Khazad-dûm: ‘Fate of the Jews’

 

‘Greatest of all the mansions of the Dwarves,’ says Tolkien in The Silmarillion, ‘was Khazad-dûm, the Dwarrowdelf, Hadhodrond in the Elvish tongue, that was afterwards in the days of its darkness called Moria.’ In Tolkien's invented language, Khazad-dûm means something like ‘that which was dug by the dwarfs’, as in the ‘Old English’ equivalent dwarrow- [= dwarf] -delf [= delved, dug].  

In The Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the fellowship pass through Moria, discover that Balin's attempt to resettle the great Dwarvish realm had been defeated, and afterwards flee from orcs and a Balrog. Gandalf dies (or ‘dies’) there and the rest of the fellowship escape eastward back into the sunlight.

So, yes: dwarfs. Dwarves, as Tolkien insisted, idiosyncratically, on pluralising the word. What are they? In the invented world of Middle-Earth, they are a race of creatures, diminutive, hardy, secretive, burrowing and delving, fond of money (gold, jewels, that kind of thing), big-nosed, bearded, ‘natural’ enemies of the Aryan elves, but not in themselves wicked like Orcs, Goblins, dragons, spiders or whatnot. But what are they, beyond this in-world description? Here's Tolkien, writing to Naomi Mitchison in 1955:

I do think of the ‘Dwarves’ like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue. [Letters, 229]

And in an interview with the BBC in 1965, Tolkien said this:

But the Dwarves are, of course, quite obviously, couldn’t you say they remind you of the Jews? All their words are Semitic, obviously-constructed to be Semitic. [quoted in Zak Cramer, ‘Jewish Influences in Middle-Earth’ Mallorn 44 (2006), 9]

Cramer, in that article, notes that the Dwarfish battle cry, as uttered by Gimli at the Battle of the Hornberg—Baruk Khazadl! (‘Axes of the Dwarves!’)—takes a Jewish form: Baruch is Hebrew, as in the blessing that starts the Friday shabbat meal, baruch atah adonai, ‘blessed are you, O Lord God’.

What about Khazad though, the Dwarfish word for Dwarf? Zak Cramer's interesting article doesn't consider this, but it's obvious enough where Tolkien has sourced this word: it's Khazar.

The Khazars were a semi-nomadic Turkic people who from the 6th-century onwards dominated a stretch of land across south-west Russia, Ukraine, Crimea, and Kazakhstan (which nation is named after them). ‘Khazaria became one of the foremost trading empires of the early medieval world, commanding the western marches of the Silk Road and playing a key commercial role as a crossroad between China, the Middle East and Kievan Rus’. And here's the thing: nowadays we understand that the Khazars were a multi-ethnic population, including various Pagan, Tengrist, Jewish, Christian and Muslim populations. But, in the later nineteenth century the assumption in the west was that the Khazars were Jews—were in fact a distinct Jewish people known as the ‘Mountain Jews.’ (Despite their importance, the Khazars did not leave a literary heritage that impinged on Western traditions, and 19th-century European cultural and archeological of the Caucausus was limited). Hence you get statements like this [Henry Howarth's ‘The Khazars’, Travaux de la Troisième Session du Congrès International des Orientalistes (E J Brill 1879), 141]:

This was the intellectual tradition out of which Tolkien worked: for him the Khazars were Mountain Jews. Khazad-dûm, or its homophone Khazar-doom, is the doom of the mountain Jews: their fate, the judgment passed upon them: namely, wealth, glory, greed that unearths a fiery demon from below and their terrible destruction. Isn't all this a touch anti-Semitic? Hard to deny, really.

It's complex, this. Tolkien was not necessarily personally anti-Semitic. His 1938 letter is well known and rightly celebrated: written (perhaps sent, perhaps not: but certainly written) to a German publisher who was prepared to offer good money for the translation rights to The Hobbit, but who required, under the Nazi race laws, that Tolkien confirm that he was not a Jew: ‘I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine ... if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people’. At this point in his life, Tolkien certainly needed the money this translation would have brought him, and there is something splendid in the certitude with which he repudiates racism here. Nonetheless, he was a man of his era, his imagination conceived the world in part in racial terms, and the ‘mountain Jews’ clearly inform his dwarfish, dwarvish, characters.

“Avatar: The Way of Water” (dir. James Cameron, 2022)

 This isn’t a review of Cameron’s second Avatar movie: Avatar: the Way of Water. You don’t need another review of this film, I know. I will just briefly note that it’s basically the same movie as the first one but with added water, that its story is strung together from a series of statements, hard to disagree with but not in themselves inherently dramatic (‘white settlers persecuting Native Americans was bad!’ ‘The Vietnam war was bad!’ ‘Whaling is bad!’ ‘Family is good!’)—and that the storylines are all refried from elsewhere: Moby Dick plus Androcles and the Lion, Apocalypse Now plus Titanic and so on. I will add that the alien-world visuals are very colourful and detailed without being especially immersive or moving or remarkable, that the actions sequences are lively without being in the least bit tense or exhilarating, and that everything in this movie is too long, way too long, way way too long. This movie is too long.

Instead of a review, I am going to notate an annoyance I had concerning the movie’s worldbuilding and the logic of its representation. You are free to dismiss me as a crank, a pedant and a killjoy, for I am, it is true, all three of those things. But I think there’s a larger point here.

