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Through the dark labyrinth

Tag Archives: Michael Chabon

A Better Place

25 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, history of ideas

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Brian Aldiss, H.G. Wells, Iain Banks, Michael Chabon, Roger Penrose, Thomas More, Ursula K. Le Guin, Utopia

Two roads converged in a dark wood.

Or, to be more accurate, two pieces of reading converged in the darkness of my mind. They are distinct pieces, unrelated, but the coincidence of reading them at about the same time untethered connections that, I suppose, have meaning to me more than anyone else.

The first was an essay in the Paris Review: Michael Chabon writing about Ursula K. Le Guin. What struck me in this essay was when Chabon talks about Le Guin’s attitude towards reading, and literacy in general. For Le Guin, Chabon tells us, literacy was “defined not simply as the capacity to read a text but as a means of training the imagination—and ultimately of constructing an authentic self—through sustained encounter with literary art.” In other words, literacy and imagination are the same thing: to read is to imagine; and it is through our imaginations that we become who we are.

Taking the next step, therefore, the function of any piece of writing, fiction or non-fiction, is to excite and exploit that imagination. Literature that does not engage the reader imaginatively, that does not make us think, see, wonder, learn, enjoy, is failing in its most basic purpose as a piece of literature.

Which takes me onto that second road, a novel I was reading before I chanced upon that Chabon essay, and that I have finished reading now only after having put aside the essay. This is White Mars, written by Brian Aldiss in collaboration with Roger Penrose. Now, it has to be said that Aldiss could be, shall we say, hit and miss as a writer. He wrote a number of things that were extraordinarily good: beautiful, vivid, engaging. But he also wrote a number of things that were simply bad. However, this is the only one of his novels that is not just bad, it is dull. It is only as you engage with the tedium of this book that you realise that even novels that were catastrophically bad, like The Eighty Minute Hour, were never actually boring.

But it is not the faults of White Mars as an individual novel that concern me here, but rather as an exemplar of a type of novel.

White Mars, which came out in 1999, is a utopia. In fact it is a utopia of an almost classic form, a form that generally hadn’t been written throughout the preceding century. The model of the classic utopia stems from Thomas More’s ur-text: the perfect society has been established some time before in the image of its progenitor, King Utopus or his avatar, and has since remained fairly static as a society since once perfection has been achieved there is nowhere else to go. H.G. Wells began to challenge that formulation at the beginning of the 20th century with A Modern Utopia, which suggested that utopia was not a destination but a process. Wells would continue to develop this notion in his subsequent utopia writings, such as The Shape of Things to Come, but already the environment in which utopias prospered had been changed. The technological consequences of modernism, evident in the First World War, made people start to distrust the future. And then we saw the brutal and authoritarian consequences of utopian political aspirations in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, militaristic Japan, China, Italy, Spain and elsewhere. Utopia gave way to dystopia as a vision of the planned society.

One of the things that is odd about White Mars is that it is a utopia at at time when the dystopia is in full flood. The few utopias that were being written were ambivalent about the notion (Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia or more tellingly “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”), or imagined radically changed circumstances, such as the universe of plenty in Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels. Nobody was writing the sort of guided tour of the institutions that were making everybody’s life better. Oh there is some scientific hand-waving in the novel, but it is at its core the sort of political, social, cultural utopia that Wells and his predecessors used to write. The sort of book where dealing rationally with everything makes everything perfect.

Take such ideas alongside Le Guin’s dictums about how vital the imagination is, and it seems a natural fit. Shouldn’t we all find our imaginations stirred by the notion of making a better world? But in fact, it is dystopias that have better engaged with our emotions through the simple device of telling a story about someone caught in the laocoonian coils of a dystopian system. Utopias fail so often because that is precisely what they do not, what they cannot do. There is no story in utopia. There should be: imagine how exciting it is in a crime story or a science fiction story to read about someone solving a puzzle, working their way towards a position that makes sense and that makes things right. Isn’t that exactly what a utopia should be: solving a social puzzle and making it right.

But that is not the story that utopian writers (and I am definitely including Aldiss in this) have chosen to tell. Thomas More had two models to draw on for his original Utopia, the traveller’s tale typified by recent books by Amerigo Vespucci, and philosophical disquisitions typified by the work of his friend Erasmus. Those who use More as their model have concentrated almost exclusively on the traveller’s tale, and that model has barely changed in the centuries since. More presented an argument; his successors present a status quo, a fact that has to be explained, described, but not dramatised.

