For Hate's Sake I Spit My Last Breath At Thee

Moby Dick
by Herman Melville

It's always a bit of a gamble picking up a so called classic novel. There's every chance that it might turn out to be Dickens, or some other shite that has managed to coast into the canon under the cover of night and is kept there by the malice of some secretive cabal of English teachers. Fortunately Moby Dick is not one of those novels, and is in fact pretty fucking awesome.

The novel is recounted by a man who calls himself Ishmael, although after the first couple of chapters our narrator disappears from the story more or less altogether. Ishmael takes a job aboard a whaling ship which, much to his misfortune, is captained by the insane Ahab, a man who has developed a terrible obsession with the eponymous Moby Dick: the whale that attacked the last boat he captained and bit off his leg. And as anyone with a passing familiarity with the story knows, the voyage and Ahab's quest do not have a happy ending.

Moby Dick was not well received upon it's release in 1851 and it's easy to see why. The novel has a remarkably post modern sensibility for its time, and it makes every bit of sense that it did not become respected until after the World Wars. Melville's character Ishmael is obviously a stand in for himself, and having had much practical real world experience with whaling he spends a good half of the book detailing the technical particulars of life and work on board the whaler and the lives of the whales themselves. These constant digressions, which increase in frequency and length as the novel goes on, were maddening to the audience at the time of the books original release.

Melville also has a very post modern sense of irony and a fairly relativistic attitude. Ahab's whaler, the Pequod, is staffed by three harpooners of Pacific Island, Native American and African origin, and despite his use of a lot of terminology that we would regard as slightly racist nowadays, his sympathies clearly lie with these noble savages, especially in comparison to their twisted, obsessed civilised shipmates. His digressions upon why the whale should be classified as a fish, not a mammal, and why whaling will never have a noticeable impact on the population of the hunted animals may or may not be ironic, but are damn funny nonetheless. In fact, the constant, verbose, irrelevant tangents remind me of David Foster Wallace's epic (but fantastic) pile of bloviating digression Infinite Jest, a book so pomo that it threatens to collapse into a singularity of hipness under the weight of all its cynical irony and smirking self-referentiality.

Above all, Moby Dick, despite its length and formal nineteenth century language, is great fun to read. Melville's wit is very fine, both in straight up humour (I loved the cook's sermon to the sharks:

Dough you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you, fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness – 'top dat dam slappin' ob de tail! How you tink to hear, 'spose you keep up such a dam sleppin' and bitin' dare?”
Cook,” cried Stubb, collaring him, “I wont have that swearing. Talk to 'em gentlemanly.”
Once more the sermon proceeded.
Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can't be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned. Now. Look here, bred'ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat whale. Don't be tearin' de blubber out your neighbour's mout, I say. Is not one shark good right as toder to dat whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale belong to some one else. I know some o' you has berry brig mout, brigger dan oders; but den de brig mouts soemtimes has de small bellies; so dat de brigness ob de mout is not to swaller wid, but to bite off de blubber for small fry ob sharks, dat can't get into de scrouge to help demselves.”

) and the quality of the writing in the more poetic and romantic parts. Also the story of Ahab's doomed quest is as iconic as they come and the allegorical meanings of his obsession with Moby Dick are a clamouring multitude. Among those suggested explicitly by Melville in the book: Moby Dick as God, Moby Dick as Satan, Moby Dick as the immense, uncaring universe and Moby Dick saying “Stop anthropomorphising me, I'm just a fucking whale!”.

With such great humour, poetry and insightful philosophy Moby Dick truly deserves its reputation as one of the great American novels. Well done Western canon of literature, you got it right this time at least.

Holiday Reading

OK, now I've kind of caught up on things again, so blogging should once more be fast and furious!

While I was away, I also got to read some books:

First up was Noam Chomsky's Understanding Power. He's nuts! He's completely myopic! He wildly overstates his case in every paragraph! Some of his 'facts' are incredibly dubious*! By the time I'd finished the first couple of chapters I was totally prepared to give this book a real bashing, yet somehow by the end he'd kind of won me over. He has some pretty smart, convincing explanations for his apparent prejudice and constant America bashing, and even though I disagree with many of his conclusions, I found the worldview he presented thought provoking and indeed a useful model with which to consider political subjects. My thoughts on it really deserve more space than I have in this multi-book extravaganza post, so they will just have to wait until the next time I read something of his.

* “So in northeast Brazil, for example, which is a rather fertile area with plenty of rich land, just it's all owned by plantations, Brazillian medical researchers now identify the population as a new species with about 40 percent the brain size of human beings, a result of generations of profound malnutrition and neglect[...]” Here's the citation.

I also read Lost in Transmission, by Jonathan Harley, which I really enjoyed. It's an autobiography by the former central Asian correspondent for the ABC (Australia's version of the BBC or TVNZ) and details the years of his life spent living in India and Pakistan, reaching a climax when he reports from the front lines of America's invasion of Afghanistan. Despite it's straightforward prose (obviously written by a news reporter) and modestly direct emotional aspect (obviously written by an Aussie) it captured my attention effortlessly. On one hand there's the political and world events portrayed, which provided a surprisingly relevant counterpoint to Chomsky and in one weird moment of synchronicity, the news (reporting Pakistan's General Musharraf declaring martial law) on TV in front of me. On the other hand there's the personal side of the story, which has numerous aspects and narratives (as any honest autobiography would) and introduced me to the concept of 'teen-creep', the state of living one's life with all the lack of responsibility and maturity of a teenager until your late twenties and beyond. Good thing I don't know anyone like that!

