Andrzej Sapkowski, "The Tower of Fools" (2002/2020)

 

Coincidentally I have just read another historical novel set in 15th-century Europe: Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward, a classic of world literature about which I wrote at, I confess, too great a length here. To turn from that to Andrzej Sapkowski’s (non-Witcher) novel The Tower of Fools (2002; translated into English by David French 2020) is to be struck by the things Sapkowski emphasises that Scott tends not to dwell-on. For example: naked ladies (‘Adèle was utterly, completely, totally naked’ [8]), amply-bosomed boatwomen (‘Reynevan did his best not to stare at her sturdy thighs, visible beneath her rolled-up skirt … her shirt clung to breasts worthy of Venus’ [84]) and sexy flame-haired witches (‘the woman was sitting with legs casually sprawled, allowing them an impressive eyeful of things normally kept covered’ [167])—not to mention sexy flame-haired lesbian witches (‘the witches were kissing passionately and voraciously … the one behind was utterly preoccupied with the breasts of the one in front, which she had pulled out of her unbuttoned blouse’ [429]). There’s also quite a bit more piss than is the case in Scott: ‘the urine matured for around two weeks in large vats’ [120]; ‘there were a great many horses, stamping their hooves in puddles of urine’ [515].

Sapkowski’s two slightly gormless but up-for-it young heroes, Reynevan and Scharley, gallop around Europe having various adventures, encountering all sorts of people, and meeting various freaks, devils, hamadryads and monsters. You can read a long way in Walter Scott without encountering a buggering werewolf (‘“as a human being it had perverted tendencies, which remains with it in wolfish form; it lies in wait for someone to drop their trousers and expose their privates—the wretch usually seizes its victim from behind, holds him fast … and then … you understand”’ [218; ellipses in original]). You will be relieved to know that this creature is dealt with promptly: ‘a punch on the nose made the werewolf howl’.

Every cliché of medieval-set historical fiction is supplied: people carouse in taverns, old hags cackle, brigands roar, sinister priests plot. ‘The black knight thundered at them with upraised sword and cloak flowing behind, so fast he was tossing up divots of turf’ [452]. The Hussite wars are raging, the Inquisition is torturing people—‘red hot irons, and the standard strappado and screws on the fingers and toes’ [231]—and there’s a lot of violence and death, all described with a kind of gurning, adolescent glee:

The ball struck Ekkehard of Sulz in the chin and tore off his head. A fountain of blood gushed from the neck of the advocate of the anti-Hussite crusade; his head slapped against the wall of the barn, rolled across the field, finally coming to rest in the grass, its dead eyes watching the dogs as they sniffed it. [290]

And let’s not forget the constant supply of ladies who are not only naked, but utterly, completely, totally naked (‘her small round breasts with nipples hard with desire, her slim waist, her shyly clenched thighs, full, beautiful’ [446]). Scott, it’s not.

The Ingenious Gentlewoman Florence Foster Jenkins of La Mancha

We watched Stephen Frears’ 2016 Florence Foster Jenkins the other night. It’s an enjoyable movie, sometimes funny, always charming, with a splendid main performance by Meryl Streep that expertly balances real pathos with actual ridiculousness, and sterling support from Hugh Grant doing his Hugh Grant act (the film includes yet another splendid scene of Hugh Grant Dancing Badly, which has clearly become a thing). Simon Helberg, also up there on the poster, does less well, I’d say: over-playing his character: mugging and exaggerating his role. Less is more for this kind of comedy I think. But the movie has some splendid moments, not least a doubled-up The Producers-style punchline. First Cosmé McMoon (Helberg’s character), hired to accompany Jenkins on the piano, walks into her luxury hotel room for the first time believing her to be a proper singer and realises, as the rehearsal proceeds, how dreadful she is. And then, later in the movie, there’s a repetition of this on a larger scale: Jenkins has hired Carnegie Hall and a large audience turns up to hear her sing (badly). The audience are mostly in on the joke this second time round though, so this scene doesn’t have the sheer glory of the moment in Brooks’ film when the curtain falls on the first scene of Springtime For Hitler and the camera pans across an absolutely silent audience, every jaw slack and every eye wide. But there’s some of the same pleasure to be had here.

About halfway through our collective watch, my daughter asked: ‘but doesn’t she realise now bad her singing is?’ This, it seems to me, is the really interesting thing about Florence Foster Jenkins, and what, in one sense at least, elevates it above The Producers. I mean The Producers is a sort of masterpiece, don’t get me wrong. Still, it is a film that can comprehend only three kinds of character: the innocent (Bloom), the schemer (Max Bialystock is really quite a simple figure: in thrall to his appetites — ‘if you got it baby, flaunt it!’ — and desperately casting-about for a way, howsoever shady, to indulge them) and the actively bonkers (several characters in this film are hilariously deranged of course). There’s something that Frears’ film does that is both fascinating and insightful, in a way that goes beyond the simple generation of laughs.

I’d put it this way: Frears’ Florence Foster Jenkins is a version of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

There’s, perhaps, a less commendable gendered aspect to this. Quixote flees the oppressive, depressing mundanity of reality into a fantasy life and it’s riding around as a knight errant, fighting giants and freeing slaves. Florence Foster J. does the same thing, but it’s dressing up in pretty frocks and singing for applause. I’m not convinced that reality-fugitive fantasy falls quite so neatly into boy/girl-coloured boxes for actual boys and girls, actual men and women in the world. But put that on one side for a moment.

I’ll say something very obvious about Cervantes’ 1605 novel: it is not really a story about the comic misadventures of a loony who thinks he’s living a real-life chivalric romance, accompanied by his trusty, unillusioned sidekick Sancho Panza. Which is to say, the novel obviously is about that: a series of episodes based on that premise and those characters. Read on this level the book is sometimes entertaining, although it is also (we can be honest) often over-extended and tiresome, and the whole thing is too samey and broken-backed to really work as a novel, for all that it retains its place in the panetheon as a timeless classic of European literature etc etc. But there’s something else going on in this text, and it’s exactly about Cervantes’ relationship to ‘the novel’.

