Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (28 page)

i-o

by Simon Logan

Prime, 110 pages, paperback, 2002

This is a strange and original book, likely to appeal very strongly indeed to some and completely repel others. According to its form and its cover copy it's a collection of short stories, but the stories are so much of a piece – even though not overtly linked – that it's hard to see the text as other than a series of windows out onto a uniquely bleak, definitively mechanistic worldview.

The typical narrator here is a brutally cyborgized individual – presumably originally human but just as plausibly originally machine, or perhaps
always
a mixture, perhaps even without a physical machine component but nevertheless so dehumanized that fleshliness is irrelevant – forced by unnamed, unknown, unknowable masters to persist in a self-destructively banal, repetitive task that, at least from the narrator's limited knowledge, is no more than an exercise in terminal futility. The passions these creatures display amid devastated landscapes of emotional barbarity are at one and the same time derived from human ones and quite divorced from them.

Here are a couple of brief extracts that seem to me to epitomize the book and that may explain, by example, more clearly the ethos of the whole:

The machine was perfect, as it always had been, the production line endless and unflawed. It built the builders, an endless stream of mass-produced gods, their own creators, their own destroyers. [from "partofit"]

and

In a few hours she will be screaming and clawing once more at her pneumatic prison but for now she is as peaceful as depression itself. The great steel rods that breathe for her slide in rhythmical patterns all around the massive contraption, hissing at me and spewing hot greasy steam at odd angles. Rusted cogs turn in aged circles, grinding against one another, sparking. Differently coloured fluids pulse through thin copper veins.

I kiss the glass before her lips and whisper a prayer of solitude to her as she stirs ever so slightly on her ice-white pillows. [from "iron lung"]

This is a short book, which is a good thing; the intensity of Logan's vision is such that it's hard to take more than a short book's worth of it. By its end you may find yourself revelling in revulsion, laughing with hatred, as if somehow your emotional reactions had been unplugged from their appropriate areas of the brain and then the plugs replaced in all the wrong sockets. It's a matter for individual readers whether they'll enjoy such a mentally dislocating experience. In the end this particular reader couldn't decide one way or the other, but was left filled with admiration for Logan's ambition in achieving this effect.

Aside from those deliberate irritations that Logan deploys as instruments in his grating, rasping, tearing orchestra of the dehumanized imagination, there's one irritation that this book could have done without: the text is appallingly proofread. Perhaps the only proofing was done by a computer spellcheck ... which would have a certain thematic appropriateness but is inexcusable nonetheless.

You won't forget the ambience of this book in a hurry, although the details of the different events and scenarios within it soon become blurred one with another. You may wish you had; and you may decide to avoid
i-o
rather than risk such an outcome. What fantasy should really be all about is taking such risks.

—Infinity Plus

Fantastic Tales

by Jack London, foreword by Philip José Farmer, edited by Dale L. Walker

University of Nebraska Press, 223 pages +
x
, paperback, 1998

This is a direct photographic reprint, complete with irritating minor typographical errors, of a 1975 publication originally called
Curious Fragments: Jack London's Tales of Fantasy Fiction
; the only change, apart from on the copyright and title pages, is that the running heads have been deleted from all the left-hand pages so that the old title no longer appears there. I make a point of all this because whoever was responsible for preparing this book for press has omitted to alter the original title where it appears in Walker's interesting Introduction; this reader at least was baffled by a couple of the sentences therein until he checked in a Jack London bibliography and realized what had happened. There is also confusion here as to whether this reprint is published by the University of Nebraska Press (title page) or Bison Books (spine and copyright page). So, while one welcomes the reissue of the collection, the welcome is qualified.

Although not well published, the collection is an interesting one – interesting rather than entirely enjoyable, in fact, because in the case of some of the stories there is good reason why they are rarely if ever reprinted. Moreover, London was no great master of the short-story form: almost without exception, the best pieces in the collection are not so much stories as what we could describe as fictional histories – straightforward narratives, sans characters, sans dialogue, and essentially sans plot.