And you'll probably be surprised to learn that I didn't realise for over two months after its release that Buffy Season 8: The Long Way Home had been published. For those not in the know/who don't give a fuck, Joss Whedon has format shifted Buffy from TV to comics and this is the first collected instalment. It's a solid enough effort (certainly miles better than season seven) and Joss takes full advantage of the new medium by upping the epic battles, violence and lesbianism. Yet despite such sound artistic development, it doesn't quite scratch the itch. The dialogue is still great and the plot and characters are developed in a satisfying way, but as with most serialised comic collections the pacing feels terrible. Five months worth of comic issues feel filled with about as much content as a one hour episode of the TV show. Nevertheless I'm still stoked to see Joss continuing the story and I am eagerly looking forward to the continuation of the series and the forthcoming resurrection of Angel.

Lastly I also finished off the recent release Fatal Revenant (make sure you pronounce the title the same way George Costanza says 'prognosis negative'!), the latest instalment of Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant fantasy saga. The series has been a favourite of mine since I was a teenager and I'm still loving it even now. It's been a three year wait since the last book and I eagerly devoured this one (only to find that this has merely replaced one cliffhanger with another that I will no doubt have to wait another three years to read the resolution of) and it cemented Donaldon's place in my list of favourite authors. Fatal Revenant was definitely heavy on exposition and low on action, a flaw I am confident will be remedied in the remaining two books in the series, but even the exposition was still absorbing to read. A little more maturity has allowed me to see past the full on angst fest of the main characters in this series to the beauty of their world that Donaldson has created to contrast it. I really must go back and read the original series again. I'm curious as to what I might get out of it this time...

Reaper's Gale

by Steven Erikson

Steven Erikson's absurdly overwrought epic fantasy series, The Malazan Book of the Fallen, is now on its seventh entry out of an intended ten. Surprisingly he has continued to crank these out at a rate a little slower than one book a year, at a time when his contemporaries have been letting deadlines slip for years, and even flat out dropping dead before finishing their stories.

For those playing along at home the action in Reaper's Gale takes place in the Letherii empire, the same setting as that of book five (Midnight Tides), where a few stray plot threads from the almost completely unrelated sixth book (The Bonehunters) are about to wash up onshore and cause all sorts of havoc. The last two books were heavy with political allegory and real world commentary and Reaper's Gale is no different. Barbarians have conquered the Letherii empire (imagine a hyper capitalistic version of ancient Rome), yet have effected very little change to the lives of their new subjects (save the large proportion of their army that was slaughtered). It hasn't taken long for the Tiste Edur (said barbarians) to be seduced by the wealth and luxury that is theirs for the taking as the rulers of the empire, and opportunistic collaborators amongst the ruling class of the conquered are only to eager to keep the apparatus of their system working. A symbiotic pair of sinister organisations, the Patriotists (a particularly horrifying gang of fascist secret police) and the Liberty Consign (a consortium of powerful business interests) are consolidating their power by imprisoning, torturing and executing anyone who disagrees with them, and justifying the extension of their authority by engineering punitive wars against smaller, weaker neighbouring countries. The conversion of the Tiste Edur to the ways of the civilisation they conquered is fairly analogous to the real world barbarian conquests of Ancient Rome and Ancient China. The observant reader may notice that other plot elements bear striking similarities to those of that other popular epic fantasy series, the daily news.

All the same I find it hard to think of any real life analogue to the Tiste Edur's emperor Rhulad, gifted with a magic sword that renders him unkillable, secretly in thrall to the series' overall villian (The Crippled God, an intriguing character who we don't get to see enough of in this instalment) and driven mad by the deliberate machinations of those who would control him and his power (oh yeah and by the sword's terrible curse). Lets just say he represents big government. Rhulad not so secretly longs for the release of death so he has sent emissaries to every corner of the world searching for warriors who may be powerful enough to finally defeat him. At the end of The Bonehunters two of the series' recurring extreme badasses were recruited into this contest, and Reaper's Gale as a whole is weighted with the portentous promise of the cataclysmic confrontation between the three most absurdly powerful characters in a series known for ridiculously overblown, continent shattering battles.

But we still have to wade through eight hundred pages or so to actually get there, and perhaps Erikson's setup is a little too juicy because while the three characters in question stand around brooding for the better part of the book there are many other plotlines in motion, some of which are more interesting than others but all of which test the reader's patience at times, as we mutter with frustration under our breath “When are we going to get to the fireworks factory!”