So: one of the things that ‘the novel’ innovates, in terms of representation, is the interiority of characterisation, or more precisely the sense that characters are complex rather than simple entities (Shakespeare also does this of course, and there’s a book to be written on the way the 17th- and 18th-century habits of reading Shakespeare’s plays as quasi-novels fed into the development of le roman as such. But not to get distracted). In pre-medieval and medieval romance, allegory or epic narrative, characters are what they are: heroes are heroic, villains are villanous, not only action but subjectivity is exteriorised (epic doesn’t ‘do’ interiority: I talk about this a little here). But then along comes the novel, and in particular the development of the Bildungsroman (from the later eighteenth-century, if you believe Franco Moretti), and now character becomes understood in a new way. It is no longer typologically ‘fixed’, no longer an iteration of a divinely-gifted and therefore fundamentally unchangeable ‘soul’ (unchangeable except along one axis, sin/repentence); it is now something dynamic, a process, a growth, an iteration of change, and moreover something that contains multitudes, complexities, even contradictions and paradoxes. Then we’re on the road to the nineteenth-century dramatic monologue, which sees those contradictions and paradoxes as constitutive, actually, of our subjectivities, and which, as Ekbert Faas argues convincingly in his Retreat Into the Mind, feeds directly into Freud. (Faas’s argument is that Wordsworth and Coleridge sort-of invented the idea of the unconscious mind, which Arnold, Tennyson, and Browning developed in their poetry, so that it was ready for Freud to pluck from the tree and put in his books. Arnold’s “Buried Life” is 1852 and it’s all in that one poem). We’re all post-Freudians now. We take it as axiomatic that human subjectivity — the characters we are in life, as well as the characters we read about in fiction — are complex, not simple.

But this reaches backwards too. Quixote models his adventures on the simple characters of medieval chivalric romance, but he himself is not simple, and that’s what makes the novel in which he appears so interesting. Now it’s true that other characters in the novel think he is simple: that he is simply ‘mad’, let’s say (early in the story his niece, housekeeper, the parish curate, and the local barber burn his books, beliving that reading these romances has driven him from his wits and that destroying them will return him to sanity). We could follow this ‘simple’ reading of him. Or we could, though it would be more of a stretch, follow a different ‘simple’ reading — believe, with Terry Gilliam, that Quixote has accessed a simple truth about the world, that it’s better to live in fantasy than in reality, and all the other characters, who refuse to play along or who actively try to stop him, are in the wrong. But here’s a more plausible reading of Quixote as a character: he both knows his knight-errantry is a mere fiction, and he absolutely believes he is a real knight errant. It looks contradictory, but that’s the nature of consciousness.

Indeed, asserting X whilst knowing, ‘on some level’ (it’s a beautifully Freudian phrase, that: our consciousnesses layered like parfait) that X is what we wish to be true not what is actually true, will, when other people contradict us, only make us assert X more vehemently. This is how people are. Point out the facts to a Trump supporter and they will only yell more loudly that Trump won the election. ‘On some level’ they know he didn’t; but they want it to be true so very much.

This isn’t a very profound or original observation, really. It’s just to say that the way the world is and the way we want the world to be are so very often in conflict that we must develop, as we grow up, a psychological dynamic for dealing with that fact —and that this dynamic cannot either simply dismiss the world, nor abandon our fantasies (what would we be without our fantasies? Not fully human, certainly).

It’s a negotion between the two, something actually dialectic, and it informs both Don Quixote and Florence Foster Jenkins. In the latter case — and to return to my daughter’s question — it is clear from the movie that Jenkins not only loves music, but that she has herself a significant musical education and skill. As a girl she played piano for the President, until syphilis (contracted on her wedding night from her deplorable husband) caused chancres that ruined her left hand and she couldn’t play any more. She turned to singing even though she can’t sing, because singing is a way of making music that doesn’t need hands. It’s true that she has musical ability; it’s false that she can sing; and the dialectic of these two things, propelled by the intensity of her desire to make music, results in the charade, or ‘play’, by which she sings badly and people are paid (by her complaisant partner, Hugh Grant’s St. Clair Bayfield) to act appreciatively, or else people act appreciatively because her singing, by being so bad, is delightful and cheering to them. It’s, to use the cliché, a victimless crime; everybody wins — until the spoilsport New York Post columnist Earl Wilson ruins everything by writing a ‘truthful’ review and puncturing the bubble. The film plays several variations on this. A ‘simple’ reading of Hugh Grant’s character, for instance, would be: he is exploiting Jenkins’ love for him, cynically enabling her fantasy so as to extract money from her to fund his luxurious New York lifestyle with his actual girlfriend (Kathleen Weatherley, played by Rebecca Ferguson). But in fact the movie makes it clear that, although he is doing this, he also genuinely loves Jenkins, and genuinely cares about maintaining the Quixotic fantasy that she is a great operatic soprano. Likewise Cosmé McMoon agonises that becoming known as the accompanist of so terrible a singer will damage his reputation as a serious pianist — although, at the same time, he really needs the money , and so is on his dilemma’s horns, trying to resolve to give up the money and retain his integrity. But in the end, he steps up, not for ‘simple’ reasons for greed but because, like St. Clair, he has in some sense fallen in love with the old woman.

The ‘act’ here is a performance, one that requires, in order to uphold it, a good deal of running-around and financial redistribution by St. Clair; and it’s particularly nice that this performance — upholding Jenkins’s fantasy version of herself over the cruelities of the reality principle — involves, precisely, a performance: standing on a stage in front of an audience. It is, in a sense, a more radical version of Quixote than Quixote, whose adventures always happen in front of only a few random people encountered on his journeys. This, in Frears’ film, pushes Quixotism to a kind of extreme. People will play-along with your fantasy (if you pay them, if it makes them laugh, if they love you) or else they won’t. If they don’t you can simply dismiss or ignore them, which is what Don Quixote does; for there are only ever a few of them at a time, and Quixote can always tell himself they are mistaken, or mad, or wicked, or else they have been enchanted by an Arabian enchanter not to see what he, the Don, plainly sees. But when you are faced with Carnegie-Hall quantities of people, or New York Post-readership quantities of people, them not playing along becomes harder to integrate into your fantasy, to the point of collapsing the fantasy altogether. Frears (or rather his screenwriters Nicholas Martin and Julia Kogan) twist reality a little here: in the movie the bad review leads, the day after the concert, directly to Jenkins’ collapse and her death bed. In real life she had an unrelated heart-attack whilst shopping and died a month after the concert. But the movie is saying: this balance we all must maintain, of which Jenkins’ case is only a more extreme version of our common state of affairs, between keeping our fantasies alive and encountering the reality principle — this complex negotiation — is so fundamental, it’s necessary to our very continued life. That seems to me both true and, actually, rather moving.