The prime examples of this form are "The Enemy of All the World" (1908) and "Goliah" (1908). The two narratives are rather similar, in that each is concerned with a mysterious genius who initiates large-scale mayhem through the application of his secret technological discovery; in the former case the perpetrator is adjudged evil, in the latter a benefactor (he smashes eggs to make the omelette called World Peace And Human Happiness), so the near-juxtaposition of the two tales, printed almost next to each other in this book, leads one to ruminate on what precisely is the difference between good and evil – a debate that was presumably running through London's mind as well, since the two stories were published in the same year. "The Enemy of All the World" gains an additional fascination because of the passage of time: there is an extensive discussion of the physical and mental abuse to which the central psychopath was subjected during childhood, and his psychopathy – his mental illness – is plainly attributed by the author to this. London's irony is that his narrator seemingly approves of the mass murderer's execution in the electric chair while at the same time recounting all the evils done to him by others that have made him mentally ill in the first place; this double standard, whereby it is somehow ethical to kill the mentally sick for the crimes they have committed through their sickness yet evil of them to have been made sick and thereby committed crimes, is merely presented by London rather than overtly commented upon. It is a double standard that still plagues modern US society.

The longest piece in this book, "The Scarlet Plague" (1912), is almost certainly the best known. Once again it is largely a fictional history, but this time it has a frame, being ostensibly told by an oldster of the future, decades after the eponymous plague has wiped out all but a handful of humankind, to the children of what has reverted to a Stone Age society. The frame adds considerable power to what might otherwise seem a rather unaffecting narrative despite its recounting of deaths by the million.

London, as will be evident, was not afraid to write of large-scale carnage. Indeed, this is an astonishingly bloodthirsty collection, four of its fifteen pieces being concerned with vast loss of human life and violent death being central to most of the others. One of the mass-slaughter fictions, "The Unparalleled Invasion" (1910), is a truly nauseating piece of work, saturated with the astonishing (for a self-professed socialist) racism that appears elsewhere in London's work and yet which goes, surprisingly, unmentioned in Walker's commentary: in this future history the Chinese, guilty of being yellow, slant-eyed and inscrutable and of talking funny, are becoming increasingly important in the world through a peaceful territorial expansion driven by rising population; the other races therefore hem China about with military force, so that none may escape, and use bacteriological warfare to annihilate her entire population. One seeks desperately for the slightest redeeming trace of irony amid the general narrative jubilation over this successful act of racially inspired genocide, but nowhere is it to be found.

In Walker's introduction to "A Thousand Deaths" (1899) we find a clue to such enormities of attitude. London received $40 from
The Black Cat
for this poorly constructed tale (at the heart of its plot is an unbelievable and utterly unnecessary coincidence) of a scientist who discovers how to reanimate the dead. This fee saved the young writer's bacon:
Overland Monthly
had been paying him a miserly $5 to $7.50 for significant Klondike tales, and as a result he was broke. Initially we wonder, in this context, why London didn't overnight decide to become a pulp writer of sensationalist fictions; on second thought, however, we realize this is essentially what to a great extent he already
was
– and remained. His natural market was indeed more
The Black Cat
than
Overland Monthly
. Despite his socialism, despite his visionary streak, despite his occasional brilliant mastery of prose (not much, to be honest, evident in this collection), he had at heart the sensibilities of a pulp writer – and unlike, for example, Raymond Chandler he was rarely really able to transcend them. Hence the ability to couch sensationalist events successfully in fictional histories but not in genuine short stories; it is perhaps significant here that by far the most successful
short story
in this collection, "War" (1911), is in no sense a fantastication (indeed, it's puzzling why it was included at all).

This collection could do with either more or less accompanying critical apparatus: there is not enough for the scholar and mildly annoyingly too much for the casual reader. One item from Walker's commentary causes a grin of disbelief at its partisanship: because the date 1984 is mentioned in passing in "The Scarlet Plague" and in a footnote to
The Iron Heel
(1907), is it not possible that George Orwell, who in 1945 wrote an introduction to a collection of London's tales, selected this date for his great satire? But, such reservations aside, Walker is to be congratulated for having done a reasonable job. For London at his best, however, one should really turn to the novels.