It must be said that while Erikson still obviously has the overall arc of the story well set out in his head, the plotting of individual books is starting to get a little befuddled. The Bonehunters started to feel a little like a Robert Jordan book, with characters being shuffled around the map in a desperate bid to hit all of the plot point required of them in that volume. Reaper's Gale is an improvement on this, but is still a step down from the quality of the earlier books. It's hard to not be a little annoyed when Erikson introduces a whole cast of new characters and dedicates a quarter of the book to them only to have the end result of it be that 'X dies, Y mystery is introduced, Z plot thread is dispatched with suddenly and offscreen'. Fortunately when the climax finally arrives it doesn't disappoint, but neither is it any Deadhouse Gates (the series' second entry and the widely agreed high point so far, especially in terms of its stunning resolution). I still have high hopes for the remaining three books in the series, but it is a little disappointing to see a bit of 'middle book syndrome' creeping in for the most recent two.

Lunar Park

by Bret Easton Ellis

I surprised myself by giving Bret Easton Ellis another go. Earlier this year I read American Psycho, which was indeed a masterpiece but was also among the most disturbing, horrifying works of art I have ever been exposed to. Fortunately Lunar Park goes easy on the gore (although it's certainly not completely absent) and the existential malaise that made American Psycho so affecting (any idiot can write an incredibly disgusting torture scene, but it takes talent to make it haunt your thoughts for days afterwards with it's mood and it's comment on the human condition) pops up only as a sarcastic background prop, in a sly wink to the lugubrious nature of his earlier work.

There are a lot of sly winks in this book. Like Yann Martel's Self, it is presented as an autobiography, and while the broad strokes of Ellis' story are, at least at the beginning, true, I suspect that some scenes and scenarios may be embellished, such as those in which the fictional characters of the author's previous works come to life and torment him and his family, or when his mansion slowly transforms into his childhood home. It also reminded me a little of Joe Hill's Heart Shaped Box, as they both deal with a man haunted by ghosts from the past both literal and allegorical, but while Hill's metaphors are about as subtle as Jack Bauer with a length of electrical cable and thirty seconds left to make the terrorist explain his relationship with his father, Ellis leaves a lot unstated and wields a sure mastery of irony and restraint.

The book begins with an account of Ellis' life and rise to fame. Again, while the bare facts are more or less correct, the man portrayed is not the real Ellis, but the warped, drug addicted caricature of an author concocted by the media in the wake of American Psycho's release. After all, in the mind of the mainstream only a monster could write such a book. Later on things tone down a little, and the book settles into its main narrative, on one level examining the fictional Ellis' relationship with his fictional new found family while the plot is propelled by the intrusions of the aforementioned supernatural terrors into their lives.

The beginning is easily the best part of the novel, as Ellis gleefully satirises both himself and the media but the book as a whole is still very good, if not quite living up to the virtuoso writing of American Psycho. The family dynamics could have easily became nauseatingly sentimental but he keeps it grounded in the sad realities of a recovering junkie who's not doing a terribly good job of recovering. The plot, while made in the mould of a generic horror such as the aforementioned Heart Shaped Box, comes to an unexpected conclusion and puts its own weird meta-fictional spin on the genre clichés. Finally, after a solid four hundred pages of wry irony, we're hit out of nowhere by a surprisingly heartfelt and moving coda, evoking a beautiful sense of nostalgia, regret and final goodbyes. The reader is left in the polar opposite of the place they found themselves at the end of American Psycho.

Random Tired Sunday Post

John Scalzi makes a good argument as to why the Lord of the Rings movies are better than the books. Via Uncertain Principles.

The Lees of Laughter's End

by Steven Erikson

The Lees of Laughter's End is the second book in a series of three standalone novels following the adventures of Korbal Broach and Bauchelain, two peripheral characters from Memories of Ice, an early entry in Erikson's mastodonian Malazan Book of the Fallen series. I hadn't read the previous book in this series (Blood Follows), but I didn't have any trouble keeping up with the story in this one.

Chad Orzel described Erikson's books well while mentioning our two main characters in his booklog entry on Memories of Ice:

“And, to give you an idea of the tone of the book, two other characters are powerful necromancers who murder dozens of people, and raise an undead army to protect themselves from battle-- and their primary purpose in the story is to serve as comic relief.”

No one should be surprised then that this novel turns out to be a fun filled romp about a cast of lost souls aboard a doomed voyage, in which the sorry collection of unfortunates manning the ship Suncurl find themselves trapped far out to sea and at the mercy of at least four or five unholy nightmares hidden onboard and in the nearby ocean (not counting our malevolent protagonists). Erikson's idea for a running gag in this light comedy novel is an inoffensive fellow who loses a different body part every couple of chapters to the various kinds of hell breaking loose.

The Lees of Laughter's End is a quick, easy read but I didn't enjoy it quite so much as I have the Malazan books. While it's nice to read a fantasy novel with a quick pace for a change, I still felt that the plot was rushed, and although Erikson's black humour works very well as an occasional flavouring in the context of his overwrought epic fantasy series, as the focus of the writing it's not strong enough to carry even a short novel like this one. I'm inclined to believe that a little more semi-serious character and setting development before everything went nuts would have both provided a more fertile home for the humour and a little more space for the frantically paced storyline to pan out.

Heart Shaped Box

by Joe Hill

I picked this one up because of a rave review by Neil Gaiman. Once again however it seems that an artist I love has tastes that both bewilder and disappoint me.