So: the ‘avatars’ themselves. As we learned in the first movie, the aboriginal population of the planet Pandora are the Na’vi, 9-ft-tall blue-skinned humanoid aliens, with elf-ears, tails and a mystic-electrical dreadlock with which they can plug-in to other mystical-electrical aspects of their natural world, mind-melding with dragons in order to ride them through the sky and so on. Earthlings have come to this planet to extract its valuable mineral ‘unobtanium’, an element that makes huge chunks of landscape float in the sky. But humans cannot breathe the Pandoran atmosphere. So humanity has developed ‘avatars’, cloned (one assumes) organic bodies shaped like native Pandorans, which human pilots remotely control by lying in special immersive VR tanks.

There’s lots that is handwavy about all this, especially towards the end of the first movie where the human protagonist Jake Sully not only remote-controls his avatar but mystically unifies his consciousness absolutely with it (via the mystic-electricity of Pandora’s world-tree). Thereafter he is not remote-controlling his avatar, his avatar has become his body.

Now, you might well say that there’s no point in objecting to the industrial-grade Cartesian pineal-gland bollocks of this. It’s the set-up for everything, and without it the whole film series couldn’t exist. So let us swallow that camel, for I have a gnat I wish to strain at. 

Avatar 1 pitches heroic Sully against a savagely violent human military officer, played by Stephen Lang, who is set on extirpating the Na’vi and destroying Pandora’s ecosystem. In a review of the first film Nick Mamatas called this character ‘Sergeant McRapeTheEarth, and that’s the name by which I’ve thought of him ever since. He dies at the end of Avatar but rather than gussy-up a new villain for episode 2 Cameron has him resurrected at the beginning of Avatar: the Way of Water. The shift is this: Sgt McRapeTheEarth’s consciousness and memories were previously downloaded onto a flash drive, which means they can be uploaded into a specially grown avatar body.

This is the main dynamic of this second film: McRapeTheEarth’s avatar, not remote-controlled but literally containing the we-might-as-well-say soul of the dead soldier, pursuing Sully’s avatar from forest to seashore, with lots of fighting and explosions and whatnot. At one point McRapeTheEarth, in Na’vi avatar form, goes to the site of the battle from the end of the first Avatar movie and discovers his own corpse, a Na’vi arrow still sticking out of it. He picks up his own skull in his gigantic blue hand in what looks like is going to be a Hamlet moment; but instead of discoursing on mortality he crushes it to dust with one mighty squeeze. Hah!

The camel I have swallowed is: that we have souls (souls which, moreover, can be recorded onto flash drives and uploaded into other bodies) and that the ‘avatar’ bodies are not just fleshy robot suits but actual bodies—in this film Sully has married his Na’vi girlfriend and fathered multiple children upon her, which means his avatar produces sperm and is able to pass on its DNA. Pretty sophisticated tech! But alright, I swallow all that. Here’s what I can’t swallow:

Sam Worthington’s avatar sounds exactly like Sam Worthington did when he was a human, just as McRapeTheEarth returns in Na’vi form with exactly the same voice as he had before. But his voice-box must, surely, be a different shape now, and is certain of much larger dimensions, and his new chest is perhaps twice the capacity of his human one. He ought to speak with a really deep and booming voice. He doesn’t. We can take this as a convention of representation: alright, the Na’vi are our p.o.v. characters, so have them speak ‘like us’. But in that case the least Cameron could do is have the human characters communicate in high-pitched, squeaky, pinky-perky Tiny Tim voices. I honestly feel cheated that he didn’t do this.

Part of my problem is that the movies make such ostentatious show of attending to questions of ‘verisimilitude’. All the helicopters and giant boats and submarines are scrupulously designed to work just as such machines would work if they were real. All that hyper-highdef SFX, all these intricately interlocking thought-through ecologies, and yet no squeaky-voiced homo sapiens? Pff.

The more I thought about this, the more it irked me. It’s the pea underneath the hundreds of Cameronian mattresses that prevents me from getting a good night’s sleep—and how I wanted to sleep, sitting through the three hundred straight hours of this interminable movie. It leads to other problems. So, the reason humans have returned to Pandora for Film 2 is no longer to mine floaty unobtainium, but to hunt the whales, or the alien whale equivalents, which they do ruthlessly and cruelly, even though they know the ET-whales are highly intelligent, sensitive and emotional beings. The reason for the hunting is that the spacewhales produce an amber liquid inside their giant brains that, we are vouchsafed in a gobsmacking aside, reverses human aging.

This means that Earth has (a) the technology to keep our bodies endlessly young, and (b) the technology, as per Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon books, to download human consciousness and then upload it into new bodies, combined with (c) the ability to grow cloned bodies so close to the original that they generate their own sperm and, one presumes, eggs. Add these together and Earth has solved death and created immortality. That’s the story, right there. If there’s something ‘in’ the spacewhale’s brainjuice that reverses aging, then find out what it is, synthesise it, and give it to everyone, keeping a store of cloned bodies and downloaded consciousnesses to cover occasional deaths by accident and so on: everyone’s immortal. Why are we piddling around in these lagoons spearing sushi with a stick? We’re gods now!

This, though it seems to me a major worldbuilding hole, doesn’t irritate me so much as the voice thing.

