Art & Criticism – Page 28

Sharp on Philip K. Dick

Published on April 10, 2007

Ellis Sharp describes the appeal of Philip K. Dick:

In the case of Philip K. Dick, I don’t find the prose that bad. Yes, sometimes it’s very tired and lazy. Other times it’s dazzling. And when it comes to writing fiction, style and gleaming prose isn’t everything. Think about (for example) Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. Henry James might well seem to be the better writer, with a massively accomplished oeuvre. But I would argue that ultimately he never wrote anything as important as what Stevenson achieved in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which manages simultaneously to be a hugely accomplished piece of writing and a brilliant exploration of the contradictory nature of human identity and a very insightful account of Victorian society and its hypocrisies. And Stevenson arrived there by way of genre writing. Interesting.

Dick reminds me of Stevenson in some ways. He’s more than just a great storyteller. He’s very good on paranoia, alienation and the self under stress. I first discovered Dick’s work as a young teenager, when I read his early work Eye in the Sky. At one point the characters discover their genitals have vanished, replaced by nothing more than smooth skin. I found that very disturbing. Rather more disturbing than, say, Gregor Samsa waking up and discovering that he’s turned into a giant insect.

But Dick is also very good on ideology and social control. The world he describes in his fiction continues to resonate today. Official reality is a vast simulacrum, is it not? Wars for freedom and democracy. Celebrity gossip. Grinning royals and loyal, flag-waving subjects. Important writers and journalists.

What I require from any piece of fiction is: does the writer’s vision engage me? If so, is it true to itself as art? And is it true to the world? In the case of Philip K Dick the answer is yes, yes, yes.

It’s easy to dismiss Dick as either a talented science fiction writer, interesting but ultimately limited by his subject matter or as a kind of half-crazed creator of hallucinary nightmares, interesting for their novelty but irrelevant to anything else, but that would be missing the true strength of his writing. Dick’s ultimate concern is the nature of reality, whether there can be such a thing as a fundamental realiy underlying our lives or whether it’s all a construct, no matter how natural it may look. Being a
science fiction writer Dick went slightly farther in this than just making the usual banal observations of the artificiality of American life, by reveling in unreality and constructed realities, yet almost always with their roots in that banal artificiality of white American suburban life.

His early short fiction, collected a few years ago in five large volumes, is illuminating in this regard, in the sheer number of stories that take place in suburban surroundings where everyday features of life have taken on a nightmarish aspect. They show how his fantasies were always grounded in the concerns of the “real world”, the paranoia, insecurity, powerlessnness and claustrophobia of day to day life, no matter how absurd or grotesk they seem at first sight.

(Speaking of science fiction, I do wonder what Ellis made of last Saturday’s Dr Who episode, featuring a certain Elizabethan playwright he’s blogged about occasionally…)

The art of reviewing

Published on June 20, 2006

No matter how crap I find my reviews the next day, I can’t help but think that at least I’m still doing reviews, rather than ill-disguised hitpieces. The English socalled quality newspapers especially have a nasty habit of abusing their bookreviews; here are two from the supposedly liberal Observer that annoyed me today

The first comes via commenter Dearkitty and is an Observer review of Richard Ingrams’ The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett. What annoyed me especially here was the opening paragraph:

If William Cobbett hadn’t existed, few people today would feel the need to invent him. Best known for Rural Rides, his socio-lyrical tour of England in the 1820s, Cobbett’s early life is a chaos of politics, tangled up in the kind of issues which are world-shattering to those who live through them but forgotten in a generation.

I can’t stand the jocular matey tone in which Cobbett is dismissed here. It also shows an uncanny lack of history to dismiss the cause of parliamentary reform and extended voting rights for the common man as “the kind of issues” that are “forgotten in a generation”. The rest of the review is almost as awful, written to template: “catchy” opening, some discussion of the subject of the book done with not too much accuracy, with less than half the review actually talking about the book itself and never actually coming out in judgement of it.

