What it is that makes Howard so much more compelling than his many imitators? To the untrained eye, it may be hard to see differences, since his faultWhat it is that makes Howard so much more compelling than his many imitators? To the untrained eye, it may be hard to see differences, since his faults are sometimes more readily apparent than his virtues, though he has plenty of both. Some might try to 'salvage him' from his pulp origins, but despite all his literary aspirations, I'm happy to call him a pulp author, and one of the best.
I have a great deal of praise for this edition in particular, volume one of a three-part series which collects for the first time Howard's Conan stories as he originally wrote them, without the meddling of either magazine editors or De Camp (who shamelessly rewrote Howard's unfinished stories to match his own views, and released them as 'originals'). It is also first to publish them in pure chronological order, eschewing all and sundry attempts to produce an official 'internal chronology'.
Howard meant the order to be somewhat ambiguous, mimicking the epics and histories that inspired the names and events of his stories. Our delightful editor plays the old Lit Crit game of connecting all the dots from the Conan tales to their origins in Plutarch, Bullfinch's Mythology, Lovecraft, or Bierce. I'm indebted to her for helping me to see Conan with new eyes by lending me the perspective of the Howard scholar.
Seeing the way his world sprang up from notes, sketches, and maps is fascinating, and the critical essays try to get a little more mileage out of Lovecraft's misunderstanding of Howard's pseudo-historical names. They are meant to be evocative of a world that, while familiar, still holds surprises. We can recognize a type, a historic conflict, terrain, and temperament without being tied down to the specificity of true historical fiction.
Howard did not want so narrow a view, and was never a stickler for small details, as evidenced by the singular madness his chronologers develop trying to account for the appearance and disappearance of Conan's red cloak and horned helm throughout the stories. Howard liked an underpinning of consistency, but excitement and story always took precedence, which is why, despite drawing names and plots from history (much as Shakespeare did), he never let them bog down his stories, always aiming, above all, to entertain.
When I say that we get Howard without editorial meddling, we must still understand that he was writing for an audience, and that much of the excitement and titillation in his tales was a sugaring of his pill for the lower denominator. Yet for all that, much of his psychology and sexual politics is deceptively complex. It is easy to dismiss him as a cliche strong man with an endless following of swooning women, but there is something more subtle at work.
Firstly, each story that shows Conan in a relationship is written from the point of view of the woman. Often, Conan does not even appear until after her character and situation are already developed. We rarely get an emotional insight into Conan, into his plans or emotions, but we do see into his heroines, which is the reverse of most fantasy romances.
In addition, Conan is often painted as the object of desire. The author's vision rests equally on the desirability of Conan and of the women, showing how and why feeling might develop between them. Conan, having been raised outside of civil society, cannot charm the women, bargain with them for favors, or fool them. His appeal is not that he has wealth, prestige, or grooming, but that he is attractive, confident, physically powerful, guileless, and does not mingle his desires with ulterior motive. He is part 'bad boy', but he is also attractive because he lies outside the arena of sexual politics--something like dating someone outside your high school to avoid the judgment, name-calling, in groups, and jealousy that would otherwise result.
The women are often the victims of civilization; that is to say, they have been carefully bred to be beautiful, desirable, and controlled. They rarely have power in their own cultures, often finding themselves at the whims of powerful men, and so it makes sense that they would seek out Conan, who is not a part of this unbalanced social system, and who has the physical and mental strength to protect them from reprisal when she abandons that culture.
On the surface, "The Vale of Lost Women" is the story which most condemns Howard as a chauvinist (and racist), but there is a subtle subversion within the tale that shows Howard as a much more canny student of the human condition than most give him credit for. The premise of the story doesn't do Howard any favors, and certainly hasn't aged well: a well-bred white woman has been captured by a barbaric pseudo-African tribe by whom Conan has found himself employed.
He finds the woman accidentally, during a revel, chained up in a tent, and she begs him to release her, saying that surely not even a barbarian like him would leave a white woman in the hands of the cruel black chief. It's hard to read without feeling a lump of political correctness rise in our throats--but socially and historically, it's neither and absurd statement, nor an insulting one.
'Odalisques' or white, virgin girls were the most valuable in trade for Barbary pirates to Moorish harems. Even today, Black women get fewer responses in online dating than any other race/sex group. Just because it's unpleasant doesn't mean that it isn't socially true, and just because it is a current social fact doesn't mean that it is an ultimate, universal truth.
We can say it is a social fact that women have been historically controlled and judged by the slut/virgin dichotomy, but that doesn't mean that they desire to be controlled, or to be sluts or virgins. It also doesn't mean that stories which portray this unfortunate dynamic necessarily support it. As students of Nietzsche and Machiavelli know, saying 'this is how the world is' is not the same as saying 'this is how it ought to be'.
Let me say that again: just because a writer presents white women as more culturally valuable doesn't mean that they are any more attractive, intelligent, or worthwhile than any other person. Cultural values are funny things, and don't necessarily align with real values. Just because someone is willing to pay $500 for a rare Beanie Baby doesn't mean that a Beanie Baby is somehow intrinsically better than a comparatively cheaper encyclopedia or road atlas.
It's easy to get hung up on what the author is specifically saying, and hard to step beyond it and look at how and why it's being said. A character's statement is different from an author's, and Howard is surprisingly careful to keep social observations in the mouths of characters, and out of the omniscient narrative voice. After her appeal to racial loyalty, the woman offers herself to Conan in exchange for being freed from the tribe--aghast at the lengths to which she must go. But Conan laughs.
He laughs and tells her that she is sadly mistaken if she assumes that she can merely trade sex for favors, as she has been taught to do in civilized society. It's this simple observation that shows that Howard (and Conan) are better students of the human condition than they get credit for. For Conan, sex does not have this connotation of a social trade, it is an act engaged in out of desire, not coercion. He scorns the 'civilized' notion that women are property to be bargained for. This separation is the same conclusion Angela Carter makes about De Sade in her incomparable Sadeian Woman: that the trade value of sex must be unveiled and demystified in order to approach any kind of sexual equality.
