Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (9 page)

Saturday Morning Fever

by Timothy Burke and Kevin Burke

St Martin's Griffin, 247 pages, paperback, 1999

In his book
The Mechanics of Wonder
(Liverpool University Press, 1998) and elsewhere Gary Westfahl puts forward an alternative explanation to the usual one for the dramatic improvement in the quality of sf published during the early years of John W. Campbell's tenure as editor of
Astounding
. It is Westfahl's suggestion (and he acknowledges that it is not entirely original to him) that the credit should be accorded not to Campbell but to Hugo Gernsback. For, Westfahl argues, it was Gernsback who published the sf magazines that the authors of the "Campbell stable" read during the formative years of their early adolescence; Campbell was just the editor who was lucky enough to be there when those writers hit maturity.

You don't need to agree entirely with Westfahl's argument (although in this instance I probably do) to recognize that he is pointing to something that is largely overlooked in critical studies of science fiction and fantasy: critics may talk of the influence of the works of Writer A on Writer B but
in fact
the most important influences on the latter are much more likely to have been Kemlo, or sf children's stories by Captain W.E. Johns and Patrick Moore, or the
Dr Who
novels, or ...

Or children's tv series. If Writer B is an American, the chances are high that her/his sciencefictional perceptions will have been early moulded by exposure to the programmes screened during those hours on Saturday mornings when kidvid took over the schedules. Secure in a world where no adult dared to tread – and, indeed, of whose nature few adults can have been aware, to judge by the inanities enunciated by those who made a profession of denouncing the Saturday morning output – the imaginations of the watching kids were stimulated and shaped. The fact that many of the series involved were junk is irrelevant to their importance (who would in adulthood defend Captain Johns's
The Death Rays of Ardilla
as a work of literature, or even as a competent piece of storytelling?), in particular because most of the watching kids were perfectly well able to discriminate between the gems and the crude ore: even the junk was liked
as
junk, and most of it served its imagination-stimulating purpose far better than the occasional self-consciously "educational" programme that the networks were bullied by the lobbyists into broadcasting.

I was talking recently to a 21-year-old who reads very little fantasy or sf, but what little she does read, she was telling me, is as a result of watching series like
Bagpuss
and
Willo the Wisp
– not to mention Disney animations – in childhood. So it's not just writers who owe something to children's television but readers as well.

The Burkes'
Saturday Morning Fever
is thus a far more important book than it might on the surface appear; if we are to understand modern fantasy and sf aright then it, or something like it, should be required reading. It is also among the most entertaining books I have read recently, and certainly far more entertaining than any "significant" book has any right to be. Here, for example, is the Burkes' initial statement of its thesis:

Saturday morning cartoons are regarded by most American adults over the age of forty as having marginally more redeeming social value than hard-core pornography ... but perhaps not quite as much value as an episode of a television talk show dealing with incestuous anorexic biker Rotarians. "Saturday morning" has long served as a shorthand epithet for culture judged to be juvenile, low-quality, moronic, mind-numbing, or cut-rate.

We have two words to the folks who think this way: Piss off.

Elsewhere, in their synopsis of the sf series
Land of the Lost
– in which a family falls through a time portal into an alternate world populated by strange creatures including the monstrous Sleestaks – the Burkes note that there was more than one flaw in the series' visualization:

The family should have looked like refugees from
Lord of the Flies
by their third year, given that they were running around in a swampy, humid climate being chased by dinosaurs and lizard people. However, everything stayed neat and clean, including the characters' psyches. You'd think by year three that the main human characters would be going a bit bugshit, particularly given that the son was right smack-dab in the middle of adolescence and was probably giving some thought to putting the moves on a female Sleestak once he could figure out which ones were female.

The majority of the fantasy and sf series discussed in the book were animations, with Hanna-Barbera the major producers in terms of bulk if not of either general or genre-specific interest. To the fantasist the most important single stable was Sid and Marty Krofft Productions, which generated series that must technically be described as live-action, although the frequent surrealistic use of bizarrely costumed characters makes the term seem somehow inapposite. Prime among such productions was
H.R. Pufnstuf
, whose title character was a mutant yellow dragon, H.R. Pufnstuf himself, mayor of Living Island, the alternate world into which youthful hero Jimmy plus his pal Freddie the Talking Flute were cast by the machinations of a sorceress called Witchiepoo, who desired the talking flute for herself (useful things, talking flutes?) and one of whose sidekicks was named, wonderfully, Stupid Bat. Is it any wonder
H.R. Pufnstuf
devotees still roam the land (the UK too) as adults? And is it any wonder there's a quasi-rumour that the eponym's enigmatic initials stood for "hand-rolled"?

