s Harp gets a shout. Looking this up I just realised I made a typo in my post including that story. This has been a useful exercise already!

• Your favourite painter?

Salvador Dali. | It’s basic but I still love Dali.

• Your favourite musician?

Lou Reed or Kurt Cobain. Can’t decide. | Still the same. Thurston Moore gets a shout because I liked his memoir.

• The quality you most admire in a man?

Patience. | Forbearance: being able to engage in cruelty, being encouraged to engage in cruelty, and choosing not to.

• The quality you most admire in a woman?

Patience. | Forbearance: being able to engage in cruelty, being encouraged to engage in cruelty, and choosing not to.

• Your favourite virtue?

Patience. | Forbearance: being able to engage in cruelty, being encouraged to engage in cruelty, and choosing not to.

• Your favourite occupation?

I could say reading and writing to try and save face, but I spend altogether too much time playing videogames. | Still true. I like going for long walks too – I’m a dull, dull man.

• Who would you have liked to be?

James Joyce. | Oh God no. I’m actually reasonably comfortable with who I am so this is a difficult question. Maybe someone like Andrew Carnegie, loads of money and a social conscience. Or Steve Albini. I’d like to see him fill out the Proust questionnaire.

• Your most marked characteristic?

Delusions of grandeur. | Oh no, life has beaten that out of me. Now I’d probably say an overactive sense of empathy.

• The quality you most like in a man?

Intelligence. The ability to hold a conversation. | A willingness to try it yourself and learn.

• The quality you most like in a woman?

Ditto. | Ditto.

• What do you most value in your friends?

A willingness to listen. | Patience, understanding, a shared sense of humour.

• What is your principle defect?

Inability to see things through. I answered the first five questions of this, then stopped. Came back a month later. Tempted to give up and log in to WoW. | I’m getting better at finishing things. Still not great. I am, however, prone to thinking through a situation, seeing the exact details and contours of a mistake I’m about to make, and making it anyway.

• What is your favourite occupation?

Them blasted videogames. | Ok, you got me, it is videogames. I played Disco Elysium recently and loved it.

• What is your dream of happiness?

Sharing my daily existence with the woman I love. | Aww, still true.

• What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?

To not have met her. | Aww, still true.

• What would you like to be?

Myself without the character flaws. | Genuinely, myself. All my dream professions don’t make money any more so if you’re talking about jobs, don’t.

• In what country would you like to live?

Holland. | Germany by default because I speak a bit of German. I genuinely love England, or an idea of England, but it does really need to get its act together.

• What is your favourite colour?

Green. I tend to like darker shades of green, like emerald or British racing. | Still green.

• What is your favourite flower?

All that comes to mind is filth. | Stop it James. Probably snowdrops. Or bluebells.

• What is your favourite bird?

I don’t know enough about birds to have a favourite. I like all kinds of birds apart from magpies, I have taken a dislike to them after learning about how they eat the young of other birds. | Still don’t like magpies but the kind of ray gun noise they make is cool. I like blackbirds, great tits, pigeons.

• Who are your favourite prose writers?

James Joyce. William S. Burroughs. Thomas Pynchon. | I still love Burroughs but prose writer? Hahahaha. I’ve read a lot of Joan Didion recently and am blown away by the control she demonstrates in her writing.

• Who are your favourite poets?

T.S. Eliot. Ezra Pound. P.B. Shelley. Hope Mirrlees. | Same.

• Who is your favourite hero of fiction?

Leopold Bloom. | A repeat question. Did past me not have the wherewithal to edit this?

• Who are your favourite heroines of fiction?

Jane Eyre. Molly Bloom. | A repeat question. Did past me not have the wherewithal to edit this?

• Who are your favourite composers?

Beethoven, for Ode to Joy | Ode to Joy is good. Otherwise, Kevin Shields.

• Who are your favourite painters?

Dali, Picasso. | I like Picasso’s paintings and really don’t wanna look at them any more. I like Marcel Duchamp a lot (Nude Descending a Staircase).

• Who are your heroes in real life?

My mother, my grandmother, my sister, my girlfriend. | Same, but I’m kind of suspicious now of the idea of having heroes, because it’ll encourage you to wait to be saved, instead of trying to save yourself. Chris Packham does incredible work and stands up under such abuse. Diane Abbott likewise.