‘Best SFF of 2022’: the Excellent Unincludeds

Every year The Guardian asks various people to write brief ‘Best Of’ round-up posts of different genres of book. I was asked for my top five SFF novels of 2022, and you can read what I wrote here (my five, in case you can't be bothered to click that link, being: Harry Josephine Giles's Clarke-winning Deep Wheel Orcadia; RF Kuang's Babel; Emily St John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility; Paul McAuley's Beyond the Burn Line and Tochi Onyebuchi's Goliath).

Some years ago the format was different: we were allowed to choose as many ‘best of’ titles as we could fit into 800 words. Now we are asked to limit ourselves to five titles. It is, of course, an artificial exercise, restricting the production of a whole year’s SF to a number countable on one hand. Nonetheless, I do enjoy compiling the list. Of course it means that no fiction by me can ever make the Guardian's best-of-SF; but I daresay it wouldn't even if somebody else were doing it. So that's no great loss.

How do I go about assembling a list like this? In any given year I read a lot of books: some books I buy, others are sent to me—by publishers, for review, because I’m a prize judge. This last process results in a large influx, actually. A year in which I judge the Kitschies, or the World Fantasy Award, or whatever, will be a year in which I necessarily read a large amount of SFF. I did do some prize-judging in 2022, although for the Orwell Prize, which rewards political fiction. For the first half of 2022 my duties on this panel rather crowded out my other reading, and though some of the books submitted to the judges were SFnal and Fantasy, most weren’t. Still, I love SF and Fantasy and always read a lot of it, classic and contemporary. I generally read the big award shortlists each year, for instance, try to keep up with what's being reviewed, and often just buy a book because I like the sound of it, or am taken by the cover art, or at random. When the commission for the Guardian Best-Of came through in October I already had a sense of what I had liked amongst all that. I then solicited other peoples’ favourite SFF titles on Facebook and elsewhere. Folk were generous with their suggestions, some of which I had read, some not. By this stage in the year my Orwell judging had finished, so I was able to devote some time to tracking down and reading many of these suggestions.

This is not an absolutely comprehensive process, of course. I did not read, and could not have read, literally every SFF title published this year. But by the time I submitted copy (in November) I’d read a pretty good spread.

Of course, there are constraints on my selection, and that’s what I’m blogging about today. Which is to say there were a number of really good SFF novels that came out in 2022 which I could not include on the Guardian list, for reasons of partiality, or conflicts of interest. Justine, the Books' editor, is scrupulous about this, and quite rightly. It’s what Private Eye mocks, year after year: ‘best books of the year’ pieces which plug books by the writer’s friends, spouses, children etc. I can see how this happens, and it needn’t be absolutely venal: when a friend publishes a book, of course you will want to read it and if you have a lot of friends in the worlds of writing and publishing then this kind of reading can occupy a lot of your time, such that when you’re asked for your opinion on the year’s best books your mind will gravitate to these titles. More, it is possible (of course!) that a friend's or spouse’s book just is genuinely good. Still, I take seriously the requirement that I do not turn the Guardian’s ‘Best SF of the Year’ piece into an exercise in mere friend-puffing.

In one sense this is quite hard: the world of SF publishing is a narrow one, and any writer is liable to bump into people in it. If I operated an absolutist policy it would become pinching. For example: I know Paul McAuley a little, though he and I are not close friends (I bought my copy of Beyond the Burn Line with my own money, and read it on my own time; it really is excellent). Or again: I appeared on a panel—virtually, in this covidious age of Zoom—with R F Kuang (it was a session in which previous deliverers of the annual Tolkien lecture at Pembroke assembled for a round-table). But I don’t know her personally, and it would be harsh indeed to Babel, a fascinating novel, to exclude it from my list on such a flimsy acquaintance. But I have to draw the line somewhere, and this is where I draw it: if I actually am friends with an author, or if I have blurbed their book, I can’t in good conscience include it on my list.

On the one hand, it's not as bad as it might be: I am not a very sociable person, and do not have a particularly wide circle of friends; nor am I especially notable or prominent in SF circles. On the other hand this policy affected some of the best books I read in 2022. You might want to argue I’m being over-scrupulous, though I do feel that the world of publishing is already plenty sclerotic with this kind of metaphorical insider-dealing, undeclared interests and influence-, friendship- and nepo-networks, and the least I can do is not add to it.

At any rate I want to use this end-of-year blogpost to mention some of 2022’s very best SF and Fantasy novels, and apologise to their authors for not including them in the Grauniad’s list. To my friends I say: there is plenty of time to shun me in 2023, break-off all contact, bad-mouth me on social media, cancel me etc, and then (assuming the paper ask me again next year) I’ll be able to recommend your new work with a clear conscience. But for now, here, in no particular order, are books that I didn’t feel, despite their excellence, I could include in my roundup. I’m choosing six, to go one-beyond the limit of five under which I previously laboured.

Will Wiles, The Last Blade Priest (Angry Robot 2022)

An extraordinary Fantasy novel, by one of the UK’s best contemporary writers. It manages to provide all the satisfactions of a ‘conventional’ or genre Fantasy book whilst also estranging and engaging the mode in wonderful new ways. But Will is a friend, I read the book in MS (and blurbed it) and I couldn’t include it. Here’s an interview I hosted on my Notebook/blog with Will about the novel.