A brief coda to this post. After watching the movie, and thinking a bit about its relationship to Don Quixote, I remembered another version of that so-often reworked and reconfigured novel: Graham Greene’s late work Monsignor Quixote (1982). It’s not Greene’s best, it must be said — and it’s been many decades since I read it — but one thing I remember from it is the way it recasts Cervantes so that its mild-mannered Spanish priest protagonist (notionally a descendent of the ‘actual’ Don Quixote) is the sane one, and the various organisations that misunderstand and persecute him — his own Church, the Spanish police, respectable citizenry — are out of touch with what really matters. My memory of the novel is that Greene is using this Quixotism as a way of talking about religious faith, as he understands and practices it: not as an absolute and unwavering certainty but as a set of desires about the nature of the universe. Greene's Monsignor exists half-way between dogmatic assertion of faith on the one hand, and the grimly ‘reality principle’ denial of spirit and miracle on the other, and in this novel Greene honours his half-belief: ‘How is it that when I speak of belief, I become aware always of a shadow, the shadow of disbelief haunting my belief?’ the Monsignor asks at the tomb of Unamuno in Salamanca. ‘I am riddled by doubts. I am sure of nothing, not even of the existence of God … Oh, I want to believe that it is all true — and that want is the only certain thing I feel.’

Lavie Tidhar (ed) "The Best of World SF: Part 1" (2021)

The question is: how to review collections of short fiction? That may not be your question. You, let’s say, may prefer to know—with respect to the volume here under consideration, Lavie Tidhar’s The Best of World SF Volume 1 (Head of Zeus 2021)—is it any good? If that is your question then I can tell you: yes, it’s very good. It's a superbly varied collection of SF, Fantasy and slipstream short stories, absorbing and stimulating and readable. This is where SF is nowadays: a global discourse, a splendid diversity, no longer in the hands of a small group of straight, white US and UK men. Tidhar's collection works both as a primer, for those interested in exploring a more diverse range of SFnal voices, and as a collection on its own terms, just as a gathering of really good SFnal shorts.

OK, very good. What else should a review provide? There are twenty-six stories here, some quite lengthy, which makes the book (I read it in processed-tree, real-world form) hard on the wrists, and awkward to schlep about in your manbag or other carryall; though presumably it is as weightless on kindle as any other e-book, which may be your preferred mode. If you’d like your review to carry a little more detail, information-wise, here’s isfdb’s list of the constituents: 

Click to embiggen. These stories are from, respectively, France, China, Singapore, Botswana, Nigeria, India, China, Singapore, Japan, Italy, Cuba, United Kingdom/Nigeria, Brazil, Trinidad and Tobago, Spain, Mexico, Finland, Israel, Iceland, Russia, India, Ghana, South Africa, Sweden, Mexico and Malaysia, which is a pretty good spread, although there are some omissions (nothing by a German author, nothing Australian, although SFF is huge in both territories/languages). 14 women, 12 men is a healthy balance too. I have in my time had some small involvements in edited collections of things, on both sides of the process, and I am nothing short of boggled at what Tidhar has accomplished here: all the regular problems of corralling a varied selection of interesting material with the added problems of navigating translations, international rights and so on. 

Is that a review of this book? It doesn’t tell you very much: some factual description, some praise. Is that enough to be a review, do you think? I could go through the list of stories judging each, perhaps giving each a star rating out of five, but to what extent would that really add value? It seems to me it would instead drive the review to that place where fine-grainedness intrudes into sheer tedium ... notating my personal quirks of taste so that, what? You could read the collection, come up with your own list of preferences and judgments, and check them against mine? Why on earth would you want to do something so fruitless? I liked some of the stories more than others, which, since the alternative would be ‘I liked each story exactly as much as every other story’, isn’t saying anything substantive, now, is it?

***

Short stories used to be a huge part of literary culture: many magazines (Argosy, Strand Magazine, New Yorker) existed to deliver them to eager readers. Short story magazines still exist of course, but now they muster a tiny fraction of circulation of those giants in their heyday. We have gone off short story writing. This happened, I think, in different phases: the bloom departed from ‘straight’ short stories in the early 20th-century, where science fiction Pulp magazines continued healthily through to the 1930s and into the 1940s. Indeed there are those, I daresay, those who think of the short story as the ideal science-fictional mode: enough space to present a novum, to frame a thought-experiment, to stage it, dramatize it with a small cast of strongly-drawn characters, but not so as to outstay its welcome or hang heavy on the reader, just enough to put the core conceit under the lens for the reader. But the fact is SF, like general fiction, is a book-length business now (although, if it comes to that, SF is really a film-and-TV-and-video-game business now, but that’s a separate issue). H G Wells wrote a lot of brilliant SF shorts in the 1890s, and then more or less abandoned the mode in the 20th-century. One late example of him in this mode is the peerless short ‘The Country of the Blind’. When he oversaw the publication of a greatest-hits collection of his shorts in 1911 he included this as the title piece: The Country of the Blind and Other Stories. In that volume's preface Wells notes that ‘the task of selection and revision’ entailed by editing it brought home to him ‘with something of the effect of discovery’ that

I was once an industrious writer of short stories, and that I am no longer anything of the kind. I have not written one now for quite a long time, and in the past five or six years I have made scarcely one a year. The bulk of the fifty or sixty tales from which this present three-and-thirty have been chosen dates from the last century. This edition is more definitive than I supposed when first I arranged for it. In the presence of so conclusive an ebb and cessation an almost obituary manner seems justifiable.