We must recall that this understanding of sex is enforced on both sides, and that if women have an artificially increased value in sexual social trade, it will eclipse any other value they have, or that they might wish to have, and few will consider them as anything else.
But Conan, being outside of that system, values women differently. After his moment of insight, he shocks us back with his barbarism, saying he really couldn't leave a white girl like her in the hands of the chief, and that he's tired of 'black sluts', which is unpleasant and unsympathetic enough to clamp our minds shut again, though whether it might be true to the world or the character (who has hang-ups with his own racial identity), I leave up to you. After all, it is rare that a person raised under one set of signifiers for attractiveness learns in later life how to appreciate a completely different idea of beauty.
He does decide to save her, but not in trade for sexual favor, which once again separates Howard from the thud and blunder writers who followed him. Again and again, if we look at Conan's scattered romantic relationships, we see that he is only interested in the fulfillment of mutual desire, and that the woman's side of the relationship is often the one Howard chooses to explore. Conan rejects the notion of coercing women, let alone forcing them, as beneath him.
He doesn't pressure women, or conquer them, or trade for sex, and the women are constantly surprised at his lack of overture, his refusal to make a game out of the whole thing--or a schoolboy's lovesick obsession. But then, Conan is less interested in an 'erotic victory' than in mutually beneficial pleasure, even if that pleasure is not socially condoned, and is, instead transgressively focused on female desire. Conan's outsider status as a barbarian allows him to approach women on more-or-less equal terms, giving them an opportunity to reject the values which otherwise bind them and to choose for themselves.
Sure, the relationships and their consummation might be idealized and romantic--they're still pulp--and I'm not claiming Howard didn't harbor certain racist and sexist opinions, but the way these themes develop psychologically in his work is rarely so simple. Howard, like Conan, was a man of contradiction and surprising subtlety.
His language also makes his work stand out from the pack: high-energy, evocative, and well-paced, his world and characters are always alive and active on the page. He takes generously from his historical and literary influences, playing with vocabulary and style to evoke a far-off period without growing so distant that he risks losing the uninitiated, as an eccentric linguist like Eddison is liable to do.
One thing the reader must come to terms with in order to enjoy him is Howard's repetition. He has favored words, phrases, and descriptions that come up again and again throughout the stories, and sometimes they feel like crutches. Part of it is that these were to be consumed as single stories, so some repetition would not likely have been noticed--but it happens even within a story.
At these points, I am tempted to compare Howard to the deliberate repetition of the epic tradition of the 'Homeric Epithet', an oft-repeated poetic phrase that becomes part of the rhythm of the text, such as "wine dark sea" or "long-haired Acheans"--or the way every warrior in the Shahnameh is described as a lion, and every beautiful woman is a cypress. Howard knows that there is power in phrases, and by repeating them, he creates motifs, identities, and connections. But, as usual for Howard, it's a combination of highs and lows: we get glimpses of his powerful, poetic language intermixed with his less effective, florid attempts.
But more than even his most effective prose (and occasional, surprisingly unoffending poetry), what sets Howard apart is his pure storytelling. His sense of pacing is admirable, often cutting out unnecessary scenes that other writers would not have realized were redundant. The stories flow along, drawing equally from the verisimilitude of historic tales and the archetypal form of the adventure story.
He moves fluidly through themes and styles, combining romance, war stories, supernatural horror, political thriller, and treasure hunting all in one story, maintaining a lilting, surprising pace without losing the story's center. His stories as a whole also work to build a grander world, much of it left for the reader to complete between hints and loose threads. There is a definite sense of historical discovery in this style, and the first three Howard stories give us Conan as a king, as an untried youth, and as a wary reaver.
Read a hundred pages of Conan and you will get a picture of a whole life, a man in different stages, changed by the world. We also get a glimpse of that world, and understanding of its places and ways without being explicitly told what they are. Compare this to almost any other fantasy writer, and they will come up short.
A hundred pages of Tolkien, Jordan, Goodkind, or Wolfe, and you haven't even left the protagonist's home. You won't get a view of the world, nor character growth. You might read a thousand pages of a fantasy series and see less growth than you would in a few Conan stories.
My question has always been: what do we gain from those thousands of extra pages? A more exciting story? A more complex world? A deeper character? Sadly, the answer is often no. Few authors seem to have taken Howard's lesson that saying more isn't as easy as simply writing more.
But then, Howard set the bar pretty high. There's nothing wrong with pulp, because pulp is written for an audience. Too often, these days, one seems to find authors obsessed with a kind of 'pure' writing that refuses to bow to any audience, editor, or sense of fun, and all you're really left with is pretension.
Pulp often gets a bad rap--the unshy way that it approaches sex, race, and politics can make a modern reader feel awkward, but at least these stories are actually, in a very real way, confronting and exploring those issues--and forcing us to do so, as well. Though the next two volumes of Conan stories never quite reach the vivacious heights of these early outings, I have to say: for all his flaws, it's still hard to find a fantasy writer who can better Howard.
'Surprisingly good for a TV novelization' is praise too faint to serve this book. This is not merely a good tie-in, it's good Speculative fiction. Per'Surprisingly good for a TV novelization' is praise too faint to serve this book. This is not merely a good tie-in, it's good Speculative fiction. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised: Disch is acclaimed as an inventive author who didn't succumb to the limits of his genre.
Then again, such acclaim is all too common, thrown at any author who deviates from the most predictable forms. Disch is more than this. His literary aspirations shine through in both form and content.
His dialogue is snappy and referential, replete with wry insight and involved psychology. His style is somewhat contrived, but that is difficult to avoid with an author who deploys such a deliberate and controlled hand.