The other review is more vile and more dangerous, a hatchet job on Noam Chomsky, which “Lenin” neatly dissected.
Here it is the last two paragraphs that got on my tits:

But what I find most noxious about Chomsky’s argument is his desire to create a moral – or rather immoral – equivalence between the US and the greatest criminals in history. Thus on page 129, comparing a somewhat belated US conversion to the case for democracy in Iraq after the failure to find WMD, Chomsky claims: ‘Professions of benign intent by leaders should be dismissed by any rational observer. They are near universal and predictable, and hence carry virtually no information. The worst monsters – Hitler, Stalin, Japanese fascists, Suharto, Saddam Hussein and many others – have produced moving flights of rhetoric about their nobility of purpose.’

Which leads to a question: is that really what you see, Mr Chomsky, from the window of your library at MIT? Is it the stench of the gulag wafting over the Charles River? Do you walk in fear of persecution and murder for expressing your dissident views? Or do you make a damn good living out of it? The faults of the Bush administration will not be changed by books such as Failed States. They will be swept away by ordinary, decent Americans in the world’s greatest – if flawed and selfish – democracy going to the polls.

There are several things to object to here: the deliberate and stupid misreading of Chomsky’s argument in the worst possible light, the histrionic fashion in which he accuses Chomsky of hypocrisie –“is that really what you see, Mr Chomsky” — “Is it the stench of the gulag wafting over the Charles River?” — “Do you walk in fear of persecution and murder for expressing your dissident views? Or do you make a damn good living out of it?” and finally, the great slobbering sucking up of those last two sentences. It fair turns the stomach.

It turns the stomach even more so, because it is the Blair defence. Everytime Blair has been confronted by angry members of the public and is held accountable for his actions towards Iraq, he comes out with the same old line, that you are allowed to your opinion because you are living in a country, in which you have the right to criticise your government (nervous hand gesutre, sweaty forehead) and should the people of Iraq not have that right?

Not that anyone is ever convinced by this pap, but it is a nice way to claim the moral high ground and any misdeeds are swept under the carpet – never mind Iraq is in a perpeptual civil war and embassy employees cannot reveal who they work for without being killed, at least the Iraqies are free now. In the same way, as long as Chomsky is not dragged from his office and burned in front of M.I.T., clearly his criticisms of the United States are without ground. Because this great United States is still a democracy and that excuses any and all misdeeds, which will anyway surely be resolved by the voters in the next elections.

Three by Ellis

Published on October 12, 2005

Ellis Sharp, over at the Sharp Side has in recent weeks written some excellent posts. Here are three of them:

First up, short post on the politics of remembering:

And contrast the Bali memorial (which will apparently be a large stone globe) with the memorial to the
victims of the 1987 Kings Cross fire. It’s a perfunctory, obscure, barely-noticeable plaque which says
nothing at all about the tragedy and does not list the names of those who died, even though many of them were residents of the capital. But then the Kings Cross fire resulted from the under-funding and undervaluing of public transport, with rubbish allowed to accumulate under ancient wooden escalators, and an easygoing attitude to smoking in confined public spaces which was a tribute to the lobbying power of the tobacco industry and its political pimps (QV Margaret Thatcher and Ken Clarke).

Then there was this post on Aldeburgh, a small seatown resort in Suffolk, which reminds me quite a lot of similar towns on the Dutch coast in Zeeland, towns like Veere or Middelburg. Towns that look nice, elegant and cultured at first, but are largely ruled by provincialism, where the idea of having a work of art in your house is reduced to a reproduction of a 17th century map of the province hanging in your hallway, next to the clothes rack.

You’d expect an independent bookshop to be a bit, well, arty and liberal. Not in Aldeburgh. The shop seemed to be run by ghastly braying Tory women. My deep distaste for the shop hit new depths as I discovered it didn’t have any Crabbe in stock. No edition of his poetry; no biography; nothing. I was looking forward to buying a Crabbe edition, which would then inspire me to read my second hand biography. But they didn’t even have Crabbe in the slimline £2 Everyman Poetry series, let alone a more substantial edition. Yet Crabbe’s closest associations as a poet are with Aldeburgh. I hate bookshops which don’t carry the work of local writers and the absence of Crabbe plus the cretinous petition made me stomp furiously out again, determined not to buy anything.

Most recently, he reprinted an excellent review of Ian McEwan’s Saturday by John Banville:

Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces — brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc. –are hinged together with the subtlety of a child’s Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks’ home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. Overall, however, Saturday has the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair — who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, oozing insincerity –were to appoint a committee to produce a “novel for our time,” the result would surely be something like this.