He goes on to speculate as to why he has, in effect, stopped writing short stories. Such writing used to come to him as easily as leaves to the tree:

I find it a little difficult to disentangle the causes that have restricted the flow of these inventions. It has happened, I remark, to others as well as to myself, and in spite of the kindliest encouragement to continue from editors and readers. There was a time when life bubbled with short stories; they were always coming to the surface of my mind, and it is no deliberate change of will that has thus restricted my production. ... I found that, taking almost anything as a starting-point and letting my thoughts play about it, there would presently come out of the darkness, in a manner quite inexplicable, some absurd or vivid little incident more or less relevant to that initial nucleus. Little men in canoes upon sunlit oceans would come floating out of nothingness, incubating the eggs of prehistoric monsters unawares; violent conflicts would break out amidst the flower-beds of suburban gardens; I would discover I was peering into remote and mysterious worlds ruled by an order logical indeed but other than our common sanity.

Here he inserts a potted recent history of the form: the 1890s were ‘a good and stimulating period for a short-story writer’ with great work being produced almost continually by a whole tribe of short-story writers (‘Barrie, Stevenson, Frank-Harris; Max Beerbohm; Henry James; George Street, Morley Roberts, George Gissing, Ella d'Arcy, Murray Gilchrist, E. Nesbit, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Edwin Pugh, Jerome K. Jerome, Kenneth Graham, Arthur Morrison, Marriott Watson, George Moore, Grant Allen, George Egerton, Henry Harland, Pett Ridge, W. W. Jacobs and Joseph Conrad’), all led by Kipling: ‘Mr. Kipling had made his astonishing advent with a series of little blue-grey books, whose covers opened like window-shutters to reveal the dusty sun-glare and blazing colours of the East’. Wells thinks that's all passed away now:

I do not think the present decade can produce any parallel to this list, or what is more remarkable, that the later achievements in this field of any of the survivors from that time, with the sole exception of Joseph Conrad, can compare with the work they did before 1900.

There's an interesting discussion to be had, I think, as to whether Wells is right in his larger literary-historical diagnosis; but it can't be denied that it describes his own career as a short story writer. Despite being one of the true masters of the form, the inspiration of Borges and generations of SF authors, and despite the fact that some of his most enduring literary achievements are to be found amongst his shorts, he wrote no more of them. Why not?

It's not a question that admits of straightforward answer, I fear. He himself blames the figure he calls ‘the à priori critic’:

Just as nowadays he goes about declaring that the work of such-and-such a dramatist is all very amusing and delightful, but “it isn't a Play,” so we' had a great deal of talk about the short story, and found ourselves measured by all kinds of arbitrary standards. There was a tendency to treat the short story as though it was as definable a form as the sonnet, instead of being just exactly what any one of courage and imagination can get told in twenty minutes' reading or so. It was either Mr. Edward Garnett or Mr. George Moore in a violently anti-Kipling mood who invented the distinction between the short story and the anecdote. The short story was Maupassant; the anecdote was damnable. It was a quite infernal comment in its way, because it permitted no defence. Fools caught it up and used it freely. Nothing is so destructive in a field of artistic effort as a stock term of abuse. Anyone could say of any short story, “A mere anecdote,” just as anyone can say “Incoherent!” of any novel or of any sonata that isn't studiously monotonous. The recession of enthusiasm for this compact, amusing form is closely associated in my mind with that discouraging imputation. One felt hopelessly open to a paralysing and unanswerable charge, and one's ease and happiness in the garden of one's fancies was more and more marred by the dread of it. It crept into one's mind, a distress as vague and inexpugnable as a sea fog on a spring morning.

In comes the fog, it seems.

Still: fog, though Wells deplores it, may be part of the unique strength of the short story as a distinct form. In saying so I'm drawing on Timothy Clark's rather brilliant essay ‘Not Seeing the Short Story: A Blind Phenomenology of Reading’, which appeared as part of the Oxford Literary Review's special issue on ‘The Blind Short Story’ in 2004. Clark makes the case for the short story as a specifically blind mode of art, arguing that ‘what I propose to call, non-pejoratively, the “blindness” of the short-story revisits the issue of the form's relation to realism’. A long quotation from Middlemarch demonstrates George Eliot's commitment to as whole a sight as possible. The short story, by contrast, is necessarily determined by its pseudo-poetic brevity:

[Eliot's] passage of character analysis lasts several pages. However, were such a series of paragraphs as that about Lydgate to appear in a short story, might the mechanics of its realism not be more likely to echo back on itself, revealing its tautological basis? This element of the literary, that it actually conjures up what it seems merely to re-present as already there, is something this forms mere brevity—its lack of concretizing context—makes less ignorable. The short story, as they say, is more ‘poetic’. Eliot's effect of subtlety seems to escape this merely self-validating quality through its integration into earlier and later passages of the text. Without that, the kinship between the general ‘human truths’ of such a realist text and the kind of effects of ‘truth’ at work in a horoscope would be clearer. This lack of the trompe-l'oeil effects of a lengthy context constitutes what may be called the relative blindness of the short story. [Clark, ‘Not Seeing the Short Story’ Oxford Literary Review 26 (2004), 8]

Clark goes on to develop a larger phenomenology of blindness and reading, and whilst there's not space to get into all that here, it is, I think, worth drawing out one other point he makes. Metaphors of seeing, according to Clark, pervade short story theory. He finds a remarkable ‘predominance of countervailing metaphors of sight, of the striving to “see” a text whole, the flash of revelation etc’ in the way critics write about the short story form, and quotes one such critic:

‘Visual metaphors’, writes Dominic Head, ‘abound in short story theory, a fact which underlies the “spatial” aspect of the genre, but which also obscures the illusory nature of this aspect.’ The illusion lies in the fact that the visual pattern is constructed from out of the necessarily temporal movement of reading, its working through both memory and anticipation to achieve a seeming ‘overview’ of the text as a whole. Visual metaphors, he argues, often focusing the whole text through some crucial epiphanic moment of ‘insight’—itself usually described as if it were an instance of the miracle of the restoration of sight—repress the heterogeneity and ‘openness’ of a story. [Clark, 9; he is quoting Head, The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 10]

This all seems to me interesting in several ways, and although Clark doesn't might have some bearing on Wells's own praxis. Blindness either as a total state, as in ‘The Country of the Blind’ (or cast by the individual out upon the community in the short novel The Invisible Man), or else as a partial restriction or limitation of vision is a recurring theme in Wells's short stories: ‘The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes’, ‘The Plattner Story’, ‘The Crystal Egg’ and many others. Conceivably Wells's increasing dissatisfaction with the short story mode correlated to that belief, which increasingly gripped him as the 1920s and 1920s went on, that he ought to be aiming at a kind of whole sight. His next novel, Marriage (1912), is a positively Eliotian exercise in comprehensive vision, in concretizing context and sheer length—getting on for 600 pages in the first edition (Joan and Peter from 1918 is nearly 800).

