Longform
Not-Exactly-Books, 2014, 5: What Has Gone Wrong With Short Stories?
Preamble
(Is there such a thing as a “postamble”, I wonder?)
After reading the previous novel I decided it was high time I caught up on some short-story reading. I had several months of Interzone backlogged, for example.
Trouble is, it seems that short stories have lost their way.
I know, that’s ridiculously sweeping. Obviously any such perceived change is far more likely to be in me, than in all recent short stories. And yet, I feel sure that short stories used to be more interesting. So could it be an age thing? Perhaps, but let me first describe what I think it is that’s wrong with them.
In short: nothing happens.
In slightly longer: too many of what people are presenting (and selling) as stories are in fact not really stories at all. They are little more then scenes, vignettes at best. There’s nothing wrong with such pieces of writing per se, of course. They can be powerful, evocative, enjoyable… but they’re not stories, it seems to me.
In a story, something has to happen; something or someone has to change. And too often in my recent reading, they don’t. Or if they do, it’s in a way or to a degree that just doesn’t compel, enthuse, excite.
The BSFA Awards 2013 Booklet
I should discuss some specifics, and with the recent1 announcement of the BSFA Awards, what better stories to pick than the four that were nominated? The BSFA very helpfully curates and distributes a booklet containing all the nominated fiction (also reproductions of the nominated artworks, and this year for the first time, extracts from the non-fiction nominees). Conveniently, this booklet arrived during my short-story-reading period, and I read it straight away, to give me the chance to actually vote, for a change.
How disappointing it was.
By now we know that the lead story in the booklet, “Spin”, by Nina Allan, won the short fiction award. So I’ll deal with it last.
"Selkie Stories are for Losers", by Sofia Samatar.
Our unnamed first-person narrator hates stories of selkies, and swears she’ll never tell one. Why this might be something that she is called upon or tempted to do seems to be related to her forebears: American, her family background is Norwegian. She grew up with selkie stories. As time goes on there is the suggestion that her mother is one of the changeling creatures.
However, the story is good because of the characterisation. It’s the shortest of the four, but has the strongest, most interesting characters. Well, character: our selkie-story-hating narrator. As the story starts she is working as a waitress and falling in love with a co-worker, Mona. And from there it’s a love story with a slightly-weird background, and always the sense that something related to the selkie myths is going to happen.
There’s a good review of it on Martin Petto’s blog, actually. I pretty much agree with that.
"Saga's Children", by EJ Swift
This is an odd story about a solar-system-famous astronaut, Saga, who has had three children by three different fathers in different places. She took no part nor much interest in their upbringing; and none of them knew the others existed until they were adults.
Saga summons them to meet her at a station in orbit around Ceres, and something happens.
But not much, as I was complaining above. The telling is unusual: throughout, the children refer to themselves as “we”, but when they discuss their various careers, for example, they list all three of their names; none of them refers to themselves as “I”. In other words, it is first-person plural.
But this has a distancing effect; we don’t really get to know any of the three. And a mystery happens and is not resolved, and we’re left none the wiser as to Saga’s motivations, or what the children will do.
I should just let Martin Petto do this for me, because his take on this story. too, is very accurate.
"Boat in Shadows, Crossing", by Tori Truslow
Maybe I should just let Martin deal with this one, too. On the other hand, he is annoyed by it in ways that didn’t bother me. It was, in fact, my favourite of the four, and the one I voted for first in the BSFA Awards (“Selkie Stories are for Losers” second, and no others).
Why was this the best? An intriguing, mysterious environment, an immediately-compelling narrator, a problem to solve, a world – or at least a city – to change.
"Spin", by Nina Allan
“A retelling of the Arachne myth”, we are told. It turns out that I didn’t know the Arachne myth, and that makes a difference.
We are in something like modern-day Greece – people use iPads, for example – but time is out of joint: the currency is the Drachma, and there are suggestions that ancient events actually happened within living memory. And the protagonist’s father is a dyer, and all mentions of his trade imply that modern chemistry is all but unknown.
