Category: My Reading

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 20th 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 20th 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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.)

An old orange and white paperback copy of Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi resting on a bit of green carpet.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Some Thoughts on the D&D 5E Player’s Handbook

There’s a Matt Colville video where he talks about how people participate in the community of tabletop games that I cannot find, but will use as a jumping off point; if you recognise what I’m talking about, please link it in the comments

Colville highlights that there are people who might not be able to find a group to play a game with, but they still buy the books, read them, and discuss them online. It reminded me that my interactions with Warhammer 40k were even more insular than that. I had the rulebook and a few of the codexes, and I’d go down to Games Workshop every now and again to buy a few models to paint, and I’d get the odd issues of White Dwarf; but I never played the game, I didn’t really have any friends who were into it, the older boys at Games Workshop were scary, and I didn’t have regular access to the internet.

So I painted the models and read the books and used my imagination.

I’m not into 40k any more (the older boys at Games Workshops are still scary), but I did start playing Dungeons and Dragons again in the last year, and with that has come plenty of rulebooks and sourcebooks to read. I decided I’d better have an honest go at at least reading the Player’s Handbook (PHB) cover to cover. See the above joke.

The only other PHB I’m familiar with is the one for 3E, which has a kind of sketch on parchment quality to it, along with tiny text and a hell of a lot of tables. Why does 3E make you calculate your AC three times? Who knows.

The 5E PHB is such a massive difference. 5E is supposed to be a more accessible edition, and that starts with the handbook. Bigger writing, brighter colours, and a plainer systems more plainly explained.

I love the lore it manages to pack in. Little snippets of background for races and classes, or the worlds D&D takes place in. Not so much it’s prescriptive; just enough that it can fuel your imagination.

Of course, you’re supposed to dip in and out of a handbook, not read it cover to cover. Do you want me to tell you it was dull reading spell list after spell list? It was. But I also looked at sections and spotted details I might not have otherwise. When I started playing again, I was familiar enough with the idea of the game that I kinda swooped in on the class I knew I wanted to play and then had a glance at the combat mechanics before deciding I’d probably pick them up just fine as I played. Which I have. But that does mean I’d rarely have any reason to look at pages that don’t relate to my class or finer points of combat, and I’d have missed out.

Here’s the funniest detail I picked up reading the whole thing through. Did you know there’s a rule for using your sling as a melee weapon, and that it requires you to still have a piece of ammunition for the sling? If you’re in a group where someone is actually using a sling and you’re actually tracking the ammunition, please let me know. I want to talk to you. I haven’t looked it up, but that must be some vestige of the original game, right? Does it ever actually come up in the modern game? Anyone who might conceivably use a sling also has a free 1d10 cantrip.

I know D&D has taken a lot of directions over the years, and a lot of the DNA is still there. It can be strictly delineated and wildly improvisational by turns. That contradiction has mostly been massaged out, but you can still see it.

The end of the PHB added another project to my pile. You know what I mean. Appendix N. Well, Appendix E in the latest PHB. I’ve read a few of the things in it (just finished reading the Conan stories), but fantasy is a genre I’d like to get more familiar with. Is there ever enough time?

Another reason I decided to really spend some time with the analogue, paper PHB is because it’s so easy to play D&D with digital tools now. Once upon a time you needed unwieldy PDFs (or an even more unwieldy stack of sourcebooks). Now D&D Beyond will track your character, roll the dice, and keep all your sourcebooks in one place. I did not expect this tool when I got back into D&D. It’s useful, but…

I am using D&D to try and disconnect and spend real time with real people. I mean, I still have my phone on me, and if I want to look up an item, I use it. Our Bag of Holding is a Google Doc and it’s just way easier. But I still really like rolling real dice, having a paper character sheet, looking things up in the paper PHB. Adam Kotsko has written a couple of great pieces on how print is just better for retaining information. I’m inclined to agree with him. In my mind’s eye, I can see the two page spread with a laughing barbarian on one side, and the table with what he gets per level on the other.

I know I’ve come to this edition late. I’m looking forward to seeing the new core rulebooks as they start publishing them this year.

First Contact: Some Thoughts on The Caltraps of Time

The Caltraps of Time is a collection of short stories by David I. Masson, all of which (in the 2012 SF Masterworks edition, anyway) appeared in the British New Wave SF magazine New Worlds.