Aldiss (and I am assuming that Penrose’s contribution is largely connected to the handwavium concerning the search for something beyond the Higgs boson) sets the story up as if it is going to be a sort of intellectual detective story. Economic collapse on Earth leaves a small Mars colony stranded, so they have to start working out how to govern themselves. That should be fine: a succession of social issues (what to do about sex, about crime, etc) become the puzzles to which utopian thinking provides the solution. But having set the situation up, Aldiss immediately resorts to the standard utopian model of the traveller’s tale, as if that is the only way that anyone can think of presenting a utopia. So we get the puzzles, but as soon as a rational response is suggested everyone falls in with it, nothing is complexified, nothing is made dramatic. It is the besetting sin of utopian writers that they consider their own particular utopia so obvious that everyone will immediately see its rational wonderfulness. Aldiss is no different from anyone else in being unable to see why anyone might disagree with his oh-so-rational solutions.

There is imagination in utopian fiction, but the imagination is expended on the idea, not on the story. In that respect it fails Le Guin’s test: it is an engagement with the imagination of the writer, a sort of literary onanism, not with the imagination of the reader. Just as the utopian writer cannot imagine an antagonist who might, for perfectly rational reasons, work against the version of the perfect state they have just invented, so they cannot imagine a reader who will not instantly see the sense of their invention. So the classic model of a utopia is a series of showcases for different aspects of the perfect state, it does not attempt to dramatically win the reader over to the benefits of such a state. The argument is assumed to have been won before the reader even opens the book. Which is why so many utopias, and White Mars is just such a case, are dull, because the literary engagement is not an imaginative engagement.

2017 in Review

31 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books

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Anthony Gottlieb, Arthur C Clarke, Becky Chambers, Benjamin Black, books of the year, Bruce Sterling, C.J. Sansom, China Mieville, Christopher Priest, Colin Greenland, Dave Hutchinson, Edmund Crispin, Emma Chambers, Emma Newman, Gerry Canavan, Gwyneth Jones, Helen MacInnes, Iain Banks, Iain R. MacLeod, Joanna Kavenna, John Banville, John Crowley, John Kessel, John Le Carre, Judith A. Barter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Laurent Binet, Laurie Penny, Lavie Tidhar, Lily Brooks-Dalton, m john harrison, Margery Allingham, Mark Fisher, Matt Ruff, Michael Chabon, nina allan, Octavia Butler, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paul Auster, Paul Nash, Rick Wilber, Rob Latham, Steve Erickson, Stuart Jeffries, Tade Thompson, Tricia Sullivan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yoon Ha Lee

It’s that time of year again, when I dust off this oft-forgotten blog and post a list of my reading through the year, along with other odd comments.

2017 has been, in some respects, a very good year. My first full-length book not composed of previously published material, appeared in May. Iain M. Banks appeared in the series Modern Masters of Science Fiction from Illinois University Press, and has received some generally positive reviews, much to my relief.

Also this year I signed a contract with Gylphi to write a book about Christopher Priest, which is likely to take most if not all of the next year. In addition, I’ve put in a proposal for another volume in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction; the initial response has been quite good so I’m hoping I’ll have more to report in the new year. So, in work terms, it looks like the next couple of years are pretty much taken care of. Continue reading →

Astonishing Stories

13 Saturday Aug 2011

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

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Ayelet Waldman, Charles D'Ambrosio, China Mieville, Daniel Handler, David Mitchell, Heidi Julavits, Jason Roberts, Jonathan Lethem, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Peter Straub, Poppy Z. Brite, Roddy Doyle, Stephen King, Steve Erickson

Let us assume, just for a moment, that ‘genre’ delineates a mode of story rather than a mode of telling, in other words that it refers to science fiction and romance and crime and the like rather than to prose and poetry and drama. With me so far? Let us, then, also imagine that there are two approaches to genre. For the sake of argument I shall call them the ‘resident’ and the ‘visitor’ approaches. Those of us who are ‘resident’ in a genre, its habituees, its authors and critics and devoted readers, want the genre to grow and live and change. Thus, although we delight in familiar landmarks, we also like exploring new neighbourhoods, new ways of doing the genre, because that is what keeps it fresh. Those who are visitors to the genre, however, here to see the sights, want it to stay the same because they are here only to see the familiar landmarks, indeed they define the genre in terms of those landmarks, they orient themselves on those landmarks (TM Maureen). Anything that does not conform to the pattern set by those landmarks is not noticed by the visitor because, by definition, it is not what drew them to the genre in the first place. The residents are happy to see change, the visitors are in search of the static. Continue reading →

