Planet in Peril by John Christopher

Raven said to Charles: "Well, Mr. Grayner?  Destruction or salvage?  A corrupt and decadent world--do you destroy it or do you try to mend it?"

Charles stood in silence; he felt that his irresolution must be written all over him.  Raven and Dinkhul were both looking at him--Raven with calm confidence, Dinkhul with the trace of a mocking grin.

He said: "I don't know--"  

I can't actually remember any
pretty blonde ladies in the book

Like so many people, I found John Christopher's first three Tripod books entertaining.  I liked No Blade of Grass when I read it a few years ago, and thought The Long Winter not bad when I read it before this blog first exploded into the public consciousness.  (Joachim Boaz rated The Long Winter "Good" back in 2012.) So, when I saw the 1959 Avon printing of Christopher's Planet in Peril with the cool Emsh cover, I got it.  As I announced to the world via twitter, which, despite my best efforts to create mesmerizing content like blurry pictures of the birds and graffiti I spot while visiting Akron, Ohio, is apparently in terminal decline, this edition is very fun, the book designer integrating elements of Emsh's cover illo onto the back cover and the title page.  My copy was owned previously by a Michael Wachover; amateur handwriting analysis suggests it was some other owner who wrote "Good" on the inside cover along with a long cryptic string of characters.  Mr. Wachover also wrote his nickname "Mike" on page 23, and that string of numbers (and letters?) appears a second time on page 11.  This paperback has lived a long and eventful life!

Planet in Peril was first published in the United Kingdom in 1955 with the considerably more appropriate title The Year of the Comet and stars Charles Grayner, 21st-century scientist.  Grayner is a sophisticated man--when he comes home and finds the cleaning lady has left the telescreen on the pop music channel, he switches it to the classical music channel.  After a long day studying diamonds as a possible power source, a little Mozart is just what he needs!  In the first ten pages of the book Grayner visits a used record store, where he runs into the guy who operates and stars on (as a kind of DJ or talk show host) the classical music TV channel, Hiram Dinkhul.  Even though they have only met once before, this guy seems to know all about Grayner's career, including the fact that the diamond expert has just this very day learned he will be transferred from Michigan to sunny California!

Fellow SF fan
Michael Wachover,
we salute you!

Planet in Peril is set in a world in which almost nobody, even a sophisticato like Grayner, knows any history.  Luckily Grayner and we readers have Dinkhul to handle the exposition duties for us.   Following a cataclysmic 20th-century war, the Western world was rebuilt by and is now run by "managerials," the various pre-war business sectors (they have names like "United Chemicals," "Atomics," "Steel," "Agriculture," "Genetics Division," "Telecom," etc.) consolidated into monopolistic entities which act as independent states.  These states are fascistic/socialistic, their citizens assorted into rigid classes and assigned their roles from above during their youth after psychological profiling.  (We learn that at school Grayner was assigned to Squad D, "research and development work.")  Like jobs, all goods and services seem to be distributed by the bureaucracy.

Outside this managerial system is "Siraq," a religious state (Dinkhul calls it a "deity-centered nation") that controls the "Near East."  (Though Grayner and Dinkhul are Americans, they use British lingo--Dinkhul at one point talks of the paucity of students who "read History" instead of the American usage "study History," while Grayner tells Dinkhul that he "tipped down the drain" the "containers of mescalin" provided him by his managers for use on vacation.)  While Westerners all smoke cigarettes, use "mesc" and engage in casual promiscuous sex (Grayner is said to frequent brothels), the Siraqis refrain, having what is said to be a "puritanical" culture.  (Christopher never uses the words "Islam" or "Muslim," just like he never uses "socialism" or "fascism.")

Like the Siraqis, Dinkhul is critical of the managerial states and to some extent lives outside of them.  His TV channel represents "one of the few remaining strands of capitalism in the modern world," he tells Grayner, and he complains that the society of the managerial states is decadent, pointing out the failure to colonize Mars and Venus though the technology to do so is available (Raymond F. Jones in The Cybernetic Brains also used the failure to explore space as a sign that a socialistic high-tech society had fallen into decadence.)  We later learn that Dinkhul, besides being a broadcaster, is a bigwig in an underground organization trying to undermine the managerial system, The Society of Individualists.  This group doesn't have a plan to take over, they just want to see the whole managerial system fall apart, assuming what comes next will be better.

I guess those are the Siraqis on their
diamond-powered flying machines

Grayner's managerial is United Chemicals, and his superiors transfer him to Cali to take the place of some other diamond expert, Humayun, who got killed in a boating accident.  Grayner falls in love with Humayun's (now his) assistant, Sara Koupol.  Koupol, like Humayun, is a political refugee who fled from Siraq; her father, a history professor, escaped Siraq with her.  Sara thinks Grayner's predecessor was murdered, and when she disappears before Grayner can even get in her pants (damn her puritanical Siraqi upbringing!) her father purportedly commits suicide.  Of course, Grayner and we readers think all these people have been kidnapped or murdered.

Much of the book consists of Grayner being cajoled or kidnapped by Dinkhul's Individualists or one managerial or another, all of them trying to convince Grayner to work for them.  Again and again Grayner is liberated from captivity at one managerial by another managerial or by the Society of Individualists--in this book people are always getting put to sleep by gas or drugged drinks or hit on the head by blunt instruments and then waking up in the custody of some other faction.  People in this book are also always putting on disguises, and members of one managerial keep turning out to be moles or turncoats who are in fact working for a different faction. When Grayner is "reunited" with Sara Koupol, Dinkhul, after some days, exposes this woman as an impostor (no wonder she was putting out!)  This is the kind of book in which the protagonist is carried along by the winds of fate and manipulated by mysterious forces--until the very end Grayner doesn't make any decisions, figure out any mysteries, or defeat any foes; Grayner does not drive the plot in any way, he is merely its passenger.

Anyway, all the managerials want Grayner (and Humayun and Sara Koupol) under their control because everybody realizes that they are on the brink of figuring out how to turn diamonds into a super efficient power source and super powerful weapon--if one managerial gets this power before the rest it will be able to rule the world.  Dinkhul, who I guess is like the book's conscience and Christopher's spokesman, tries to preserve Greyner's freedom to choose his own way while hoping Greyner will not stand in the way of a collapse of managerial society.

Loosely affiliated with the Society of Individualists is an underground cult of religious fanatics known as the Cometeers who think the appearance of a comet in the sky is a sign that managerial society is about to fall.  (You probably know that comets are associated with the crisis of the collapse of the Roman Republic and the Norman conquest of England.)  The managerials tolerate the Cometeers, and their revival-style meetings provide a cover for the Society of Individualists' own smaller meetings.  In the last 30 pages of the 159-page novel Dinkhul leads Greyner on a country-wide tour of Cometeer groups, seeking clues about the whereabouts of Sara Koupol.  As the puritanism of the Siraqis contrasts with the indulgence in drugs and promiscuous sex of the managerials, so the ecstatic Cometeers provide a contrast to the passionless managerials--on their faces Greyner sees "a concentration, a passion, which he never remembered seeing anywhere."  Dinkhul and Greyner get kidnapped again, and this time taken to Siraq--it turns out the Cometeers are being financed by the Siraqis as a means of further undermining the managerials.  We learn that Humayun, Sara Koupol and Professor Koupol have taken over Siraq in a palace coup, built the diamond-based super weapon, and are going to take over the world.  Greyner has to decide if he will try to alert the managerials and save the (drug-addled, corrupt and static) West from the (semi-capitalistic, imperialistic and puritannical) East, or just settle down with Sara and live a happy life with her as a member of the world's new ruling class.  

When I bought Planet in Peril, and when I started reading it, I had hopes it would be an exciting adventure story and/or a human drama.  I was disappointed because it is a kind of satire of and meditation on modern Western life, religion, radicalism and conservatism.  (I didn't realize it at first, but the character's names have an allegorical ring--Grayner, Ledbetter, Raven, etc.  Is "Humayun" supposed to reminded us of "houyhnhnm?")  Do I agree with Christopher that individualistic capitalist societies are more vital and productive than bureaucratic collectivist ones?  Of course I do.  Do I agree that while religion is a scam, it brings structure, meaning and even joy into people's lives?  You bet.  Does my agreement with what I think Christopher is trying to say here mean I loved this novel?  No way.

