Boundaries

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Andrei Tarkovsky, Christopher Priest, M. John Harrison, Maureen Kincaid Speller, nina allan, Robert Holdstock, Steve Erickson

[This is, I suppose, a place holder for something I may want to explore at greater length elsewhere. But for now …]

I don’t normally listen to podcasts, I suppose I tend to be visually rather than aurally directed. But Maureen insisted that I should listen to an episode of Weird Studies, to be precise, Episode 81: Gnostic Lit: On M. John Harrison’s ‘The Course of the Heart’. She said I would enjoy it; she was absolutely right. In a sense it amplifies and runs variations on some of the things I was talking about when I discussed The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again a little while ago.

One of the things that caught my attention was an opening discussion about zones, specifically referring to Tarkovsky’s Stalker. (The two people hosting the podcast don’t seem to be overly familiar with Harrison’s other work, so they completely miss how closely this relates to the middle volume in his Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, Nova Swing. A pity, that could have opened up a much wider and even more complex discussion.) But I found myself thinking less of the zones, however we might choose to characterise them, than of the boundaries between zones. And I realised how much of my favourite literature, the literature that for me best exemplifies the fantastic, is specifically concerned with the identification and the examination of such boundaries.

Harrison is, of course, the prime example here. The Course of the Heart concerns the relationship between mundane reality and the pleroma, here identified as the vanished land of the Coeur. Typically, the pleroma is not real and its achievement is more associated with loss than with achievement, so in Nova Swing the story moves between everyday disappointment and the unfulfilled promise of the pleroma-like zone. Exactly the same dynamic is there in The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, as it is in stories like “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium” or, more recently, “In Autotelia”.

But it is not just Harrison who explores this boundary between the worlds. Think, for instance, of Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock. The edge of Ryhope Wood is exactly the sort of border between Saubade and the zone that we encounter in Nova Swing. Crossing that border, entering the wood, is less a journey into a land of myth than it is into a land of promise.

Or there is the boundary between England and the Dream Archipelago in Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation. It is not just that these are two sides of a shattered mind, it is that each is a realm of promise. To Peter Sinclair in Britain, the Dream Archipelago is the longed-for but ultimately unsatisfying pleroma; to Peter Sinclair in the Dream Archipelago, it is the other way round. As the boundaries between the two worlds become ever more porous, so the other land becomes more expressly the dream that is unfulfilled, the desire that is unsatisfied.

And there are others. The sister who disappears and then, perhaps, reappears, crosses one way and then the other across this very boundary in Nina Allan’s The Rift. The multiple Americas of Steve Erickson’s Rubicon Beach are separated one from the other by just such a boundary.

Of course, and it is probably rather bathetic to point this out, identifying and crossing such a boundary is commonly figured as an act of creativity. The two Peter Sinclairs are both writers, the secret of Ryhope Wood is first revealed in the pages of a diary, the story of the Coeur is imagined into life in the stories that one character tells to another. But still I can’t help thinking there is something here, something that might repay further consideration. Something to ponder upon further, I suspect.

The Same River Twice

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Steve Erickson, Ted Mooney

I can’t actually remember reading Ted Mooney’s first novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets. I know there was a lot of buzz about the book. I have a copy of the UK paperback, which came out in 1983, so I must have read it around then. The thing is, it is one of those books that once you’ve read it it feels like it has always been part of your reading history: I must have read it long, long ago, back in the 1970s, or the 1960s. That sort of book, the effect stays with you, even if you can’t always remember the details.

So Ted Mooney automatically became a member of that small select group of writers I was going to keep looking out for. Except there wasn’t anything to look for. Years went by; no new Ted Mooney.

Then, out of nowhere, when I had almost given up, I came across a new novel, Traffic and Laughter, (1990). Was this even the same Ted Mooney? It felt very different, and to be honest it didn’t work for me as well as its predecessor. But it was still something to read eagerly and happily.

Then more silence, until a third novel right at the end of the decade: Singing Into the Piano (1998). I think I must have happened across this novel during one of my trips to America early in the new century, because I have a distinct memory of reading it while sitting outside a coffee shop in Oakland. Maybe it was the setting, but this novel hit the spot. My latent addiction to Mooney’s work was reawakened.