We start with the protagonist leaving the family home – running away, it feels like, though she is an adult – and making a new life for herself in another town. She gets a job, and practises her art of weaving in her spare time.
A mysterious old woman speaks to her enigmatically.
Her art soon earns her success and some recognition.
But some people – one woman in particular, with a sick son – think that she has a power, that her images can influence the future, if not cause it. It emerges that her mother was executed (or murdered) because she was believed to be some kind of witch.
She strikes up a relationship of sorts with the sick son (who may not be very sick at all), and we think we begin to see how things are going.
But then the old mystery woman is back and our hero is looking at some spiders on a bush and feeling weird and it’s all over.
What? What the hell just happened?
It turns out that Arachne was a weaver who claimed to be (or was) better than Athena, and got turned into a spider as a punishment. So there you are.
I’ve liked several of Nina Allan’s stories before this, but this one just doesn’t cut it for me; and I find it hard to believe that in all the science fiction (and fantasy) in all the world, there wasn’t a better short story published in 2013.
(My namesake Petto didn’t review this one, but instead posted a link to a review of it that no longer exists.)
Maybe I’m just grumpy cos on the rare occasion I’ve get round to submitting my own stuff, it’s been rejected.
Anyway, there we go. Back to novels.
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Recent when I first drafted this, maybe… ↩︎
Aye, (Head)Phones
I’m not in the market for a new pair of headphones. My venerable Sennheiser HD450s are still doing fine for over-the-head use, and the same brand have provided me with a series of earbuds for mobile use. But I tried a pair of Beats by Dre phones in an HMV the other day, just to see what all the fuss was about.
They looked pretty good, felt comfortable, and sounded great. But the price!
Apparently Apple bought Beats more for the streaming service than the phones. That makes sense: if they’d wanted a headphone company they’d have gone for Sennheiser, obviously (and if they cared about earphones in general they wouldn’t have made horrible ones for years).
But you’d think that if they wanted a streaming service, they’d have gone for Spotify, which is surely more established.
So I suspect the truth may include a combination of the two, plus a degree of cool cachet, in what is perhaps a demographic that they don’t currently reach.
Either way, if the next iPhone or Mac comes with a cool pair of phones (unlikely though that may be) I won’t be unhappy.
Kippers for Tea
I usually post before elections. This time I didn’t get round to it.
The results of the European parliament elections were horrendous, of course. But one slightly good thing may come out of it all.
IMHO the single biggest contribution to UKIP’s success is the fact that Nigel Farage was never off the BBC in the last few months. More appearances on Question Time than anyone else, for example. Constantly consulted on the radio about anything even vaguely connected to Europe or immigration (or anything else, it seemed).
In short, it’s the fact that the BBC treated them like a mainstream party that has caused — or at least helped — them to almost become one.
I see a close parallel with the way they give climate-change deniers equal time with climatologists whenever there’s an environment story; the intent being balance, but the effect being to give undue weight to the views of a tiny minority.
Here, though, they went far beyond that point, to where I feel they were guilty of violating their mandated requirement to show balance.
So the potential good outcome: at least people of the right can no longer say that the BBC has a left-wing, pro-Europe bias.1
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Not that that was ever a very fair point; you just have to look at the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, for a counterexample. ↩︎
Religion, Faith Schools, and 'The Great Pumpkin'
Another from the "never posted" series. Again, I don't know why I didn't post it. It seems pretty finished. It's also wildly out of date, stemming is it does from 2006. 2006! That's eight years ago now! Where the hell does the time go?
Anyway, the original piece follows.
Religion is much in discussion at the moment, it seems, and atheism even more so.The Archbishop of Canterbury has said that
the ideal of a society where no visible public signs of religion would be seen — no crosses around necks, no sidelocks, turbans or veils — is a politically dangerous oneBut no-one has been trying to do that. True, there have recently been two cases in which employers have restricted what their staff can wear, with regard to items related to religions. Now, whether employers should be able to insist on such restrictions is one question, and a valid one to be asked; but it’s not something new, nor unique to religious clothes.