No question but it's a shame. Wells blindness was prodigiously more eloquent and resonant than his attempts as clear-sightedness. But he didn't think so, and drew a line under his short story writing. The short story form is the enclosed valley of ‘The Country of the Blind’; it is the sightless but blessed inhabitants of that valley. And the truth of Wells's later career is that he could not rest content in that place, but had to engineer a gigantic rock-fall and the opening of a new breach in the surrounding mountains to be able to scramble back to Realism.

I'd say there's something of that brilliant, creative blindness about the best of the Best of World SF stories Tidhar has gathered: Aliette de Bodard’s ‘Immersion’, an finely written exploration of masks, identity and hiddenness set on a multi-ethnic station, or Hannu Rajaniemi’s ‘His Master’s Voice’, a characteristic piece of posthuman-nanotech worldbuilding that centres an uplifted dog and feeds us the world through this creature’s estranging, limited sensorium. I also liked the creative opacity of Vandana Singh’s time-ghost-haunted ‘Delhi’ and Malena Salazar Maciá’s post-singularity, post-apocalypse, nanobots-are-gods ‘Eyes of the Crocodile’. The blindness of insight, the insight of the blind. Excellent stuff.

-----

Related: here's a short piece I wrote on the SF fix-up.

Jonathan Meades, "Pedro and Ricky Come Again" (2021)

 

Jonathan Meades is a vastly more stylish writer than Richard Dawkins, but he is as one-dimensional as the geneticist in his atheistic hostility to religion. It is, for him, simply ‘the tyranny of mumbo jumbo’:

A secular cultist who was failing to attract adherents asked Talleyrand what he should do: ‘I would recommend you to be crucified and rise again the third day,’ replied that consummate opportunist. He was, of course, right. Religion is a matter of the survival of the fittest cult. And the fittest cults are those which have equipped themselves with the bulkiest apparatus of irreason — creation myth, miracles, incantations, liturgical quirks, eschatological fictions, sartorial disfigurements, silly hairdos, omniscient others, genital mutilations, dietary proscriptions, and populist iconography.

Jolly stuff, but under-thunk. Meades quotes Clement Attlee’s (as he styles it) ‘sane’ approach to the whole business: ‘believe in the ethics. Can’t accept the mumbo jumbo.’ But plenty of people take their faith along those lines; which is to say, not that they reject the miraculous side, but that they don’t fret or obsess over it. They believe the miraculous stuff not through perversity or contempt for common-sense but via a Newmanesque assent that is indeed a common-sense, with a particular and important emphasis precisely on the common. Attlee’s comment is on-target provided we take ‘ethics’ as more than just a moral code, and understand it more broadly as a community, a way of orienting oneself in life that transcends selfishness and brings meaningfulness— if we understand religious affiliation, in other words, not just as the falsifiable (as Dawkins might say) articles of belief but as the group you worship with, the school community to which your children belong, as involvement in setting up the church fete and running a stall at the jumble sale, as putting money aside for zakat or running a soup-kitchen for the homeless. As, in other words, the social- or communitarian-quotidian alongside the supernatural. Or more particularly, as the quotidian structured and informed — redeemed, to use the Christian term — by the supernatural.

And in fact, in a do-I-contradict-myself-very-well-I-contradict-myself move not untypical of him, Meades’s next paragraph shifts the line of his mockery to go after Anglicanism precisely because it doesn’t avail itself of all the laughable paraphernalia of irreason, although (given that Anglicanism is the third largest Christian global denomination, after Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox churches) this ought by Meade’s own logic to have doomed it to failure. ‘The shabby ineffectuality of Anglicanism,’ he snipes, ‘derives from having not demanded all that much belief of its congregation, thus containing the germ of its own secularisation. It is an add-on.’

Look: I myself am, as Meades is, an infidel. But there’s something about this kind of thing that strikes me as plain lazy, and worse. Most people alive are religious to one degree or another. It’s we atheists who are the minority. Snark and mockery of this kind is poor form: a betrayal of the common humanity that asks of us respect for others, not despite but because of their differences.

One needn’t be a believer to see that Credo quia absurdum is more than just a stupidity, or a contradiction in terms. It looks perverse, but its point is not its perversity. There’s a story in Boccaccio’s Decameron of the Devil, having taken the form of a man, deciding to snatch the soul of a certain small-time rural priest whom, he knows, is having doubts about his faith. He arranges for the priest to visit Rome: ‘for,’ the devil thinks, ‘when he sees all the vanity and venality, the corruption and impurity of what is supposed to be the very centre of Christianity he will tumble into atheism!’ The priest, excited to see the Holy City, accepts the offer. He travels, sees the city and returns, but with his faith restored. ‘Wait a minute,’ says the devil. ‘What about the wickedness! The nepotism and lustfulness, the corruption and gluttony!’ ‘It is true I saw all that,’ the priest confirms. ‘But it made me realise: for Christianity to be able to encompass the whole world, and be as widespread and powerful as it is, even upon such rotten foundations — why then Christ must be stronger and more certain than I ever realised before!’ The devil is thwarted.