I think the nature of consciously writing in a different, experimental mode, means that you’ll get some duds, because of course not every experiment is going to succeed. Caltraps is a record of Masson’s experiments. Most of them are okay, and one of them is good enough to justify the whole collection.

People have a lot of different reasons for creating art. Expressing yourself is a fine and good aim, but if you’re really honest with yourself, some of the impulse will be rooted in wanting to make a contribution to humanity, in wanting to be remembered. Sure there are people whose entire oeuvre is capital A Art1 , but there are more people who create one really good thing that cements them. All you have to do is write one really good guitar riff, one really great story, one memorable character.

Which makes it sound easy. I know it isn’t. What do you think I’ve been trying to do?

It is time for me to be entirely honest with you. I read the first half of this collection a few years ago, during COVID, and then dropped it. Recently I’m trying to finish off books I’ve already started rather than starting and dropping more new ones, so I picked it back up, and I remembered that I dropped Caltraps (now that’s an image) because there’s a story written entirely in Olde English.

We’ll get to that, but in the spirit of fairness, I’ll post my notes from the first few stories verbatim as well. I have no memory of them otherwise and don’t want to re-read them. This was around the time I started taking more notes on my reading and particularly would write mini reviews of short stories as I worked through a collection (like my notes on Ballard’s complete fiction, volumes 1 and 2).

Lost Ground

A messy story with some great imagery. A bit Ballard-lite. Manages to convey some weighty emotions.

Not So Certain

Whereof we cannot speak we must remain silent.

Mouth of Hell

What a hole.

On to the second half, which I just finished reading and am pretty sure is the stronger half, even if one of the stories wears a bit thin after a few pages and just keeps going.

A Two-Timer

Hilarious title. A fun time travel travel caper, but the middle third drags. SF works by making things strange, of course, but page after page of a guy talking in Olde English about what a fright a horseless chariot is gets a bit old.

The Transfinite Choice

A terrifying answer to the colonialist logic inherent in a lot of stories about alternate dimensions. Reminded me a bit of the Philip K. Dick novel Cantata-140.

Psychosmosis

You need to be able to name the dead to keep living, yourself.

Traveller’s Rest

Heart-wrenching time-travel story. War never changes.

Oh yeah, this is definitely the stronger half, but with qualifications

A Two-Timer is a fun story wrapped around a dull exercise. This is what I mean about experimental fiction not always hitting. It’s a great idea, right? If I’d had it I’d have written it, and I doubt I have the chops to pull it off half as authentically as Masson. The idea: a time travel story where we get the perspective of someone from the 17th Century who has mistakenly travelled to the mid-20th, written entirely in language authentic to that person’s original era. The guy learning to use the time machine is lots of fun. The guy getting into trouble in the 20th Century before returning home; also fun. The middle section where he goes on and on and on at length writing about modern technology in Olde English? You expect a bit of it, sure, but it’s just too long and too dull.

Now The Transfinite Choice, that’s good, tight SF. He has a great idea but leaves enough for you to figure out that it doesn’t outstay its welcome (see previous story). Masson lays out the terrible logic our society functions under. We may well discover time travel, but we would immediately use it to try and solve “problems” that we have decided are ineradicable-because-unprofitable to fix, like overpopulation. I won’t spoil any more if you haven’t read it, but this is a great story.

Psychosmosis I find it difficult to talk about, not because there isn’t anything to say, but just because I’m starting to notice that, having had a fair bit of grief heaped on me in the last few years, I will read a story as being about grief if there’s even the slightest hint of it. This story, about refusing to name those you’ve lost in an attempt to carry on living in a world that is empty without them, is almost too on the nose.

Traveller’s Rest is the really great piece, the one that means that most of the rest of his stuff will stay in print along with it. I don’t want to ruin the story for you, but once you’re halfway in and get the gist you’ll know what’s going to happen anyway. There are some really great works about how war and conflict alienate you from the people you love, the society you’re protecting. Masson uses the relativity of time as a metaphor for that alienation in this deft, perfectly paced story that ends with a really ferocious sense of irony and futility. This mines the same vein as Inception and The Forever War.