And it’s not as if anyone other than British Airways has done anything to restrict the display of Christian symbols. The woman in question there was in a uniformed occupation, and the cross violated the uniform code. Case closed. Do you think it would have been any different for a police officer or ambulance driver? If you want to get the uniform rules in your job changed, speak to your employer, go through your union, or whatever: but keep the courts out of it. Similarly if you are in a non-uniformed job with a dress code.
All of which is different from – almost orthogonal to – the case of Jack Straw asking Muslim women to remove their veils during a conversation (note: asking, not insisting; during a conversation, not forever).
I got the impression from the radio news this morning that the ArchieCant was trying to play the “persecuted Christian” card, railing against the overwhelming forces of our secular society. But having scanned his actual article, I see that that is not quite so. Rather, he is warning of the dangers of a society which only allows state-sanctioned religions to exist. Fair point, but again, not something that anyone is suggesting in Britain.
There’s no excuse for a Christian leader to complain about his (and it is always “his”) religion’s place in modern Britain (or, even more so, America). The various Christian churches, and the church of England in particular, hold a remarkably privileged position in British public life, from the head of state being also the head of the church, through the tax-free status of religions, right up to the exclusively-religious nature of Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’ (and that’s not even mentioning the ‘Daily Worship’ or the complete takeover from 8 on Sunday mornings).
Then the Education Minister Alan Johnson has changed the former intent of the government regarding allowing non-believers (or different-believers) into new “faith” schools. Now don’t get me wrong: I am utterly opposed to “faith” schools: one great thing that America gets right, in my opinion, is it’s implementation of the separation of church and state that bans states from enforcing religious observation in schools, and I would happily see it removed from schools here. But we are where we are, and if there are going to be new, state-funded schools that base part of their teaching on a religion, then I think that the worst thing possible would be for them to be exclusively pupilled by kids from families who are followers of that religion.
And remember I went exclusively to state Catholic schools in Scotland.
The State of Me, by Nasim Marie Jafry (Books 2014, 4)
Well this is an interesting one. Nasim is an old friend. Or it might be more accurate to say she was the big sister of an old friend. She lived two doors down the road when I was growing up. Her younger brothers were both close friends of mine. A few weeks ago I came across some old email, and it made me think of them. I knew that Nasim had had a story or two published, so I googled her. Found her blog, discovered she’d had a novel published, ordered it from Amazon, and here we are.
In doing all this I got back in touch with her and with her brother, Yusuf, who I haven’t see in I don’t know how many years. So it’s all good.
But what about the book, I hear you ask?
Well, it’s not the kind of thing I’d normally choose to read — or not without a serious recommendation from a friend, for example. But it’s really, really good.
It’s a fictionalised autobiography, in that the protagonist goes through the same experience with contracting ME (Myalgic Encephalopathy) that Nasim herself did. And it’s set partly in Balloch, where we grew up.
Far more importantly, though, it’s a really good book. The characters are believable, especially the protagonist, Helen. That might be just as you’d expect, as they’re drawn from life; but I strongly suspect that it’s no easier to write a convincing character based on a real person – even yourself – than to write one who is completely imaginary.1 We are drawn in to her inner life, her loves and her problems, and we are glad to be.
When she is laid low by the hateful condition, we feel her every twinge and ache. When she falls in love we fall right with her. And that’s an important point: this isn’t a misery memoir; it’s by no means all about the illness, or even about Helen’s responses to the illness. ME affects and influences everything in her life, but she still manages to have a life, and Nasim makes it an interesting one, one we’re happy to share for a while.
Yet at the same time she manages to educate us about ME, through Helen’s own learning about it. It is still a little-understood condition, with underfunded research and mistaken guidelines from NICE.
All in all, it’s a fine debut, and I look forward to reading more from Nasim.
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And of course, consciously or not, writers always draw on the real people they’ve met when constructing their characters. What else is there, after all? ↩︎
Secret Diaries
Sad to hear of the death of Sue Townsend. I didn’t keep up with the Adrian Mole books after the first couple, but I was always happy to see her byline in the paper or hear her on the radio. And I did enjoy those early books and the TV series.
