Tales from the Bitface

The first book of this year, or the last of last? I started reading James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand a couple of weeks before Christmas, set it aside for some Christmas books, and then went back to it.

I started reading it once before, years ago, and didn’t get far. And I think that’s because of its very strange style. Ellroy uses a chopped-up style of extremely short sentences, much repetition of names, and almost no use of pronouns. For example:

The witnesses were antsy. The witnesses wore name tags. The witnesses perched on one bench.

Or:

Wayne ducked by. Wayne passed a break room. Wayne heard a TV blare.

And that kind of thing is repeated across 600+ pages. It can be hard work at times. The only relief comes in some chapters that purport to be transcripts of phone conversations recorded by the FBI.

We are in the real world here, in the sixties. Right at the start, JFK is assassinated. The three viewpoint characters are all dodgy members of various law-enforcement agencies (Las Vegas police, FBI, CIA) and are all connected to the conspiracy behind that event (spoiler, it was the mob, but certain others, like J Edgar Hoover, weren’t too bothered and/or were sort of involved).

The story carries on through the sixties up to the other to big political assassinations, of Martin Luther King and RFK. And guess what? Our antiheroes — or some of them, at least — are involved in those too.

It’s a novel of the sixties, then, about conspiracies and secrets. Not unlike my beloved Illuminatus! trilogy. So why don’t I love it, then? Mainly, I think, it’s that stylistic choice. I don’t see the point of it, and I found it quite annoying, until eventually it became almost comical. And I did enjoy the book (otherwise I would have stopped reading, what with life being too short to read a book you’re not enjoying). Just not as much as might be expected from the setting.

There’s also this: I learned when I was around half way through that this is actually the middle volume of a trilogy. I’ve noted before, though perhaps only in footnote, that publishers seem to hate putting numbers on books¹, or otherwise letting the reader know important details like that. And it doesn’t matter that much here. It works OK as a standalone novel. But I realise now, part of the strangeness at the start may have been a kind of sense that we were expected to know the characters to some degree. I wrote about something like this fifteen(!) years ago, and the sensation I had this time (I now realise) was similar.

Lastly, it’s a very brutal book. There are many acts of extreme violence, described in casual, if not loving, detail. And the casual racism of the language will probably upset some people even more than the violence.

So I’m glad I’ve finally read it, but I don’t see me searching out the other parts of the trilogy.

It’s interesting to discover that this is a great read even though I’ve seen the TV series. An interesting parallel with early last year, or rather last thing in 2024, when I read Conclave, not long after seeing the film.

If you’re unfamiliar with Mick Herron’s ‘Slough House’ stories, the series is up to four seasons now — or is it five? — on Apple TV. And it’s really good. This is the book that started it all, and it’s excellent. A group of misfit MI5 spies, each of which has been shunted aside from the main track because of some mishap or fuckup.

I said I wouldn’t say much about the previous book till I’d read this one, since they’re really all of a piece, a single story spread across the two. And now here we are. Oh, and there are spoilers below.

Trouble is… it doesn’t feel like we’re quite finished.

To summarise: I mostly enjoyed the story very much. There were points where I was just wanting it to end, but in the sense of wanting to find out what happened, not of wanting it to be over. Lyra and Pantalaimon can separate, since their adventures in the original trilogy (something I had completely forgotten when I first read volume 2, which is part of the reason I reread the originals back then). And they’re not getting on with each other at the start of volume 2. In fact, Pantalaimon leaves Lyra, goes off on his own, to find, he says, her imagination.

Which sets up the main driver for the two books. Or one of the main drivers. Because there’s a lot going on beyond Lyra and Pan’s life. Specifically, the Magisterium is up to its old shenanigans and a whole lot of new ones, and there’s a war brewing. Or being brewed. But it’s not clear to the ordinary people of Brytain (as they spell it over in Lyra’s world) who or what the war is against.

Lyra and Pan travel east by different routes. Along the way they meet gryphons and witches and humans and, of course, daemons. Some of the humans seem to barely believe their daemons exist, which is odd.

And there are still windows between the worlds — presumably opened by some past bearer of the Subtle Knife — and the Magisterium is trying to destroy them with explosives and some success. Because, they believe (or their new pope-like leader claims to know) the windows let evil into the world.

Or something like that. The ravings of religious nutters doesn’t make much sense. This new pope-like guy is, by coincidence, Mrs Coulter’s brother. That is, he’s Lyra’s uncle. We assume, therefore, they’ll meet towards the end.