Sad!

Planet of Peril's plot, characters, and tone are weak.  The story conveys no emotion--all of the characters remain calm and detached, either gently ironic like Dinkhul or, even worse, cold fish like Grayner. Perhaps by design (to show how a technocratic society saps the life and emotion out of people), perhaps due to incompetence, Christopher's characters have no passion and the story develops no tension.  We don't get any sense that Dinkhul really hates the static collectivist society of the managerials or that Grayner deeply or ebulliently loves Koupol or is bitter or angry about the way the various factions are manipulating him.  The stakes feel low because the different factions don't threaten or bribe Grayner, and none of the characters gets shot at or risks death or maiming--looking back, I suspect that all the scenes of people getting knocked unconscious were played for laughs, though I didn't laugh.  The lack of feeling and danger makes the book flat and boring.

The scene I quoted as an epigraph to this blog post, in which Dinkhul and Raven (head of Atomics) both try to sway Grayner, reminded me of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, in which a representative of modern liberalism and a representative of religious and communist radicalism compete for the soul of a bland middle-class guy. The book as a whole reminded me of Anthony Burgess's satiric The Wanting Seed, which I also found didn't inspire in me much feeling.  Planet of Peril, however, suffers in comparison to The Wanting Seed because while Christopher is subtle (to be kind) or limp (if you want to be harsh about it), Burgess is loud, sharp, edgy.  Burgess just comes right out and tells you homosexuals are disgusting and that English people are superior to Third Worlders and lays his theories about history and religion right on the table for you to see.  This is a way to generate excitement, or at least interest, in your novel if it lacks human drama and tension.  Christopher's Planet in Peril, unfortunately, though it has a provocative theme (Muslims armed with a super weapon are going to conquer the world, and we decadent Westerners should welcome it!) isn't stirring or captivating because it is too soft and too vague.

Barely acceptable.

Synthajoy by D. G. Compton

"What you're doing to Tony there--can you justify that as satisfying a need?"

"Of course I can.  The need for innovation.  It's as potent as the need for sex, or for power."

Against his rationalizations I could only range a deep, instinctive repugnance.

As a kid growing up in Northern New Jersey I spent lots of time riding in the car on Route 80, travelling between home and my maternal grandmother's house. Nana, as we called her, had lots of cool old toys that I now see in antique stores, a round tin box full of like 12 pounds of fascinating buttons for us to sift through, and a bookcase full of hardcover books, including an encyclopedia published during World War II that, among other things, had black and white reproductions of Charles R. Knight paintings under the dinosaur entries, and a lot of those Reader's Digest Condensed Books. I bring this up not just because I like reminiscing about my prosaic childhood, but because it appears (according to this page at the New York Review of Books website) that critically acclaimed SF author D. G. Compton has done work for Reader's Digest Condensed Books as an editor and as a condenser!

Compton's first science fiction book published in America was 1968's Synthajoy, and this week I read my copy, the Ace Science Fiction Special edition with the cover by the Dillons.  I liked Compton's Steel Crocodile when I read it in July, so I expected to like this one as well, and I was not disappointed.  Joachim Boaz read Synthajoy in 2011 (check out his review here) and on this topic we are in close agreement--he also quite liked it.

Synthajoy is presented in the form of a first-person narrative from Thea Cadence, a nurse and the wife of Edward Cadence, a doctor and the co-inventor of Sensitape. The text switches back and forth between a day to day narrative of her confinement in a mental hospital, and flashbacks to what I think of as "the main plot," the story of the development of Sensitape and of Thea's relationships with Edward and with electronics expert Tony Stech, the other half of the Sensitape development team. The irony is that Thea is now receiving the very Sensitape treatment she helped devise with her husband Edward and his partner Tony!

Synthajoy sees use of literary or "New Wavey" techniques, like a sentence typed in undulating curves instead of on a level line, passages written in the form of a film script or a play, and sections and chapters that end in the middle of a sentence--many of these sentences are never completed.  Most importantly, the main plot is not related in strict chronological order.

The main plot: An increasing number of people in overcrowded England have come to feel life is not worth living, and they just lay down and, after a few weeks, even though their bodies are perfectly healthy, die. The medical professionals call this "Uncompensated Death Wish," or UDW, and over a million people a year are dying of it!  Edward and Thea Cadence treat UDW cases, one of whom is the Jewish owner of an electronics shop, Jacob Stech. Jacob's death inspires his son, Tony, to devote his electronics expertise to curing the disease, and together Edward and Tony invent a machine that cures UDW, Sensitape. Sensitape is a system by which people's thoughts and feelings are recorded and can be played back for others via a headset; the first tape, called Relaxatape, plays a recording of the brain waves of a person at peace, and the brainwaves of those who "listen" to the tape conform to the recording, forcing them to relax. Millions of lives are saved from UDW through use of such therapeutic tapes and Edward becomes a national hero, but the Sensitape team doesn't stop there.  Soon Edward and Tony are at the head of a major commercial enterprise, recording tapes of all kinds of experiences, from artistic creation to sexual intercourse, and selling the tapes and the machines needed to play them not only to medical institutions for therapeutic use, but also on the retail market for entertainment purposes.

While not a scientist herself, Thea is instrumental in the development of Sensitape; for one thing, she introduces Tony to Edward, suggesting that Tony ("the electronics king of West London") could be of assistance in overcoming apparently insuperable technical challenges faced by Edward.  As Thea begins to doubt the morality of Senistape, her essential role in its development burdens her with tremendous guilt. ("All this, the whole hellish structure, is my fault....I could have altered the fate of the human race.")  As she sits at the machinery with Edward and Tony while they record the brain waves of a couple having sex, she becomes vomitously ill.  She is in physical contact with a dying priest as his last thoughts are recorded and is a witness to Edward convincing musicians and artists to have their acts of performance and creation recorded.  And then there is a scene which explicitly tells us Sensitape is something like drug abuse, when gangsters who control the European heroin and cocaine trade knock on the Cadences' door and, guns drawn, demand they be given a cut of the profits of Sensitapes sold as a narcotic substitute because this product is driving the drug dealers out of business.

We've seen this sort of thing, artificial dreams or recorded thoughts used as therapy or entertainment/pornography/addictive substance more than once over the course of this blog's life, in numerous early '70s Barry Malzberg stories, in Lin Carter's 1968 "The Thief of Thoth", and Evelyn Lief's 1972 "Every Fourth House."  New Jersey's own Malzberg, one of the premier critics and historians of science fiction, in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, cites Peter Phillips as being the first to do this sort of thing back in 1948.

The human part of the plot concerns how Edward's and Thea's marriage is a cold sham, how Edward starts having an affair with the woman known as Mrs. X (the woman who was recorded for the sex tape--she has perhaps the highest sex drive in Britain!) and then Thea starts an affair with Tony.  Everything comes to a head after Tony dies in an experiment in which he "listens to" an experimental tape which Edward has prepared, Synthajoy, a tape which synthesizes various pleasurable and ecstatic experiences to create the ultimate pleasure, and Thea has a bad reaction to a recording of the emotions of a genius conductor leading his orchestra--she can feel the love of the genius for Brahms, and it makes her feel like an abominable interloper. ("To experience the tape was to trespass on that love....")  Edward is murdered; Thea tells us that Mrs. X, wanting to renegotiate her sex tape contract for a bigger share of the profits, killed Edward so she could steal the contract, but Thea herself is convicted of the crime. (All this adultery, murder, and murder trial jazz perhaps reflects Compton's career as a mystery novelist.)  Thea is sentenced to confinement in the very hospital for which she did interior design and subjected to the very sort of therapy she helped develop, compelled to experience tapes designed to induce contrition...or is it guilt?

In the last pages of the novel we realize how mentally unstable and how unreliable a narrator Thea may really be when she provides a different version of the story of the murder, we learn the truth(?) about her alleged frigidity, and, after spending the whole book talking about how she hates Sensitape and what it has done to British society ("hellish structure") and how she looks down on profit seekers ("To buy (with money) what Beldik had recorded (for money) was to compound a moral felony"), she declares she will perfect Synthajoy--the ultimate Sensitape!--and make a bazillion pounds selling it, apparently to get revenge on Mrs. X.  (Shades of Winston Smith!) To what extent has Thea always been flawed, and to what extent has the Sensitape therapy/punishment/brainwashing turned her into the troubled person we have spent this book with?