And this contrivance, this self-aware, clever style is in no way out of place in the Prisoner universe. Like McGoohan, Disch is twisting and playing with the tropes of spy literature, including its trite dialogue, and mixing them with post-modern counterculture deconstruction.
Perhaps the most surprising part is how well his voice in this novel matches with the television series, itself. The inscrutable layers are there, as is the unyielding heart of six, the crushing weight which at every turn you feel must finally overcome him, and all the multivariate allusions to how his predicament parallels the sum of human experience, imagined as a struggle between the individual and communal urges.
I don't usually include examples from the books in question, but there is one which I feel illustrates perfectly how Disch's writing meshes with what made the series great. Feel free to skip it if you'd rather read it for yourself, though it's a momentary insight, not a plot point:
At one point, Number Six has again escaped to London, and is trying there to make contacts, to tell his story, and to seek allies to protect him from return. He rushes about the city in a furor, contacting anyone, trying to decode stolen tapes, calling offices, trying to set up appointments.
At every turn, he is met by difficulty. His calls are not returned, appointments are put off, and no one can find a machine to play the stolen tapes. Six is wracked by paranoia, seeing everywhere the hand intent to snatch him back, infiltrating everyone and everything.
Then he realizes that, being trapped so long in The village, he had grown used to it, to its constraints but also its convenience, its minuteness. He realizes that he had merely forgotten that the world is a difficult, confused, maddening place that seems to set upon you at every turn to inconvenience you and drive you back.
The poignancy of this simple insight, to me, shows all the strength of Disch's storytelling skill and grasp of psychology; and more than that, unveils a new and fundamental truism about the world of The Prisoner and the changes it has wrought in Number Six.
I have a great ardor for the original series, but this has hardly made me ready to accept all interpretations. I found the most recent televised reimagining to be sadly lacking, but not so this book. It extends itself, exploring the mythology, not limiting itself to the content of the show. But then, how could any author hope to capture the tone of such an unpredictable, ever-changing creature without being similarly bold and unfettered?
Some hardliners may resent the direction the book takes, but I appreciated that Disch was not content to wrest McGoohan's laurels, preferring to draw high his aim in hopes of winning his own. In my purview, he succeeded.
Then, some months later, I was in a comic shop in midtown Manhattan and came across a book which listed and rated books which were tie-ins to films and television series. Curious, I thumbed through it to see if there was an entry on this book. To my edification, there was, and it read:
"This is the single best tie in novel ever written."...more
'Shade' is still The Book for me, when it comes to comics. I've read Moore, Gaiman, Ellis, and Morrison, but none were ever struck as true. In terms o'Shade' is still The Book for me, when it comes to comics. I've read Moore, Gaiman, Ellis, and Morrison, but none were ever struck as true. In terms of humor, depth of psychology, insight, and variance in ideas, only Moore's 'Swamp Thing' comes close, but it's still not as unusual.
Yet in the intervening years, I didn't return to Milligan. He is less visible than those other authors, and my stumbling across Shade when I did was a mere coincidence; Only recently have any collections been made available, and those only cover the weakest part.
But it is only natural to return to the source. I have sought elsewhere for his equal and missed him, so my road leads back to Milligan, and it would be hard to pick a more remarkable book than Enigma.
If Shade parallels Swamp Thing, then Enigma is a thematic companion to Watchmen, and flat-out superior, if we believe Morrison's sidelong jab at Moore. I wouldn't say their styles invite a one-for-one comparison, but I do agree that Milligan's is the most literary voice in comics.
Despite being shorter, Milligan's deconstruction it is less narrow in focus, less suggestive, more organic and revelatory, less drunk on its own political transgression. 'Enigma' plays with power, reality, and the farce of superheroes, but is drawn not with the cold, harsh lines of watchmen, but a confused and lifelike dream.
I have come to know good writers by this sign: that they make inescapable a vision you never could have accepted without them. Milligan has this kind of insight, and wit, and a wry self-consciousness--the sort that Morrison has always counterfeited in an attempt to reverse-engineer cleverness.
There is rarely a false note in Milligan. He speaks with post-modern realism, always playing with the audience, turning words back on themselves, revealing the world through the inadequacy of dualism. His works have verisimilitude in their details, in their absurdity, in their unwillingness to settle on a single view.
This book is often difficult, often unpleasant, I can't say I always enjoyed it, but can easily say that it was good: well-written with a strong voice, unpredictable, it forced me to think and to feel at once.
Fegredo's art is likewise difficult. He is a very skilled draughtsman--deceptively skilled. The art is messy, scattered, and free--sometimes the story gets lost in the experiment--but when he needed to, he could hit the high points, and do it well. Beauty, confusion, sex, pain, and death play across the page, each recognizable, each palpable.
It's remarkable that a mainstream publisher had the courage to publish such an unusual book, and speaks of a strong editorial staff, concerned not merely with their market, but with the evolution of the medium. I can only hope that publishers and companies of the future will recognize the importance not just of sales, but of the long-lasting effect of making available original, adventurous visions, like Enigma.
At first, I found the story somewhat all too similar to Shade--and while I enjoyed Shade, I needed Milligan to do something new, to challenge himself as he had continuously done in that series. But Shade also started slow, so I kept with it.
It unfolds its struts, built of surprising, human moments, each poignant beneath the a wild, surreal, magical canopy. Finally, Milligan manages to do the hardest thing in writing: to deliver the ending the work deserves. There is resolution, yet we realize that we already knew it: the mysteries had been germinating in our minds, and now that the end is here, we wish we could change the question that we had once begged him to answer.
But the new question is already lost on the wind, and it is in that moment between conclusion and the implication of something greater that we find ourselves utterly gripped. He takes us on a journey, we see the sights--discrete moments and memories--and then he drops us off where he picked us up. Yet, on disembarking, we cannot help but feel that in some indescribable, nagging way, the world he has kindly returned us to is not the one we left.