Five books

12 Friday Aug 2011

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

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David Hajdu, Mark Z. Danielewski, Michael Chabon, Monty Python, Thomas Wharton

Salamander by Thomas Wharton (2001, Washington Square Press 2002) – A clever work in the postmodern mode that normally I would enjoy, but I found this a little disappointing. I think it was because the cold surface mechanic was allowed to swamp the emotional story underneath. It is actually a series of tales within tales, some of which work, such as the journey of a fake mechanical man through 18th century China, but others don’t. We open at the siege of Montreal on the evening before the British scale the Heights of Abraham. A French officer comes across the ruin of a bookshop, and settles down to talk to the woman who owned it. She starts telling a story which is our true framing narrative. An eccentric Austro-Hungarian nobleman builds a fantastical castle inside which everything, including walls and fittings, moves by elaborate clockwork. To find your way around this castle you don’t need a map, you need a timetable. To this castle comes an English printer who specialises in producing novelty books, he is commissioned to print an infinite book (Wharton does not wear the influence of Borges at all lightly). As he sets about his task he falls in love with the nobleman’s daughter. The two share just four illicit nights before the nobleman discovers them and imprisons the printer in the bowels of the castle. Years pass, the daughter is delivered of a daughter of her own, who is locked up from birth in a Venetian nunnery. Eventually the old nobleman dies, the girl, now grown to adulthood, escapes the convent and returns to the castle where she releases the printer, her father. The two then set out in a curious ship to sail the world in order to complete the infinite book and at the same time find the printer’s lover who has long since gone missing. The journey takes them by a lunatic route to remote Pacific islands, to China, to Egypt, to the Arctic icefields and finally to London. Along the way they have a series of bizarre adventures, are told even more bizarre tales, and amass the rare Chinese paper, the curious Venetian printing frame, the unique ink that will allow them to print the book. Finally in London they briefly meet again with the printer’s lover, but what should have been the culmination of an epic doomed love affair is treated as if it has no emotional impact whatsoever, and that’s where I fall out with the novel: it is clever but it has no heart.

The Pythons Autobiography by The Pythons (2003, Orion) – During the 1960s, while I was growing up, it was a classic period for comedy. I was slightly too young to have anything but a secondhand or belated awareness of the granddaddy of them all, The Goons, but I was very well aware of That Was The Week That Was (in various incarnations) and what seemed like its natural successor, The Frost Report. Such shows started to familiarise me with a particular group of performers: Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett and John Cleese who did the classic three classes sketches on the Frost programme, for instance; and others like Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie, Michael Palin and so on. Some of these names and others started to crop up in less satirical, more surreal shows such as At Last The 1948 Show, Do Not Adjust Your Set, and, on radio, I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again (I still find myself singing the Angus Prune Tune at regular intervals, and can quote lines from the show – ‘They came upon a man-eating tiger. Hmm, tasty.’ – after getting on for 40 years). Then, in 1969, the funniest members of the 1948 Show team and the funniest members of the Do Not Adjust Your Set team got together for a new show, which I remember going out fairly late at night and with little fanfare. Fortunately, as an obnoxious teenager I pretty well had control of what we watched in our house, and despite constant expressions of bemusement and dislike from my parents I religiously watched every episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. For years after, particularly once I got into fandom, I kept encountering people who could (and would) recite entire Monty Python sketches at every conceivable occasion. Let’s face it, even when done for the 20th time by a distinctly inebriated John Jarrold, the Dead Parrot Sketch is still funny. This ‘autobiography’ (an inordinately heavy coffee-table book with loads of photographs) has been constructed from what appear to have been long interviews with the different members of the team (including extracts from previously published material by Graham Chapman along with interviews with his lover, David Sherlock, and his brother and sister-in-law), none of whom seem to have been aware of what any of the others were saying. These have then been spliced together to form a more-or-less chronological account of the period from University to The Meaning of Life. It’s odd how many of them seem to have been the one who finally came up with the name Monty Python, and how often key incidents are recalled very differently, sometimes apparently taking place in different countries. Some of the things we were aware of vaguely, or learned a little about later, such as Chapman’s alcoholism and the near open warfare between Cleese and Jones, become much clearer here. In fact as a joint biography the book works extraordinarily well, and feels a lot deeper and more honest that such efforts usually are. At the end of the day I found that Eric Idle, the Python I had always liked least, was the one I had most respect for.