Laying it all out like that, it’s really clear how these stories fit in to the New Wave. They’re all about the relativity of time, or the relativity of perceptions of time and space, how our inner worlds affect our outer worlds. If you’re into that kind of thing (I am), then this collection is definitely worth reading, but if you’re not sure, read Traveller’s Rest first to get the vibe (here’s a link to it at Lightspeed Magazine).

1 (although I’m reminded recently of seeing a rash of Bob Dylan records turn up in a charity shop window near me. All the really good ones (there was a copy of Highway 61 Revisited) went quickly. The last one left was a copy of Nashville Skyline. It’s still there.

Some Thoughts on S.U.M.O. and Rest is Resistance

I don’t generally read self-help, but a colleague loaned me a copy of Paul McGee’s S.U.M.O. (Shut Up, Move On), and I did my best to approach it with an open mind. And you know what? It’s pretty good.

I don’t generally read self-help, but a colleague loaned me a copy of Paul McGee’s S.U.M.O. (Shut Up, Move On), and I did my best to approach it with an open mind. And you know what? It’s pretty good.

Most of Paul’s suggestions revolve around a simple idea, which is that you cannot control the world, you cannot control other people, but you can control yourself, and how you react to things. This, as far as I can tell, is repackaged stoicism, which has its uses. You might well be going through something you can’t control – a calm and steady voice like Paul’s can be a real comfort.

(I’m not entirely sold on stoicism for two reasons. One; any train of thought that so naturally attracts right-wing grifters is suspect to me, at least as something I’d want to apply to my own life. Two; is not the logical end-point of stoicism a whole bunch of people putting up with things they shouldn’t have to put up with? Do what you can to keep your own head straight, absolutely, but some things should not be borne: they should be fought against, even if you know you’ll lose.)

Some of S.U.M.O. is just emotional intelligence for dummies. I’m not saying I’m some empathy genius, but McGee suggests a lot of things that I thought people did naturally. Apparently not. If someone cuts you off in traffic, or is mean to you, have you considered that they might be having a bad day? I had, but enough people hadn’t that this book was worth writing. Or how about taking the time to make sure you don’t make emotional decisions? Writing a letter angry but sending it only after re-reading it calm. Sleeping on it for a bit before quitting your job. This would have been very useful advice to me at, twenty? Maybe some of it as late as twenty five? Again, I am not a genius; I am some knob with a blog. That said, I’ve definitely met some adults who need to learn these lessons.

I did particularly like that McGee sprinkles the book with personal anecdotes. He doesn’t just tell you what to do. He provides you with examples of things that weren’t going great in his life before he learned the lesson he just imparted to you, shows you what an improvement it’s made to his relationships. S.U.M.O. is mostly about improving your relationships, and that’s absolutely something worth doing. Even if the knowledge in it isn’t new to you, it might teach you a way of articulating it that is, or some exercises that use that knowledge in a way you hadn’t considered. You can use S.U.M.O. as a workbook, but I didn’t, partly because my copy was a loaner but mostly because the pages slipped by quickly. S.U.M.O. is like having a conversations with a wise friend.

I’m reminded of another self-help book I read recently, one called Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey. A lot of the knowledge in that is not stuff that was already second nature to me. I’ve burned out super hard a few times recently, during COVID and since then, and I needed someone to articulate to me why I wasn’t doing myself or the people that I love any favours.

Hersey makes an utterly compelling argument about the insidiousness of work pushing itself into every waking moment of our lives, about how this is by design, about what we can do to push back against it. I approached it as someone who does work that relies on me being emotionally engaged, and as someone who has attempted to side-hustle themselves a living.Rest is Resistance wasrevelatory.

I needed to be reminded that I am allowed to do nothing, that I sometimes need to do nothing. I’m considering re-reading it to make sure I’ve absorbed all the arguments, but the title is the central and entirely complete argument in and of itself. Rest is resistance.

Every YouTuber I follow seems to have read Atomic Habits. It wasn’t my intention to fall down a self-help rabbit hole, but maybe I will. I have read Aurelius’ Meditations and found them helpful, and I’ve read a bit of Seneca as well. I fully intend to give the stoics a full and proper consideration, but I’ve always had trouble completely subscribing to any ideology or way of being, and like with a lot of other things I’ve tried, I imagine I’ll take what works for me from the stoics and leave the rest.

Which is probably what the stoics would suggest I do.