As an outsider I can confirm: it’s easy to look at religion and see only money-grubbing evangelical preachers, paedophile priests and jihadist fanatics. But, as a plain observation about the world, religion is — almost if not quite entirely — not that. It is two billion Christians and a billion Muslims and a billion other believers living their lives, getting on with things, their being-in-the-world structured by their faith. If such credunt is predicated upon absurdity, then the functional efficacy of the belief invites us to reconsider the kind of the absurdity we’re talking about. Voltaire said: ‘certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste’, a sentence poorly translated by the common English version: ‘those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’ (rendre is not croire after all). The point is: most of the population of the globe believe in the absurdities of their faiths and almost none of them commit atrocities. Épater les bourgeois has its place, but épater les bulk-of-human-beings-alive veers towards the kind of intolerance that only edgelords and adolescents find beguiling. We should grow up. 1

Mitch Benn, "The Terra Trilogy" (2020-21)

The question of tone is perhaps underexplored in criticism and reviews. A book or film can be simplistically written, or clumsy, or can perpetrate various aesthetic delinquencies without alienating its readers if it hits the right tone. By the same token, a book can be admirably written and achieve interesting things and yet be tonally alienating to the point it is fundamentally unlovable. This latter describes, I sometimes fear, some of my own best books. But I was put in mind of the former reading Mitch Benn’s Terra trilogy. Not that Benn writes simplistically (although he pitches these books at younger readers, and avoids any more complicated stylistic fretwork, or indeed fireworks) or that the trilogy is clumsily rendered: it's not, it's well-plotted and cleverly handled. The register is classic SF through a comic lens, somewhat after the manner of Douglas Adams or Pratchett’s YA books. And the result is funny. Not roll around on the floor, lose-control-of-your-bladder hilarious, but certainly funny. My point is that, tonally, the whole thing possesses great charm, a thing that is perhaps surprisingly rather rare in SF. I enjoyed this trilogy very much.

In book 1, Terra, we follow the titular heroine, who was ‘rescued’ from Earth by a well-meaning alien called Lppb (he acted, even though doing so violating his species’ principle of non-interference, because he believed Terra’s parents to have died in a car crash leaving the baby alone). She has been brought up on the utopian planet of Fnrr. At 12-years-old she is about to start alien high school as the only human in class. Fnrr is nicely drawn: a rational, ordered if vowelless place full of Pulp SF wonder-tech, and Terra is a likeable protagonist. The story, such as it is, concerns malign forces readying for war. Terra has a key role to play in saving her adoptive world, bringing her unique human-ness to bear on the threat; and at the end she is reunited with her not-dead-after-all human parents. There’s a satirical edge here, about how shabbily we are treating our own irreplaceable planet, but Benn doesn’t press too insistently on that pedal.

Book 2, Terra’s Earth, picks up two years later, with Terra not particularly enjoying her time back on Earth (the question of where ‘fits in’, where she feels herself to be ‘at home’, runs through the whole trilogy). This instalment gives Terra a sidekick, a boy called Billy Dolphin, annoyed that the appearance of actual flying saucers in the skies of Earth has killed his beloved science fiction. Things are looking grim on planet Fnnr, though. For one thing, a dictator, who has acquired the human knack of lying, previously unknown on the world, has seized power (shades of Ricky Gervais The Invention of Lying here, although Benn handles the premise to make more of an anti-religion point). For another thing, a strange black featureless planet is hurtling in on a collision course. Terra and Billy save the day from the Borg-like giant ball of nanothreat.

In Book 3, Terra’s War, an anomaly called the Everywar is spreading, like ‘a crack in the sky’, across the cosmos. Through it emerge swarms of monster-alien attackers (‘big, quadrupedal, the four limbs seemed to operate as arms or legs as required, breathing a sort of oily black liquid,’ Terra notes. ‘We saw its thoughts, we felt its feelings. It was consumed with hatred for us. I’ve never felt anything so horrible’). There’s a broader canvas in this third instalment: the story takes the characters all over the shop, and is rather more violent than the previous two. There are different theories about the Everywar: an invasion, a kind of cosmic sickness, or perhaps a cosmic immune reaction (‘Yes, said the Kwad Shar Chen matter-of-factly. Perhaps our universe has become diseased, corrupted. Perhaps what we now observe is simply the immune system of the cosmos in operation: purging the infection so that the universe may ... heal’). The reality behind the Everywar is somewhat different, but I abjure spoilers.

Various strands from the first two books are picked up again; there’s a bit more religious satire (‘A doctrine of humility being preached from a church the size of a moon, thought Terra. If you say so ...’), a smidgeon of time-travel and a good deal of what the film classification geezers call ‘mild peril’. If the first volume was a trifle under-plotted, the next two volumes make-up for that: each, I'd say, is an improvement on the last. It seems fatuous to describe the trilogy as ‘proper’ SF—it is, but you might well prefer improper SF—but it’s readable, enjoyable, ingeniously plotted stuff, and, to return to my original point, genuinely charming. Also: in this vol, Benn coins a new word, ‘Propilogue’. I very much hope this will catch on. 

The Snyder Cut

#DeReleaseTheSnyderCut  

Undo it. Have The Flash run faster than light to wind it back into the past.

It's a bad film, it's an egregious bad film. At every point it chooses pomposity over fun, the pose over meaning, the action-figure over character. It's tortoise-slow, sewage-coloured, masculinist (Wonder Woman diminished further from her earlier near-nothing) arthritic bollocks. It's a film that offers its central insight on a golden platter for the audience to admire: THE TEAM IS STRONGER THAN THE INDIVIDUAL. Only in as pathologically individualist a culture as the US could this pass for Great Wisdom.

Ben Affleck is a handsome bloke, and has assiduously beefed-up for this role. But his charismalessness is painful to watch. That man is natman batman. 

Henry Cavill's Cancelled Moustache would have been a better Superman.

The Flash is ... well: his fundamental conceit is just silly.

Wonder Woman was sidelined in the original Justice League flick but she did get a couple of sparky dialogue scenes. Not here. Now she's just a red leather corset and a short skirt.

Cyborg has a ploddingly set-up, allegedly poignant family context that is as unconvincing as it is dull.

Aquaman doesn't fit at all. His character belongs to a kitsch nonsense-fantasy of briny fish-prince royalty. In this film he's just a shirtless over-buffed dude holding a big fork who sometimes gets into a rumble.

The villains are sub-Panto. Steppenwolf is less born to be wild, more bored to be bad-guy, lurching around in a suit of armour made from a thousand metal strips that looks like John Lewis silvered wrapping paper. Darkseid is slightly taller than Steppenwolf and has glow-y eyes. The army of flying minions are about as scary as a bunch of daddy-long-legses.

In sum: it's a turd. Zack Snyder's Justice Log.

Klara and the Spoilers

That's to say: it's hard to discuss this novel without giving away its ‘reveal’. Not that Ishiguro is an M. Night Shyamalan type of author, of course; we don't read him for his startling plot-twists. Perhaps spoilers don't matter. What he's doing in this novel doesn't depend upon his reveal, which ought to mean it would be possible to include spoilers in my discussion without actually spoiling the reading experience. Nevertheless, you probably don't want to read this review if you haven't read the novel. And you should read the novel! It's a good novel. Only ...  