E J Swift, The Coral Bones (Unsung Stories 2022)

This is a beautiful, richly written and superbly alive novel about climate collapse, human love and human endurance, layering three stories past present and future in and around the Great Barrier Reef. I’ve met Swift several times, and whilst she and I are not friends I was lucky enough to be sent this novel in MS, and I blurbed it (you can see what I wrote on the publisher’s website). I expect to see this book widely represented in the coming awards season: it's a stunner.

James Smythe, The Ends (HarperVoyager 2022)

This is the fourth and final volume in Smythe’s Anomaly quartet, and it is extraordinary. I liked but couldn’t altogether love the first volume in this series, but as it has gone on, telling specific stories in each volume that also connect and resonate across all four, the Quartet has grown in my esteem—if it didn’t sound too pretentious, I’d call it a SFnal version of Eliot’s Four Quartets, working-through similar fascinations: memory, belonging, exploring and homecoming. And this final volume, in which the Anomaly finally reaches Earth, is the best of the lot, a marvellous cope-stone to the series. Smythe contrives a gripping story that also brings the themes of the whole into superb constellation. Way to stick the landing, James.

M D Lachlan, Celestial (Gollancz 2022)

A smartly constructed alt-historical moon adventure: in this novel’s 1977 both the Soviets and the Americans are exploring the moon, and the story starts with a mysterious hatch being discovered on the lunar surface. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and read it in one go: propulsive, ingenious, in places period-appropriate pyschedelic, a very good SF novel. But Mark Barrowcliffe (the man behind the pseudonym) is a friend, and I blurbed it. 

Lavie Tidhar, Neom (Tachyon 2022) 

‘Neom’ is in the news at the moment (obviously it’ll never happen; though it makes a brilliant setting for imaginative writing)—and this gorgeous novel, set in Tidhar’s ‘Central Station’ future, is as good as anything he has written: richly imaginative, pin-sharp, a brilliantly deft piece of worldbuilding and storytelling. Tidhar is a powerhouse of contemporary SFF, a major voice; but he’s also a friend of mine. You can see my blurb for the book in the above image, although the publisher has, wisely, replaced it with one by a more famous figure than I for later editions.

Tori Bovalino, Not Good For Maidens (Titan 2022)

The elevator pitch for this book might be: a dark YA fantasy, based on Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. The book itself is exactly as rich, atmospheric, Gothily queer and wonderful as that suggests. Rossetti’s poem is one for which I have a particular fondness, which perhaps predisposed me to like this novel; but I am also (or was also: she has now passed her viva) on the supervisory team for Tori’s creative writing PhD at RHUL. She is a brilliant writer of YA, and is going to be huge.

‘Pinocchio’ (2022: directed by Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson)

 

The buzz on del Toro’s Pinocchio (Netflix 2022) was very promising (Mark Kermode thought it a near flawless five-star masterpiece) so I sat down to watch with high hopes. Those hopes, however, were not fulfilled. Disappointment!

Hi diddle dee-dee, this movie’s not for me. I thought it dreary, plodding, ponderous, draggingly slow. The animation is painstaking and very detailed but lacks any sprightliness or pep. The characters move and interact as if pushing through transparent treacle, every last gesture and twist and flick over-telegraphed. The design has moments of striking Del-Toroesque Goth-appeal, but a movie cannot exist purely on its design. What about everything else? The voice acting is underpar: David Bradley plays Geppetto with an unlikeable querulousness; Christoph Waltz delivers a haphazard, overwrought performance as the villainous Volpe; and whenever Ewan McGregor’s Sebastian J. Cricket was on screen I found myself thinking back to Toast of London, in the recording booth, with Clem Fandango on the other side of the glass: ‘that’s great Ewan, really great: could you do it again, make it a little more likeable? Great—and again please? One more time please. OK we'll go again.’ Fire the nuculire weapons!

The attempts at humour, without exception, misfire: a problem both with the conception of the comic moments themselves (the cricket is squashed! again! and again!) and with the timing of them. The timing is out for most of the story beats, actually. Also the plot makes little sense. Do I apply a hobgoblin-of-little-minds criterion of pedantic consistency to a fairy tale, though? Is that really what I'm doing? Say it’s not so! But a story needs to have a coherence, a logic, even if it’s not the logic of verisimilitude. My sense with this film is that the story is never quite sure how Pinoccho is supposed to figure.

So: at first the pious Catholic 1930s Italian villagers are convinced that Pinocchio is possessed by the devil. Then, instantly, he is integrated into the local school system so much that the local fascist podestà comes round to Gepetto’s house in person to rebuke him for the lad’s truancy—after missing just one day! So why didn’t Pinocchio get to school? It was because, on his way there, he was tempted away by evil circus-svengali Count Volpe—it seems Pinocchio is at one and the same time both an unremarkable ligneous boy in his hometown and a startling freak-show marvel whom people will pay top dollar just to watch. Odd, that. When Gepetto and the podestà both try to retrieve the boy from this new life of circus performing Volpe shows-off the signed contract. Except that Pinocchio (who hasn’t ever been to school, remember) can’t write, so has instead drawn a smiley face at the bottom of the document. This is treated as legally binding, with Volpe angrily threatening to bring his lawyers down on everyone, although one wonders under what provision of contract law such a document, doodled upon by an illiterate minor, would be binding. It hardly matters, anyway, because the plot then guilliotines this entire development by having Pinocchio abruptly run over and killed by a lorry. He spends a little time in an archly-conceived, plum-coloured afterlife, all dark purple sand, coffin-clad cliff-faces and skeletal rabbits playing cards, ruled over by a mauve sphinx (this character is another iteration of the blue fairy: the movie’s one and only female character). It turns out that Pinny is immortal and so back to Italy he goes.