• Who are your favourite heroines of history?

Rosa Parks. Ada Lovelace. Aphra Behn. | Same. Add Boudica.

• What are your favourite names?

As full of self-regard as it is, I like my name a lot. I like Ophelia a lot, too. | My feelings haven’t changed. Trying to think of another name, Ellen sprang to mind. I don’t know where that came from.

• What is it you most dislike?

The necessity of earning money. | Oh God yes.

• What historical figures do you most despise?

Hitler. Reagan. Thatcher. | I wrote this in 2015 and had no idea Johnson and Trump were coming. Dominic Cummings was also pretty easy to hate. Politicians have to be able to lie, but an inability to tell the truth is unconscionable in a democracy.

• What event in military history do you most admire?

The defence of Stalingrad. | That was a pretty impressive one. I don’t tend to think about military history. When I’m over 40 I am sure I’ll get way too in to WW2, but I’m not there yet.

• What reform do you most admire?

The liar who decides to stop, and does. | People don’t really change. This question now makes me think of political reform. Having watched the social safety net get systemically attacked for a decade plus at this point, the postwar consensus looks more and more like a bright spot against a background of complete dark.

• What natural gift would you most like to possess?

Either a musical ear or the ability to easily learn languages. | Same. Perfect pitch would be great. I’d be so annoying. You’d lean back in your chair, it’d squeak, I’d say “That was an Ab” and feel smug, you’d grunt, and in my head, I’d know the grunt was a D#, but I’d not say anything, because I know when not to push it.

• How would you like to die?

With no foreknowledge or apprehension of the fact. | I wouldn’t like to, there’s too much I want to do.

• What is your present state of mind?

Still thinking about packing it in and logging on to WoW. | I have moved on; I don’t play WoW any more. I’m tired but glad I’ve got something to work on this evening.

• To what faults do you feel most indulgent?

Impatience, anxiety, frustration. | I worry too much. Always have, probably always will.

• What is your motto?

Scheisse passiert. | “You can’t make people do things.” I know it’s not catchy.

Some Thoughts on Keeping a Commonplace Book

You’re at a dinner party (or some other similarly sophisticated get-together). You’ve had a couple of drinks, you’ve finally loosened up, you’ve forgotten that you spent Friday afternoon showing Craig from marketing how to read a forwarded email and that you’re going to have to spend a good chunk of Monday doing it too. You wanted to be an artist. You’ve got the humanities degree to prove it.

The conversation takes its turns. Your friends tell you about a conference they recently attended in San Francisco, opportunities they might take to develop a game in Toronto, leadership vacancies.

You tell them about Craig.

Of course, they discuss the housing market.

Finally the conversation moves towards something you might know about; culture. Someone mentions having seen a play, or read a novel, or seen a film adapted from a book. And you’ve read it, you’ve seen it. The book was better.

They ask you what you thought of it.

“Umm, it was good. I really enjoyed it. I need to read the rest of their work.”

Trenchant insight right there.

Me writing this blog post

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I’ve read a bunch of classics and can remember only bits and pieces of them.

Take Moby Dick for example. I remember being weirded out by the continual shifts in and out of it being formatted like a play script. I remember the chapter on making rope. I remember… this bit:

Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-labourers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

I’ve read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and can remember only two things; the image of him straining to read by a bit of dull light filtering down a prison hallway, and his advice on preventing burglary:

A light on for the burglar to see is the very best single means of protection. One of the ideal things is to leave a bathroom light on all night. The bathroom is one place where somebody could be, for any length of time, at any time of the night, and he would be likely to hear the slightest strange sound. The burglar, knowing this, won’t try to enter. ‘It’s also the cheapest possible protection. The kilowatts are a lot cheaper than your valuables.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

James Joyce is one of my favourite writers and I can’t remember much of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man except for the classic moo-cow opening and the bit about forging in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race.

I realised what I hadn’t been doing was taking proper notes.

Take a look at my copy of Ulysses for example, loads of notes, and it’s easily the novel I know best. Taking notes helps you think and helps you remember, and there’s loads of different ways to do it.

The copy of Ulysses I used while I was an undergraduate.

I journal, and some of my thoughts on my reading go in there. I’ve started keeping a spreadsheet where I put a one or two sentence review of every book I finish. This blog plays a part in me actually remember my reading and making some use of it, too. I’ve been endeavouring to keep more personal notes and to make them useful and share them.