And there you have it. Good, but. Start with the good. Ishiguro writes a certain kind of book. His is a dialled-down, even chilly manner. It's possible to bounce-off that (this, indeed, was my first reaction to reading him) but dismissing his fiction because it's not hotter, in a McLuhan-y sense, because it's not more melodramatically styled, or eventful, or gnashing, or because everyone is so on-the-surface polite, really is to miss the point of him. His books are about these important, sometimes eloquent repressions. About the way that, in both our love and our animosity, we understand less than we think we do. He thinks we are outsiders looking in. Or, more precisely, that though we are all outsiders looking in, there isn't really an ‘in’ to observe: there's no big central meaning, or mystery, that defines life, or if there is something ‘in’ there—if fascism is on the rise in 1930s Continental Europe, if there is an ongoing holocaust of cloned teeangers being murdered so as to harvest their organs, if there are ogres and dragons lurking in the mist—then such things are not at the centre of the stories Ishiguro tells, because such things are not, whatever we might tell ourselves, actually at the centre of our lives.

He writes about characters on the edge of things, quiescent figures navigating the small-scale difficulties of their world, who spend more time observing than acting, are more passive than active, patients rather than agents. This, Ishiguro is saying, is how things are, and this is the ground against which he makes his subtle, affecting etudes of sanity (in The Unconsoled), memory (in The Buried Giant) or innocence and hope (in this novel). If you don't like his books because they are not pungently-enough written, or because the characterisation isn't jolting-joe enough for you, that's your perogative. But you're missing an utterly distinctive, often moving and penetrating voice. Craig Raine says somewhere that dubeity and conviction are the twin poles of dreaming (he was talking about Kafka, I think) and there's a gleam along precisely that fault line with which Ishiguro at his best illuminates.

That's not to say that he's not sometimes a boring writer. On the contrary, he is often a boring writer. But dreams are often boring too (we can be honest) and there are truths, and effects, and indeed affects, that are only articulable via boredom. The point is that Ishiguro balances a relentless, sometimes tedious clarity of apperception—hence Klara as a name, here—with a kind of obliquity, an uncertitude, a haziness. An eloquent reticence. When it works, this balance manages things no other writer achieves; but that's not to say that Ishiguro's schtick (dismissive word, I know) is equally effective in each of his novels. I didn't love The Buried Giant for instance, and although I enjoyed the process of reading Klara and the Sun rather more than that previous novel I can't say that I think it entirely works, as a novel. It may be, as has been the case with other novels by him, I need to let it settle, to let its ironies and uncanninesses to steep for a while in my imagination. I don't know though. 

Klara is a robot, although nobody at any point in the story uses that word: her kind are ‘Artificial Friends’, or ‘AFs’. This, in a small way, is symptomatic of a larger problem. It's one of the tells of a less sfnally confident writer I think, a superstitious shying-away from the over-obvious, as when a story about vampires or zombies scrupulously avoids the v-word or the z-word and instead refers to ‘feeders’ or ‘walkers’ or whatever. Actually in real life we call our robots robots, because obviousness is part of who we are as a species. And (actually) it seems to me this trivial thing is an element of a larger two-fold problem with Ishiguro's robots. Which two folds? Well, one is the sheer derivativeness of the story he is telling here, a perennial problem for writers who work in SF. The other is about the way the robot figures, the semiotic of ‘the robot’ as such, and that's a bigger problem. [This, incidentally, is where the spoilers begin].

The first of these two folds is the more noticeable, especially to a reader who happens to have read widely in the SF backlist. Reading Klara and the Sun reminded me of reading a hundred pulp SF stories about robots, and although few of those were as elegantly written as this I wasn't sure Ishiguro adds all that much to this tradition. We start in a old-style shop that sells robots as companions, seen entirely from the perspective of Klara, one of the items of stock. She is a mild, charming and observant individual, possessed of (we are told) ‘wonderful mental capabilities’, although at the same time she is culpably naïve to the point of actual simple-mindedness.

Klara is bought as a companion to a clever but sickly girl called Josie who lives with her mother in an expensive house in the countryside. Josie's parents are separated, and her mother's high-flying job does not leave much time for Josie, who spends most of her days alone—hence, we suppose, the need for an artificial friend. There is a neighbouring house in which an English boy called Rick lives. Rick and Josie have declared their love for one another and are planning an adult life together, although Rick is poor where Josie is rich. From time to time Josie's mother takes her into the city so she can have her portrait painted. Josie had an older sister called Sal who died. For about half its length the novel bubbles along with all this, and the reader is borne along the bubbles. The mother, Chrissie, is nicely drawn (her love for her daughter complicated by her fear of losing her which leads to some sharp and even cruel treatment) and both Klara and Rick feel like teenagers, or so I thought.

Then the twist: Josie is not just sickly, she is dying. The portrait Chrissie has commissioned is not a painting but a looky-likey robot body. Klara has been purchased not as a companion for Josie but in order to observe her closely enough to be able to mimic her, such that after her death Klara's programme can be transferred into this Josie-robot and Chrissie can assuage her grief by continuing to live with a simulacrum of her daughter.

It is, in other words, a retread of Aldiss's story ‘Super Toys Last All Summer Long’ (made into the much baggier 2001 Spielberg movie A.I.), via about a dozen Asimov robot stories (slogan: “I, Robot: the ‘I’ stands for Ishiguro!”) and a standard Black Mirror plotline. The stiffly formal politesse with which Ishiguro's robots talk is part of this pulp tradition too: I was somewhat reminded of another Aldiss story, 1958's ‘Who Can Replace a Man?’, which does much of the work of Klara and the Sun, only funnier and in ten pages rather than 300.

This twist is shadowed by Klara's own leap of robo-faith. She herself is solar powered, and needs only to sit in the sun for a short time to be recharged. From the display window of the store, before she is bought, she sees a tramp die (as she thinks) in the shadows of the alleyway opposite. The next day the tramp is up and about again and she deduces that the sun has restored him, just as it does her. When she realises that Jodie is dying she strikes a bargain with the sun: in return for a small sacrifice on her part (specifically, sabotaging a polluting city truck, since she believes the sun hates pollution) let the sun cure Josie of her sickness. This episode and its consequences are at the heart of the novel, and include some very striking and beautiful writing. If Klara's mission feels a little arbitrary, then faith sometimes manifests that way: like Gorchakov struggling repeatedly to cross the swimming pool without extinguishing the candle he is carrying in Tarkovsky's Nostalghia.       