Inescapably one of the finest comics I've ever read, but unfortunately, only the beginning of the series is available, and it is the weakest part. It Inescapably one of the finest comics I've ever read, but unfortunately, only the beginning of the series is available, and it is the weakest part. It will be a crime if the lack of success of these early bits forestalls the entire series becoming available, because it stands up as the equal of any other Vertigo title. Milligan is still trying to find his voice in these early stories, which are more standard fare, but soon he catches his stride and reaches levels of thoughtfully absurd wit to rival Moore's 'Swamp Thing', Gaiman's 'Sandman' or the better arcs of 'Hellblazer'.
Good as they can be, it's a shame Morrison and Gaiman get the lion's share of the attention for the Britwave movement, because Milligan wrote a much more innovative book. The art is solid, if not always remarkable. Bachalo is a bit weak at the beginning but he does some of the best work of his career around the middle. The illustrators who replace him for the closing of the series are competent, but don't have the same strikingly idiomatic visions.
The real star here is the writing, and Milligan is a talent who deserves to be better known and widely respected. His 'Enigma' is as unusual and insightful as Watchmen, his Extremist and Skin are darker and more transgressive than anything else put out by a major publisher. Yet Shade is his most imaginative and wide-ranging book, an amazing feat of constant reinvention with a smart, literary sensibility unrivaled in comics.
When people ask what my favorite comic is, I still say 'Shade', and I'm always sad at the lack of recognition when I say it.
Compared to the Nineteenth Century's Romantic movement and the Seventeenth's Shakespeare and Milton, the Eighteenth has always felt a veritable void tCompared to the Nineteenth Century's Romantic movement and the Seventeenth's Shakespeare and Milton, the Eighteenth has always felt a veritable void to me. There was a little bit going on in France with Diderot and Voltaire, and some minor British works by Swift and Defoe, but by and large, Eighteenth Century literature is Fielding and Pope.
He began his inimitable wit and wordly mastery with 'An Essay on Criticism' when he was only 21. It was a varied, vivid exploration of what makes writing good, and includes such oft-quoted lines as "To err is human, to forgive divine", "A little learning is a dangerous thing", and "fools rush in where angels fear to tread".
Four years later he added his contribution to the Epic Tradition with 'The Rape of the Lock'. One of the reasons that this was a slow century for literature was that it was a century obsessed with the superficial. Like all great Epicists before him, Pope captured the spirit of his age, but in this case, instead of capturing it in a broad net of climactic action, beautiful language, and political posturing, he speared it with an acerbic tongue.
His epic was a small one, but just as Milton reinvented the genre by replacing the hero with the villain, Pope revolutionized the genre by replacing the epic with the everyday. His lampooning of the high nobility and their self-importance allied him literarily with his contemporaries, such as Voltaire, who all prefigured the social and literary revolution of the coming century.
Pope plays a very delicate instrument with his epic, often balancing a thin line between respect and ridicule: the same line the nobility had to walk every day. His linguistic and conceptual abilities shine here, as does his humor, which lies on the upper borders of the clever and the witty.
Pope had an unfortunately backward view of women, nowhere reaching the subtle implications of Milton's autoerotic Eve or Shakespeare's Cleopatra, or even the powerful women of the Greek and Roman Epics. Yet his portrayals here do not show the same bias as his 'Epistle to a Lady', since he lets his mockery fall equally on the foolish men and women of his period, and often for the same superficialities.
His later works consisted of translations and numerous political treatises, which though scathing and brilliant in their way, do not continue the philosophic and artistic exploration begun in 'An Essay on Criticism' and expanded in 'The Rape of the Lock'. The Dunciad certainly has a similar bent, but is too historo-specific to really have the same effect, so 'The Rape of The Lock' is probably the best work of the best British poet of the Eighteenth....more
Kipling's is one of those imaginations which, slipping here and there, seems to plant the seeds for numerous books and genres yet to be devised. He wrKipling's is one of those imaginations which, slipping here and there, seems to plant the seeds for numerous books and genres yet to be devised. He writes to pique, slowly twisting out his stories and drawing the reader along unexpected and unrecognized roads. Each tale might set the mind on a new and unusual tack, and hence, more than anything, Kipling is an author for authors: an author whose imagination is contagious.
His stories always center around the foreign mystery of his native-born India, but more than that, of the intersection of dry, Anglican Protestantism and vibrant, deadly, magical Hindu tradition. The Greeks long ago borrowed from the Indian mystics the ideas of the soul, of atomism, and asceticism, and since then, the West has adopted holy meditation, the scourge of the flesh, and the One God who is Many.
Kipling's cultural crossroads is not a new conflation, but a reintroduction of an old acquaintanceship. Many of his earlier stories present a kind of deniable magic: a magic which is only magical because it is unfamiliar, and which later finds a perfectly reasonable explanation. It is not hard to imagine such overgrown superstitions on the parts of the British, whose magical roots have been long straitlaced and sublimated, excepting ghost stories at Christmas.
In 'My Own True Ghost Story', we find a Britain who is obsessed with finding magic in India, and who comes to find it only because he looks for it everywhere. Kipling's works are full of such reversals of expectation, where it is not the 'alien magic of India' at fault, but the alien India which a foreigner wishes were true.
In his introduction, Neil Gaiman mentions the stigma of Colonialism that follows Kipling to this day. Kipling was representing the point of view of a ruling class descended from a foreign culture, but he is hardly dismissive of Indian culture or its traditions. Indeed, he does not try to make anything absurd out of Indian culture, nor does he try to represent it from the inside.
Though many may be content to declare him a racist and a colonialist because he was of the race of conquerors, that stance forgets that every nation has been conquered and sublimated by a series of various cultures, and that this should not invalidate the conquering culture any more than it invalidates the conquered culture. Even North America's native people wiped out a previous aboriginal population in staking their claim.