For those who are in the dark, Joe Hill is the pen name of horror writer Joseph Hillstrom King, whose reason for using a pseudonym is obvious once you know that his father's name is Stephen. As it happens it's almost comical how much Hill's style resembles his father's. Sure he's sexed things up with a lot of modern rock references (Trent Reznor gets namechecked dozens of times) but fundamentally it's the same mainstream sleaze and horror mix that has raked in huge royalties for King senior for so many years.

Heart Shaped Box starts with a brilliant hook; a semi-retired heavy metal icon buys a ghost over the internet, with the expected horror novel consequences. For the first two chapters it's fantastic stuff, fun, goofy and spooky all at the same time. However the author makes a fatal mistep in explaining the mystery behind the ghost and its connection to our protagonist a mere three chapters in, abruptly removing all suspense and any chance at genuinely scary horror (which admittedly he does pull off rather well in the first two chapters). For this reason, among others, the plot is a bit of a failure. A good horror story requires mystery and despite so much potential in the setup Hill pisses it all away almost immediately. Nor is there much suspense to be found being concerned for the characters either, as they're neither sympathetic nor interesting. The themes and deeper meaning of the story are integrated well but far too obvious. (There's this GHOST right? And it's from his PAST. And it's CHASING him.)

On the other hand, while How Proust Can Change Your Life is a breezy, petitely dimensioned two hundred pages but Heart Shaped Box is over three hundred and fifty in large paperback format and I finished them both in about the same time. This is attributable to one genuinely respectable talent that Hill has inherited directly from his father.

I've read a few mainstream novels in my time, or at least I've tried. Tom Clancy and John Grisham's offerings were both hurled viciously against the wall (literally) in disgust at their offensive stupidity before I managed to finish either novel. I did make it to the end of The Da Vinci Code, but was choking and gagging the whole way. Stephen King, although he is similar in stature to these authors in a commercial context, has kept me entertained more than a few times because he is simply a better writer by miles and his son shares this skill. His prose is nothing more than workmanlike, but it's the platonic ideal of workmanlike writing. Simple, direct, and great tasting contentless brain candy. While I was staying up well past midnight on a school night to devour this novel I was struck by the image of myself eating an entire packet of salt and vinegar potato chips. You know it's junk and it'll make you feel ill the next day but it just feels so good and satisfying to keep chomping on mouthful after mouthful until it's all gone.

How Proust Can Change Your Life

by Alain De Botton

I've never read Proust and although the author of this book is not the first person I've heard to describe him as the most brilliant novelist of all time, I don't think that I am yet ready to tackle all seven weighty volumes of his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. Y'know... there's a new Erikson out and Penny Arcade to read and all...

In any case How Proust Can Change Your Life makes a decent introduction to this celebrated novelist. It succinctly summarises the themes and lessons of his work and dwells on the qualities that make it so respected, while also informing us in casual asides of the author's (that is to say, Proust's) eccentric and entertaining life and behaviour. He was surprisingly intellectually lively for a hypochondriac who preferred not to leave his bed.

It helps that the author (that is to say, De Botton) is a fairly decent writer himself. The tone is a little overly mannered for my taste but his wit and good natured enthusiasm for the subject make it great fun to read. To my surprise I found myself laughing out loud before I was even a chapter in, and then realising that it was the first time a book had made me do that in a long while.

It certainly did whet my appetite to try some Proust, but cautionary early reports from someone who has dived into In Search of Lost Time have kept me away from the bookshop. It is now on the list, but it's still a long way behind Erikson...

Glue

by Irvine Welsh

You may remember Irvine Welsh as the fella what wrote Trainspotting. If you've read that book or seen the movie then you'll find his novel Glue to be in familiar territory, following the lives and loves of four working class lads from Edinburgh as they get drunk in bars, start brawls at the footy and take shitloads of drugs. The story is divided into four chapters, each set roughly a decade apart, starting when the boys are five years old and just beginning school.

The style of the writing is a little obtuse. A large portion of it is written in phonetic Scottish dialect, which I thought was wonderful as I love Scottish accents, but others could easily find it irritating. Welsh also makes an inexplicable decision to use hyphens as opposed to quotation marks to indicate dialogue, which I thought to be needlessly obstructive to the ease of my reading.

However if that doesn't bother you then it's a right barry read, yeah? Despite the perpetual grimness of their economic and social situations, the characters display a joyous, irrepressible lust for life throughout, and it's endlessly entertaining reading about their dubious intimate lives and extra legal shenanigans.

While the central sections were enjoyable and highly addictive reading, I found the end a bit lacking. The story in the final section took an abrupt turn to the depressing and I found the redemptive note at the end unconvincing, primarily because I'd found quite a bit to dislike about a few of the main characters by the time we got there. Still I can appreciate that the flaws these characters have is part of the books message, which (to simplify) is a tribute to genuine blokey mateship. All of our friends are dicks sometimes but the friendship wouldn't be meaningful if it couldn't survive the occasional hiccup, be it having an argument over a girl, getting in a drunken punch up with one another or covering up a murder.