Interesting to learn from this Guardian piece that the first one was published at around the same time as The Smiths’ first gig. Adrian would probably have approved.
Why Devilgate?
I always expect people to ask me about my use of the handle devilgate, but they almost never do. But an old friend did recently, and I wrote him the answer, and I think it belongs here.
So sit back and relax, and I’ll fill you in on the whole story.
You’re familiar with the origin story of the comics character Daredevil, I assume? Well it’s almost exactly like that, except with less radioactive material/eye interaction, blindness and skintight costumes. But with added rock ‘n’ roll.
So, back around the time I was in primary 4 or 5 (age 9-10), Suzi Quatro, as I’m sure you know, had a song called ‘Devilgate Drive’ (or so I thought for decades; I was telling a colleague at work this story a few years back and we looked for it on Spotify, and couldn’t find it; until we split it into two words: ‘Devil Gate Drive'; somehow much less satisfying). I didn’t actually know the song back then, but some of my classmates did, and started calling me ‘Devilgate’, precisely because I was decidedly non-devilish (or so I assume). I was seen as a bit of a goody-goody, because a) my Mum was a teacher, and b) I was a bit of a goody-goody.
As nicknames go, it was a lot better than it could have been. I remember once another kid asking me what it meant, and I said, “Devilgate: the gate full of the devil.” Which is kind of embarrassing, but considering how goody-goody I actually was (altar boy, and all that), it’s surprising that I wasn’t more bothered by the diabolical nature. Perhaps further evidence that all children are naturally without belief, until and unless they’re indoctrinated into having some: I probably didn’t really believe in the devil.
Anyway, spin forward a few years and I got online and was looking for a handle somewhere – Slashdot might have been where I first used it, and I was just trying to find out whether you can find the creation date of your Slashdot user ID, but it seems you can’t. I have a vague feeling, actually, that I used it somewhere else first, but I can’t imagine where that might be.
Anyway, having established it, it became my go-to handle. Wherever there’s a web service, if there’s a devilgate (or Devilgate: I see that I capitalised it back in the Slashdot days), it’ll almost certainly be me. Except for eBay, where I’m devilgate_real, because some bampot had nicked my name by the time I got there.
And so when I finally got round to registering my own domain, it was obvious what I’d choose.
The First Three Books of the Year
The first three books of 2014 were:
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
Gaiman’s fantasy inspired by his own childhood experiences is fun. It is short, however, and strangely unmemorable after just a couple of months.
It by Stephen King
I read some King when I was younger, but hadn’t in several years apart from On Writing, until a couple of years ago when my beloved gave me 11.22.63, his time-travel fantasy about going back to save JFK. I throughly enjoyed that, and was reminded that he had a vast back-catalogue that I could catch up on.
A significant portion of that catalogue is contained in the single volume of It. It is a monolith, a vast behemoth of a book, at around 1300 pages.
It’s good, though, and I shouldn’t fixate on its size. King uses the space to let his characters breathe and grow. They have the strange limitation as adults that they have almost totally forgotten their childhoods, as a direct result of their encounter with the titular creature. Though not, as you might suppose, because they were traumatised. Rather it seems to be a feature of interacting with the supernatural entity that haunts the town of Derry, Maine, in the primary guise of a scary clown, that, if you face it and live (few do) you forget the encounter.
I had met Derry before: in 11.22.63 the protagonist spends some time in this strange town, and the effect in the book was so jarring – it felt obvious that here was a place with a history – that I looked it up. Turns out he’s used the fictional town as the setting for several stories (and presumably couldn’t resist routing his time-traveller through it).
Anyway, getting back to the book at hand: I spent weeks embroiled in King’s small-town America, its characters and its horrors. And I thoroughly enjoyed it, but am in no hurry to go back there soon.
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Wow. Just wow. This is an awesome book. Atkinson manages to tell the same woman’s life story again and again and keep it interesting and gripping every time (well, there’s a slight longueur during a German period in one iteration, but the undercurrent of terror – she is living in the Führer’s holiday home – keeps it from being a problem).