Positively 4th Street by David Hajdu (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001) and Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan (Simon & Schuster, 2004) – These two books resonate off each other interestingly. The Hajdu is subtitled: ‘The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina’ and basically covers their rise to fame from Joan Baez’s first performances in Cambridge to Richard Farina’s death in a motorcycle accident on the day his novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, was published, a fairly intense period of little more than seven years. None of the four come across particularly well. Baez is seen to be ruthless in her pursuit of fame right from the start; Dylan at first seems a pleasant innocent, but as his own fame grows he seems even more ruthlessly unpleasant than Baez; Mimi Farina is a rather colourless child shaped by those around her rather than her own will; while Richard Farina is a lier and a fantasist who somehow became more charming and attractive the closer he came to achieving his ambition of getting a book published. Although the book doesn’t venture into the period when I really got into the music of both Baez and Dylan, it is still a nostalgia-fest for that long forgotten period when folk music somehow seemed to collide with politics and with rock and roll. There are some fascinating little asides in here, too, such as the fact that the best man at the marriage of Richard and Mimi Farina was Thomas Pynchon. Much of Dylan’s book overlaps with the early part of the Hajdu (the construction of this book does not follow a chronological pattern, after two opening chapters centred on the time Dylan arrived in New York in 1961 the story shifts to the period of ‘New Morning’ at the end of the decade, then shifts again to the recording of ‘Oh Mercy’ in the mid-80s, before dropping back to 1961; whether subsequent volumes will allow us to construct a single coherent narrative I rather doubt). I am mystified by the number of people who have rated this as one of their books of the year; it is far better written than most of the other attempts at prose I’ve seen from Dylan, but it is no masterpiece. And comparing it with the Hajdu, you get the impression that Dylan is no more telling the full truth here than he has in any of his other accounts of hife, while at the same time it looks like Hajdu is misinterpreting Dylan’s behaviour in the worst light possible. Dylan is very much in control of what he reveals about himself, but at the same time there is a suggestion undercutting the story that I think is not put there consciously. Time and again you get the impression that Dylan becomes bored or unhappy with his life and so reinvents himself, but then becomes unhappy that others expect him to conform to his new character and runs away to reinvent himself again. This sense of flight from what he is making of himself, an oft-repeated quest for a ‘freedom’ that he never seems able to identify, is a motif that recurs throughout the book but is nowhere explicit.

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon (4th Estate, 2004) – Chabon has become restless with genre. Having moved significantly towards genre with Kavalier and Clay, he has since relentlessly moved from genre to genre. Having tried fantasy with Summerland and alternate history with the story that began in McSweeney’s and which is apparently due to be his next novel, this novella plays with the detective story. It is not, however, a straightforward engagement with the genre, even though he goes back to its most iconic figure. The central character in this rather charming story is an unnamed Sherlock Holmes, but it is an 89-year-old Holmes who has, for 40 years, tended his bees in Sussex, a Holmes who lives alone, receives no visitors, and worries more than anything about the debilitations of his great age. It is 1944, the war is on, and outside his home on the Sussex Downs the retired detective meets a small boy who does not speak, but who bears a parrot which repeats sequences of numbers in German. Then a man is killed, the parrot disappears, and Holmes reluctantly finds himself drawn into the investigation; though what interests him most is not the murder but the disappearance of the parrot. The puzzle is slight, and the mystery of the numbers, which relates to train numbers heading for Auschwitz, remains unsolved (we can guess the answer only from a chapter daringly told from the point of view of the parrot), but Chabon plays fair with the detective element even if it is clear his interest lies more with the characters than their stories. In fact the only thing that niggled in an otherwise delightful work was the constant mention of zips when I’m sure most clothing would have been buttoned.

The Whalestoe Letters by Mark Z. Danielewski (Pantheon, 2000) – As I said repeatedly at the time, Mark Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves was one of the most dazzling works of fiction of the last decade. In a book full of invention, typographical play, cross-references and general weirdness, one of the things that stood out was an appendix devoted to a sequence of letters from the hero’s mother sent (or at least written) during her final years in an insane asylum. Reminiscent, in an odd way, of Flowers for Algernon, the way these letters charted the breakdown of her mind was one of the most touching and humane things I have read for a long time. Danielewski has also abstracted those letters from the novel, added a handful more and some other material, bulking the whole thing out to form this short book. While I suspect they would not mean a thing to anyone who was not already a devotee of House of Leaves, they do work surprisingly well on their own. Tragic, bitter and comic all at once, the sense of watching a real mind fall apart with suspicions and confusions is uncomfortable and moving. The existence of this slim volume suggests that Danielewski may not be able to move away from House of Leaves, at least for some time; nevertheless, it also demonstrates what a genuine talent he has.

First published at Livejournal, 29 December 2004.

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