Bach

by Malcolm Boyd

It occurred to me one day that while I could recite the biographies of every member of Pink Floyd past and present to anyone who would listen, I knew next to nothing about the lives of most of my other favourite musicians from a little longer ago. While I might personally attribute roughly equal musical merit to both Bach and Pink Floyd, I am aware that from a more objective view point knowledge of the former probably makes a more important contribution to one's artistic education.

For roughly half of this book I found myself wishing I had bought a biography of Syd Barrett instead. Recalling Bach's life is a little soporific for two reasons. Firstly, there's just not that much historical source material detailing his personal life. His private behaviour and his personality are mostly a complete mystery to us. As a result his biography becomes just a list of towns he lived in and jobs he held. Secondly, from what we can tell he didn't really do much that was exceptional (besides the obvious). Here's a guy who grew up, moved to the city, got a job, got married, had some kids and then died, and just happened to compose the most amazing, transcendent music ever written along the way.

On the other hand the rest of this book is the story of his artistic development and that's a whole other subject. While his contemporaries may have sadly forgotten to record what Bach ate for breakfast most days, they were sharp enough to recognise that future generations might be grateful to have access to his music. While I found these sections hard to follow a lot of the time (the author of this book assumes a basic familiarity with the forms and conventions of Baroque and Classical music that I just don't have) I found it interesting, and the later sections were especially fascinating. Towards the end of his life it is obvious from his work that Bach recognised his gift and became concerned with leaving a legacy that would do it justice and act as a summation of his achievements. In fact, his last composition (The Art of Fugue) was not even intended to be performed (which is not to say it's not OK to perform it), but to be appreciated in the abstract, in the mind of the skilled musician reading the score. The esoteric and almost superhuman nature of his later work is frankly a little frightening, but in a good way. It's both humbling and inspiring to realise that the chubby, smirking visage looking out at you from the cover of this book contained a mind capable of producing the most transcendent and complex music ever written.

In a way, Bach's music represents a pinnacle of human artistry. Up until him the styles of music (triggered into rapid progressive development by the invention of the printing press) became more and more complicated. After him music became simpler and simpler (perhaps reaching it's nadir with punk rock). While it's impossible (and misguided to even try) to argue whether Bach was 'better' or 'worse' than say Mozart, Beethoven or Wagner, his genius stands out from the rest as, while the others represent major milestones along the linear path of musical development, Bach was a unique aberration, writing music that uncovered something that never occurred to his contemporaries and has never been reproduced by those who came after. It stands alone as something unique and untouchable.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu

by Susanna Clarke

Some time ago I read Susanna Clarke's gargantuan fantasy novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and found it quite enjoyable although I feel that, as capable a writer as Clarke is, the conceit of a comically prim fantasy had worn out much of its humour by the end of nine hundred pages. The Ladies of Grace Adieu is a collection of eight short stories from the same setting as Jonathan Strange and again while they are well written I can't help but feel that this collection is just the same old trick being trotted out for a victory lap on the coattails of the substantial commercial success of the novel.

Nevertheless if more of the same is what one is after then The Ladies of Grace Adieu will not disappoint. The first few stories are a bit lackluster and tend to run a bit long but the second half of the book improves greatly in terms of wit and although the stories still lacked for brevity they were a breeze to read. It's an enjoyable book but a little unnecessary if you've already read Jonathan Strange.

Self

by Yann Martel

Way way back in the very early days of this blog one of the first posts I made was in regards to Yann Martel's Life of Pi, a Booker prize winning novel that I rather liked. Self is an earlier novel by the same author, and I didn't like it nearly as much.

The two books are in some ways quite similar, they both play little games with the narration and the reader's expectations, but in very different ways. This novel is supposedly an autobiography, although right from the start the reader is told this with a wink and a nudge. It is hard to say what parts are real and which are imagined, but I would guess that the bulk is probably true to life. Certainly the descriptions of boy's boarding school and university rang very true to my own memories of those kinds of places, but one can also be fairly certain that for example the scenes when the author spontaneously changes gender may not have happened in real life strictly as they appear on the page.

All the scenes and anecdotes in the book are rendered in clever post-modern literary type ways, but for every conceit that turns out to smart and witty there's another that is indulgent and grating. Most of the time it just gave me a desire to reread Dave Eggars' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but unfortunately it's buried somewhere in a box back in New Zealand.

The ending of the book takes a sudden and disturbing turn to the genuinely horrific which is more than a little unexpected. I hope for the author's sake that this particular section is not truly autobiographical but it's rendered with such vividness that I fear that it may actually be factual. At any rate it's an upsettingly memorable way to end what is up until then a very wry, distant autobiography.

It is a clever book in a lot of ways, and I'm sure plenty of English classes could be spent describing the themes and structure (I did like the way that things would have played out the same for the author regardless of the gender he/she wore at any given point in the novel), but the writing is not quite strong enough to support it. It's seems as though the author had plenty of good, intellectual ideas, but not quite the experience to pull them off successfully on a gut level. Of course it's an early novel and any roughness to it can be more than forgiven considering how well Life of Pi turned out.

Fragile Things

by Neil Gaiman

The non fiction books I spent most of last year reading were fascinating, but man did it take me a long time to get through them. However as soon as I finished them I quickly breezed through Neil Gaiman's latest short story collection in a couple of days. I didn't enjoy it quite as much as Smoke and Mirrors, but it's still a fine read.