Every time I read extracts from Saturday, my gorge rises. I haven’t got a high opinion of McEwan to start with and these excerpts confirm my opinion. Yet I still know I will need to read this book sooner or later if only to be able to pan it with a clear consciousness.

Miéville on fantasy

Published on May 13, 2005

I know I’m banging on a bit about China Miéville, with two entries on him in one day, but I missed this article in The Independent when it came out last year:

The real distinction between the tourists and what has become the “generic” fantasy tradition shows up in the weaknesses of the mainstream. When writers don’t respect the field from which they borrow, let alone when (cough, Theroux, cough) they despise it, their work doesn’t believe itself. On every page, nervously scrawled in invisible ink, are the words “It’s ok! It’s not fantasy! It’s really about oppression/marginalisation/exploitation/etc!” The curiously philistine and simplistic belief is that fantasy is only “meaningful” so far as it’s narrowly allegorical.

By contrast, writers within genres know perfectly well that they are writing about refugees, or economics, or gender oppression, or whatever else, but they also enjoy the strangeness they create for its own sake. And they always have done. Gulliver’s Travels is a vicious satire on various social ills, but it also revels in the uncanny spectacles it creates: squadrons of tiny people tethering a man to the ground; talking horses; islands floating with a giant lodestone. It trusts the reader to get on with the tasks of understanding, and of enjoying the strange. It is a book that delights in fantasy.

One of the great signs of fantasy’s health is that often these days, those who borrow its tropes from
outside genre, like David Mitchell, the hot favourite to win Man Booker prize, do so with facility and
respect. Mitchell writes brilliantly about human society and emotion, and about ghosts, sentient computers and transmigrating souls, without sneer, anxiety or generic despite.

Auntie Beeb

Published on February 13, 2003Leave a comment

Chris Bertram is talking about the BBC on his weblog, after he recieved a link from the Biased BBC weblog. He notes some things I’m annoyed with as well:

So what do I think about the BBC? I’m not particularly keen on the way it is financed (by a regressive poll tax) and I’m sure that will change given the multiplication of channels. The BBC’s current position strikes me as untenable given the way it uses the licence fee to subsidise its aggressive competition with the private sector via ventures such as BBC Choice, BBC4, BBC Style, BBC Everything Else and in the magazine market with its range of music, gardening, history etc etc offerings. I think I’m right in saying that they’ve now been barred from surreptitiously advertising some of these products on their main TV channels, but, all the same, magazines like History Today have to compete in a market against a product bearing the imprimatur of the prestigious public service broadcaster and containing numerous TV tie- ins, listings and so on. That strikes me as unfair.

I don’t really agree on the licence fee, as it does make the BBC more independent from the government than if they had to depend on funding from general taxes. I was against the similar arrangment we had here, true, but that was because we had the worst of both worlds: a licence fee *and* lots of commercials.

As for Chris’ other points, I quite agree. I get very annoyed with the amount of advertising the BBC does themselves for channels I’ll never see and I do think the BBC has gone too commercial in the last five years or so: BBC World e.g. is nothing but a rebranded CNN with british accents. I also think the quality of the two main channels has drastically gone down: too much socalled reality programmes showing some rich upper class twits getting their life laundried or their gardens the size of Devon redone or buying a second home, a small little castle near Windsor. The less said about [fx: annoying Scottish accent]Fame Academy[/fx] the better. And spare me Pauline “can’t act, can annoy” Quirk, please. However, Chris has a point when he says:

At the same time, I thing a great deal of what the BBC produces (like the Robert Hughes programme on Gaudi and the documentary on Algeria I mentioned recently) is really great stuff. And a lot of the best drama of recent years has been on the BBC (would Denis Potter ever have gone so far without it?). Channel 4 used to provide an alternative arena for good programming, but in recent years it has become dominated by reality TV, crap gameshows, chat programmes from hell and other dross (yes, even more than the BBC).

The strength of the BBC at the moment seems to me to lie in its non-fiction programmes. Series like “What did the Victorians do for us?”, “The Blue Planet” or “Life of Mammals” are just plain brilliant and it’s hard to see any other tv channel doing them.