This, though, brings me to the second and bigger problem. It's not that Klara's hopeless prayers to the sun-god aren't affecting, because they are. And the ambiguous ending of the novel, where it seems a miracle cure has indeed been effected, doesn't diminish this (indeed, the final chapter, in which Klara, still as ingenuously curious and observant as ever, seems to have been abandoned in a junk-yard of some kind is beautiful and touchingly done). But Klara herself is a bad robot. Not morally bad, or badly written, but badly conceived. Bad in the sense that she has to be two absolutely incompatible things for the story to work. She has to be both an amazingly complex machine whose chips and programming pass the Turing Test and actualise genuine personhood, a technological marvel capable of superhuman processing feats—and she has to be the village fucking idiot, who observes human beings eating and drinking and still thinks they are somehow solar-powered, who thinks bulls rise up out of the ground into their fields and who believes that the sun literally lives in a half-built barn visible from Josie's house. I don't mean to taunt Ishiguro with failing to satisfy a hobgoblin-of-little-minds consistency with this. This second, foolish Klara is really the point of the novel. It's is a book about innocence, and the selfless love and profound hope such innocence enables; and Ishiguro has a sensitive and (I think) true apperception of the ways innocence and ignorance blur one into the other. But ‘the robot’ is the wrong figure for this Prince-Myshkinosity.

Let me put it this way: there is an old-fashioned vibe to Klara and the Sun. The near-future America Ishiguro describes smacks of the 1950s. That's not a problem in itself (the same could be said about Phil Dick's best work) except in one regard. Ishiguro has observed that teenagers spend all their time on their phones, a detail reproduced in this novel. But Klara herself is entirely cut-off from the world wide web. Her programming is sophisticated enough to enable her to mimic human behaviour and speech precisely, but her programmers didn't think to fit her with a database explaining how the world works on the most basic level, such that she might understand that the sun is a giant ball of nuclear-scalding gas in space and not an orange deity that lives in a barn. Ishiguro groks that teens are online all the time, but he hasn't grokked the Internet of Things.

My objection is not a worldbuilding one (although, I have to say: of course a robot like Klara would be connected to the internet). I can see that a Klara with access to even the most basic information about how the world works wouldn't be a Klara who would trek to a barn to offer a sacrifical deal to the Sun that lives there. If Ishiguro's solution to this is a bodge, well alright, sometimes writers must bodge. No: my objection is that ‘the robot’ just doesn't figure what Ishiguro needs it to figure for Klara and the Sun to work. He is a writer fascinated by outsiders, by individuals who combine unusual observational insight with a kind of blindness to looming obviousnesses. He returns again and again to the disengaged and disenfranchised in order to construe a vision of life in terms of disengagement and disenfranchisement. In the English servant class of the 1930s of Remains of the Day, or in the clones of Never Let Me Go, or even in the very elderly, alzheimery couple of The Buried Giant he selects viable vehicles with which to explore and dramatise this fascination. But robots don't work that way. The thing about contemporary technology is not that it stands outside human life, watching with loving but slightly baffled innocence; it's that it absolutely interpenetrates our lives. That it is the pharmakon that simultaneously enables and poisons all our intrapersonal connections. The technology of which ‘the robot’ is the fictive avatar, the technology that manifests in our actual lives in all the ways it does (from Alexa and Roombas to our ever-present phones and screens, from the agorithms that steer us about the internet to the hundreds of labour-saving automated systems in our homes) just isn't the coolly disengaged observer that Ishiguro, in this novel, needs it to be. 

There are a couple of other, less central but clumsy false steps in the book too, I think. I mean, pity the editor tasked with returning constructive criticism on the new manuscript by their publishing house's only Nobel Laureate: can't be easy. Still: Josie's father, separated from her mother, joins them in the latter third of the novel for a trip into town, and we discover that the breakdown of the marriage was a function of him leaving his high-prestige job and joining a group of fascists. This far-right political strand, though, is undeveloped, and hangs awkwardly. Perhaps Ishiguro introduced it because he felt, having premised his book on intelligent robots, he had to run a line about slavery (because, you see, intelligent robots would be slaves, do you see? do you?) alongside the novel's major themes of innocence and hope. Klara and the Sun is set in a sketchily-rendered future America, and it can't be denied that the heritage of slavery is still a major, malign shaping force in American politics.

The problem is that Ishiguro isn't really interested in politics—another underdeveloped strand in the novel is that some kids have been genetically altered to be smarter and some haven't, although none of the societal or even existential implications of this are developed—and his treatment of race is awkward to the point of being actively problematic. So it is that Klara, a robot and therefore by definition neither white nor black, notices the skin-colour of the humans she observes, but only when that colour is black: ‘a black-skinned woman stepped forward’ [68] ‘I saw the Diner Manager, a large, black-skinned man, standing very still behind [the counter]’ [245] and so on. So it is that Josie's mum has a bossy housekeeper called, ahem, Melania, who speaks like this: ‘“Listen A.F. Ma'am take Miss Josie to see Mr Capaldi. Portrait guy. That Mr Capaldi is one creep son bitch ... Ma'am love Miss Josie. But Miss Sal die and mess Ma'am up bad. Get me, A.F.?”’ [177]. Like the cook in old Tom and Jerry cartoons we never see her face, and she remains entirely marginal. If I say Klara and the Sun just doesn't get race in contemporary America right, you might counter with: well, it's not really a novel about race. Perhaps so; but in that case it would probably have been better for Ishiguro to have left out these half-done gestures.

It also seemed to me that the novel is too long, and too slow. That's a trickier call, since overlong, repetitive and slow has been part of the Ishiguro USP since at least The Unconsoled. The difference, though, is that elongation, repetition and a morass of triviality (as evasion) is the point of The Unconsoled, where it doesn't strike me as the point of this novel. 

In sum: despite some wonderful portions, this seems to me a near-miss from Ish. But perhaps I'll change my mind on it. I've done so before on Ishiguro's writing.