As you probably know, it’s the tale of a woman who was born in 1910 and died – at various times, and in various ways. We are told the story of her life as she repeats it, again and again – or through multiple parallel timestreams. As the iterations go on, she starts to have some awareness of her past lives. She doesn’t understand what they are at first, of course, especially as a child. At first she’ll just have a sense of dread as she nears an event that killed her before. Later they are clearer memories of the future.
It is utterly fascinating and a joy. And not SF, though if I had read it soon enough I’d have nominated it for the BSFA Award.
I read Kate Atkinson’s first, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, years ago, and likened it to Iain Banks’s The Crow Road (hard to to think of higher praise). I read one other, but wasn’t so impressed, and rather lost track of her, apart from watching the TV adaptations of her detective stories. I think maybe I need to go back and catch up on her work.
Link: The One Correct Way to do Dependency Injection | Schauderhaft
The One Correct Way to do Dependency Injection | Schauderhaft In the end, "Dependency Injection" just means "passing parameters"; which was always the right way to do things anyway. From my Pinboard
Tony Benn
This blog raises a fist and a glass and a helping hand in memory of Tony Benn. A true socialist and all-round good guy.
Some People Left for Heaven Without Warning...
Too many people died in 2013. So many, it seems, that when Philip Chevron of The Pogues died, I didn't get round to finishing my post. Here's what I wrote in October:
... Except there ain't no fucking heaven, and too damn many people have left for it this year. I hate 2013.If there’s one slightly positive thing about Philip Chevron dying two days ago for me, it’s that I was reminded that the box set Just Look Them Straight In The Eye And Say… Pogue Mahone! exists; and also that it is now available in an inexpensive format for about £14. I ordered it on Tuesday night, and it arrived today.
I’ve been listening to it all afternoon. It’s a combination of outtakes, demos, live tracks and radio sessions, and it’s very good.
One thing that stands out at the moment, though, is that their music is steeped in the imagery of death. “Some people left for heaven without warning” is a line from “Sally Maclennane”, of course.
Weirdest Customer Request?
This is one of those unpublished posts I told you about. I don't know why it wasn't published (well, except that I hadn't written the last couple of sentences).
A while back I heard the strangest ever request from a customer.
As you might know, I work for a software house.1 We write financial software for banks. As a thing to talk about it tends to be boring, but it can have interesting challenges.
Anyway, one of our product’s problems, as a web-based app, is that it was written to specifically target the Internet Explorer browser.
I know that seems at best charmingly retro, and at worst appallingly non-standards-compliant, but there are a couple of good-ish reasons. Principally the fact that the original version of the web app was written by contractors who both only knew IE, and were told that our clients only cared about IE. The latter was probably true at the time, and as for the former, well: let’s just say that sometimes people in companies make some stupid decisions, and leave it at that.
Inevitably, and especially as the browser landscape has matured and Apple and Google have come to rule the world, there have been calls to fix things. But there have always been higher-priorities. Getting new features done takes priority over making things work better, sadly.
One of these years we’ll fix it – personally I don’t think it’ll be as difficult as people always think (that fear is another reason why we have resisted doing it).
But what it would really take to force us to sort it out would be if a client demanded it.
If it were going to make or break a sale, we’d be all hands on deck.
So it’s interesting that we got a query a while back wherein a client was concerned about the fact that the app doesn’t work properly in Firefox. This was causing some of their users distress, as FF is their chosen browser. Was this it? Was this the opportunity, at last, driven by customer demand, to bring our app into the late twentieth century?
No.
No, the client had a better idea. They wanted us to to change our app such that it would detect that the user was running something other than IE…
… and prompt them to use IE instead.
Oh dear.
(We didn’t agree to their request.)