Synthajoy is a good novel and I enjoyed it.  The characters and their relationships are all believable and interesting, and all the literary touches (the somewhat experimental stuff I've mentioned, and also more conventional things like detailed descriptions of rooms and landscapes) aren't just showoffy frippery that obscure the narrative, but actually make the book more engaging.

Back of my copy

The science fiction elements are alright, but are secondary to the human drama.  The obvious novels to compare Synthajoy to are Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, but while those novels create rich fictional worlds and address, head on, important political and philosophical debates, in Synthajoy Compton doesn't really describe a world much different than our own or make a very direct or convincing moral or political argument.  The reviews from UK periodicals quoted on the back of my copy claim the novel is "horrifying" and "hair-raising," but I didn't feel that it was all that "horrifying" myself.  The England depicted by Compton isn't some kind of totalitarian nightmare; it seems like everybody whose brainwaves are recorded on Sensitapes, and most everybody who uses Sensitapes, is doing so voluntarily.  (As a convicted murderer, Thea is the exception.)

Compton's gripe seems to be that the people who produce the tapes are doing so for money, and that those using them are decadent sheep, the prey of manipulative sleaze merchants; Compton's complaints about Sensitape are reminiscent of the evergreen complaints we hear about drugs, pornography, television, rock and roll, comic books, etc., that these are shallow forms of addictive entertainment that turn their consumers into soulless zombies, or at least fail to elevate them the way high brow or wholesome art is reputed to by the intellectual elite or moral arbiters.  Synthajoy is an attack on capitalism and on innovation for innovation's sake, on business and science run amuck, and Compton's case is not based on logic or evidence or historical analogy--it is based on irrational emotion, the "instinctive repugnance" expressed by Thea in the lines I chose as an epigraph for this blog post.

A clue that the book is taking a conservative stand based on tradition or prejudice or some kind of "precautionary principle" is that the book's villains, those who keep promoting Sensitape and keep pushing the envelope, accuse Thea, our heroine, of being a prude, a puritan, or a reactionary, while calling themselves "progressive" and trumpeting how they are serving mankind even as they claw and scrape for money and fame.  

There are lots of thought-provoking things going on in Compton's book that are worth talking about.  As a man, the author takes a risk in writing a first-person narrative in the voice of a woman; and when I say "risk" I basically mean a risk that women will find his depiction of a woman unconvincing and that feminists in particular might consider it an outrageous act of misrepresentation or cultural appropriation.  (Let me repeat that from my perspective the character of Thea is convincing and compelling.) On the one hand, Compton does things with Thea that feminists may appreciate: her husband uses her to advance his career, he can be dismissive of her, and he can fail to recognize her contributions.  There's a good scene in which Thea enters the room where Edward and Tony are working on their invention; the men just met this very day, but Thea finds she is already treated as an outsider by them--among men she is "the other" despite her essential contributions and her previous relationships with them.  On the other hand, Thea says stuff like "No more or less than men, women judge you, dominate you, flatter you, compete with you.  But unlike men, their motives are unfathomable," her frigidity is a major plot point, she is a victim, she acts kind of hysterical, and much of what she tells us may be a self-serving lie.

While relationships between the sexes are at the center of the novel, there are also issues of race, ethnicity, and cultural difference presented in Synthajoy, and I have to admit I am not sure why these issues were presented (though I have a theory!).  The Steches, Jacob and Tony, are Jewish, and Thea's attitude about Jews is to see them as a sort of exotic species.  "I'd seen him [Tony] and his father together--there was a feeling between them my hospital experience had already shown me to be peculiarly Jewish."  After Jacob's death, Thea goes to visit Tony's shop: "I was there because I was cold, and already dead, and I wanted to see how Jews kept warm and alive."

There is also a minor black character, Dr. Mbleble, the giant ("six feet seven, with neck and shoulders like a big black bull") Nigerian sexologist who diagnoses Thea as being sexually dysfunctional because of what he calls "the repressive puritanism Mrs. Cadence was brought up under."  I probably don't have to tell you that the oversexed Negro is a sort of cliche.

My aforementioned theory is that a minor subtext of Synthajoy is of non-Christian, non-English people changing English society, and not changing it for the better.  Tony basically invented the Sensitape that changes English society in ways Thea finds so objectionable, and Mbleble spars with Thea's lawyer at her murder trial--he not only represents sexual license, but is a threat to her freedom.  The idea of the Jew as influencer is highlighted by this line: "'No strings,' he [Edward] said, spreading his hands in Tony's Jewish way."  Tony's "Jewish ways" are infecting English Edward!

I've already told you I see Synthajoy as an attack on capitalism and the profit motive, and I probably don't have to tell you that for centuries a standard trope among anti-Semites has been the image of the Jew as the cunning and ruthless businessman. Well, late in the novel we realize Jews aren't the only category of people Thea finds exotic and fascinating:

I occupied my time observing the other members of the board, businessmen, a phenomenon I had only recently come into contact with.  Everything about them fascinated me, the way they worked, what they thought, the faces they made.  Merchants, with merchants' eyes.

Here I will note that Mrs. X, another threat to Thea, is also a foreigner, though not a particularly exotic one; she is an American.  The United States, of course, is seen by many people as a sort of archetypal capitalist country, and it is common for people to characterize the U. S. A. as a place where the only thing that matters is money. According to my theory, the Jew, the American, and the black represent a new English culture, one based on technology, profit-seeking and sensuality that is killing the old English culture based on things like Christianity and classical music (over the course of the book a priest dies and a musician has a stroke in Thea's presence) and the heroism of people like Horatio Nelson, whose column is mentioned a few times. Maybe we should see this as a bourgeois or popular revolution against society's traditional elites?

As I have suggested, to me these (perhaps unsavory) elements of Thea's personality and/or Compton's beliefs serve to make her and the book more interesting, but it seems possible that other residents of our early 21st century might find them, as the kids say, "problematic."  Your humble blogger does not hesitate to recommend Synthajoy; it is a smooth and entertaining read without any fat or fluff that is also thought-provoking and rewards close attention.  Worth the time of anybody at all interested in "literary" SF or SF that touches on psychological or gender or race issues.

A Very Private Life by Michael Frayn

This is what she always wanted to know--how the outside classes live, what the world is like outside the holovision circuits.  And this is it.  She gazes about her with benevolence.  These are real people, undistorted by holovision!  This is the real world!

My copy

Remember how much I loved Paul Lehr's cover for Croyd? Well, here we have another Lehr masterpiece, the cover to the Dell 1969 edition of Michael Frayn's 1968 novel A Very Private Life.  The colors, the shadows, the tubes, the sphere, the man's face, the sharp points of the sphere's stand, the woman's nude body, the red arcs of electricity...beautiful!  (This gorgeous painting would later appear in non-English markets on the covers of other books, even though all the elements of the illustration are directly based on things in Frayn's text.)

I've never read anything by Frayn before, though he is an important playwright and my wife is a big fan of Copenhagen in particular.  Let's see what A Very Private Life is all about. 

A Very Private Life is written in the style of a fairy tale--its first line is "Once upon a time there will be a little girl called Uncumber."  Its tone and its short chapters reminded me of a children's book, but this is a fairy tale for adults, written in the future tense and the present tense, about social class and familial and sexual relationships, about the vast social and psychological distances between individuals and between groups of people, distances which make satisfying connections between people so difficult to achieve.

In the future, middle-class people, known as "the inside classes," live in hermetically sealed underground houses, houses which they never leave.  All the air, food (largely pills and goop that comes out of a tap) and goods they need are brought in, and all the waste they produce sent out, via pipes and tubes.  Communication and entertainment is provided through the holovision system, a network which will strongly remind 21st-century readers of the internet.  Nobody ever comes to visit; education and socializing, including sex, are all conducted over the holovision; members of the inside classes almost never lay their eyes directly on a fellow human being--they even wear dark glasses around the house, though they leave their bodies bare, and family members living in the same house tend to communicate via the holovision with each other rather than leave their personal rooms.  Married couples even send their sperm and ova out through a tube, and later receive their baby via tube!