I’ve also started keeping a commonplace book.

I’ve known about them for a long time, but in my recent drive to just take more notes in general, I decided to give it a go. I came across the idea again while researching Zettelkasten, which I ended up not trying because it just looks like too much work, whereas copying down the odd quote I found interesting seemed manageable.

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Some Things I Enjoy about Keeping a Commonplace Book

• It makes me feel like I’m back at uni, a bit. Anything that makes you feel ten years younger is worth doing.
• It did increase my comprehension and my recall. I tried my best to treat my books the way C.S. Lewis suggests; like toys. Flipping back through them at the end to look for quotes I wanted to copy down helped me recall what I’d read and cement it.
• The copying down fixed the ideas further, and also acted a little bit like a gym for my fingers. Hunter S. Thompson said he learned a lot about writing by literally copying out great works of literature to see what it felt like to copy those words down, to feel them being written by his own fingers. Keeping a commonplace book is microdosing this effect without having to type out The Great Gatsby.
• It’s a great way to form connections and stockpile material for blog posts.

Some Things I Wish I’d Known about Keeping a Commonplace Book

• Leave a few pages at the start for a table of contents. Leafing through the whole thing to find notes on a particular book might increase your memory of what you’ve copied overall (see my point above in “Some Things I Enjoy…”), but in the moment it it just frustrating. You want that quote for a blog post. You need that quote for a blog post. Your blog post won’t be complete unless you find that bit you copied from Moby Dick where he talks about how much he loves squeezing sperm.
• Don’t be overzealous. I remember my first year of uni – people would take way too many notes, me included, up to and including writing down everything the lecturer said verbatim. I think the first book I took notes from for my commonplace was The Winds Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose (see my reviews here and here). You know what le Guin is like. I underlined every other sentence and then copied it all down dutifully. This lead to…
• …me feeling bad about finishing books, because I’d then have a load of work to do. I know, right? Do yourself a favour and don’t introduce any more friction into your reading experience than absolutely necessary. Selecting what bits are resonating with you and that you want to remember is an important part of the process.

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To be entirely truthful with you, keeping a commonplace book hasn’t been a priority for me the last few months. I’ve finished five or six books without worrying about copying any quotes down. I think the most useful part of the exercise might actually be taking the time to have a flick through a book when you’ve finished it, just to refresh bits of it in your memory while it’s still recent.

This is a particularly good tip for e-books, I think. (I read this somewhere and can’t remember where, sorry.) Part of the reason we have an easier time recalling information from printed text as opposed to reading on a screen is that printed text engages our spatial and tactile memory. You remember a quote saying a certain thing, but you also remember it being in a footnote on the bottom right of a page, and not having many pages left in your right hand. That can be lost with an e-book, but you can re-engage that sense by taking time to flip through an e-book before reading it in earnest, making sure you highlight and create notes, and then going back through checking those highlights and notes when you finish. (Again, I read a post to this effect somewhere and now cannot find it, because, as you see, while I am engaged in improving my note-taking practise, it isn’t perfect. If you recognise this advice as your advice, please let me know and I’ll credit you.)

Have you tried keeping a commonplace book yourself? Do you have any advice? Is there anything I’m doing wrong? Please do say in the comments!

Some Thoughts on Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital

I’m a white guy with a beard and a humanities degree. I like going for walks. It was inevitable, then, that I’d find my way to psychogeography.

It’s a practise (or set of practises, I guess), that I’ve been aware of for a long time but haven’t engaged with in a serious way. I read The Society of the Spectacle around the time the Leveson enquiry was happening and felt very knowing. I’ve recently felt compelled to take more and more notes in all areas and aspects of my life, and one of those areas has naturally been the walks I take around the Peterborough area.

But more on that later.

Happenstance, serendipity, chance. Call it what you will, it plays a bigger part in our lives than any of us can admit and stay sane. The stakes aren’t always super high, though. I was thinking about Iain Sinclair and how London Orbital was such a great idea for a book because I had seen people discussing it on Twitter. I was thinking about it as I walked in to a charity shop and immediately spotted a copy of it on the shelf.

(I know what the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon is.)