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Incidentally, why “house”, I wonder? By association with “publishing house”, obviously, but why are those “houses”? I’m reminded of a discussion I had on a software mailing list in the nineties regarding the American tendency (then, if not now) for referring to a “shop”, meaning a programming entity, including an old-school IT department within a company. ↩︎
Another Lost Month, and Unpublished Posts
OK, so not content with the last post celebrating the fact that I missed a whole month, I then went on and missed February, too. These months just go by so fast.
Anyway, a couple of things. I noticed that I have a few posts sitting in draft form but that are more-or-less complete, so you may shortly see some slightly-non-timely things.
And I’m thinking I might have another go at blogging about the books I read. I appear not to have done that regularly since 2009 (these years go by so fast…) I might not give every book its own post, but put a few into a summary. As I’ve only read three so far this year (one of them was Stephen King’s 1300-page behemoth It, so I don’t feel too bad about the count) I’ll start with those.
This might just encourage me to post regularly, if not frequently.
Meanwhile, here’s a picture of Arthur’s Seat to keep things visual.
Missing Months
I missed all of December. On this blog, that is. No posts at all. V bad. And nearly missed January as well.
But not quite. Here’s a photo to remind us what January’s weather has been like.
And I’ve just done my tax return.
Welcome to the end of the first month of 2014.
2001: The aliens that almost were
An interesting piece on Kubrick, Clarke and collaborators trying to design the aliens for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Via Daring Fireball.
The Summer of Rereading, 3: More Culture
I stayed with the Culture books, skipping over the non-Culture SF ones, Against a Dark Background and Feersum Endjinn. That brought me to Excession, in many ways Banksie’s Culture masterwork. Certainly it’s the first in which the ships take such central, starring roles, which makes it the defining one for me.
I remembered much more of this (I’ve definitely read it more than once before), but there were still bits that were only fuzzy at best. It is galaxy-spanning, “widescreen baroque” space opera at its best.
I hadn’t finished it by the time we went on holiday, so I had to take it with me with only a hundred or so pages to go. That was mildly annoying, but it didn’t take us over our weight limit.
The next Culture novel to be published is Inversions, but I didn’t quite feel like reading it, because I was keen to get to Look to Windward. I feel as if I’ve been wanting to reread that almost since I first read it. So I took it with me, and with only a brief interruption to finish The Magus in the appropriate country, as I’ve already discussed, I stormed into it.
And, err, it was a bit disappointing, actually.
Here’s the thing about not remembering books though: I remembered almost nothing about this. I thought I remembered it, but really I only had the setup (the business of waiting for the light from the stars destroyed in the Culture-Idiran War to arrive) and one brief scene near the end. This had the great positive that it was almost like reading a new Culture novel.
The trouble with it is that the plot is quite thin, and mostly happening off stage. And a lot of the events that happen in between are only really there to show off some of the fantasicness of living on a Culture orbital. In a sense it tries to do exactly what Banksie himself said you can’t really do, which is to set a story in a utopia. This is why the Culture novels general focus on someone working for Special Circumstances or at least Contact; they happen at the edges of the utopia, or just outside its fringes, where things are a lot more dangerous.
There is an ongoing threat to at least one of the main characters, but it doesn’t really engage us all that much. We don’t, perhaps, care all that much about what happens to them.
That said, there are still some great moments. But I wonder whether my expectations, set by my memory of really enjoying it, were too high. It’s often best to approach artistic works with lowered expectations.
The Summer of Rereading, 2: A Culture of Marvel and Miracles
After Iain Banks died I decided it was long past time for a big reread of all his books. Most of the older ones were in the attic, though, so it was a while before I got started.
The books in the attic aren’t terribly well ordered, since they’re just in boxes, and have been moved in and out of them over the years. Also it’s very dusty up there. Not that that affects the order or accessibility of the books; I just say it to try to evoke some sympathy. Poor, poor, pitiful me, sneezing in old clothes while looking through lots and lots of lovely books.
I digress. Sometimes I think its what I do best, actually. One of the non-Banksie things I found was the box containing my copies of MarvelMiracleman, which I hadn’t read for a long, long while. To my shock, an issue was missing. Luckily it was an early one (4, I think), and I also found my Warriors, where it was originally published, so I had all the material. I still prefer it in black & white with the bigger pages, incidentally.