First edition

The inside classes control their moods via drugs; among other things, their pharmacopoeia includes "calmants" should they get anxious and "Hilarin," to be taken before a party to ensure they laugh at even the oldest and weakest jokes.  A hallucinogen, "Libidin," is taken during their long distance love making sessions, along with "Orgasmin;" lovers share visions of flying over mountains and through clouds and such romantic claptrap.

We learn all this as we follow the maturation of Uncumber, the daughter of a "decider" (a kind of government bureaucrat) who lives in one of the houses with her father, mother and a younger brother.  Uncumber is a curious, troublesome child who refuses to take her drugs and wonders what it is like outside.  When, in her late teens, she dials a wrong number on her holovision and meets a man named Noli, who lives far away and speaks a foreign language, Uncumber inexplicably falls in love with him.  She leaves the house and travels thousands of miles to meet Noli, having numerous adventures in the strange outside world of the teeming working classes, who wear clothes, breathe the air the house dwellers fear because it is full of germs and pollution, and perform the manual labor that produces the food and other goods consumed by the inside classes.

Having observed the life of ease and privacy lived by the inside classes, we experience the generally drab and monotonous, but occasionally passionate and dangerous, life of the lower orders as Uncumber moves in with Noli's family, who reside in a ruined mansion.  Noli's large family has only one holovision, one of Noli's three wives cooks their food herself on a stove, and Noli not only has physical sex with his wives, but sometimes strikes them.  To Uncumber's disappointment, when Noli finally has sex with her, instead of engaging in the intimate all-natural sex she craves, he apes the practices of the inside classes and takes Libidin pills before coupling with her:

She has corrupted him, she realizes.  The world which she represents still hangs about her, even though she has rejected it.  It has touched against Noli's world and bruised it, just as wealthier worlds have always bruised and destroyed the poorer ones they have come into contact with down the ages, however good the intentions of their representatives.

In the final third of the novel Uncumber leaves Noli's family but gets lost in a forest on her way to the rocket terminal.  Desperate for help, she knocks on the airlocks of various houses, but her fellow members of the middle-class refuse to aid her, and she almost starves to death before being captured by a band of nomadic brigands.  She briefly experiences life among the lowest of the low, accompanying them as they break into a house and murder its inhabitants.  When they catch up with the murderers Uncumber is taken into custody by the police, known as "the Kind People" in this world, an apparent reference to Aeschylus' play The Eumenides; "Eumenides," which means "Kindly Ones," is a name for the Furies, the Greek goddesses of vengeance who punish wrongdoers.

A recent British edition; I guess
this is a stock photo--it could
apply to just about any story
about a (Caucasian) teenage girl 

Uncumber is provided a house of her own by the authorities; for reasons that felt a little contrived (disappointing in a novel which otherwise is so convincing, in which everybody's feelings and actions feel so natural) she is not put back in contact with her family.  In the closing chapters of the book Frayn informs us that over the decades and centuries the inside classes will grow even more isolated and individualistic, insiders Uncumber's age deciding to forgo having children and to break contact with their elder relatives and to live out their centuries in solitude.

I take Frayn's argument to be that we are doomed to be alone because we cannot know one another, and that our relationships are bound to be disappointing or destructive.  Illustrating the unbridgeable gaps between peoples and individuals, and how these gaps distort our views of each other, Uncumber, as a young child, calls the people who live outside houses "animals," but when as an adult she meets Noli and his large family, because they live in a (albeit ruined) palace, she calls them "kings and queens."  Our views of each other are shallow and inaccurate, based more on our own desires and fears than knowledge of each other, such knowledge being almost impossible to obtain.

In our last episode we talked about Anthony Burgess' The Wanting Seed, so I guess you could say this is our second dystopia in a row by a British writer with major cred in the literary mainstream.  I was a little lukewarm about The Wanting Seed; it is amusing and full of challenging ideas and literary allusions, but doesn't provide emotional depth.  I can be more enthusiastic about Frayn's A Very Private Life; while not as dense and complex as the Burgess, it has the kind of sharp clear images and emotional weight that move me: despite its fairy tale tone, it feels very "real."  Frayn's depictions of human relationships and Uncumber's feelings ring true and pull at the heartstrings, while his descriptions of Uncumber's world--her home; a seaside dominated by the machinery of industrialized aquaculture; the grounds of Noli's ruined mansion; the forest where she encounters despair, hope, and then atrocity--paint vivid images in the mind.

Very good.  My wife owns a copy of Frayn's 1966 novel The Tin Men; maybe I should check it out as well.      

The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess

'What I was told made me very unwell.  I don't get my promotion.  My father's philoprogenitiveness disqualifies me.  And my own heterosexuality.'

My copy, front. Focus: cannibalism, 
terror, mind control (?)

Well, we just reread Barry Malzberg's "Culture Lock," a 1973 story about an authoritarian government which promotes homosexuality, now let's take a look at Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel The Wanting Seed, which also features an overbearing government determined to limit heterosexual sex.  I own a paperback copy from Ballantine, printed in 1970.

Beatrice-Joanna Foxe is a romantic, an atavist, an Anglo-Saxon heterosexual in a multi-ethnic future London of hundred-story tall skyscrapers, capital of a socialistic Britain dominated by gay men and eunuchs.  Beatrice-Joanna has a voluptuous body, even though skinny girls are in fashion.  She wants to be a mother even though reproduction is considered declasse by most members of her (middle) class ("Leave motherhood to the lower orders," she is told by a government bureaucrat, "like nature intended.")  She believes in God even though she has never seen a Bible and religion has been largely suppressed.  And despite all the government propaganda pushing homosexuality, she has an insatiable desire for men, while such common sights as that of lesbians kissing and of perfumed men applying lipstick make her retch.

Part One of the 223-page novel chronicles a single, terrible day in the rocky marriage of Beatrice-Joanna and her husband, Tristram.  Tristram is a teacher of history, who, after completing the day's lecturing (Burgess uses the lecture to key us in to the novel's background and themes) is told that a gay man has been given a promotion Tristram himself was in line for because of Tristram's disfavored sexual orientation and because research indicated Tristram's parents had a shockingly large number of children (four.)  For ages all government policy has been aimed at discouraging reproduction, but as the level of population threatens to overwhelm the ability of the Ministry of Agriculture to produce enough food to feed everyone, even on short rations, the authorities are cracking down harder than ever.

That very same day Beatrice-Joanna learns their infant son has died--public officials assure her it is for the best: "Think of this in national terms, in global terms.  One mouth less to feed."  While Tristram takes to a bar to look for comfort for the loss of his promotion in the bottom of a glass, his wife is comforted by Tristram's brother Derek.  Derek, in reality a virile heterosexual who has been cuckolding Tristram behind his back, has for many years been putting on an extravagant and convincing imitation of a gay man in order to get ahead.  And get ahead he does!  When, as part of the crackdown, a new police force (the "Population Police") is formed, Derek is made its Commissioner!

First edition, focus: skyscrapers
 and/or bar charts (?) 

People who talk about politics often use the metaphor of a pendulum to describe how one political faction or ideology's rule is inevitably followed by rule by its opposite.  The topic of Tristram's lecture to his uncomprehending students is the similar idea that history works in a cycle of three stages, a "Pelagian Phase," an "Intermediate Phase," and then an "Augustinian Phase."  Poor Tristram and Beatrice-Joanna are living through an Intermediate Phase, when the Pelagian government, which believed in the perfectibility of man, is disappointed to find man is not as tractable as supposed, and turns to harsh measures (like the Population Police) to get the populace to behave.

(I'm not sure if we are supposed to take this cyclical theory seriously, or Burgess means it as a satire of mechanical Marxist and Whiggish theories that argue history is a kind of inevitable journey through various stages to a particular end point.)