I started it pretty much immediately but it’s taken me a good while to work through. I get the impression Sinclair does not write nice easy books about his nice easy travels. His project, to walk a circuit of London directed by the M25, within its “aural boundaries”, and to get it done before the Millennium, was a difficult, stop-start task, and London Orbital is a difficult, stop-start book.

A lot of it is down to Sinclair’s writing style, which is one of those where you have to glom on to the rhythm and tone and go with it, as opposed to fighting it and trying to decipher every sentence exactly. In a lot of ways Sinclair is non-fiction Ballard, obsessed as he is with the same spaces, the same processes, but in terms of style and tone, it’s more like Virginia Woolf’s writing about London, or Hope Mirrlee’s Paris. You are absolutely in the stream of Sinclair’s consciousness. As much as he is reporting facts about where he walked, when, who with, he’s also recording his impressions, snatches of conversation, bits of text he sees on the streets, adverts, digressions about the history of literature and the history of London.

It’s great and I love it and I found myself going with the flow quite quickly, even if I couldn’t always abide it for very long, but I can imagine someone struggling and getting out and not coming back.

The digressions are fascinating. I suspect some of these projects Sinclair engages in are ways of him bringing his enormous reading to bear in a context that will stand it, and who can blame him? What’s particularly interesting, I think, is the way he doesn’t make much of a distinction as to fact or fiction. A house William Blake might have stayed in is treated with the same weight as an area that plays a part in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And why not? It weighs just as heavily in the imagination, especially if you’re there. The few pages on Dracula stunned me; Sinclair describing him as the original psychogeographer, as map obsessive, London obsessive, someone already forming deep and psychic connections with a space before he’s even arrived. It’s an angle I’d never considered, and it’s made me immediately want to go and re-read Dracula. It’s almost throwaway how Sinclair introduces the idea and it’s better, more original, more interesting literary criticism than I’ve seen in ages.

(If the idea comes from somewhere else, or has an antecedent, please let me know in the comments.)

I imagine you have to be careful, writing non-fiction featuring your friends, to not abuse their good nature or turn them in to figures of fun. I always loved the way Bill Bryson talked about his relationship with his friend Stephen Katz in A Walk in the Woods and thought it a model for that kind of thing. Sinclair walks the same tightrope and succeeds here. In particular I’d highlight his portrayal of Kevin Jackson, who comes along on some stretches of the walk totally unprepared, or even misprepared, and is treated within the narrative with real sympathy. He brings a jacket that’ll “cook him if he wears it, cripple him if he carries it”. He wears trainers when he should wear boots, and boots when he should wear trainers.

It’s clever, the way he uses these real people as characters. Renchi Bicknell is a foil for Sinclair in the sense that Sinclair is often a detached observer, interested in what these spaces do to his own interior space, whereas Renchi is the people person, the smooth talker, the one who can get them past a security guard or talk down a paranoid local. Kevin, on the other hand, reminds us of the physical reality. Life isn’t frictionless; we have bodies we need to navigate through these spaces. Kevin stops the book becoming about the M25 in Sinclair’s own head, which would be fascinating I’m sure, but also one-note.

If you’ve read any of my reviews before you’ll know the highest compliment I feel can pay a book is that, having read it, I immediately want to go off and write an imitation of it (see Renata Adler’s Speedboat). If you haven’t guessed by now, I’d pay London Orbital the same compliment. I’m ready to fall down the psychogeography rabbit hole.

I can see Iain Sinclair has written quite a few books. Is there somewhere you’d recommend I go having started with London Orbital? Not that I lack for stuff to read, because to pay it another compliment, I’ve come away with yet more on my reading list.

Some Thoughts on Murakami’s Men Without Women

I was gifted this collection for Christmas and I’m glad I was. I’ve been aware of Murakami for a long time (and I’ve owned some of his novels for a long time), but just never got around to giving him a serious go. This collection was a great way in to his work, I think.

As usual when I look at a collection of short stories, I’ve taken the #onetweetreviews approach; I’ll post my raw notes, lightly edited, below the break, and then will develop my thoughts a bit after that.

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Drive my Car

This story made me think about pacifism, about what it means to be capable of doing someone a great harm, and wanting to, and not doing it.

Yesterday

For anyone who has ever found themselves playing a role in someone else’s relationship: this one’s for you.

An Independent Organ

Men will go to any lengths to justify their behaviour.