On a theme that will become common, I was surprised at how much I didn’t remember. The whole “Olympus” thing, for example. I thought that was just a passing page or two at the end, but it’s actually woven through the second half of the work. To be honest, I didn’t remember much after the part that was in Warrior apart from Johnny Bates’s carnage in London.
Anyway, it’s still pretty good, but not as good as I remembered. It doesn’t hold up the way Watchmen still does, in my opinion. Also Thatcher appears in it briefly, which is just weird.
To return to my digression, I found various things in the attic that I haven’t read in a long time, so there will doubtless be more rereading ahead. Which is kind of a shame, because as always there are so many new (and old but unread) books to read.
But back to Banksie. I thought of just starting at the beginning and working through them all in order of publication. But I found I didn’t really feel like reading The Wasp Factory at the time, while I did feel like reading some of the SF. So I started with the Culture novels. I thoroughly enjoyed all that I’ve got through so far, and had the mostly-pleasant (but slightly worrying) sense of not being totally familiar with them.
Consider Phlebas: I still find it striking that here in the first Culture novel, if you don’t have any prompting about the Culture, it’s not totally obvious that they’re the good guys. Horza is so well-written, so sympathetic as a viewpoint character, that it’s hard not to support his anti-Culture beliefs. That those beliefs are not really examined (in the time period of the novel, at least) is probably a realistic picture of how most of us go through most of our lives.
The Player of Games: I had remembered this as one I hadn’t liked so much, with its gloomy, spoiled protagonist. Gurgeh is both of those things, but he is also manipulated quite thoroughly by Special Circumstances1, and in the end his life is improved because of it. Which wasn’t their intention (probably); or not their main one, at least. But it does tell us that no matter how good your life is in the Culture, it can still get better. Damn.
Use of Weapons: There’s a game you can play when you’re reading most Culture novels: it is, “What Are Special Circumstances Trying to Achieve This Time?” This is the book with the largest number of distinct chances to play, as we work backwards through Zakalwe’s timeline. A series of grim fragments of conflicts on different worlds, with Zakalwe always there as some kind of general or military advisor. We see him at the end of his engagement each time, and usually at the end of his tether if not the end of a rope.
And the forward-running chapters also have an unresolved special circumstance. But we don’t really care about it, or any of the others. We care about Zakalwe. And about Sma, and the wonderfully-named drone, Skaffen-Amtiskaw; but mainly about Zakalwe. Which is impressive work by Banksie, considering.
But more later.
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That’s what they do, after all. ↩︎
He's really a guitar player but he uses a camera
"He's really a guitar player but he uses a camera": Interview at The Quietus with Lou Reed and Mick Rock, the photographer who took, among many other things, the Transformer cover shot.
The Summer of Rereading 1: The Magus, by John Fowles
A summer of rereading, that's what this one has been for me. Let me tell you about it.
Note: contains spoilers
Early on – maybe it was still spring – when we booked our holiday to Greece, I decided it was time to reread The Magus. I read it something like thirty years ago, when I was at university. I remember enjoying it, but being annoyed by the ending.
So I was expecting that annoyance to still be there. On occasions between then and this rereading, I have looked at the last couple of pages. I did so again before starting it this time; it was no clearer for doing so. Fowles himself recognised problems with the ending. In his foreword to the revised edition, he acknowledges that the novel has flaws, not least that it is a novel of adolescence, both his and that of his protagonist. (I found Nicholas to be annoyingly adolescent and spoilt, especially at the start, on this reading.) He goes on to say:
The other change is in the ending. Though its general intent has never seemed to me as obscure as some readers have evidently found it -- perhaps because they have not given due weight to the two lines from the Pervigilium Veneris that close the book -- I accept that I might have declared a preferred aftermath less ambiguously… and have now done so.
(Ellipsis the author’s, incidentally.) The thing is, he hasn’t done so. Not really. Not if you want to know whether or not Nicholas and Alison get back together, which seems to have been what his correspondents regarding the original edition were concerned about.