In the years since the last collection came out Gaiman's style has changed very little. All the stories are fantasy (or maybe sci-fi) but with a solid real world grounding (and sometimes the fantasy elements are a pretty light touch), although this time around the stories are less clever or whimsical and more sinister.

The first story is 'A Study in Emerald', which is an original mashup of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos and Sherlock Holmes. In most writers hands this would be a terrible idea but Gaiman of course infuses it with wry wit and makes it the best idea in the world.

In 'October in the Chair' the months of the year sit around and tell stories. It's a typically Neil sort of story idea, and it gets mentioned in most reviews of the book as one of the best, but I didn't like it. It possibly had something to do with the attributes of the months being the opposite to what I think they should be.

'Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire' is just as cute and self-referential as the title suggests but is fairly amusing all the same. It's followed by a selection of ghost stories, all of which are very effective. 'Closing Time' has that classic ghost story kind of creepy imagery that lingers in the mind, but 'The Flints of Memory Lane' is scarier, probably because Gaiman claims that it's a true story from his childhood, and despite the lack of anything truly supernatural or dangerous, the detail evokes memories of those times when, as a child, you find yourself completely spooked by something for reasons you can't explain. 'Bitter Grounds' is another weird one. Gaiman's short stories sometimes have a way of hitting you with an random event at the end, and then sitting back and looking smugly at you as if to say “What's the matter? Don't you get it?” while the reader scratches his head and says “Yeah kind of, but it just doesn't quite fit...” I have yet to determine if this is because (a) I am dumb, (b) Neil isn't quite as clever as he thinks he is or (c) it's meant to be like that because Neil just likes to leave the reader with a sensation of dissatisfaction that they can't quite articulate the reason behind. I'm leaning towards (c).

'The Problem of Susan' is also noteworthy, for it's nasty, disturbing take on C.S. Lewis' high school chaplain approved Narnia series. As unpleasant as it was to read, I have to admit getting a good deal of satisfaction out of seeing an areligious counterargument to Lewis' books, which have always pissed me off. Thanks for ruining a perfectly good fantasy series with your stinky fucking religion, jackass.

The highlights of the collection are 'How to Talk to Girls at Parties' and 'The Day the Saucers Came'. The former does the standard post-modern fantasy story thing and takes an everyday cliché (in this case that to an adolescent boy girls may as well be from another planet) and makes it literal. It made me wish that I could meet some girls who were actually from another planet. 'The Day the Saucers Came' is a short poem that merges wit and poignancy flawlessly.

Not every story is a winner, I thought 'Diseasemaker's Croup' was a bit boring and stupid, but the rest of the book ranges from good too brilliant. The last story in the collection is 'Monarch of the Glen', which is a kind of sequel to American Gods, checking up on its protagonist Shadow a few years after the end of the novel, although it's more about Scotland than Shadow, who doesn't really do much in this story. It's still a much better sequel than Anansi Boys though.

Ideas

by Peter Watson

Fancy that. I actually finished two books in a week. Of course it's then taken me a month to actually get this post up, but I think I can fairly claim extenuating circumstances. This one's a real mammoth and it took me about six months to get through. Not because it's boring or hard to read but (a) because of sheer length and (b) because it's so dense; full of information, history and of course, ideas...

Ideas is a world history of human thought, covering a time span from the dawn of humanity to about 1900CE. Battles, inventions and great men are mentioned, but only in order to give context to a narrative of the way in which people have viewed themselves and the world around them. It's somewhat disturbing to see just how much this has changed; it frightens me to think that even a thousand years ago most Europeans honestly believed that life was meant to be a painful and miserable punishment for Adam's sin, and if you go back further to the ancient Greeks, not to mention earlier societies in Asia and the middle east, the mindsets are truly alien to us.

The author's voice and opinions are very strongly imprinted on the interpretation of events but this didn't detract from the book at all, even when I found that I disagreed. The only complaint I would make is that it's a bit Euro-centric, at least from the midway point (the pre-renaissance) onwards, but to be fair a justification is put forward for that decision.

There's just so much interesting stuff packed into this book that it's quite impossible to give an overview of all the cool stuff I learned from it, but a few things stand out as being notable. Firstly, the so called 'axial age', the birth of the modern religions, coincides with the first appearance of another, more abstract, concept: the bad idea. Until this point it's one back-patting success after another: fire, the city, writing, civilisation, a code of laws. Once we hit about 400BC we start getting things like slavery and racism. My interpretation is of course contradicted if you buy Jared Diamond's theory that the original bad idea was moving from a hunter gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary one, but while it's an interesting hypothesis it's little more than conjecture.

The other thing that stuck with me was the author's link between what he calls the hinge of history (the period around 1200CE in which commerce and learning in Europe began to recover from the dark ages and set the stage for the renaissance) and the rise of the belief in the importance of the individual. I'm not sure how this triggered the acceleration of science and technology that ushered in the renaissance and the modern era, but it's an interesting synchronicity.

There's loads of other stuff I could mention, but suffice it to say that this is a pretty cool book, and it presents history through a new and thought provoking perspective.

