“Literature”

Saturday — Ian McEwan

"Literature", books and books review
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Cover of Saturday


Saturday
Ian McEwan
278 pages
published in 2005

I’ve been suspicious of Ian McEwan ever since I read his Book prize winning novel Amsterdam and almost threw the book against the wall at the denouncement where McEwan descended into stupid cliches about the Netherlands’ attitude towards euthenasia. That suspicion deepened when it turned out McEwan, like Martin Amis had turned into a permanent bedwetter after the September 11 attacks. He’s been less outspoken than Amis, but he has said enough for me to know I dislike his politics, which seems to be of the Decent Leftist persuasion, being obsessed with the struggle against “Islamism”, the threat of terror attacks and the vulnerability of the western democracies. As with Amis, “9/11” seems to have functioned as McEwan’s midlife crisis, his fear and doubts about his own encrouching mortality being confused for insight into the general condition of the world. It’s this mixture of Decent politics and midlife crisis that’s been poured out into Saturday. I didn’t want to read it at the time when it first came out, being warned off it by various reviews, but four years on I thought it would be interesting to see if it really was as dire as it was made out to be.

It is.

Had I read this in 2005 it would’ve been thrown against the wall, library book or not. Set on the day of the worldwide anti-war protests on 15 February 2003 a month before the invasion of Iraq, with the London march making regular appearances througout the novel. Not that any of the characters in the book actually go on the march, they all have something better to do. Even the protagonist’s son, described as anti-war doesn’t, as “he doesn’t feel much need to go tramping through the streets to make his point”, confusing making a political statement with narcissism. It’s typical for the entire novel, which hammers this point home again and again from the first encounter with the march, with a street cleaner sweeping up garbage left behind by people going to the march to the last, with the same street cleaner still busy cleaning up behind the march. This way the anti-war protest is reduced to something hypocritical, narcisstic and even frivolous. Saturday only pays lip service to the arguments of the antiwar movement, spelled out explicitely just once, in a row between the protagonist and his daughter, who gets to represent the antiwar side. She gets emotional and slightly hysterical while her father gets to stay calm and collected; later it’s revealed she’s pregnant. In such a way the antiwar movement is constantly dismissed, at best shown as shallow people who mean well but who just don’t realise how bad Saddam is.

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Tales — H. P. Lovecraft

"Literature", books and books review, science fiction
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Cover of Tales


Tales
H. P. Lovecraft
838 pages
published in 2005

This deceptively slim volume, much slimmer than the similarly titled 1997 Jocye Carol Oates edited collection of Lovecraft stories, turned out to be printed on the kind of paper they use to print those teeny tiny complete bibles with. So what I thought would be a week’s worth of reading actually needed two long train journeys to finish, by the time I was somewhat bored with Lovecraft’s eldritch obsessions. After a while all the lurking horrors and dwellers in the darkness start to blur into each other and the descriptions turn from atmospheric into mildly ridiculous. Lovecraft is not a writer you should over indulge in; it’s better to read him sparingly story by story.

As a collection this is an impressive book, part of the prestigious Library of America series set up to safeguard America’s literary heritage. That H. P. Lovecraft, as first science fiction, horror or fantasy writer is allowed in these hallowed pages as a genre writer, not ust an established literary figure dabbling in these genres, is a good sign of how far these genres have penetrated literary
consciousness. You may quibble about Lovecraft as a first choice, but he has slowly evolved from a cult writer into one appreciated as much for his literary qualities as his ability to scare his readers so he’s certainly not an undefensible choice.

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London calling

"Literature", Art & Criticism
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Curt Purcell, of the excellent pulp/weird fiction/horror/sci-fi/etc blog Beyond the Groovy Age of Horror has been inspired to explore “the ultimate urban setting, the original Big Bad City, the real Metropolis: London”. The list of books he plans to read is interesting in its diversity:

Here’s a listing of what I’ve set aside in my to-read stacks. I don’t plan to read these in any particular order, and I may not get to all of them this time around. In any case:

  • Soft City by Jonathan Raban
  • Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  • London: A Pilgrimage by Gustave Dore and Blanchard Jerrold
  • The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
  • The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
  • At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald
  • Limehouse Nights by Thomas Burke
  • London Under London by Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman
  • London Dossier by Len Deighton
  • Burden of Proof (retitled Villain) by James Barlow
  • The Long Firm by Jake Arnott (also with something about the BBC television adaptation)
  • Tainted Love by Stewart Home
  • The Man from the Diogenes Club by Kim Newman
  • SAM 7 by Richard Cox
  • The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban
  • Mother London by Michael Moorcock
  • London Fields by Martin Amis
  • Something from the Nightside by Simon R. Green
  • London Revenant by Conrad Williams
  • Caballistics, Inc. from 2000 AD