But that’s not what bothered me, either then or now. I don’t mind an ambiguous ending. And I actually kind of like the way you can think of it as a freeze-frame, like the ending of a film (Bonnie and Clyde ends like that, if I remember correctly – though in a more dramatic event).1
No, what annoys me is that we never really learn what Conchis and the others were up to. They called their project “The Godgame” (it was also Fowles’s proposed title for the novel at one point); but what was the point of it? What were they trying to achieve?
Ultimately I suppose that can be answered in part by Fowles’s argument regarding people asking about the “meaning” of the novel:
If The Magus has any "real significance", it is no more than that of the Rorschach Test in psychology. Its meaning is whatever reaction it provokes in the reader[.]
So the Godgame’s meaning or purpose may be simply the reaction it provokes in Nicholas; but that still leaves us wondering, as I said above, why did Conchis do it? Was it just the whim of a rich man? He did it because he could? And yet mere whim feels weak alongside all the discussion of freedom and what it means.
In the end the mild sense of frustration remains, because we never find that out.
Back when I first read it, there was no immediately obvious way to find discussions of it. No doubt there were some in academic journals and theses, but finding those would have been difficult. Now, of course, such discussions are easy to find. And the most interesting one I found recently was by Jo Walton on Tor.com: Twists of the Godgame: John Fowles’s The Magus. As Walton says, the ending “twists at just the wrong moment and sends it away from metaphysics into triviality and romance.”
She goes on to compare it to Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life”, which I haven’t read. But the argument that “Fowles doesn’t know what he’s doing, that the underlying reality that is never explained doesn’t make sense” rings true for me. And so when she says that “what Chiang’s ‘The Story of Your Life’ does is what Fowles may have wanted to do”, I’m inclined to suspect that she’ll be proved right when I come to read the Chiang.
I still loved the book, though: you can enjoy the journey even if you’re not entirely happy with the destination. Walton’s conclusion gives a hilarious suggestion for how it could have been improved, though:
It’s beautifully written. The characters are so real I’d recognise them if I saw them at the bus-stop. And there’s nothing wrong with it that couldn’t be fixed by having them go off in an alien space ship at the end.
Now that would have been an ending.
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Apparently there was a film of the book made. It’s considered to be so bad that (according to Wikipedia) Woody Allen said if he had his life to live again he’d do everything the same, except he wouldn’t see The Magus. ↩︎
Cultural Times
On Wednesday I went to The State of the Culture, a symposium on Iain M Banks's "Culture" novels, at Brunel University. Paul Kincaid's writeup suggests that his experience was very similar to mine. Including the journey. I thought it was a long hike from Hackney, but he came all the way from Folkestone. And I managed to find the main reception, where they gave me a map showing the way to the Antonin Artaud building. I was later than Paul, though.
I was surprised that it was so sparsely attended. There were only about thirty people there, including all the ones who were presenting papers. Given Banksie’s popularity, I thought it would be packed. A few years back when he was guest at the BSFA’s monthly London meeting, they had to have it in a lecture hall at Imperial College, instead of the usual room over or under a pub. I suppose that either the academic nature of it put people off, or just that it wasn’t very well publicised. Shame, really.
My assessment of the event generally is much the same as Paul’s so you can just read his comments. But of the papers that were presented, the one that I was most disappointed by was the one that I would probably have found most interesting, if I had been able to hear it. Martyn Colebrook’s “Playing Games with Gods: The Player of Games”, which compared the Banks work with John Fowles’s The Magus. By coincidence I’ve read both of those in the last couple of months (and more on them later), so it would have been interesting to hear what Dr Colebrook had to say. But unfortunately he was just speaking too quietly for the human ear, which is what I’m equipped with (I was at the back of the room, having arrived late).
I’ve sought his paper online, but it doesn’t seem to be around yet. Maybe sometime.
The most used word of the day, apart from “Culture”, was “transgressive”. Indeed, the same Dr Colebrook has edited a collection of essays called The Transgressive Iain Banks.