The Pursuit of Oblivion

by Richard Davenport-Hines

I'm in love with Kinokuniya, a bookshop here in central Sydney. I've made so many impulse buys there over the last year that there's a 'to read' stack as high as my bed in my room. The very first time I walked in there this book caught my eye, and although I had to wait a few months until my finances had stabilised to go on the book buying orgy I longed for, it was the first one I picked up when I did.

The subtitle of the book is 'A social history of drugs', and the first half covers drug use in traditional societies and the advent of the first synthetic drugs (namely opium and cocaine). It's very interesting to learn about how social attitudes towards these substances evolved, but it's presented very dryly and wasn't quite as full of prurient details as I hoped. The second half, while still broadly following the same subject, takes a sudden and impassioned turn in style as the author's outrage at the incredible harm done by the western world's (and most notably the USA's) drug policies can no longer be hidden behind guardedly passive non-fiction prose.

And it's hard not to get angry yourself while reading it. It makes sense when you think about it but I was surprised to learn that making drug use a criminal act is a convention that has only been around for a little over a century. Before then opiate and cocaine addiction were primarily afflictions of the middle and upper classes (at least in Europe) and it was treated (rightly) as merely a health issue. The only reason this approach failed was because of the poorly thought out medical decisions made by the doctors of the time:

“It was his [Dr. Alexander Wood, 1817-1884] idea that taking opiates through the mouth, and the act of swallowing, created an appetite, like other forms of food and drink. He became convinced that if the drug was injected rather than swallowed, patients would not hunger for it. He was wrong.”

Other shining moments of exemplary medical science documented in the book include deciding to wean patients off opium by switching them over to cocaine.

Another interesting insight is that every traditional culture in the world has it's own method of getting fucked up, based on the available plantlife; in Europe this was alcohol, in the middle east it was marijuana, in South America it was cocoa leaves and in Asia it was opium. Guess which one is acceptable in western society and which ones are regarded as deviant and dangerous. Also consider the nature of the puritanical anti-drugs campaigns when these drugs were first introduced to America; the dirty Mexicans raping white women while high on marijuana and the shifty Chinese creating hives of sin in their opium dens. From this perspective, the motives behind drug prohibition are often quite racist.

But despite the vitriol directed towards the various figureheads of prohibition (Thatcher and Reagan get pretty bad thrashings, but not the worst) the book gives us little insight into why this culture of finger waving wowserism came about so suddenly. There have always been religious nutters and Jim Andertons around, but they never succeeded in having their way until the late 1800s. Understanding what truly drives these people would seem to me to be an important part of engaging with their ideas, but it is left unexamined here.

Nevertheless the points the book does make are good ones. Firstly, that the common media caricature of the drug user, lower class, living in a dirty hole in the wall, not caring about anything but his or her next fix, has never been accurate. The middle and upper classes have always enjoyed indulging and most (but of course not all) manage to do so without ruining their professional or domestic lives. Secondly, that any level headed look at drug use must admit that besides the obvious bad effects that it has, humanity has and always has had a natural inclination towards getting fucking out of it (the titular pursuit of oblivion) and most, if not all, attempts at prohibition do not even acknowledge this fact, betraying their lack of grounding in any kind of interest in practical realities. Lastly, history and economics both show that any attempt to prohibit an intoxicating substance desirable by a large number of people is fighting futilely against the laws of supply and demand. Any success in restricting the supply simply increases the profitability for the criminal organisations importing it, and a significant number of end users will pay any price to get it, perhaps by resorting to crime, but more probably just because those who can afford it will always put a premium on having fun.

But tell all that to the Jim Andertons of the world. They haven't listened for the past hundred years, while they've squandered billions on an unwinnable war against (some) drugs, and they're not likely to start now.

The Brain Eaters' Greatest Hits Part 2

Some time ago I posted the first article of this two part series, promising that it wouldn't take me a year and a half to finish it like the last series I wrote did. I have kept that promise, taking merely a fleeting nine months to get around to writing this second, concluding post. Refresh your memories by rereading the first post and then continue on to see what other sad victims of the brain eater continue to shuffle around issuing shitty new albums or novels from the empty shells of their former artistry.

4. Audioslave

Rage Against the Machine and Soundgarden were two of the best popular bands of the early 90s, and everyone was disappointed to see them break up. A few years ago when Chris Cornell (Soundgarden singer) joined with Rage (minus their vocalist Zach) to form Audioslave, it seemed like a brilliant proposition. Unfortunately their first album, while passable, was nowhere near as good as anything produced by the original bands. There was still hope that they could improve, but that was confounded when their second and third releases turned out to be truly appalling four-and-a-half-minute-pop-rock-song middle of the road boredomfests. The Brain Eater must have been truly sated after reducing guitarist Tom Morello from his former brilliance to a four chord strumming zombie, barely capable of stuttering out a half way decent solo.