It was on Saturday mornings that many more widely recognized fantasy and sciencefictional characters made their screen debuts or knew their finest hours. Hours, anyway; maybe not finest. Among them were Superman, Batman, the Addams Family, GI Joe, Godzilla, Dr Dolittle, Casper, Spider-Man, Captain Marvel and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to name just a few. The company in which they mixed included lesser and since largely forgotten shows like
Goober and the Ghost Chasers
,
The Groovie Goolies
and a series whose title character baffles comprehension,
Rubik the Amazing Cube
; but
Star Trek
and
Planet of the Apes
(in both cases the animated series),
The Flintstones
,
The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show
, Ralph Bakshi's
Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures
,
Sabrina, the Teenage Witch
and
Jonny Quest
were in there as well.

The Burkes' book does not serve well as a reference guide to these and many other shows that have, as noted, indirectly played such a significant role in forming today's fantasy and sf: here you will find little by way of rigorous data on running times, seasons aired, production credits, etc. But that is not the Burkes' purpose. Instead they seek to convey the sensation of being a Saturday morning kid during the Golden Age of the 1970s and 1980s, and in this they triumph superbly. Consider: I was reared in Scotland rather than the United States, and in fact my home did not possess a tv set until I was anyway a little too old to appreciate what I would by then undoubtedly have dismissed as "kids' stuff", yet, thanks to the Burkes, I now have a fairly clear impression of (and here I wish to choose my words carefully) what I would now remember it felt like had I spent my formative years as an American Saturday morning tv kid. That is no mean achievement. And the experience has opened my eyes to the
why
of some of the sf and fantasy (art as well as the written word) of the 1990s.

There are minor cavils. The index is not 100% reliable and the copy-editor might wisely have read through the text one extra time. But otherwise this gloriously irreverent, gloriously partisan, gloriously affectionate text offers a splendid insight into one of the foundation stones of the modern fantasy/sf edifice.

—Samhain

Voice of the Violin

by Andrea Camilleri

Translated by Stephen Sartarelli

Viking, 256 pages, hardback, 2003

Every time I came to the end of a session of reading
Voice of the Violin
, my introduction to the writing of Andrea Camilleri and his character Salvo Montalbano, I found myself grinning all over from sheer pleasure.

Which is odd, because it's a full-blooded detective story whose subject matter is not always especially pleasant. A minor traffic accident draws Sicilian cop Montalbano into discovering the naked, murdered body of a beautiful young woman, Michela Licalzi; immediately before death she has had both vaginal and anal intercourse, but there are no secretions within her body for forensics to work with, and all her clothes and personal belongings have been removed from the scene. Some of those personal belongings were valuable – notably her jewelry, in the handbag she kept with her – but where was the sense in her murderer removing all the rest? Unless, of course, the other items might in some way offer a clue to his identity ...

Montalbano has to work through not only the mystery but also Sicilian police politics, the complexities of Michela Licalzi's romantic and other liaisons, and a pair of linked crises in his own emotional life – these latter two problems exacerbated by the immediate attraction between himself and the dead woman's best friend, Anna Tropeano.

This might sound as if it all makes for
Voice of the Violin
being a weighty, somewhat worthy, somewhat gruelling novel, a reader preconception that is perhaps not helped by public comparisons between Camilleri's Montalbano and Georges Simenon's Maigret. Such comparisons are actually well justified – if you like Maigret (or Mark Hebden's Pel series, or Janwillem van de Wetering's Amsterdam Cops series, or Sjowall & Wahloo) you'll love this – but they obscure the astonishing lightness of touch that Camilleri achieves. He's a master of creating character or conjuring up a scene with just a few deft brush-strokes, while Montalbano's rather quirky morality and passion for good food, both very lightly and often humorously depicted, manage to become almost additional characters in their own right.

This is really quite a short novel – the publisher has released it in a small format to bump up the page-count a bit – but it's an immensely satisfying one. It's also a very
complete
one. It's customary to say of good novels that one was disappointed to come to the last page, but in the case of
Voice of the Violin
the telling is so well crafted that in fact this wasn't – at least for this reviewer – true: as with one of those meals Montalbano so much enjoys, the last mouthful perfectly satiates, and even a morsel more would be a surfeit.

—Crescent Blues

The Wooden Sea

by Jonathan Carroll

Tor, 302 pages, hardback, 2001

Jonathan Carroll is one of the best and most intelligent novelists at work today, and yet, although they sell healthily, his books have never achieved the sales figures his manifold virtues so richly deserve. This has puzzled many – the jacket of this new novel is covered in quotes from the famous expressing exactly this bewilderment – yet the reason Carroll's work has never really conquered the commercial market seems obvious enough, a conclusion reinforced by reading
The Wooden Sea
: his novels cannot easily be summarized in a sentence or two.