Discovering that the boy cannot die, the podestà gets very excited: put him in the army, he cries, to fight for the patria fascista! Does he go to Gepetto and say: “old man, make me an army of such unkillable soldati”? He does not! Instead he recruits Pinocchio into youth camp, alongside his own son, trains him for a bit and then, randomly, instructs his son (who has befriended the puppet) to shoot him with a pistol and kill him. Seems a waste. I suppose his idea is to, I don’t know, toughen-up his boy. But the lad refuses, the podestà is killed by an allied bomb whistling down directly onto his head and the movie lurches into its final act.

Gepetto and Sebastian Cricket have gone in search of Pinocchio and on the way been swallowed by a giant dogfish—a whale in Disney’s version of course, though it’s a huge dogfish in Collodi’s original 1883 novel. In the novel, though, Pinocchio and Geppetto easily escape; this film’s denouement, in which Sebastian hatches an elaborate plan to climb out through the fish’s ‘blowhole’ (a stoma that squalus acanthias, being a species of fish rather than mammals, does not possess) draws on Disney rather than Collodi.

Pinocchio blows-up the dogfish and dies, which is no biggie since he is immortal; but—oh no!—down in the mortal world Geppetto is drowning. P is told that if he wants to go straight back to life, instead of waiting the arbitrarily imposed ten minutes (or whatever) lag-time, then he must sacrifice his immortality. He gladly does this, goes back, saves his father and dies in the process. Except that then he’s brought back to life anyway. It’s a confusing zig-zag that is trying to tug your heartstrings, but which just leaves you baffled.

Then there are the songs. The songs are awful. Utterly unmemorable. Impossible to imagine any one of these smeary dollops being remembered 80 days from now, never mind 80 years—the way ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’, ‘Give A Little Whistle’, ‘Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee’ and ‘I've Got No Strings’ are still universally recognised and loved.

Bringing in Disney, of course, tips my hand. It is unfair, and arguably point-missing, to compare this movie to to the peerless Disney Pinocchio (1940)—Del Toro is clearly, indeed rather clangingly, not trying to remake the beloved Disney original (unlike the dire Roger Zemeckis retread). That's fair enough. My problem is not that Del Toro’s approach is stylistically and tonally unlike Disney’s (although the animation certainly misses the sprightliness and life Disney’s team achieved), or that he has moved the story from a nonspecific 19th-C milieu to a specific, fascist-Italian 1930s/40s one. It is that his film creaks, lumbers, misses, bores, outstays its welcome. That it doesn't work.

‘But,’ you will say, ‘how can you nitpick and picknit at the plot logic of Del Torro’s movie and overlook the daftness of the original plot?’ I agree, the plot of the 1940 movie is just as illogical in its way as this 2022 one. But I would argue that the aporiae in the 1940 movie’s plotting are, actually, expressive of the movie’s key concerns, in a way that isn’t true of the 2022 film.

For example: in the 1940 movie, naughty boys, including P., are inveigled by a mysterious ‘Coachman’ to voyage to Pleasure Island. Here they are indulged with champagne, cigars, all the food they can eat, gaming tables, and an island-ful of fine things for them to vandalise—to smash, wreck and ruin. The Mona Lisa is there! And those naughty boys have defaced it! 

But it’s all a ruse: there is some magic on the island that means, the more the boys misbehave, the quicker they turn into jackasses: literal donkeys, which the Coachman then ships off and sells, to hard labour in salt mines and suchlike.

But think about this for a moment, under rubric of a business proposition. How much does it cost the Coachman to fit-out Pleasure Island? Never mind the endless booze and cigars, food, sundry costs of portage, the labour required to herd and ship-out the finished-product donkeys. What about the paintings? In 1962, the Louvre insured the Mona Lisa for $100 million (about a billion dollars in 2022 cash). 

Long story short: there really has to be a cheaper way to produce jackasses, so as to sell them on at profit.

And of course there is! It’s called ‘sex’. You get a mummy donkey and a daddy donkey together and, via a special kind of donkey cuddle, a baby donkey gets born. Certainly cheaper, and therefore more profitable, than the Coachman’s method.

Of course I’m being deliberately obtuse. We are not expected to read this sequence literally. It’s a piece of fabulation, talking metaphorically rather than mimetically: it's saying ‘allow a boy to behave badly and follow his bestial instincts and he will turn into a jackass’. That’s a way of telling a moral story, in a dramatic and visually arresting way. You could make the same argument about the oddities of plotting in the Del Toro movie.