3. Shihad

They were the biggest rock band in New Zealand for much of the 90s, and for once the popularity was deserved. The Fish Album, Killjoy and The General Electric are packed with classic songs, and I have many fond memories of seeing them perform live touring for The General Electric (and it's preceding EP Blue Light Disco). However the subsequent album saw them trying to remake themselves for an international (i.e. American) audience as Pacifier and releasing a horrifically bland 'nu-metal for pussies' album, a career move that could only have been made by a band left with barely enough neurons to feed themselves following a sudden and vicious attack by the brain eater. They tried to redeem themselves with their most recent album Love is the New Hate and the attempt was appreciated, but they just don't have the spark anymore.

2. Robin Hobb

Robin Hobb's Assassin series is one of the finest fantasy trilogies I've ever read. All three books are very good but the last one is truly fantastic, with one of the most emotionally moving endings I've ever read. She went on to write a sequel trilogy (only loosely connected to the first), The Liveship Traders, which was OK, but nowhere near the standards of the preceding books. Then, in one of the Brain Eater's most unholy crimes yet, she returned to the characters and setting of the first trilogy and RETROACTIVELY RUINED THEM FOREVER!!!! If you ever read and enjoyed Assassin's Quest then never ever read Fool's Fate. At the time I wondered what would possess someone to take an incredibly moving and sad story and render it all meaningless by reversing literally everything that happened and turning it into a lame happy ever after ending. I now know the terrifying truth. It was the Brain Eater!

1. Bob

Man, Bob used to be so awesome you know? But now that he's popular it's like he doesn't care about his original fans any more. But that's cool, I can still enjoy his older work without letting it be ruined by thinking about all the crap he's done lately.

Smoke and Mirrors

by Neil Gaiman

Most fantasy authors, even those fond of writing huge multi volume doorstop epics, really shine when it comes to short fiction and Neil Gaiman is no exception. The absurdities of the genre make it hard to sustain belief and take the story seriously, and the longer and more complicated the story becomes the harder it is to pull it off. Even a brilliant writer like Gaiman drops the ball once or twice when working on a years long serial like Sandman, but in a short story collection like this one he is free to introduce an interesting fancy or a witty perspective and play with it for a few pages before moving on.

As with his other writing the fantasy aspect is fairly is not really all that fantastic; there are no clichèd Tolkien-esque conventions here, every story is set in what is more or less the 'real' world and the magic works in a manner more like that of a fairy tale or an urban legend rather than the more typical Dungeons and Dragons type mechanics. This realistic grounding is one of the things that makes Gaiman's work so resonant. He always starts with a story or a premise that is completely drawn from real life, and the supernatural elements merely serve to emphasise or reframe that premise.

The stories in this collection are drawn from over a decade of his career so there is a fair amount of variation in style, tone and subject matter. Just as a few examples: a science fiction version of Beowulf with a werewolf as the hero, a pair of unique and perverse takes on traditional stories (namely Snow White and Santa Claus) and Gaiman's version of the last book of the bible. Some of the stories are obviously earlier work and aren't up to his usual standards, but even taking them into account the collection as a whole is such high quality that it would be impossible to pick a favourite tale.

His latest collection, 'Fragile Things', is awaiting consumption and as much as I'm keen to devour it, I'm forcing myself to finish the history books I've had lying around for months before I do so.

Holiday Reading

A few quick reads from over the holidays.

Girl Genius – Phil and Kaja Foglio

A nice breezy steampunk manga style comic. It's complete fantasy cheese without being stupid or cliched and has a very original story and setting. It's been a long time since I read a decent by-the-numbers epic fantasy so this was a nice discovery. A few teaser chapters are available online at their website if you're interested.

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – Will Eisner

Another graphic novel. In stark contrast to Girl Genius this book is about as dark and depressing as they come, diving into the nasty details of anti-semitism in the 20^th century by chronicling the history of the forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As you probably know The Protocols is a vile piece of hate literature that continues to be published worldwide today, despite being debunked as lies many times since it first appeared.

It's grim stuff, but as well as being interesting to know the book itself is stylistically an interesting implementation of a non-fiction comic. Just don't read it at the same time as Girl Genius. Too much cognitive whiplash.

Water From The Sun/ Discovering Japan – Bret Easton Ellis

A pair of short stories by the author of American Psycho published in one tiny book. These are really pretty superfluous; they merely retread the same territory as his infamous novel, only quicker and with less ickiness, and with the protagonist replaced by a soulless TV news presenter and a soulless has been rock star respectively. Not worth the half an hour it'd take to read them.

Holocaust Tips For Kids/ Smite The Heathens, Charlie Brown – Shalom Auslander

I have no idea who this guy is but these books were only $3 each so I grabbed this one at the same time as Easton Ellis' on account of its amusing titles. The first story, Holocaust Tips For Kids, delivers almost exactly what the title promises. A young Jewish boy learns about the holocaust in history class and details his intended courses of action in case the Nazi's should ever come for him and his family. I think it's meant to be comical and serious at the same time but coming on the heels of The Plot it was really just depressing.

Smite The Heathens, Charlie Brown is a lot lighter. Using the time worn characters and scenarios from the Peanuts comic strip, the author recounts a tale of religious rivalry growing from innocuous mistrust to all out war. The message is serious but who can't laugh at the idea of jackbooted 'Snoopy Youth' marching the streets to flush out 'Great Pumpkinites'?