This is precisely the reason they're so very rewarding, of course, but not helpful when you're trying to recommend them to friends. If you were wanting to recommend a Stephen King or a John Grisham novel, for example, you could say "it's about vampires in a small American town" or "it's about this guy on the jury of a cigarette-company lawsuit who's secretly an anti-smoking campaigner" and you'd have adequately conveyed the gist of the book. Each novel of Carroll's, by contrast, is "about" a
whole lot of things
, so you're reduced to saying: "Just read it. You'll love it." (This is almost
verbatim
the way UK editor Peter Lavery introduced me to Carroll's work, way back when.) To repeat, this is why people who
do
read them
do
love them, but of course it makes it hard to induce people to do the reading bit in the first place.

So my apologies in advance – and to Carroll as well – if the following resumé seems a bit vaguer and more chaotic than it could be.

Frannie McCabe is Chief of Police in the small town of Crane's View, somewhere in the sleepier reaches of New York State. One day a dying three-legged dog is brought into his office, and takes over his heart. A few days later it dies, and he buries it. At about the same time a couple of the rowdier townsfolk disappear, seemingly into thin air. The dog refuses to stay buried, reappearing in his car boot accompanied by a beautiful perfume – not the stench of decay that one might expect. Other enigmatic symbols associated with the dead dog recur in McCabe's life, notably a coloured feather which only later will he realize is actually artificial. A teenager dies, and it is discovered that the drawings in her schoolbook relate to the dog, the feather and McCabe himself. An old artbook reveals an 18th-century painting of what appears to be the three-legged dog – and called by the same name, Old Vertue.

These and other strange occurrences could
almost
lie within the province of the real, and for a while McCabe desperately tries to rationalize them as such. However, his attempts soon founder as his life lurches into the outrageously surreal. Aided by allies that include himself as a teenager (his junior self promptly gets the hots for McCabe's own stepdaughter), he struggles to make sense of all the weirdness, before realizing the counterproductiveness of trying to make sense of something that
has
no straightforward sense, no rationality.

An individual called Astopel, whom for some time both McCabe and the reader assume to be a demon of a sort, tells McCabe that he has only seven days of life to solve the enigma of what is going on if he is to save the world. However, those days need not all be spent in the same
part
of his life; cast into the future, for example, he spends some hours as an old man and learns the dreadful truth as to how his wife has died/will die young – an event which he obviously yearns to avert once back in an earlier portion of his life ...

Where this novel succeeds most brilliantly is in its portrayal of constantly shifting realities. Let me enlarge upon this. The fantasy concept of alternate realities is similar to but distinct from the sf idea of alternate universes or parallel worlds; the two concepts can be overlapped, of course, and often are, but they need not be. Good alternate-realities stories are extremely difficult to write, which is why there are so few of them: many writers either do not take up the challenge or (which is really much the same thing) lapse into the easier-to-handle sciencefictional mode of the alternate-universes story.
The Wooden Sea
– although it is in part actually an sf novel – is a paradigmatic example of what the fantasy alternate-realities story can be made to do, while also, though it is eminently easy to read, demonstrating the difficulty of handling the mode. McCabe's (and hence the reader's) realities are in a constant state of flux, always likely to be temporary and never to be trusted, but somehow our
perception
of those realities remains fixed: because of this, although the sequence of events, if related baldly as a list, might seem to be random, there is at no point any sense while sharing McCabe's adventures that they have just been arbitrarily thrown together – it is always in our mind that they do have a purpose and an order, although that purpose and that order may transcend our understanding.

Even when finally an explanation is forthcoming, there is the delightful feeling that this explanation itself may be as transient as the realities through which McCabe has, and we have, journeyed. In that sense, the plot's explanation almost doesn't matter.

All this is infernally difficult to achieve, as I've said: as readers we usually want to have a book's rationale (or rationales) firmly foregrounded, and become impatient otherwise. It requires great skill for an author to shake us loose from this dependence on the rational, this desire to duck the challenge that full-blooded fantasy should be issuing to its readers. Michael Moorcock does it sometimes. More specifically, Gene Wolfe succeeded brilliantly in
There Are Doors
(1988) and, in a rather different way, Mark Helprin managed it in the later parts of
Winter's Tale
(1983) – while, of course, Lewis Carroll managed it in his proto-surrealist
Alice
novels. There are other examples, but they're few and far between. It was in particular the Wolfe book that kept coming to mind while I was reading
The Wooden Sea
. Although the two novels are very different, both succeed in letting us – or making us – cut ourselves free from the logic of the everyday world.

It would be perfectly possible to read
The Wooden Sea
with great pleasure as just an entertainment, and doubtless many people will, perhaps pondering from time to time about its seeming quirkiness. But it would be a waste to do so when the book offers us so many other rewards.

—Infinity Plus