It’s a list that can be almost infinitely extended, because there are few cities that have had such a hold on the public imagination as London. Sure, every big city has literature associated with it –even Amsterdam has writers associated with it, like Simon Carmiggelt– but London is different in that its attraction is worldwide, perhaps matched only by New York. Even Rome is only a village compared to London, as Nancy Mitford teased. Unfortunately, that does result into a certain amount of arrogance and navelgazing on the part of the London based media and literati circles, the illusion that because London is so important, they and everything they do is important.

On bookshelves

"Literature", Art & Criticism
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It’s that perennial middle class literary question: should your bookshelves accurately reflect what you read, or should it have the books read by the kind of person you would like to, as Ezra suggests:

Bookshelves are not for displaying books you’ve read — those books go in your office, or near your bed, or on your Facebook profile. Rather, the books on your shelves are there to convey the type of person you would like to be. I am the type of person who would read long biographies of Lyndon Johnson, despite not being the type of person who has read any long biographies of Lyndon Johnson. I am the type of person who is very interested in a history of the Reformation, but am not, as it happens, the type of person with the time to read 900 pages on the subject.

I can sort of understand this, in that there are always books you want to have read but are less keen on to be actually reading, but buying books with no real intention of ever reading them? That’s wankerish, only one step removed from something like George Bush’s reading list, where you know the person and see the books they supposedly read and think “naaah”. These tricks never work, because when people pull them they always get the same sort of Generically Erudite Library , with the Joyces and the Nabakovs and the 900 page Charo biographies and all that, but without the real sort of esoteric interests a proper bibliophile develops.

Can litfic ever measure up to fantasy or sf?

"Literature", fantasy, science fiction
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Fantasy and science fiction writer and fan Jo Walton had an interesting post up today about whether mainstream, literary fiction can ever be as good as the best science fiction and fantasy novels:

In one section, she states that some well-regarded people think Middlemarch the best novel in the world, ever. I stopped and looked suspiciously at this, turned the idea around a few times, and cautiously considered that in fact perhaps Middlemarch did deserve to be considered in the same company as Lord of the Rings, Cyteen, A Fire Upon the Deep, The Disposessed and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. (That grinding sound you hear? F.R. Leavis turning in his grave?) But you know, not really. Because it’s just an awful lot easier if you get the world ready made for you. That’s my main objection to people who say mainstream and fanfic can be as good as original SF. People can juggle two balls awfully well, and Middlemarch and Dark Reflections both do that, in their different ways, about as well as it can be done. But that still can’t really compare to people who are juggling four.

Please do not think this is the usual reverse snobbery of a certain kind of science fiction fan denying that traditional literary values are worthless; what Jo is saying is much more interesting than that. She argues that all other things being equal, writing a good literay novel is easier than writing a sf/fantasy novel, because in the second case the writer has not just to invent the plot and characters and such, but the entire world in which their story takes place and make this world accesible to their readers. Mainstream authors on the other hand do not need to do so, as they can confidently assume their readers has a certain familiarity with the world in which their novels take place.

It’s an interesting, almost seductive theory, but I don’t think it’s right. For I start I think that Jo both underestimates the work mainstream authors have to do to make their settings convincing and overestimates how much science fiction writers need to do. Just like a mainstream author does not need to explain what a car or horse is, neither does a sf writer need to explain how a hyperdrive works or what a positronic brain is. We know already, because we’ve seen these concepts in movies and television series, in cartoons even, not to mention some eighty odd years of science fiction stories. Meanwhile any mainstream author who doesn’t set their story in a setting that is right here and right now will have readers to whom this setting is new, who may not stumble over things like horses and cars, but who will stumble over say the position of women in society.

Take Jane Austen for example, writing in a society in which women almost literally had no rights at all, where women had to marry or face starvation. This is a setting that is almost unimaginable to a modern audience, yet the genius of Austen lies in making clear this essential horror even to us, without writing for us. That is a feat few science fiction authors can emulate.

Mainstream writers also have another set of balls to juggle that sf/fantasy authors need not bother with: making sure that the settings they create “feel real” to their readers. Asimov could imagine Trantor anyway he wanted it to look, because Trantor is not real. But Ian Rankin needs to make sure the Edinburgh of his novels is simular enough to the real one to convince those readers who know it….

So no, I don’t think sf writers juggle more balls than mainstream writers. Just different balls, at times.