Except there was nothing to feed that addiction.

For most of the next twenty years I was convinced that Singing Into the Piano was his last work. There was no more. Had he died? Until earlier this year when a friend mentioned, in passing, that he had come across a Ted Mooney novel he hadn’t known about before. I did an eager, anxious search, and there it was: The Same River Twice (I love that title). And it came out in 2010, for heaven’s sake; why had I not heard about this before now? (After I’d bought the book but before I read it, I encountered Ted Mooney on Facebook, and we’ve exchanged the odd comment since then, so I can say definitively that he ain’t dead yet.)

The Same River Twice is the sort of book you read as a slow, luxurious immersion, there’s no rush, you read slowly because you want to savour it. It is also, I think, perhaps his best novel. (Yes, yes, I know, but I think it may be even better than Easy Travel to Other Planets.)

It is a novel absolutely jam-packed with plot. Yet the plots interweave so subtly between the vivid, engaging characters, the everyday domesticity of their lives, and the startling sense of place, that for a long time you forget how much is going on in this book.

It starts with Odile, a French fashion designer who, for a little extra cash, has agreed to undertake a smuggling trip to Moscow. There, on the black market, she buys a number of gorgeous Soviet-era banners. The Russian government has forbidden their export as cultural artefacts, but Odile has agreed to smuggle them out for Turner, a Paris-based art expert who reckons he should be able to sell them for millions. All goes well, but as she safely crosses the border with her illegal baggage, her companion on the trip, Thierry, disappears.

Back in Paris, Odile returns to her normal life, designing a wedding dress for a non-practising Moslem woman, while Turner discovers that he may have under-estimated how much the Soviet banners would go for on the Western art market. But the even tenor of their lives is unsettled. Odile’s home is searched, while Turner receives enigmatic warnings from a Russian oligarch who is one of his best customers. As the storm clouds gather, Odile and Turner start an affair.

Alongside all of this, but unaware of any of it, Odile’s husband, Max, is an avant garde film-maker with serious, uncompromising intent: he insists on filming only in available light, he prefers to use non-actors, and his work blurs the line between drama and documentary. He has embarked on a film that follows the story of two of his and Odile’s friends, Groot and Rachel, who are busily restoring a century-old Dutch barge on the Seine.

One of Max’s recent films had been an unexpected hit, but he has discovered that there are pirate DVDs of the film in which the ending has been subtly changed in a way that changes the perception of the whole of the rest of the film. This is actually a relatively minor part of the novel, but I found myself intrigued by it because it made me think of something that Steve Erickson might do. Although I suspect that Erickson would take the idea in a very different direction.

Investigating the piracy leads Max to a petty criminal who has just been murdered, and then to a plot to use DVDs to store and smuggle DNA. This, in turn, leads him into the orbit of the Russian oligarch. And the centre of this curious web is Thierry, who resurfaces late in the novel having smuggled an important scientist out of Belorussia.

Yet this profusion of plot, enough to power two or three thrillers, still accounts for only a fraction of this novel. There are details of the way Turner prepares the sale of his Soviet banners; there’s Odile being painted by an old portrait artist; there’s the summer visit of Max’s daughter from his first marriage, the wilful Allegra; there are the anarchists who live in the same apartment building as Max and Odile and who may or may not be involved in a jailbreak from the nearby Sante prison; there are the advances and setbacks in the repair of the Dutch barge that reflect the advances and setbacks in the relationship between Rachel and Groot; there’s the persistent bass note of the making of Max’s film and the troubles finding funding for it.

There’s drama enough all through the novel: a fire-bombing, a police raid, torture, a couple of murders. Yet the drama never overpowers the novelistic virtues of the book. There’s the same crisp, clear prose that has been a hallmark of all four of Mooney’s novels. There are characters who feel real: the grouchy Max and generous Odile; the calm, seen-it-all voice of the portrait painter; Turner’s loneliness; Rachel and Groot feeling their way clumsily through a relationship neither is entirely sure of. There are the incidental details that suddenly make a scene spring into life. The whole book feels like a slice of life in which the thriller elements act as part of the background rather than the artificial focus of the story. And yet, those same thriller elements inject a pace and an urgency into the story that keep the reader entangled. So whichever critical perspective I apply to the novel, it works.