But I’d argue the 1940 Pinocchio is doing something else with the Pleasure Island sequence. It hinges on the question above. Isn’t there a cheaper, more efficient way of ‘making’ donkeys? Obviously there is. Sex. But in the world of Pinocchio sex is precisely what is missing, what is taboo or interdicted—because it’s a children’s film, because it’s a war film and the men are all away in the army separated from their wives, or for deeper reasons. Something is broken in the logic of fertility in this colourful animated land. A cool blue-coloured fairy gifts life to a puppet (because that’s what women can do) and it comes alive, sort-of. We could say: Geppetto has made a son the hard way, constructing it like Frankenstein did his monster, rather than the easy way (I say easy: when the two of us made our son, it was my wife who did all the heavy lifting of course). But Geppetto doesn’t circumvent ‘nature’ out of hubristic arrogance, the way Frankenstein does. He does it because … well, why? Because he lives in a land without women and has no alternative, perhaps? This, it seems to me, is part of the pointedness of the movie: it is, in its brilliant, colourful, vividly-sung, often hilarious way, a kind of “Waste Land”, a film about a kind of desolation: the old world having died—to quote another famous Italian—and the new world yet to be born, we find ourselves in an interregnum in which a great variety of grotesque and wonderful symptoms appear.

What’s the equivalent for the Del Torro Pinocchio? Why the clonking relocation to Fascist Italy, turning the movie into an epigone Pan’s Labyrinth? Del Toro is, in part, saying: fascism is bad. Which, I have to agree, is true, for fascism is indeed bad; although it’s a truth not very eloquently or resonantly expressed by this movie. What else? Is the point that fascism treats human beings like puppets, disposable, controllable, mere things? Is that it? Or that fascism is a kind of malign circus act, a puppet show, all outward display and inward emptiness?

I daresay I’m both overreading and under-praising this film. Lots of people I know, whose opinions I respect, really love it. Still: it’s a Pinocchi-no from me.

Annie Ernaux, ‘The Years’ (2008; translated by Alison L. Strayer 2017)

 

Following Ernaux's Nobel win I addressed my (deplorable, no doubt) ignorance of her work by reading this. It's acclaimed, the blurb tells me, as her masterpiece, and won the Prix Renadot in France and the Premio Strega in Italy.

It's ... fine? I guess? A deliberately bitty panorama of life in France from the 1940s to c.2000 made up of lots of short paragraphs, flashbulb moments from history and culture, news, lists of films seen and various moments from the protagonist's life: schooldays, life as a wife and mother in provincial France, working as a teacher, life post-divorce with a handsome young toyboy. Perfectly readable but, maybe, rather featherweight. It's like Billy Joel's ‘We Didn't Start The Fire’, but for France and with added bits of sex-life. Still: Nobel Prize!

Most of it is this kind of thing: ‘reserve soldiers continued to leave for Algeria ... the SS France, the Caravelle jetliner and the Concorde, the Common Market and, sooner or later, peace in Algeria. There were new francs, scoubidoo bracelets, flavoured yoghurt, milk in cartons, transistor radios’ [76]. A hundred pages later it's still going on, further down the cultural-historical line: ‘male voices compared PCs and Macs ... they mentioned the latest cover of Charlie Hebdo and the most recent episodes of The X-Files, advised us to see Man Bites Dog and Reservoir Dogs’ [179]. Every now and again the running commentary is interrupted by passages like this:

Once in a while she looks at herself naked in the bathroom mirror. A delicate torso, small breasts, very slender waist, slightly rounded belly. The thighs are heavy with a bulge above the knee. The sex is clearly visible, now that the hair is more sparse, the cleft small compared with the ones displayed in X-rated films. She is surprised. It is the same body she's had since she stopped growing at around the age of sixteen. [167]

A male novelist writing a passage like that would be, rightly I think, mocked. It is different coming from a woman's pen I suppose. Still: after a while the obliqueness of all this notated specificity grows wearisome. ‘Solidarność, the Restaurants du Coeur, the release of Mandela ... Hypermarkets expanded, shopping trolleys were replaced by others so big one could scarely touch the bottom. We changed television sets so that we could have a SCART plug and a VCR’ [141]. The boorishness of men is a repeated theme, and the way constant external change actually, paradoxically, construes a kind of inner changelessness is pretty well done. But I'm not sure the book puts the necessary distance between portraying banality, for satiric or social-commentary or even aesthetic reasons, and simply being banal.

On the internet all one needed do was enter a keyword and thousands of ‘sites’ would swarm on the screen. [208]

You don't say! ‘We could research the symptoms of throat cancer, recipes for moussaka, the age of Catherine Deneuve, the weather in Osaka, the growing of hydrangeas ...’ Yes, yes. Point taken.

It's a 200-page novel that feels like a novella, an exercise in literary Pointillism that isn't, or didn't strike me, as much more than this gimmick. But conceivably (I don't say this to snark) my reaction only reflects the boorishness of masculinity that the book, in part, critiques.

+++

Photo-Moderne, Cinémonde, German soldiers, Lillebonne
L'Hirondelle, Convent School, President de Gaulle;
De Beauvoir, long division, Les Muppets on television
Mireille Mathieu, Bjorn Borg and Emanuelle;
Bourgeois life, Maman/wife, Tirlipot, pastry slice,
Mitterand, Beatles song and Catcher in the Rye;
Panties, Debussy, visiting Seine-Saint-Denis
Canal+, reading Proust, sexual clichés home to roost.

We didn't start the Ernaux
Til her Nobel Prizing made it worth appraising
Didn't much enjoy the Ernaux
No, I'm just not sure if I will read much more of her.