Gaiman is also one of the authors who shows a clear line of inspiration back to Kipling. The concept of his novel 'American Gods' is completely laid out in Kipling's 'The Bridge-Builders'. Likewise, one can find the roots of Gaiman and Pratchett's 'Good Omens' in Kipling's 'The Appeal', which also forms a background for C.S. Lewis' 'Screwtape Letters'. All three show the afterlife in terms of a purely British bureaucracy: polite and convoluted. Kipling also provides a scaffold for Gaiman's favorite: 'awkward fellow in an incomprehensible underbelly of horrifying magic'.
Yet these are not the only threads to be traced through Kipling. 'A Matter of Fact' is a proto-lovecraftian horror tale, if there ever was one, from the carefully-paced, skewed tone to the confessional style to the incomprehensible sea creatures and the alienating realization that the truth often has no place in the world of man.
The collection also includes a pair of science fiction tales, which are not Kipling's best work. The first, especially, is difficult to follow. His retro-future is barely comprehensible today, and he has made the most common mistake of the unskilled sci fi author: he explains too much. He spends much more time on describing his unusual, convoluted technologies than on imagining the sort of world they would produce.
The second, 'As Easy as ABC: A Tale of 2150 AD ', spends more time on plot, politics, and character, and if one makes it through the overwrought sections, one can see a prototype of 1984. The political tack of the story tries to tackle fascism versus democracy decades before it became a reality. While he does not have Verne's eye for the social impact of technology, he did succeed in making a remarkably forward-looking tale.
He also dabbles in metaphysical and psychic connections, trying to divine the nature of consciousness. In 'The Finest Story in the World', he presents a case of previous lives as the lively backdrop for a true Author's Story. The narrator obsesses with writing, talent, inspiration, and the eternally looming specter of Lost Perfection in a way which threatens to pull out the heart of any aspiring writer by its strings.
'The Brushwood Boy' deals with another obsession of the writer: the despair that there will never really be an audience who can comprehend you. Eventually, the tale collapses neatly into a paranormal love story, but its implications stretch far beyond its conclusion. 'Wireless' takes a technological tack in the question of whether there might be a universal source of human inspiration.
He also writes many more standard English Ghost stories, usually regarding mental breakdown and obsession, as in the 'The Phantom 'Rickshaw' or 'Sleipner, Late Thurinda'. Perhaps the most powerful of these is the seemingly innocuous 'They', which subtly and slowly builds a mood of thick unease without resorting to any tricks or shocks.
There are also the tales of a world which suddenly turns, growing stranger that the protagonist could have imagined, but without resorting to magic or the uncanny. Such stories as 'The City of Dreadful Night', 'Bubbling Well Road', 'The Strange Ride of Morrowby Jukes', and 'The Tomb of his Ancestors' ask us to accept a world which seems eminently possible, if unlikely. It is these stories that most stretch our horizons by asking us to imagine something which requires not a leap of faith, but merely a coincidence of remarkable circumstances or an unusual world view.
Kipling also has chance to show the humorists' pen in the Fish Story 'The Unlimited Draw of Tick Boileau' and in the uproarious farce "The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat', which rises in ever steeper climaxes of unimagined consequences until it begins to shake the high seat (and low comedy) of Wodehouse himself.
There are many other tales besides, from Fairy Stories to original Mythology (which Kipling fully realized in his lovely 'Just so Stories'), adventures, and even a mystery. Kipling's great wealth of production and imagination is daunting, but we may at least take comfort in the fact that his soaring wit is not the kind that overawes and dumbs us, but the sort which sets our mouths to laugh and call, and our minds to dance and twitter, or to fall suddenly into unknown and unrecognized depths in just the place we thought we knew the best.
He may lack the poetic turn of Conrad, the drive of Verne, or the harrowing of James, but neither could they lay claim to the far-ranging vivacity of that ingenuity that is, and remains, Kipling's.
A nice collection, including some stories I haven't come across anywhere else. Particularly intriguing is a travelogue by H.P. Lovecraft originally ghA nice collection, including some stories I haven't come across anywhere else. Particularly intriguing is a travelogue by H.P. Lovecraft originally ghostwritten for Harry Houdini.
That story, along with Doyle, Haggard, Kipling, Stoker, and archaeologist Howard Carter provide a view of the mysterious Egypt which lured the English of the Victorian age. The Poe, Twain, and Bradbury provide more absurd and amusing views of the mummy myth.
The inclusion of an original Egyptian myth gives another useful insight, as does Elizabeth Peter's well-researched period piece, though it was not as culturally intriguing as the actual myth.
The Rohmer is amusing, though as unpolished as one expects from the pulps. I could have done without this particular Anne Rice piece, which pales in such close quarters with masters of structure, humor, and especially tone.
It's a good introduction to a once-rich setting for stories and myths which has now been mostly boiled down into action movie fodder. Most interesting is how it recalls a time when Egypt and its mummies were filled with a promise of mysteries; a sense that each stone unearthed might rewrite history, yet again.
Today, the myth has become a cliche, the magic has been codified, and the mummy is more likely to invoke Scooby Doo and Brendan Frasier rather than an alien and unknown threat from a time long dead. It was nice to be reintroduced to the myth as it once was....more
A delightful, colorful, and personal history of the politics of Rome. Clearly, Plutarch was an adherent of the Great Man Theory, and he was lucky to hA delightful, colorful, and personal history of the politics of Rome. Clearly, Plutarch was an adherent of the Great Man Theory, and he was lucky to have plenty of them to choose from.
Plutarch's history is anecdotal, collecting all the common stories about the men who defined Rome (and Greece, in other volumes). It is an unusual way to write a history, or an autobiography, but it has the benefit of telling us a great deal about the empire, its people, and their stories, even if the biographical elements must be taken with a grain of salt.
Plutarch is not as plainly partisan as Sallust, but neither does he achieve the cold detachment of Caesar (whether it was true humility or masterful construction is another debate). Plutarch intends his biographies as odes to the many virtues of man, and instructional book on how to live well, with the implicit assumption that famed, successful men always live well.