And yet it is a decade since it appeared. Why do we have to keep waiting like this?

2017 in Review

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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.

Reprint: Postmodernism

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Brian McHale, Christine Brook-Rose, Christopher Priest, Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Frederic Jameson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Geoffrey Chaucer, Henry James, Iain Banks, James Joyce, John Fowles, Katherine Dunn, Kathy Acker, Kim Newman, Kurt Vonnegut, Laurence Sterne, Miguel de Cervantes, Paul Auster, Richard Jefferies, Robert Coover, Samuel R. Delany, Steve Erickson, Thomas Pynchon, Virginia Woolf, William Gibson, William S. Burroughs, William Vollman

Another of my Cognitive Mapping columns, this one appeared in Vector 219, September-October 2001. As with the column on Modernism, my views are likely to have changed somewhat in the interim.

Cognitive Mapping: Nature

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Edgar Pangborn, H.G. Wells, Ian McDonald, J.G. Ballard, Jack London, James Tiptree Jr, John Crowley, Joseph Conrad, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Mary Shelley, Richard Cowper, Richard Jefferies, Richard Kadrey, Robert Holdstock, Ronald Wright, S Fowler Wright, Steve Erickson, W.H. Hudson

Another of my Cognitive Mapping columns, this one was written for Vector, as usual, sometime around 1998, but may never have actually appeared.

Reprint: Amnesiascope

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Steve Erickson

I’ve been a fan if Steve Erickson since I first came across Days Between Stations not long after it was published (I even managed to get a review of it into the Times Literary Supplement). I’ve written about him several times since then, both extensive essays and relatively shorter reviews. This was a review that first appeared in Vector 191, January-February 1997.

Making Up America: Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter

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Bruce Olds, Charles S. Peirce, D.H. Lawrence, Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, E.M. Forster, Gary Wills, Grover Cleveland, Harold Evans, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, John Brown, Oswald Garrison Villard, Owen Wister, Robert Coover, Robert Heinlein, Russell Banks, Steve Erickson, Steven Millhouser, William Gibson, William James

This was one of those I wrote for no reason other than that I loved Russell Banks’s novel, Cloudsplitter (1998) so much. I think I did try sending it out once, though without any great expectation, and I briefly considered including it in my first collection of essays, but in truth the only place this ever appeared previously was in an apa. It’s an essay that grows out of my interest in the American Civil War, so there’s no science fiction here, but there is philosophy, which suggests a sort of continuity.

Reprint: Against a Definition of Science Fiction

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Damon Knight, Darko Suvin, Farah Mendlesohn, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jane Austen, John Crowley, Kelly Link, Ludwig Wittgenstein, m john harrison, Monty Python, Raymond Carver, Robert Heinlein, Samuel R. Delany, Steve Erickson, Steven Millhouser, T.S. Eliot

This is a revised version of a talk that I gave to a joint meeting of the Science Fiction Foundation and the British Science Fiction Association on 27 June 2009. This revised version was then published in World Literature Today, May-June 2010.

Zeroville

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Steve Erickson

Just too late for the various best of the year pieces I’ve contributed to, I discover Steve Erickson’s Zeroville which is one of his best, and certainly the funniest thing he’s written. Of course it’s not really science fiction or fantasy but, as with everything he’s written, there is an element of the fantastic that runs through it. One of the central plot elements, for example, concerns a single frame inserted into every film ever made which, when extracted, create a new film. It is also, though this is something no review so far seems to have picked up, a novel that overlaps with his first book, Days Between Stations: our hero, Vikar, lives on the same secret street in Los Angeles that migrated between San Francisco and LA in the earlier novel; among the movies he watches is The Death of Marat by Adolphe Sarre; and when he starts to make his own film (another in the list of great unfinished movies in Erickson’s work) his scriptwriter is Michel Sarre, who still wears his eyepatch over one eye or the other apparently at random. In Days Between Stations this trick of Michel’s allowed him to see the world very differently, and this double view finds its echo in Zeroville when Vikar becomes aware that one profile reveals (in crude terms) the good side of a character and the other profile the bad side.

Astonishing Stories

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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.