Scheherazade

This is some hyperfixation.

Kind

The repressed always returns.

Samsa in Love

A fun twist on a classic – it is weird having a body, isn’t it?

Men Without Women

The strangest story in the collection, with the most savage hurt at the centre of it.

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I realised while I was reading these stories that, recently, I’ve not read many conventional stories where men and women worry about their careers, love each other, hurt each other. In fact the context I can most easily recall that does include that stuff is the occasional murder mystery I read. My habits are my habits, I’m trying not to worry about them. It might have reached the surface of my mind because I read about half of this collection on a train moving away from someone I love (but towards someone else I love).

Love and pain are felt in so many exquisite degrees, right? This collection is about the many big and small ways that we disappoint people, are disappointed, how those feelings linger. I’d point particularly to Yesterday in this collection. Kids playing at adult games are liable to get hurt in ways that are deeper than they notice at first, and this story captures that feeling exactly.

Again, I haven’t “properly” read Murakami yet, but I knew I’d probably like him. His main concerns, as I understand them (apart from love), are The Beatles, Cats, and Jazz, and that means I’m likely to get on with him. They’re all present here.

And Kafka, I guess. An Independent Organ is a devastatingly sad riff on A Hunger Artist, and Samsa in Love is a playful look at The Metamorphosis that supposes, just what if?… Gregor Samsa awoke to find himself turned in to a man. Terrifying, I know.

Shecherazade is another standout, elevating pillow talk to high art and again riffing on a classic, The One Thousand and One Nights. Most of these stories revolve around male desire, so one that tries to centre a woman’s experience is welcome. It’s also totally unhinged, but all these stories are, in their own way, and maybe that’s Murakami, but maybe that’s also just how love makes you.

The translation duties are shared between Philip Gabriel and Ted Goosen; they do an admirable job of keeping the voice consistent in these stories. The narrators all come from different backgrounds, but they are also clearly of a piece, and this helps strengthen the theme, I think. It’s quite a spare voice, matter-of-fact. This book taking its name from a collection of stories by Ernest Hemingway shouldn’t be lost on you.

I think I’ll have to move up reading one of his novels. I have copies of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood, and Kafka on the Shore, I think, somewhere. Would you start with one of those, or would you try something else?

Some Thoughts on Viriconium

M. John Harrison is one of those writers that I knew on paper I should fall in love with but hadn’t properly tried. Up until last year I’d been a big fan of his blog and his tweets but hadn’t read much of his fiction other than The Centauri Device. Then I got gifted a copy of Wish I Was Here and couldn’t help but devour it over the course of a couple of afternoons. (I reviewed it here.)

I was sold on M. John Harrison, so I decided to finally get started with the Fantasy Masterworks omnibus of Viriconium stories that I bought myself last year.

It’s an incredibly varied body of work with a lot to offer, and that asks a lot of questions. At no point did Harrison condescend to my expectations. Not every story hits, but that’s as much down to my reading comprehension as it is anything else, I think. I imagine these stories would be similarly rich on re-reading as Gene Wolfe’s New Sun books are supposed to be.

As has become my habit with these collections and anthologies I end taking notes story by story. I’ll post those raw notes, slightly edited, below the break, and then continue my discussion after.

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Viriconium Knights

Why do I get the feeling that the tapestry is obliquely showing me important plot points?

The Pastel City

Like a heroic fantasy adventure inside a T.S. Eliot poem. The vibe here is impeccable. Harrison really goes out of his way to portray a world being scoured by a wind only moving in one direction; capital T Time, before pulling the rug and demonstrating that even at the end of Time, change is possible, is in fact the only constant. I think writing a fantasy novel about a swordsman who refuses to name his sword is hilarious. I just love the way he writes – I love the vocabulary, I love the odd choices of words. Gene Wolfe uses a similar technique in The Book of the New Sun. If you want to make it strange, writing about it strangely will go a long way.

Lord of Misrule

You don’t have to go to the end of time to meet sad people full of memories.

Strange Great Sins

Strange indeed. Is there a greater sin than not becoming yourself?

A Storm of Wings

Even sadder and more elegiac than usual. I miss tegeus-Cromis. So do a lot of people. The world, failing to end, undergoes a mutation. Filled with weird architecture you’ll struggle to imagine.