This is the main drawback of Plutarch's style: the acceptance of grand, virtuous stories about men, who like all of us, were in the end, only human. He does sometimes include more minute and humorous details, which always help to pleasantly round out his portraits.
Reading these roughly in order, and in comparison with other views from the time (when they exist) is very profitable, and Plutarch gives us a lot of stories that we wouldn't have if not for him. It is a benefit to have them at all, but it is unfortunate that we cannot confirm or compare many of them.
Indeed, the lives of some of these men and the details of their periods are known only by reference to Plutarch, and perhaps some fragments here and there. The collection is vital if one wants any real comprehension of Rome, but it also reminds us just how little of their history survived to reach us.
I'll have to finish the extant Roman lives, and the Greek ones as well. They are certainly worthwhile for any classicist....more
Conrad should be known for more than 'Heart of Darkness'. As good a book as it is, it shows only a minute glimpse of what he is capable of. The delicaConrad should be known for more than 'Heart of Darkness'. As good a book as it is, it shows only a minute glimpse of what he is capable of. The delicacy, humor, wit, and sheer beauty he shows in this collection marks him as one of the most talented writers of his time, and with one of the most unique voices.
I at once compared him to Chekhov, for he shares with Chekhov a remarkable psychological insight, and hence is capable of constructing characters by merely hinting at notions and moods, or by what he doesn't show us. It is this deft characterization that allows realism to equal the strange vitality of truth, recalling that 'fiction' need not mean 'falsehood'.
But then it shouldn't surprise that Conrad has something reminiscent of Chekhov, as he was born in the Ukraine, and was familiar with the same tradition of stories, and storytellers, as well as the bittersweet, resigned humor of Eastern Europe. But that is not all there is to Conrad.
Along with the patented despair of the great Russian authors, Conrad possesses a lightness, a bawdy, earthy amusement, something that approaches wit, picking up the story and bearing it along, without crudely driving it, like some French oxen. Like Dumas, pere, Conrad is capable of writing an adventure, a story which ties together the improbable, the unfortunate, the miraculous, and the disastrous into something grand and amusing and ridiculous, but not without a touch of humanity and pain. But then, Conrad left the Ukraine at 18 to join the French merchant marine, so it should hardly surprise us that he picked up something there of wit and joie de vivre, even as he picked up the Gallic tongue.
Yet he wrote his stories in English, and his stories were not without an English touch. After all, he bears comparison to Haggard, Stevenson, and Melville, but more than them, Kipling. There is something often small and precise, undaunted about his characters that is British, and he writes of Horror like a Victorian, of the overawing force of the sublime.
But why should that surprise us? After all, he left France to join the English merchant marine, picked up a new language, and sailed up the Congo river in Africa for them, and by this point, he was a man of forty who hadn't written as much as a short story.
In Africa, he experienced a kind of Hell on Earth, a place of true demons, of suffering, of things unimaginable. Like Dante, he descended, ever on, and saw for the first time the terrible depths of the human heart. And he emerged.
Yet never the same, he had gained some insight, or lost some ideal there, and in all the future, could only see the world as a strange, tinted place, a satire, a place where pains and joys were small, yet refused to be overshadowed.
Perhaps it was here that he found his greatest talent: the ability to feel great beauty and great terror in every thing, every man, every sunset, every gust of wind and gesture. Conrad will surprise you. Not merely with his amusing, fraught characters, eccentric, varied stories, and moments of amusement, but with sudden, poignant, insightful visions of the world, visions both unerring and vast.
In a moment and a turn of phrase, Conrad suddenly opens the soul, and a deep sigh flows from the page like the breath of the Earth, a sigh of love that has seen love die, and a thousand times. There is something in his voice, something that is not merely Russian, or French, or English, but which moves between them, and rises above him, and is his voice, and his alone, and forever.
It is not ungainly, or unfamiliar, and yet it is not quite like anything else. It is not merely the English of the unpracticed man, or the knowledgeable foreigner, but of the man who has come to terms with his new language late, and comfortably, and who saw it for the first time with lined eyes.
They meet as two old people meet, already grown, already whole, and become lovers because it is easy, and it is pleasant. The laughs they share, for there is no reason not to, the pains they do not need to share, because they both know them well, already. He does not forget his past loves, nor does he pine for them. He loves now his new love, yet not simply because she is new....more
Nothing better represents Caesar's understanding of how to play upon the hopes and joys of man than the fact that he was able to turn a few hundred paNothing better represents Caesar's understanding of how to play upon the hopes and joys of man than the fact that he was able to turn a few hundred pages of troop movements into a thoughtful, engrossing narrative. We read not only Caesar's thoughts and intentions in the work, but also gain an invaluable view of Roman politics. In his own words, Caesar sets the scene for the events which soon overtook the empire and captured the imagination of western literature for thousands of years to come.
If the secret to enjoying Tolkien is skipping all the poetry and troop movements, I never thought this reflected poorly on poetry as an art, but I must admit I never realized that there was an art to the military memoir to reflect poorly on. I shall have to do my best to remedy this, though whether there are accounts which equal Caesar's in elegance and focus, I remain in doubt....more
Pablo Picasso spent his entire life trying desperately to do something new, something unique. He moved from style to style, mastering and then abandonPablo Picasso spent his entire life trying desperately to do something new, something unique. He moved from style to style, mastering and then abandoning both modern and classical methods, even trying to teach his trained artist's hand to paint like a child.
In 1940, four French teens and a dog stumbled upon a cave that had lain hidden for 16,000 years. Inside, they found the walls covered in beautiful drawings of men and animals. When the Lascaux caves were opened to the public, Pablo Picasso visited them, and as he stared at the prehistoric hunting scenes, was heard to remark in a despondent tone: "We have invented nothing".