In Part Two Beatrice-Joanna flees London for the countryside after discovering that she was impregnated (by Derek or Tristram, she is not sure) on the day her first child and Tristram's career hopes died.  At State Farm NW313 she reunites with her sister Mavis and Mavis's husband Shonny, a man of unshakeable (or so it seems!) religious faith.  For his part, Tristram gets mixed up in a street fight between striking workers (their gripe: rations have been cut again!) and the grey clad regular police and is tossed in prison.

In Part Three we briefly meet the Prime Minister, Robert Starling, and his catamite, Abdul Wahab.  Starling is under terrible stress because a worldwide famine is leading to starvation and even cannibalism, and there seems to be no solution to the problem.  Little Wahab is a Muslim and his naive (or is it cunning?) talk about the efficacy of prayer starts a chain of events in the government that leads to a lifting of prohibitions on religion.  While Beatrice-Joanna is secretly giving birth to twins in an abandoned outbuilding on State Farm NW313 and underground clergymen are emerging from obscurity, Tristram, with the help of a Nigerian murderer and cannibal, escapes from prison.

An earlier Ballantine, focus:
reproduction

Part Four follows Tristram as he leaves London and heads for State Farm NW313, he having learned his wife is there.  The Starling government has collapsed (political and social changes happen with bewildering speed in this book, which is more of a satire than a realistic "what if" scenario) and rail service has ended, making Tristram's journey a slow one.  The police have been driven from the countryside by the populace, many of them killed and eaten!  The resulting anarchy is not depicted by Burgess as a dangerous chaos but as a rebirth of freedom and human decency: after centuries of anti-pregnancy and pro-homosexual propaganda and policy, the English people have fervently returned to their natural inclinations and engage in unashamed public heterosexual sex.  Private enterprise is starting up again, and, with the cessation of television broadcasts, people are creating their own entertainment--amateur theatricals, parades, music made with old-fashioned instruments.  (Where the old government TV shows glamorized gay relationships and denigrated reproduction, these new amateur productions unabashedly take heterosexual sex as their theme.)  Everyone is eager to help Tristram reach his wife and he is provided food and lifts from town to town. "When the State withers," a musician explains to Tristram, "humanity flowers."  Tristram interprets these changes as the end of the "Interphase" and start of the "Augustinian Phase."  

Another aspect of an Augustinian Phase is militarism, and before he can get to his wife, Tristram finds himself shanghaied into the newly reactivated British Army!  Part Five of The Wanting Seed is set a year into the new regime, that of George Ockham--all that anarchy only lasted a few days.  While Beatrice-Joanna and the twins live in luxury (the new capitalist economy has improved living standards) with Derek (who has cast off his old nancy boy pose with the change in regime), Tristram, a sergeant, acts as an instructor to low-I.Q. privates, and then finds himself sailing off on a campaign.  But, as the back cover blurbs of my copy warn you, the war is a sham: there is no war, and Tristram's platoon of dolts is simply murdered--this is the Augustinian government's solution to the overpopulation problem, to recruit the criminal and stupid and execute them, claiming they died defending their country.

In an epilogue, having survived the murder of his comrades, Tristram makes his way back to England and is reunited with Beatrice-Joanna.  He also theorizes that the Augustinian period will not last long; soon the inevitable historical cycle will begin again.

My copy, back

There is a lot of stuff going on in The Wanting Seed; Burgess addresses many topics.  The text on the covers of my copy proclaim the book a "NOVEL OF THE POPULATION BOMB," that is "TERRIFYING," "SHOCKING,"and "HAIR-RAISING."  I am going to have to disagree with Saturday Review and Newsweek; except for a few scenes, the tone of The Wanting Seed is jocular, and ofttimes feels broad and farcical.  As a satire rather than something realistic the book's characters and situations do not feel "real" and do not inspire deep feelings.  The potentially terrifying scenes, like the cannibalism and the massacre of Tristram's platoon, are heavily foreshadowed, so they are not "shocking," and are accompanied with absurd jokes, so they are not "hair-raising."

As for being a novel about overpopulation, I didn't feel that Burgess was putting a whole lot of effort into developing an atmosphere of claustrophobia or impending doom, of describing how horribly overcrowded London was.  It seemed to me that he was using overpopulation as an excuse to present his caricatures of Pelagian (leftist) and Augustinian (right wing) government, the former stifling people's freedom and natural inclinations and the latter indulging in gross violence and weeding society's losers out of the gene pool.

What I found more compelling than the overpopulation and strictly political themes was the novel's focus on love; as I read it, The Wanting Seed struck me as a celebration of heterosexual love, the kind of love that leads to the creation of children, the kind of love sanctioned and promoted by Christianity.  I suppose I was primed to find such a theme in The Wanting Seed by my memories of A Clockwork Orange, published the same year as The Wanting Seed.  In the final chapter of the original version of A Clockwork Orange (not the truncated American edition upon which Kubrick's film was based), Alex, after efforts of an overbearing and intrusive government have failed to reform him, is reformed by his own desire to have a child.

A recent printing, focus: comedy

The names of the The Wanting Seed's two main characters, taken from those two great medieval stories of love, the carnal tale of Tristan and Isolde and Dante's autobiographical descriptions of his chaste love for Beatrice in La Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy, point us in the direction of seeing the novel as primarily about Christian heterosexual love.  The novel's plot is driven by Beatrice-Joanna's sexual lust and her desire for children, and Tristram's jealous and then forgiving love for his wife.  Children play a prominent role throughout the story.  Burgess also contrasts heterosexuals and homosexuals, exhibiting plenty of sympathy for the straight characters and their desires, and no sympathy at all for the gay characters, who are portrayed as disgusting and are repudiated, violently, by the common people.

While many of the religious characters in the book were silly or flawed, I still felt like Burgess was trying to put across a positive view of religion.  Tristram, for example, follows a sort of Christian journey, learning to forgive his wife and to resist the (initially powerful) temptation to pursue revenge against his brother.  The atheist characters in the story are not confident in their lack of faith, falling back into religiosity on slight pretexts, while, given the chance, the mass of people quickly reassert their belief in God, in the same way they enthusiastically embrace straight sex as soon as the Pelagian government falls.  Burgess seems to suggest that a belief in God is as natural and irrepressible as physical desire for the opposite sex, that both are healthy urges that centuries of propaganda cannot extirpate.    

The Wanting Seed apparently got good reviews when it first appeared, but if it was published in our 21st century I suspect the author would be at risk of being dragged before a court for the Michel Houellebecq / Mark Steyn treatment, not only for its portrayal of gays but for its attitudes about race.  In the first dozen pages, as Beatrice-Joanna looks at a multiracial crowd, she reflects thusly:

Was it, she thought in an instant almost of prophetic power, to be left to her and the few indisputable Anglo-Saxons like her to restore sanity and dignity to the mongrel world?  Her race, she seemed to remember, had done it before.

As the novel presents heterosexuality as superior to homosexuality, and the pervasiveness of "homos" in Pelagian Britain as a source of disgust or horror, so too, I think, it presents the "native" British people as superior to the Africans and Asians who now make up the lion's share of London's population, and, as with gays and lesbians, suggests that the prevalence of nonwhites is a sign of an unnatural, unhealthy, cultural deviation.  The widespread, government-sanctioned cannibalism of the Augustinian period, for example, is closely associated with non-white people--a cross-eyed "Mongol" at the labor strike voices his desire to have the police put in a stew pot, there is the aforementioned murderous Nigerian whom Tristram meets in prison, and when Tristram is in the army the soldiers' rations, he finds, are human flesh imported from China.  While white British people and the government do embrace cannibalism, Burgess seems to be trying to suggest that it is a fundamentally alien practice, a foreign perversion which has infected the people of the sceptred isle.

I would expect many people nowadays to find The Wanting Seed's points of view reprehensible, and I have already suggested that it is too satirical for my tastes, that it did not elicit an emotional response from me.  But the novel has its virtues and I am still happy to give it the old thumbs up--it is amusing and interesting.