The Dancer from the Dance

Weird things happening on the heath.

The Luck in the Head

I could bound myself in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

The Lamia & Lord Cromis

Fate exists and you could not possibly guess at it.

In Viriconium

We spend more time in Viriconium than in any other story, and what a run down, claustrophobic place it is.

A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium

You always suspected that Viriconium could be anywhere or anywhen.

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I noticed as I was reading these stories that I was tracing the dying earth subgenre of SFF backwards. Or science fantasy, if you wanna call it that. I read The Book of the New Sun a few years ago and had never read anything like it, but knew you could follow it back to Jack Vance and The Dying Earth. The thread runs through Viriconium.

Opening this collection with Viriconium Knights is a smart move, I think. It drops you right it and disorients the hell out of you in terms of the setting, the characters, the way people view the world and how they speak to each other. It’s a concentrated hit. I didn’t understand the significance of the metal bird at the time, but having read Wolfe and been annoyed with myself at totally missing the significance of Dr. Talos’ play in Claw of the Conciliator, I was primed when the old man showed Ignace Retz the tapestry. Re-reading it quickly as I write this, it is a terrible echo, ever so sad; the first time I just nodded my head and knew what to expect.

I don’t know if Harrison arranged the stories or if that choice was made by an editor, but I think it’s significant that the stories from Viriconium Nights were broken up and arranged around the three novels, and not put in as their own block in the same order as published. Viriconium Knights would have one effect reading it after tegeus-Cromis has departed the stage, a nice little callback, do you remember that character? He was swell, wasn’t he? Placing it here, first, an echo of a thing that hasn’t happened yet, deprives you of that feeling of warmth and just highlights the disconnect, the instability of time and identity within these stories.

If The Pastel City was the only Viriconium thing then it would stand very well on its own as a great novel and fine addition to the genre. It’s an epic adventure story that subverts as many ideas and tropes inherent to epic adventure stories as it can, and even has some horror elements. (Thinking about it a lot of these stories have horror elements.) It’s a quest narrative where the quest only obliquely gets fulfilled and the hero is a master swordsman who refuses to name his sword and prefers to think of himself as a poet. The novel is written like the novelist prefers to think of himself as a poet. I mentioned it above, that using weird, archaic language can create that sense of strangeness.

(This extends even to the colours. I learned so many new words for colours reading these stories. Make it new!)

I just came across (here) an old essay of Harrison’s on the idea of worldbuilding. I think this quote is particularly edifying;

Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain

Harrison is writing a kind of post-structuralist fantasy, writing a constantly shifting city into existence by relying on the constant shift of language, asking the reader to do a lot of the work knowing full well every reader “reads” a different text into existence.

In Wish I Was Here, Harrison talks a lot about T.S. Eliot – I thought as I was reading the Viriconium stories that it was like a fantasy novel set inside an Eliot poem, but it goes deeper than that imagery. Harrison is as disobliging as Eliot. Eliot expects you to be familiar with so much stuff outside of his text to be able to fully grok it, Harrison does likewise. Harrison even quotes directly from The Waste Land without citing it, a few times actually, in much the same way Eliot doesn’t let you know when he’s copped something from Fraser, or Shakespeare. It’s poetry, innit.

Which is all to say that I adored The Pastel City, that if you were writing a fantasy novel just for me, just to appeal to my own interests and predilections, you would write The Pastel City.

The short stories that in this collection begin to serve as connective tissue are even more oblique, and I’m going to have to re-read them, I think, to have the same relationship with them that I developed with the novels. Some of the imagery starts repeating, like the Mari Lwyd.

A Storm of Wings is an odd one. In a world that is kind of already post-apocalyptic, but has reached a kind of equilibrium, what does the end of the world look like? It’s something totally alien, totally unimaginable, and it’s far enough in the future that our hero, tegeus-Cromis, has passed, and we must deal with it ourselves. A lot of the characters are heard aloud wishing for the return of their poet-cum-swordmaster in a way that probably echoes what the general reader is thinking. Instead we’re given; a rogue, a person who has been reawakened after millennia and is losing their grip on reality, a person who has been reawakened after millennia and *has* lost their grip on reality, and Tomb the dwarf, so that at least we’re not totally alienated, because despite me using words like “post-structuralist” to describe these stories, they are still stories, and Harrison knows what he is doing.