The Iliad is equally as humbling to a writer, as complex, beautiful, and honest as any other work. The war scenes play out like a modern film, gory and fast-paced, the ever-present shock of death. Though some have been annoyed at how each man is named (or even given a past) before his death, this gives weight to the action. Each death is has consequence, and as each man steps onto the stage to meet glory or death, Homer gives us a moment to recognize him, to see him amidst the whirling action, and to witness the fate Zeus metes.
The psychological complexity and humanism of this work often shocked me. Homer's depiction of human beings as fundamentally flawed and unable to direct their own lives predicts existentialism. The even hand he gives both the Trojans and the Argives places his work above the later moralizing allegories of Turold, Tasso, or even Milton.
Of course, Homer's is a different world than theirs, one where the sword has not yet become a symbol for righteousness. In Homer, good men die unavenged, and bad men make their way up in the world. Noble empires fall to ravenous fire and the corpses of fresh-limbed young men are desecrated.
Fate does not favor the kind, the weak, the moral, or even the strong. Fate favors some men now, others later, and in the end, none escapes the emptiness of death. Though Homer paints some men as great, as noble and kind and brave, these men do not uphold these ideals for some promised paradise, but simply because they are such men.
There is something refreshing in the purity of the philosophy of living life for yourself and yet expecting no entitlement for your deeds. A philosophy which accepts the uncontrollable winds of fate; that when the dark mist comes across our eyes, no man knows whence he goes.
Later traditions make other claims: that the righteous will be rewarded, that the lives of good men will be good and the bad will be punished. In thousands of years of thinking, of writing, of acting, have we gained nothing but comforting, untenable ideals? Then Picasso was wrong, we have invented something, but it is only a machine which perpetuates itself by peddling self-satisfaction.
I read and enjoyed the Fagles translation, which may not be the most faithful, but strikes that oft-discussed balance between joy of reading and fidelity. He makes no attempt to translate the meter into English, which is a blessing to us. The English language does a few meters well, and Homer's is not one of them.
The footnotes were competent and interesting, though I could have stood a few more of them; perhaps I am in the minority. I also thoroughly enjoyed Knox's introductory essay. I would normally have had to research the scholarly history of the book myself, and so Knox's catch-me-up was much appreciated....more
The Gormenghast books are considered to be the beginning of the 'mannerpunk' genre, and along with Tolkien, Moorecock, and Howard, Peake is one of theThe Gormenghast books are considered to be the beginning of the 'mannerpunk' genre, and along with Tolkien, Moorecock, and Howard, Peake is one of the fathers of the modern Fantasy genre. Mannerpunk is a genre typified by complex psychology, plots driven by character interaction, and a strong sense of mood.
It is also notable for the characters rather than the world being fantastical. In this sense, mannerpunk, and certainly the Gormenghast books, work in the vein of surrealism (meaning not 'unreal', but 'more than the real'); not unlike the Russian Gogol. The genre is based upon the works of authors like Jane Austen, the Brontes, Baroness Orczy, Swift, de Cervantes, and Dumas pere.
Peake himself was a polymath, excelling not only as an author, but a poet and artist. He is the only self-portrait in Britain's National Portrait Gallery. As a poet, he has a mastery of language and conceit that places him above popular 'jingle man' Poe.
This makes him quite unlike Tolkien, whose long stretches of verse tend to be stilted and unfeeling. Then again, Peake is more passionate than than Tory Tolkien.
Despite his mastery of language and evocative characterization, Peake is not an easy read. Indeed, his thick prose and slow pace can quickly tire the mind. Like a skillful chess opponent, Peake demands much of his reader. He is not content to let the reader be a passive escapist, so his work engages and challenges. It would take a great and knowledgeable mind to meet each of these challenges on equal footing, but even we lesser minds may find amusement, shock, and beauty.
Peake's original idea was to chronicle the life of a character from birth to death. The first book deals with infancy. The second takes him into adulthood in a sort of bildungsroman. The third involves the adventures of young adulthood. Unfortunately, Peake's slide into dementia prevented any furthering of this vast and witty trove.
In literature, Peake may have come the closest to completing a book which balances complex psychology, deep character, poetic style, exploration of reality, and a surreal mixture reality and fancy. Peake's books were very audacious, and though he sometimes fails to reach his own lofty ideals, the really remarkable thing is that sometimes, he doesn't.
I know of no author in all of the English language who is like Peake, or who could aspire to be like him. His voice is as unique as that of Milton, BiI know of no author in all of the English language who is like Peake, or who could aspire to be like him. His voice is as unique as that of Milton, Bierce, Conrad, Blake, Donne, or Eliot, and as fully-realized. I am a hard and critical man, cynical and not easily moved, but there are passages in the Gormenghast series which so shocked me by the force of their beauty that I would close my eyes and snap the book shut, overwhelmed with wonderment, and take a moment to catch my breath.
I would drop my head. My eyes would search the air; as if I could find, there, the conclusion I was seeking. My brow would crease--in something like despondency or desperation--and then, of its own accord, a smile would break across my face, and I would shake my head, slowly, and laugh, and sigh. And laugh.
Peake's writing is not easy fare. I often needed room to breathe and time for contemplation, but he is not inaccessible, nor arduous. He does not, like Joyce or Eliot, require the reader to know the history of western literature in order to understand him. His story is deceptively simple; it is the world in which he sets it that can be so overwhelming.
Peake writes with a painter's eye, which is natural enough, as he is more famous as an illustrator than a writer (the only self-portrait in the National Portrait Gallery). He paints each scene, each moment, in such careful, loving, playful detail that it can only be described by the original definition of 'sublime': a vista which is so grand and beautiful that it dwarfs our humanity, evoking a wonder akin to fear.
But Peake's writing is not so entirely alienating; on the contrary: he is vividly concerned with life. Gormenghast is the story of a life starting at birth, though our hero only got as far as the cusp of manhood before Peake was seized by malady and death. Each character is brightly and grotesquely alive. The 'fantasy' of this book is not, like so many epics, magic signifying some allegorical moral conflict. The magic of Peake's world is the absurdly perfect figures that people it.