—unknown venue

Silence and Shadows

by James Long

Bantam, 407 pages, paperback, 2002; reissue of a book originally published in 2001

Once upon a time archaeologist Patrick Kane was renowned punk rocker Paddy Kane – a rock star with a secret, in fact, because the industry moguls were convinced he would lose his sexy image if it were to be publicly known he had a wife and infant son. As fame went increasingly to his head – not to mention the booze, and the groupies, and the drugs – so he listened more to the bean-counters' lies, until eventually, at the height of an internationally televised charity concert, he sang a hate-song targeted at his wife. Almost immediately afterwards he realized both what he'd done and what he'd become, and resolved to abandon the rock-star life. That was when the news reached him that his wife had, in the aftermath of watching the concert on tv, either carelessly, through anguish, or deliberately driven her car to the bottom of a river, killing both herself and their son.

Ever since then, Kane has been on the run from his guilt and his grief. Resurrecting the archaeology he studied at university, he has got himself a job with a seedy commercial archaeological outfit, and to his surprise he has been put in charge of a dig in rural Oxfordshire.

That dig, to uncover a Roman mosaic floor, is sabotaged by an unscrupulous land developer, but a mysterious local, Joe, who can sing but not speak, guides Kane to an immediately adjacent site – that of a rare Saxon-period barrow. Through a mixture of song and archaeology, slowly the story is pieced together of the occupant of that barrow, a woman who died defending the villagers from murderous attackers. While excited by the results of the dig, Kane is disconcerted by the passing resemblance Joe's sister Bobby, herself mourning a dead lover, has to his dead wife Rachel. But his obsession is less with her than with the seventh-century woman who was known in the vicinity as the German Queen and whose story, like her bones and funerary artefacts, is emerging from the grave.

Silence and Shadows
is not really either fantasy or science fiction – although archaeology is of course a science, that aspect is not stressed – and yet one can hardly imagine that any devotee of the fantastic genres could do anything other than adore this book. That distinctive fantasy
frisson
runs right through it, so that we have the feeling of being constantly close to the line that divides reality from the Other – rather as in many of the nonfantasies of Peter Dickinson.

The writing is often very lovely and highly evocative – the opening few pages are as fine a distillation of destructive guilt and grief as any I have come across – but also it is often very funny, as in

"You've not tried [a brand of rough Scotch whisky] before?" said CD. "Well, as they say in the traditional distilleries of the South Bronx, there's always a first time but there's not often a second time."

Unusually, the music-industry details ring true, and the song lyrics – both those of Paddy Kane's punk barnstormers and the traditional ballad of the German Queen that Joe sings – read authentically, rather than as a prose writer's unmusical versifying. But what really bring
Silence and Shadows
to life are the characters and the constantly shifting dynamics among them. This comment applies not just to the major protagonists but also to a fairly large cast of bit players, some of whom perform that difficult transition from apparent comic-cut status on first introduction to real, three-dimensional people about whom one comes to care. They are a very sweetly imagined chorus to offer background to the song that is made up of the story of Patrick and Bobby and Joe ... and the German Queen.

While reading
Silence and Shadows
I found my mind constantly harking back to Peter Ackroyd's
First Light
(1989), which was also about an archaeological dig and which also sought to evoke a sense that a timeslip was always just around the corner. Although Ackroyd's novel got all the swooning broadsheet reviews, the fact of the matter is that
Silence and Shadows
is by several orders of magnitude the better novel. It is the more moving and better written of the two, it is populated by characters who are certainly more real and vibrant, and it is vastly more enthralling – indeed, it is as gripping a read as you could hope to come across.

In the world of art it can often be difficult to remember that a miniature can be as fine as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: the mere disparity in size distorts one's impressions of the relative worth of the two. In the same way, one is tempted to say that
Silence and Shadows
is not a major novel simply because its range is small, its vision focused on a microcosm rather than events that might shape the world. Yet that would be to misjudge it; it will haunt your mind long after you've completely forgotten whatever major blockbuster it was you last read. It is not quite perfect – a few lines of the badinage between the amateur helpers at the dig grate clumsily (as would be the case in real life, of course, but that's no proper excuse) – yet, as with a beautiful human face, such tiny imperfections can almost add to the overall effect.

Although this edition is an attractive paperback, there is a strong chance that you will, like this reviewer, decide after having read it that only the hardback will do for your shelves, because
Silence and Shadows
is a book you will inevitably wish to reread several times over the years. You might want to save yourself some money by buying the hardback at the outset.

Yes, it's
that
sort of a book.

—Infinity Plus