Harrison isn’t too arch to give us what we want, he just isn’t gonna do it in a straightforward way. The Lamia & Lord Cromis is another quest narrative, because that’s the kind of context that tegeus-Cromis belongs in. Lords of his house are fated to have to find and slay a rare beast, the eponymous Lamia. He does, eventually, do this, but it doesn’t bring him the fulfilment he expects, and I think him losing a ring in the same swamp that he loses one of Queen Jane’s in The Pastel City is interesting. tegeus-Cromis is directly engaging with his fate in this story, but not in the way he thinks.

(I just want to point out that even in giving us what we want, Harrison doesn’t. tegeus-Cromis spends a lot of The Pastel City brooding over his dead sister, in what I imagine might be a reference to Elric, but Harrison doesn’t use the prequel story to show us that loss, or bring tegeus-Cromis’ sister on stage for cheap dramatic irony. Remarkable restraint.)

By this point, and leading into the next novel, I was really noticing what Harrison wasn’t showing us, what he refuses to explain. There is plenty of advanced technology like airships, power armour, and laser swords, that he doesn’t explain, and doesn’t have the characters theorise about in-text either. The stuff just is, like stuff in real life just is. The way he describes the radiation from these technologies is cool (again, he’s not *against* the reader, he’s just not doing it all for them), they give off motes of white and purple light. In Viriconium, the last Viriconium novel, has a plague that is never explained, only its effects shown, that of sapping the will, the creative energy, the life force, of the city.

I actually had a moment reading this one where I thought, “I wonder what it’s like to live through a plage?” It took me a few moments, but I realised I had. And it had had a similar sapping effect on my energies, my life force. I know some people managed to have incredibly creative quarantines; I felt like such a dick because I didn’t. On paper it sounded perfect. My wages were getting (mostly) paid, and I had to stay home. The perfect time to work on that novel. I ground away at it and just felt miserable. None of it came easy. I kept a journal on and off. I’m glad I tried to keep myself busy and have some material to show for it, but it’s hard to look back at it as a particularly fruitful period.

(“Why won’t Harrison explain the plague?” I wondered to myself, as if anyone ever fully explained COVID.)

The protagonist, Ashlyme, a painter, has a friend who is also an artist and who is suffering from the plague. Ashlyme recognises his friend, Audsley King, as a great painter, but struggles to understand her recent work or why she choses to wallow in the plague zone instead of getting out and lapping up the adulation she surely deserves. Audsley has no interest in the praise of people she does not respect. This friction animatesthe whole story and the plague is just a backdrop. The stuff with the secret police, and the twins; I’m sure they represent the city, but otherwise am having trouble reconciling that subplot with the story as whole. Which might be the point. Art has contradictions and unreconcilable parts. Does some of this speak to Harrison’s attitude to the Viriconium stories as a whole? I think so, at least a bit.

The last story, A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium, is a gear shift, set as it is in our world, among our people, some of whom have been to Viriconium before, some of whom want to visit for the first time. It’s an interesting contrast – what makes one story set in grimy cafes with a cast of weird people a fantasy and what makes another story set in grimy cafes among weird people not a fantasy story? Is it just the names? Some pretty weird names in this one, but then some of it takes place in York. Is Viriconium a place or a state of mind? I don’t know how I feel about this story, haven’t come to a nice conclusion. I just have questions and ideas I’ll be happy to think about every now and again until I eventually re-read these stories and maybe glean a bit more.

I’ve always enjoyed the modernist bent in SFF, the New Wave stuff, the exploration of inner space. Having read this and The Book of the New Sun, I’m thinking about how some of those other modernist ideas and ways of working leaked into the fantasy side of SFF, as a way of providing a kind of jungle gym for the reader’s mind. I came away from Viriconium with a lot of things to think about and a huge list of vocabulary to look up.

I love a book where I can feel myself becoming a better writer as I read it. The way Harrison constructs his worlds and stories looks so maximalist, and on closer inspection is so deliberate and restrained. Sometimes there is an impulse to explain every cool idea you have, and it is so satisfying to be trusted as a reader to fill in gaps, to be left space enough for a world to grow in me. Viriconium is ever changing in the stories, and is ever changing in my own mind and in the minds of everyone else who reads it.

Viriconium!