They are stylized and symbolic, but like Gogol, Peake is working off of his own system of symbology instead of relying on the staid, familiar archetypes of literature. Unusual as they may be, there is a recognizable verisimilitude in the madness imbued in each. Their obsessions, quirks, and unpredictability feel all too human. They are frail, mad, and surprising.
Like the wild characters of his sketches, Peake writes in exaggerated strokes, but somehow, that makes them more recognizable, realistic, and memorable than the unadorned reality of post-modernists. Since truth is stranger than fiction, we find reality in his off-kilter, unhinged world. This focus on fantastical characters instead of fantastical powers has been wryly dubbed 'Mannerpunk' or a 'Fantasy of Manners'. It is a much more enveloping and convincing type of fantasy, since it engages the mind directly with visceral artistic techniques instead of relying on a threadbare language of symbolic power. Peake does not want to explain the world, but paint it.
Tolkien can certainly be impressive, in his stodgy way, but after reading Peake, it is difficult to call him fantastical. His archetypal characters, age-old moral conflict, and epic plot all seem so hidebound against the wild bulwark of Peake's imagination. The world of Gormenghast is magical and dreamlike, without even needing to resort to the parlor tricks of spells, wizards, and monsters.
Peake's people are more fantastical than dragons because their beings are instilled with a shifting and scintillating transience. Most dragons, fearsome as they may be on the outside, are inwardly little more than plot movers. Their fearful might is drawn from a recognizable tradition, and I question how fantastical something can really be when its form and behavior are so familiar and predictable.
Peake's world--though made up of things recognizable--is twisted, enchanted, and made uncanny without ever needing to stretch our disbelief. The real world is full of wonder, confusion, and revelation, so why do authors think that making it less real will make it more wonderful? What is truly fantastical is to find magic in our own world, and in our own lives.
But then, it is not an easy thing to do. Authors write in forms, cliches, archetypes, and moral arguments because it gives them something to work with; a place to start, and a way to measure their progress, lest they lose themselves. To write unfettered is vastly more difficult, and requires either great boldness, or great naivete.
Peake is ever bold. You will never catch him flat-footed; his pen is ceaseless. He drives on in sallies and skirmishes, teasing, prodding, suggesting--but always, in the end, he is an electric presence, evading our cumbersome attempts to catch him in any one place. Each sentence bears a thought, a purpose, a beauty, a consciousness. The only thing keeping the book moving is the restless joy of Peake's wit, his love and passion for his book, its places, characters, and story.
He also has a love for writing, and for the word, which is clear on every page. A dabbler in poetry, his careful sense of meter is masterful, as precise as Bierce. And unlike most fantasists, Peake's poetry is often the best part of his books, instead of the least palatable. Even absent his amusing characterization and palpable world, his pure language is a thing to behold.
In the introduction, Quentin Crisp tells us about the nature of the iconoclast: that being different is not a matter of avoiding and rejecting what others do--that is merely contrariness, not creativity. To be original means finding an inspiration that is your own and following it through to the bitter end.
Peake does that, here, maintaining a depth, pace, and quality that is almost unbelievable. He makes the book his own, and each time he succeeds in lulling us into familiarity, we can be sure that it is a playful ruse, and soon he will shake free again.
Alas, not all readers will be able to keep up with him. Those desiring repetition, comfort, and predictability will instead receive shock, betrayal, and confusion. However, for those who love words, who seek beauty, who relish the unexpected, and who find the most stirring sensation to be the evocation of palpable wonder, I have no finer book to suggest. No other fantasist is more fantastical--or more achingly human.
Even before I was shown the meaning of life in a dream at 17 (then promptly forgot it because I thought I smelled pancakes), IThe universe is a joke.
Even before I was shown the meaning of life in a dream at 17 (then promptly forgot it because I thought I smelled pancakes), I knew this to be true--and yet, I have always felt a need to search for the truth, that nebulous, ill-treated creature. Adams has always been, to me, to be a welcome companion in that journey.
Between the search for meaning and the recognition that it's all a joke in poor taste lies Douglas Adams, and, luckily for us, he doesn't seem to mind if you lie there with him. He's a tall guy, but he'll make room.
For all his crazed unpredictability, Adams is a powerful rationalist. His humor comes from his attempts to really think through all the things we take for granted. It turns out it takes little more than a moment's questioning to burst our preconceptions at the seams, yet rarely does this stop us from treating the most ludicrous things as if they were perfectly reasonable.
It is no surprise that famed atheist Richard Dawkins found a friend and ally in Adams. What is surprising is that people often fail to see the rather consistent and reasonable philosophy laid out by Adams' quips and absurdities. His approach is much more personable (and less embittered) than Dawkins', which is why I think of Adams as a better face for rational materialism (which is a polite was of saying 'atheism').
Reading his books, it's not hard to see that Dawkins is tired of arguing with uninformed idiots who can't even recognize when a point has actually been made. Adams' humanism, however, stretched much further than the contention between those who believe, and those who don't.
We see it from his protagonists, who are not elitist intellectuals--they're not even especially bright--but damn it, they're trying. By showing a universe that makes no sense and having his characters constantly question it, Adams is subtly hinting that this is the natural human state, and the fact that we laugh and sympathize shows that it must be true.
It's all a joke, it's all ridiculous. The absurdists might find this depressing, but they're just a bunch of narcissists, anyhow. Demnading the world make sense and give you purpose is rather self centered when it already contains toasted paninis, attractive people in bathing suits, and Euler's Identity. I say let's sit down at the bar with the rabbi, the priest, and the frog and try to get a song going. Or at least recognize that it's okay to laugh at ourselves now and again. It's not the end of the world.
It's just is a joke, but some of us are in on it....more
J.G. Keely
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