The final page of my copy
advertises three Burgess novels, all of
which I have read and can recommend

Burgess's style is smooth and easy to follow, and the jokes, particularly the dialogue of minor characters like school-age children and Tristram's guard at prison, are actually funny.  At the same time, Burgess rewards the educated reader (and the reader willing to educate himself by typing things into google.)  Burgess challenges you to figure out exactly what he is getting at with his cyclical theory of history, either expects you to know or to look up such esoteric words as "bathycolpous," "strabismus," and "flavicomous," and fills his text with copious literary and historical allusions of varying degrees of subtlety.  I doubtlessly missed many of them, but it is fun when you do catch such references, when Burgess's erudition overlaps your own; as a reader of Boswell and Johnson, my ears perked up when Tristram entered Lichfield, for example.  A few times I felt that Burgess was giving a shout out to science fiction readers: The Wanting Seed has many minor characters, characters who are only mentioned once, and Burgess seems to have deliberately named some of these individuals after important SF writers--an Aldiss, an Asimov, and a Heinlein all show up.
   
Not a great novel, and not the shocking horror show advertised, but a good novel, readable, thought-provoking and entertaining.

Five 1963 stories by Thomas M. Disch

Long-time readers of this here blog will perhaps recall my praise of Thomas Disch's novel On Wings of Song, his fix-up novel 334, and some of his short stories.  Followers of my twitter feed may remember that earlier this month, in South Carolina, a thousand miles away by Toyota Corolla from my Midwestern HQ, I purchased a 1971 copy of Disch's 1967 collection One Hundred and Two H-Bombs.

Besides the fine cover painting (presumably by Paul Lehr) this edition has an intro by Harry Harrison of Stainless Steel Rat and Eden fame.  Harrison describes Disch's physical appearance in the early '60s, and gives a little capsule history of the "New Wave," which he says is a poor label for the phenomenon.  As Harrison tells it, the science fiction field was in a "grey period" in the early '60s, but then a bunch of new writers, writers who had read widely of mainstream literature and travelled around the world (Disch and Harrison both spent time in London, Harrison reminds us) appeared on the scene.  These new writers were a breath of fresh air that shook the old dinosaurs of SF, whom Harrison declines to name.  According to Harrison, Disch is "about the best of this pack," a man who writes in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess, producing works that are "comic," but don't try to make you laugh out loud.

I think Disch is an exciting, challenging writer (I like his irreverent criticism as well as his fiction) and so I have really been looking forward to tackling some stories from One Hundred and Two H-Bombs.  This week I read five stories from the collection, all of which appeared in 1963, in either Amazing Stories or Fantastic Stories of Imagination. 

"Final Audit"

"Final Audit" appeared first in the July issue of Fantastic.

This is an ingenious and absurd fantasy story, set in the late nineteenth century, starring a bank auditor who has access to very specific but trivial occult information; inexplicably, he can see the figures he will write in one of his ledgers (the one covering the bank's postal expenses) 30 days before he writes them.  He tries to use this very minor predictive ability to his advantage, but with no luck.  In fact, focusing so much on this ledger stultifies his career and social life. When the ledger actually does provide valuable information (that the bank will burn down) the auditor is too obtuse to benefit by it, and, in a somewhat predictable twist ending, he causes the conflagration himself.

"False Audit" is well-written and well-constructed, and an effective spoof of or homage to stories about the ability to predict the future.  Because the story is set in a bank Disch is able to include numerous attacks on the bourgeoisie of the kind that we find so often in fiction: the stockmarket is no better than gambling, businesspeople are all callous, corrupt, and greedy, etc.

I liked it.  

"The Return of the Medusae"

"The Return of the Medusae" appeared with "The Princess's Carillon" and a third story by Disch in the August issue of Fantastic; isfdb lists all three together as components of the "Fables of the Past and Future series."

This is a clever story, less than two pages in length, that speculates on how the survivors would react if suddenly and unexpectedly everyone awake was turned to stone.  Which statues would be left intact, even decorated with flowers by grieving relatives?  Which would be smashed because they were ugly or simply in the way (think of people turned to stone while in the middle of a bowel movement)?  Would artists chisel away at the doomed, trying to improve their looks, change their expressions?  The story is convincingly written in the voice of an historian or art critic, living long after the event.

Good.

"The Princess' Carillon"

This is a farcical satire of welfare state liberalism, or of fears of welfare state liberalism, or both.  A nine-year old white princess, an orphan, is physically and psychologically abused by the regent, her uncle, but the legislature supports the regent because of his well-administered welfare program.  The little princess is sent to an integrated school, where she fears the black kids will kill her ("or worse.")  A black boy tells her he is really a prince, and will return to his "proper form and color" if the princess kisses him.  She kisses him, and he becomes a frog, whom she marries.

I tend to not like absurd satires, and I'm not getting much out of this one; there is no character or plot, no human feeling, and no point that I can really discern.  It is only two and a half pages, so I can't really argue it is a waste of time, but I'm not willing to tell you that time reading it was well spent, either.

"The Demi-Urge"

There are words that I learned at one point, but, because they don't come up very often, whose meaning I tend to forget, so that every few years, when they do come up, I have to look up.  "Defenestration" is one, and "demiurge" is another.  Maybe this story will permanently imbed "demiurge" in my porous brain.

This story, three pages long, consists of two messages, each sent by a member of a survey team from a Galactic Empire back to HQ; this team is examining our solar system, during a time when Earthlings have colonized the entire system and are preparing to travel to the stars.  One of the messages laments that the Terrans have become slaves to their Machines, and requests permission to liberate the Earth people by destroying all the Machines.  The second message is from a dissenting member of the survey team.  He asserts that those his comrades believe to be Machines are in fact the native Terrans, and those they wish to liberate the true Machines.  This mistake has been made because the Galactic Empire itself is populated by Machines, created by a race long extinct, a fact forgotten for millennia and only now evident because the Empire has stumbled upon true living beings for the first time in recorded history.  The revelation that the citizens of the Empire are not natural entities, but artificial constructions of an earlier natural race, will cause an inferiority complex that will shake the Empire's foundations.

Pretty good.  "The Demi-Urge" first appeared in the June issue of Amazing and is now available at Gutenberg.org.

"Utopia? Never!"

Utopias and utopianism are common topics in science fiction--during the life of this blog I have read stories by Theodore Sturgeon and Edgar Pangborn which present utopias, as well as stories by Clare Winger Harris, R. A. Lafferty, and Tanith Lee that express skepticism of utopianism.  I was intrigued by the title of this three-page story, curious to see how Disch would engage with the idea of Utopia in this short format.

I was a little disappointed; this is an entertaining story, but little more than a twist-ending thriller kind of thing.  The planet of New Katanga (the name is a clue to what is going on), called "Utopia" by its inhabitants, has great wealth, because it exports the finest fleece in the galaxy.  Due to a secret process, the "gobblers" raised on New Katanga have much better fleece than gobblers raised on other planets.  This monopoly produces enough money for the Utopians to live lives of ease, dining on the finest cuisine in the galaxy, surrounded by beautiful architecture.

The overt theme of the story is voiced by a tourist visiting the planet, who declares that a utopia is impossible: "'There's always a fly in the ointment...Injustice is a part of human nature.  A society can't do without it.'"  This is the kind of pessimism we have every right to expect from the author of 334!   Despite his skepticism, the tourist is enjoying his visit, and jumps at the chance to become a citizen of New Katanga.  Then it is revealed how the Utopians produce such fine gobbler fleece--immigrants are fed alive to the gobblers!  It is a diet of human flesh which makes the gobbler fleece of New Katanga so fine.  The evil behind New Katanga is made explicit when we (and the tourist) discover that the gobblers are fed in a Roman-style arena, before rapt crowds of spectators.

Presumably this is yet another literary attack on successful businesspeople; the Katangans make their profits and finance their high lifestyle through monopoly and murder.  It also reminded me of the dream sequence in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, in which scenes of a utopia are followed by a vision of human sacrifice.
   
An acceptable entertainment.  "Utopia? Never!" first appeared in Amazing's August issue.

***********

A pretty good selection; 1963 was evidently a good year for Disch and his fans.  "The Return of the Medusae" and "The Demi-Urge," in particular, are models of good "short-shorts;" they offer striking ideas and are imbued with emotional content and psychological insight.  "Final Audit" and "Utopia? Never!" are well-put-together and entertaining.  As for "The Princess' Carillon," well, you can't win them all.

More stories from One Hundred and Two H-Bombs in our next episode!

Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

London!  Mile after mile of mean lonely houses, let off in flats and single rooms; not homes, not communities, just clusters of meaningless lives drifting in a sort of drowsy chaos to the grave!  He saw men as corpses walking.  The thought that he was merely objectifying his own inner misery hardly troubled him.  His mind went back to Wednesday afternoon, when he had desired to hear the enemy aeroplanes zooming over London.   

During my ill-fated pursuit of a doctorate in History I had a class on Modern Britain.  The professor was an expert on the press and publishing industry, and one class session was devoted to George Orwell.  I read Down and Out in London and Paris and Road to Wigan Pier for this session, both of which I heartily recommend for being well-written, interesting, and fun.  (I'd read 1984 and Animal Farm in junior high, and remembered them well enough that I thought I could wing it in class if the prof asked me about them.)  A woman in the class mentioned Keep the Aspidistra Flying, warning us all it was very bad and nobody should read it. Inquiries as to why it was so bad yielded no details--"It is just bad," she assured us.

This exchange stuck in my mind due to its mysteriousness; why did this student object so heartily to Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and with so little specificity?  Years later, I guess in the early 2000s, I read the novel myself, and developed theories as to what about the novel had inspired her distaste.  I found the novel quite good, and recently decided to reread it.  Last week, during rare moments of solitude on a cross-country road trip, I read an old hardcover university library copy of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, published by Harcourt, Brace and Company and printed in the USA.  The novel first appeared in 1936.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying is one of those novels in which an artist or writer has no money and is struggling to survive and achieve recognition for his art.  There are lots of these out there; Henry Miller's oeuvre comes to mind, as does Charles Bukowski's. There's also Knut Hamsun's Hunger.  Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage also includes some of this kind of material.  Even though these books are pretty thick on the ground, I tend to fall for them; there is something about the idea of the down and out writer, railing against society and counting his pennies, unsure of what tomorrow might bring, that appeals to me.

Prefacing the text proper of Keep the Aspidistra Flying is half a page of Bible verses, I Corinthians xiii, with the word "love" replaced with "money" (e.g., "abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money"), a childish sort of joke that gives us a foretaste of the book's theme.

Gordon Comstock, our hero, is an unsuccessful poet, "aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten already," consumed with envy of those with money, and convinced that everything worth having--charm, love, sex, a successful career--is the product of access to money:  "It was the lack of money, simply the lack of money, that robbed him of the power to 'write.'  He clung to that as an article of faith."  "All human relationships must be purchased with money.  If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you...."  The first two dozen pages are full of lines like that, as well as descriptions of Gordon toying with the coins in his pocket and fretting because he can't afford as many cigarettes as he would like to smoke, and so has to ration them out, resist smoking some today so he won't have to face a day without tobacco on the morrow.

One of the things I enjoy about Miller's and Bukowski's stories about down and out artists and writers is how the protagonists are total and absolute jerks.  They may rail against the evils of the world or capitalism or society or whatever, but they are no better-- they steal, they abuse women, they take advantage of friends, and so on.  This sets up dramatic tension, as the reader has to wonder to what extent the impoverished artist is the victim of our allegedly horrible society, and to what extent he has made his own bad luck.  (It also matches the reality of writers and artists I have met, a disreputable and snobbish lot who are always taking advantage of people, taking temporary jobs at art supply stores or bookstores so they can steal supplies, and moaning that the taxpayers should subsidize their decadent lifestyles because the art-buying public is too obtuse to voluntarily part with their lucre--which the artist himself of course has contempt for--to buy their paintings and sculptures.)

Gordon Comstock fits comfortably into this mold; he hates everybody and everything, from the advertisements pasted on the walls, to the books in the bookstore and lending library where he works, to the customers of the store, who come in two types; the educated snobs he hates for their money and polish, and the middle-class and lower-class readers of thrillers and romances whom he despises for their lack of taste and refinement. Comstock even hates Greta Garbo and Arthur Rackham!  He is so angry at the modern world that he looks forward to the inevitable mass war that will see bombers blasting civilization to rubble!  Gordon's seething hatred, his inexhaustible store of criticisms, complaints and calumnies, is amusing; some specimens of his spleen are funny in their own right, and the sheer volume of off-the-wall complaints creates, in Gordon, a laughably absurd, but still quite real, character.

Through flashbacks about his family and exemplary episodes chronicling Gordon's relationships in the mid-1930s with such people as his friend Ravelston (a wealthy and ineffectual socialist who edits a leftist periodical nobody reads called Antichrist), his long time girlfriend and office worker Rosemary (they have been dating two years and have not had sex yet), and his sister Julia (she barely makes a living for herself, but has been lending Gordon money for years which he has never paid back), we learn the hows and whys of Gordon's poverty.  As we expected, he has made his own bed, but blames society for his troubles.  When he does get fifty American dollars from selling a poem he doesn't use it to buy new clothes or pay back his sister Julia; he blows it all on booze and a whore within hours of cashing the check!  He blames this selfish and idiotic behavior on the fact that he can't be expected to know how to wisely spend money because he's never had money before.  When Gordon had a decent job he was good at (as copywriter at the ad agency where he met Rosemary) he quit, a decision he rationalizes as "declaring war on the money god."  He never finishes his second book of poetry because he's "too crushed by poverty to write." And so on.

Things get worse for Gordon as the novel progresses; he loses his crummy flat and lame job at the bookstore and lending library after, while inebriated, punching a police officer, so he has to take an even crummier apartment and an even lamer job at an even worse lending library, one which only caters to the lowest dregs of society, providing them books which are"published by special low-class firms and turned out by wretched hacks at a rate of four a year, as mechanically as sausages...."

Eventually, Rosemary has sex with Gordon out of pity.  ("It was magnanimity, pure magnanimity, that moved her.  His wretchedness had drawn her back to him.")  When Rosemary turns up some weeks later with news that she is pregnant with his child, Gordon suddenly comes to his senses. He abandons his war on the money-god, gets his job at the ad agency back, throws the unfinished manuscript of his second book of verse down a storm drain, and marries Rosemary. After resisting bourgeois life and its rules for years, the appearance of his child has inspired him to embrace middle-class life. To Rosemary's amazement, he even buys an aspidistra, the hardy plant which to him has long symbolized boring middle-class pretensions.

There is a lot to like about Keep the Aspidistra Flying.  I've already told you I enjoy Gordon acting like a total jerk to everybody.  Numerous minor characters are also entertaining.  At the same time that Gordon's misadventures are funny, Orwell manages to convey to the reader a sense of his desperation and frustration as he faces cold and uncomfortable residences, doubts about his poetry career, boring jobs, and guilt at how poorly he treats Ravelston, Rosemary and Julia, who are always trying to help him despite his trespases against them and his self-destructive behavior.  The book is also full of interesting tidbits about literature and literary life, like a quick rundown of authors popular in the 1930s, many of whom are largely forgotten today, and a description of lending libraries, which, unlike the free public libraries I have been familiar with all my life, are private businesses that charge a few pennies to their customers for each book "borrowed." 

Orwell makes a number of surprising and interesting choices with the novel.  It is definitely strange for Gordon to throw his manuscript, the product of years of work, down the drain!  We expect writers to glorify writers, and we expect lefties like Orwell to denounce advertising, but in the end of the book Gordon turns his back on literature decisively and embraces a job producing deceptive ad copy.  Orwell's attacks on advertising seem sincere, so the reader wonders what he is trying to say by having Gordon's salvation come from producing catchphrases and slogans that will fool people into purchasing items they don't need, like foot deodorant.  (Deodorant, like advertising, is apparently a hot button issue with socialists; at Rutgers a history prof in a 19th century class told us that the selling of deodorant was a scam, and just recently we had Bernie Sanders disparagingly bringing up deodorant.  At the CUNY Grad Center there was a perennially disheveled Marxist prof who famously smelled bad.)