Andor (Disney+ 2022)

 

There is rarely consensus in Star Wars fandom, or indeed in SF fandom more broadly, but something approaching that has been arrived at with regard to Andor (Disney/Lucasfilm 2022). It is, everyone is saying, the best Star Wars for a long time, perhaps the best since the original trilogy.

It’s a prequel: the story of how Cassian Andor (played with ingenuous charisma by Diego Luna) goes from being a ‘rebellion-averse’ cynic to a mainstay of the revolution against the Galactic Empire, which is how he appears in Rogue One (2006), itself an immediate prequel to Star Wars: a New Hope (1977). Now, there is, it seems to me, something very interesting about the logic of ‘the prequel’, and especially its popularity as a mode at the moment, and part of me thinks it has to do with Spoiler Culture. What I mean is: the outraged reflex to deplore ‘spoilers’ has metastasised, become a culture in its own right, looms over SF as if the only thing that matters about a text—about a film, a book, a TV series—is not knowing what’s going to happen next in its plot. How angry people get when reviews, or social media, or casual chat ‘spoil’ a text for them! Furious, furious. It’s getting silly, frankly.

I’m not denying that there can be pleasures in the unexpectedness of plot-motion, but I am suggesting the deeper satisfactions of storytelling lie elsewhere. Rereading is more profoundly pleasurable than reading. Just as Greek audiences for Attic tragedy already knew the stories they went to watch (the point of Sophocles’ Oedipus plays is not ‘ohmygod what’s going to happen next? Will the king live happily ever aaaafter?’—the point is how the dramatist frames and tells the story we already know), so a prequel show like Better Call Saul works as well as it does—better than Breaking Bad, according to many—in large part because we know where the overall story is going, so we can concentrate on how it gets there.

Andor certainly benefits from that. Nor does this pre-knowledge destroy narrative tension. For example: we know that Mon Mothma (an excellent performance by Genevieve O’Reilly, whose mask of poise and self-command never obviously slips and yet who nevertheless communicates to the audience all her inner turmoil) survives the show, because she’s right there, in the original trilogy. But Andor nonetheless generates genuine tension out of the precarity of her position as an Imperial senator struggling to keep her secret life secret.

It’s also true that Andor benefits from good writing, good acting and absolutely superb set- and prop-design, costumery and special effects—it so completely inhabits its illogical ‘it’s the 1970s and all the tech is clunky and old-fashioned and fat-buttoned and yet also somehow super-advanced artificial-gravity laser-pistol and FTL spaceships’ idiom that it feels utterly believable. The script keeps a large number of characters in play and almost all are vivid and engaging (some of the ordinary-proles-on-Ferrix are perhaps a bit interchangeable, and Varada Sethu’s rebel agent Cinta Kaz isn’t given much to do, other than moon about as the romantic foil to Faye Marsay’s more substantially-written rebel agent Vel Sartha). But in the main the whole is superbly accomplished, high-spec, quality TV drama.

After a slightly awkward prelude—our hero, Cassian, is searching for his lost sister on a distant planet and ends up killing an imperial soldier (the ‘lost sister’ plotline is then simply dropped for the rest of the series)—the show settles into four nicely chewy main acts. The first is set on the blue-collar industrial world of Ferrix. We are introduced to Syril Karn, an imperial Deputy Inspector: a wonderfully stiff-necked creepy performance by Kyle Soller, this, playing the character as an emotionally stunted incel who has, in a strangulated sort of way, internalised an eroticised version of imperial tyranny as ‘order and beauty’. Karn tries to track down and arrest Andor, but the operation blows up, people are killed, Andor escapes and Karn is dishonourably discharged (what the show does with the rest of his storyline is masterful).

Act 2 takes us to the rural world of Aldhani: Andor has been recruited by Stellan Skarsgård’s rebel bigwig Luthen Rael and sent to join an operation—a heist, effectively: stealing a fortune in cash from an Imperial base. In Act 3, the Empire reacts to this affront by tightening its authoritarian grip, and Andor (who has walked away with his fee, wanting nothing more to do with the rebellion) gets sent, with bizarre arbitrariness, to an Imperial jail. If Act 2 is a heist movie, Act 3 is a prison break movie, and it leads into Act 4 which takes us back to Ferrix and the denouement.

It's a broad canvas with lots going on, and mostly the show juggles its disparate elements well. There are odd sunspots. The Imperial Prison controls its inmates by forcing them to walk around barefoot on a floor that can be electrified at any time, and Andor defeats this technology by breaking a water pipe, flooding and thereby short-circuiting the system, which seems a little screwy to me (wouldn’t the inmates just take off their uniforms and wrap them around their feet, to avoid being zapped?) I puzzled mildly how it can be that Cassian Andor has a Mexican accent where his mother, Fiona Shaw’s Maarva Andor, has an Irish one—beyond, of course, the fact that the actor Shaw is Irish and the actor Diego Luna is Mexican. [Update: Twitter tells me that Fiona Shaw is actually Andor's adoptive mother which, er, OK?]. That’s pettifogging of me, except that there did seem something underbaked about the representational logic of the show. Here’s a question: why are all the show’s Imperial officers human? Wouldn’t the Empire hire talented (talented-at-fascism, I mean) officers from everywhere? There are all sorts of funky alien species knocking around the Star Wars universe after all. (The obvious answer to my question is that, setting aside the in-text logic of the show’s worldbuilding, the Empire figures tyrannical uniformity, racism, oppression and hostility to ‘the Other’, where the rebel alliance figures diversity and acceptance and love and rainbows and so on. But in Andor there are plenty of female and POC imperial officers, so in terms of contemporary hiring practice the Empire looks weirdly progressive, actually—compared, say, to the original trilogy).