Reader, they do not meet. And that’s only the least of what feel like a great deal of loose ends. In fact there are so many points of interest that we might have expected to be resolved that are not, that this feels like the middle volume of a trilogy, not the final one. Which makes sense, considering the first volume of this trilogy was a prequel to the originals, while the second two comprise a sequel. It feels like Pullman wanted to, or should have, written a full sequel trilogy.

I mean, I don’t mind a few things not being resolved. Stories never end, really, they just stop. But there’s just so much here feeling like untold stories. Maybe he’ll release a series of standalone shorts, as he has before with things like ‘Lyra’s Oxford’. Maybe he really has another volume up his sleeve, but if it takes another six years to write it… well, he’s not getting any younger.

Where we’re left is not terrible. Lyra and Pan are back together and reconciled, and the immediate active dangers are stopped. But they’re in another world that doesn’t seem great, and if they go back to their own, they’re a wanted terrorist, thanks to their uncle’s work!

I express the previous paragraph in the way I did to make a point that occurred to me about Lyra’s world. All humans have daemons, which are part of themselves. An externalised part of their personality or psyche. The human and daemon talk to each other, and will talk about themselves doing things, saying, ‘When we sneaked into the catacombs…’ and so on. We. The thing Pullman missed, I think (and I’m sure his Exeter College predecessor, JRR Tolkien, would not have missed) is: language would be different. Ordinary, everyday language. There would hardly be a personal singular pronoun. Or it would still exist, but be used in a different way.

There would probably be different forms of the first-person plural, too. A ‘we’ that means one human and their daemon referring to themselves. And another form of ‘we’ that means a group of people (and their daemons) together.

Anyway. Just a thought about language. And I want more, Mr Pullman, but I don’t expect it. Still a great story, just not quite the ending I was hoping for.

I started to dip into the new one, but as I said I might, I decided it had been too long. I went back and reread this one. And I’m very glad I did. I had forgotten many of the details, remembering only a few high and low points.

I really enjoyed it, and won’t have much to say about it till I’ve finished the new one, which I’m already well into, you won’t be surprised to hear.

There is the suggestion that some gates between the worlds are still open. Are any of them to our (Will’s) world? And would we want Lyra and Will to be reunited, if that were possible? It would undermine the ending of the original trilogy, but if done right…

That said, I don’t think that’s where it’s going to go. Just the idle musings of a shipper.

A book about nuns in the 12th century? Why not? Austin Kleon rates it, which is how I came to it.

About one nun, more accurately, a real historical figure, who may or may not actually have been a nun at all: Marie de France. She was definitely a poet, though.

None of that really matters, though. The book isn’t a biography, it’s fiction. A novel based loosely on a historical figure about whom not much is known. She’s descended from a fairy, or said to be in the story. She has visions of (or from) the Virgin Mary. She saves an abbey full of nuns from starvation, and turns it into a power in the land.

It’s very good. In my ongoing, unstructured notes on how writers present speech, and such: there is no direct speech at all in this. Or there is at times, but it’s not punctuated as such. I would have expected to find that annoying, but actually I hardly noticed it.

Groff is an excellent writer, I would have to say. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more by her.

This is a very odd little book. Laxness won the Nobel for Literature back in the fifties, but I had never heard of him before I read Jack Deighton’s review of it earlier this year. This is often the way with Nobel laureates, or so it seems to me. The committee members know of many more writers than you or I.

In her introduction, Susan Sontag includes science fiction in the group of labels of ‘outlier status’ which apply to this novel. Only, I would say, if some characters believing they are ‘in communion with the galaxies’ makes it so. Yet it somehow has something of the feel of SF. Maybe because our unnamed narrator is exploring a landscape in which he is lost and confused.

It’s the psychological landscape of a small community who live by the titular glacier, though. And that glacier — Snæfells — is the same one Jules Verne’s characters start their Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Which gives it a tentative connection to one of our ur-texts. But nothing explicitly fantastical happens. Unless it does. Resurrection? Maybe. Somebody disappearing mysteriously? Possibly.

We, the reader, are as lost and confused by the behaviours of the characters as is the narrator, who has been sent by the bishop of Iceland to find out what has been going on in the distant parish.

It muses on a lot of ideas (SF is ’the literature of ideas’, of course, so there’s that), but has no plot as such. It’s intriguing, though, and well worth a read.