There is a real ambiguity about the book's attitude about capitalism and the bourgeoisie; to what extent does Orwell share the at times contradictory criticisms he puts in Gordon and Ravelston's mouths?  Should we see Keep the Aspidistra Flying as the story of a man who is stupidly rebelling against capitalism and then makes his peace with it and lives a better life thereby, or as the story of a brave man who follows his principles as long as he can, and is eventually crushed?  This ambiguity is stark when one considers that Gordon's character arc is similar to that of Winston Smith in 1984; Smith wages a (pathetic) war on the Big Brother government, and in the end of the novel embraces ("loves") Big Brother, while our man Gordon Comstock pursues his own quixotic struggle against "the money god" only to rejoin the ranks of the strap hanging army of salarymen at the end of the book because he loves his wife and baby.

Besides 1984, Keep the Aspidistra Flying reminded me of Don Quixote, the tale of a mad man sometimes seen as the portrayal of a man who suffers (and makes others suffer) because he has noble values in our corrupt world, and A Clockwork Orange, in which the evil protagonist is reformed by the prospect of becoming a father.
     

So, if I am giving a big thumbs up to it, why did that student in my late 1990s class object to the novel?  I'm guessing it is because the book is a resounding endorsement of traditional family values and, by 1990s (and 21st century) standards, totally "politically incorrect."  In that first chapter in the bookstore Gordon heaps scorn on feminists, homosexuals, and women who like to read popular fiction about love and sex.  The book is full of what I guess you would call "essentialist thinking."  Gordon, like "all small frail people hated to be touched," while we are told fat men typically have a good humor and never admit to being fat: "No fat person ever uses the word 'fat' if there is any way of avoiding it....A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as 'robust.'"  Scots get a similar treatment.  Gordon's competition for title of "Most Villainous Character" in the novel is a physically deformed businessman of low scruples; his physical ugliness represents his moral ugliness in a way that is common in literature, but which nowadays is likely to be seen as declasse or even a "microaggression" against people with disabilities.  

At the end of the book we get an unambiguous, unalloyed indictment of abortion. First the emotional case against abortion.  Gordon, even though his modus operandi though the whole novel has been to act selfishly and to hope English society will be obliterated by enemy bombs, finds abortion unthinkably revolting: "'Whatever happens we're not going to do that.  It's disgusting....I'd sooner cut my right hand off than do a thing like that.'"  Then a few pages later the scientific case against abortion. Gordon goes to a public library and looks at medical textbooks with illustrations of fetuses; Orwell describes in detail a six-month-old and a nine-month-old fetus--Gordon is "surprised" that "they should begin looking human so soon."  He'd thought it would look like a blob with a nucleus!  Finally the moral case against abortion.  "Its future, its continued existence perhaps, depended on him.  Besides, it was a bit of himself--it was himself.  Dare one dodge such a responsibility as that?"

Women in the novel are less interesting and well-rounded than the male characters; there are briefly sketched women we are supposed to find repellant (the feminist bookstore customer, a suspicious public library employee, the whores, or "tarts" as Orwell styles them), while the important female characters (Julia and Rosemary) are there to be Gordon's victims; they are there to demonstrate what a creep Gordon is and lack inherent interest.  Gordon is not punished for treating Julia and Rosemary so poorly, and a minor character (the good-natured fat man alluded to above) cheats on his wife repeatedly, but after hitting him in the head with a glass decanter she takes him back.  

I believe I have diagnosed my former classmate's allergy to Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and I "get" why she wouldn't like it or recommend it to a class of grad students in the humanities and social sciences, but I will have to disagree with her overall assessment of the book.  I love Orwell's clear writing style, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a fun novel, full of laughs and period interest, and its somewhat ambiguous and idiosyncratic take on social and political issues may offer surprises to today's readers.  Definitely worth a read.

Lallia by E. C. Tubb

For Christmas my brother got me an iTunes gift card.  I don't listen to a lot of new music, and when I do, its on YouTube (I guess I am vulnerable to the charge of stealing the food right out of poor Hope Sandoval's mouth.)  So I recently used the credit to purchase from Gateway e-books of some of E. C. Tubb's Dumarest novels.  Today I finished Lallia, the sixth Dumarest adventure, reading it on my iPhone.

I won't deny that I would rather have a paperback copy of Lallia (in particular I am always curious about the interior illustrations you find in Ace Doubles), but I've not seen one in a used bookstore, and for price and convenience, the Gateway digital edition beat out Amazon and Abebooks' used copies.

The Gateway edition of Lallia has a blurb on its cover from Michael Moorcock.  As those of you who follow my every move are aware, it is just such a Moorcock comment about Tubb that led me to start reading the Dumarest books in the first place.  I certainly agree that the Dumarest books are "fast-moving and colourful."  Another reason Moorcock, who describes himself as an "anarchist," has famously attacked more conservative writers like J. R. R. Tolkein, Robert Heinlein, and C. S. Lewis, and has engaged in what you might call feminist literary activism (revising his own work to be more sensitive to womens' issues, and trying to stigmatize and marginalize John Norman's Gor books), might appreciate the Dumarest series is that Tubb populates them with callous aristocrats, greedy businessmen, and manipulative intellectuals, as well as the legions of poor desperate people who suffer from their indifference and exploitation.

The other four Dumarest books I have read have included secondary plots about competing elites who enlist Dumarest in their struggles, but in Lallia it's all Dumarest; I think he appears in every scene. Dumarest, as part of his quest across the galaxy in search of Earth, a planet most people see as a fiction, joins the crew of a small space ship.  This ship, the Moray, is bad news. The ship's captain tries to make a profit by carrying cargo and passengers between planets, but they are just barely getting by, and don't even have the money to keep the ship clean and properly maintain its systems.  Tubb pithily characterizes each member of the doomed Moray's crew; the captain, who is horrified of space and indulges in the use of an alien symbiote that provides him vivid dreams, the dipsomaniac engineer who puts everyone at risk by getting drunk when he should be carefully tending to the sensitive hyperspace drive, the naive young steward who doesn't know what he has gotten himself into by signing up.

One of the themes of the Dumarest books which I haven't mentioned in earlier blog posts is religion.  In every book the bizarre Cyclan, a galaxy-wide organization of scarlet-robe-clad geniuses who have had brain surgery to disable all emotion, appear.  The members of the Cyclan use their fantastic mathematical ability and ice cold logic to manipulate others and increase their influence.  The foil of the Cyclan is the Church of Universal Brotherhood; they have also appeared in all the Dumarest books I have read.  The members of the Church try to help the poor and wretched, giving them food, helping them negotiate with the middle class for jobs and medical care, that sort of thing.  Tubb (at least in the books I have read) has always portrayed the Church monks as selfless and sincere, but there is a Clockwork Orange aspect to the Church; those who accept food from the monks are expected to kneel before the "benediction light," which conditions them hypnotically with the command "thou shalt not kill."  (You can believe that Dumarest, who regularly finds himself fighting for his life against assassins, gladiators, and monsters, has never knelt before the benediction light.)

Religion takes center stage in Lallia.  The most responsible and sympathetic of the crew of the Moray is the navigator, who is a student of ancient religions and a committed believer.  One of the planets the Moray lands on is home to a primitivist "back-to-nature" sect that considers metal "a thing of the Evil One" and uses only wooden and stone implements.  In the end of the novel the ship crashes on a planet called Shrine, the destination of scores of sick or deformed pilgrims.  These people seek a miraculous cure, and sometimes receive it, for on Shrine is an ancient alien artifact which nobody understands, but which truly has healing properties.  Tubb's view of religion is nuanced, and each character, through his words and actions, evinces a different attitude towards religion, and we see religion employed as a tool to dominate others, as a comfort to those in trouble, and as an inspiration to perform good works.

This may be a book in which the author presents views about religion, but primarily Lallia is still an adventure story.  As in earlier volumes, Dumarest ends up fighting for his life as a gladiator and rescuing a beautiful woman who has psychic powers.  He also has to contend with a Cyclan assassin; the Cyclan is still trying to retrieve the ring that book 4's beautiful psychic woman, Kalin, gave him, a ring which has encoded within it a priceless technological secret.  Lallia also moves the plot of Dumarest's saga forward; when he touches the artifact on Shrine Dumarest receives a vision of the galaxy, with the region where Earth lies highlighted.  

Another solid Dumarest adventure; interesting characters, strange creatures and technology, plenty of violence and tragedy.  Next up on my iPhone, Technos, the seventh Dumarest caper.