But I thoroughly enjoyed this show, and am happy to join the consensus: it is the best Star Wars since the original series. I have seen it praised as more realistic than, let’s say, the sequel trilogy, because it eschews both Jedi knights and Sith warriors, with their force-magic fairy-tale shenanigans. There are none of either in the show, and excluding them from this story was a top-drawer decision by the show-runners, although its strength is not that it makes the series ‘realistic’—a daft thing to claim about a space-opera really—but that it deprives the writers of the magic plotty ‘get out of jail free card’ that the Jedi and their improbable skills represent. Instead the show portrays the rebellion as effortful, as entailing genuine costs, as a struggle, and does so convincingly. And, with the brief post-credits sequence after the show’s twelfth and last episode giving us a glimpse of the Death Star being assembled, I got a particular frisson. It wasn’t the fan-service (though I’m certainly not immune to that). It was the sense I got, determined by precisely the prequel-nature of the show, that the heroism, labour and struggle of the rebellion, of rebellion as such in the world, was being slyly satirised. ‘You see how hard it is?’ the show seemed to be saying to me, ‘you see what people must sacrifice? How torturous revolution is, sometimes literally? How ruthless? You see how it is a thousand separate small actions and intentions aggregating over time that build a movement? You see what human price must be paid, in broken relationships, in lives lived in terror, in mutilation and death? Well,’ the show was went on, ‘this is how such things end, and it’s not with collective action, collective courage and determination. No: things can only be brought to consummation by a magic teenage space-wizard using his magic abilities magically to blow-up the giant sphere of oppression.’ That’s an acidic commentary on the nature of political struggle, if ever I saw one.

Carroll and Gleim: ‘Life, what is it but a dream?’

 

Through the Looking-Glass (1871), that famous dream-narrative, ends with this acrostic poem:

A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July—

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear—

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?

I think this poem, and especially its famous last line, is Carroll's version of a poem by celebrated eighteenth-century German poet, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, ‘Das Leben ist ein Traum’ (1784). We know Carroll spoke German, or at least that he worked at it: Robert D. Sutherland [Language and Lewis Carroll (The Hague: Mouton 1970), 40] quotes various diary entries to that effect (‘learn Prendergast's German hand-book’ and so on), and says: ‘that Carroll desired to achieve competence in French and German is apparent from his dogged perseverance in studying them ... for the better part of thirty years’. And in his day, Gleim was one of the most famous German poets. Here's ‘Das Leben ist ein Traum’:

Das Leben ist ein Traum!
Wir schlüpfen in die Welt und schweben
Mit jungem Zahn
Und frischem Gaum
Auf ihrem Wahn
Und ihrem Schaum,
Bis wir nicht mehr an Erde kleben:
Und dann, was ist’s, was ist das Leben?
Das Leben ist ein Traum!

Das Leben ist ein Traum:
Wir lieben, uns’re Herzen schlagen,
Und Herz an Herz
Gefüget kaum,
Ist Lieb’ und Scherz
Ein leerer Schaum,
Ist hingeschwunden, weggetragen!
Was ist das Leben? hör ich fragen:
Das Leben ist ein Traum.

Das Leben ist ein Traum!
Wir denken, zweifeln, werden Weise;
Wir teilen ein
In Art und Raum,
In Licht und Schein,
In Kraut und Baum,
Studieren und gewinnen Preise;
Dann, nah` am Grabe, sagen Greise:
Das Leben ist ein Traum!

Here's my English version:

Life is but a dream!
We slip into the world and float
With baby teeth
And eager gum
On dream-life's fleet
Drifting foam,
Til we no longer clasp the Earth:
And then, what is it, what is this Life?
Life is but a dream!

Life is but a dream:
We love, our hearts quickened,
As heart to heart
Barely join
In Love and Play
Turn but to foam
All gone, and washed away!
What is this life? I am questioned:
Life is but a dream.

Life is but a dream!
We ponder, study, we grow wise;
We share our stories
On Form, on Space,
On Light and Gleam,
On Plant and Tree,
Studying, we win the prize;
And, nearing death, the old ones deem:
Life is but a dream!

It's not just the refrain of this poem, but the imagery of the river, flowing with bubbles (Schaum, foam), that runs through it. The first five stanza's of Carroll poem owe little to Gleim, it's true: here he elaborates the specifics of his trip up the Thames with the three Liddell girls, and the ‘phantomwise’ vision of Alice herself—although that word contains, I'd argue, a kind of Gleim-y pun: phantomwise means both ‘affecting me as a phantom’ and also ‘wise in her phantom-ness’, that is: achieving the wisdom (Gleim's line 20, Weise) that is the poem's main theme: life is nothing but this phantom, this vision, this dream. And the final two stanzas of Carroll's poem strike me as a compacted gloss upon, or version of, Gleim's lyric.