Review of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Several years ago, my dad bought me a Penguin boxed set of twentieth century novels that included the likes of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Animal Farm, something by D H Lawrence; this is the first that I’ve read. I’d never read any Virginia Woolf; I won’t be hurrying to read anything else by her, I think.

First impressions of the book were quite good. It’s a portrait of a fairly disparate group of more or less socially awkward people all brought together by the Ramsays to stay on their summer home on a Scottish island, along with their various children. Mr and Mrs Ramsay are the focus of the novel (and are based on Woolf’s parents, the blurb assures me), but they are by no means the dominant viewpoint characters.

There is a strong sense, now that I think about it, of the fleetingness of life. The narrative does a lot of head-skipping – jumping around from viewpoint to viewpoint. I found it rather annoying, actually. There are various places where, for instance, there are two female viewpoint characters, maybe in successive paragraphs, each of whom may be thinking about the other or other women in the house, and too liberal use of pronouns, making it hard to identify exactly who is being referred to.

But where this technique does work, it shows a group of people who are all thinking about each other and who don’t really understand each other. However, you don’t necessarily get an in-depth portrayal of any one character – at least, until the end of the book.

The structure of the novel increases the sense of transitoriness. The main, first part of the book is as I’ve described; the second, very brief section shows time passing (it’s entitled ‘Time Passes’) and various events happening to the Ramsays and their friends; in the third part, some of the characters return to the house and revisit their earlier activities or intentions. This latter segment is quite melancholy, as various characters have died or moved on, and, while the viewpoint is more stable, alternating between just two characters for the most part, it’s quite dull; I missed some of the more interesting people.

Some of the writing is quite beautiful and evocative, like this from the second part of the book:

Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase. Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind (the house was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and ventured indoors…. And so, nosing, rubbing, they went to the window on the staircase, to the servants’ bedrooms, to the boxes in the attics; descending, blanched the apples on the dining-room table, fumbled the petals of roses, tried the picture on the easel, brushed the mat and blew a little sand along the floor. At length, desisting, all ceased together, gathered together, all sighed together; all together gave off an aimless gust of lamentation to which some door in the kitchen replied; swung wide; admitted nothing; and slammed to.

There were a couple of moments when the characters’ reactions and motivations struck me as being perfectly realised – such as James Ramsay’s hatred for the father whose pronouncements about the weather deny him the chance of a trip to the lighthouse (and who, much later, takes him and a sister). Charles Tansley’s pride at holding Mrs Ramsay’s bag made me stop reading and think, Wow – that’s exactly right:

… all at once he realised that it was this: it was this:—she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.

With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets—what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least; she had eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair—He had hold of her bag.

“Good-bye, Elsie,” she said, and they walked up the street, she holding her parasol erect and walking as if she expected to meet some one round the corner, while for the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; a man digging in a drain stopped digging and looked at her, let his arm fall down and looked at her; for the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; felt the wind and the cyclamen and the violets for he was walking with a beautiful woman. He had hold of her bag.

In addition to the aforementioned head-skipping, the long sentences were often difficult to process and made reading the book an often frustrating experience. In this passage, the first paragraph consists of one short (or non-long) sentence and one incredibly long one (this excerpt comes just after the previous quote where Tansley realises his love for Mrs Ramsay, so the second paragraph not only clarifies the first, but also sets the young man’s thoughts in context):

But here, as she turned the page, suddenly her search for the picture of a rake or a mowing-machine was interrupted. The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the window which opened on the terrace), that the men were happily talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, “How’s that? How’s that?” of the children playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, “I am guarding you—I am your support,” but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow—this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.

They had ceased to talk; that was the explanation. Falling in one second from the tension which had gripped her to the other extreme which, as if to recoup her for her unnecessary expense of emotion, was cool, amused, and even faintly malicious, she concluded that poor Charles Tansley had been shed. That was of little account to her. If her husband required sacrifices (and indeed he did) she cheerfully offered up to him Charles Tansley, who had snubbed her little boy.

What I’ve cut and pasted from the text into my review show some very noteworthy writing. Ultimately, however, the lack of narrative focus and drive and the deliberately anti-climactic latter parts of the book made finishing it a real chore, even though it’s a mere 230-odd pages long. The last section, only a third of the book, with Lily Briscoe agonising over her painting and Mr Ramsay, oblivious to their spite, taking two of his children to the lighthouse, seemed interminable.

To the Lighthouse is not a terrible book, by any means, but it’s not an easy one to enjoy or appreciate.

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Review of The Silmarillion by J R R Tolkien

The Silmarillion is a curious book, in various ways. While many (though not all) love The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, not so many of those who do have a great liking for Tolkien’s part mythology, part history of Middle Earth. It is a book that could only be published on the coattails of a massively successful fantasy series – The Wheel of Time and A Sonf of Ice and Fire, for instance – and would probably only be of interest to people who really liked the original story.

It’s also strange in its narrative focus. The early part of the volume is distinctly biblical in its style of writing and concerns the pantheon gods and lesser primordial beings – the Ainur – which gives it very classical Greek overtones. After that, though, the story gradually expands to become more novelistic in style – events are described in increasing detail and characters are given more dialogue.

Some of those who have read the book prefer the later parts for exactly this more character-centred stle. However, I first read it a long time ago and it was the earlier, mythopoetic part of the volume that always stuck in my imagination; it shaped my attitude towards fantasy cosmogony in my own creations. That said, the tale of Beren and Lúthien also got lodged in there, although less inspirationally so.

Reading The Silmarillion a second time – for the Tolkien discussion group I attend – I was struck by a few things. Firstly, my memory is not very good for lots of the details of the various sub-plots and characters that occupy various chapters of the Quenta Silmarillion – the long central part of the book that deals with much of the history of the Elves. This is largely due to the nature of the narrative being related.

It was the story of Fëanor, his jewels, his family and his people that especially interested me, but their story is dispersed throughout the Quenta. This arc story is interrupted by various notable episodes. There are a few chapters – that concerning Beren and Lúthien and the one about Túrin Turambar – where the narrative becomes rather more detailed than usual – and these are admittedly some of the best tales within the larger story. But, in some ways, they feel rather irrelevant, especially that of Túrin; Beren and Lúthien have a direct impact on the fate of the Silmarils, at least. It also occured to me that, if all three Hobbit films are successful, these individual tales from The Silmarillion might make excellent money-spinning successors.

Towards the end of the book, the attention shifts away from the Elves and towards Men. To me, this felt very anti-climactic. Men are lesser beings than Elves, having been given the crappiest gift imaginable – short lives and actual death – by Ilúvatar, the Creator. Even the villain of the latter piece, Sauron, is basically a cheap knock-off of his erstwhile boss, Morgoth. Much of what Sauron does has already been done by the disgraced god.

This relates to one of the overall themes of all the Middle Earth works – that of continual decline, a slow, inevitable fall from grace. The poignancy of this comes across extremely effectively in The Lord of the Rings, I think, but here, the sweep of history – and especially Man’s role in the latter parts of that history – render it a rather annoying kind of nostalgia.

My attitude towards the Ainur – the Valar, in particular – changed a lot over the course of reading the volume. At the start, they seem wonderfully noble and magical. By the end, however, they are distinctly haughty and uncaring – especially when it comes to Men. Their ban on anyone sailing west beyond sight of Númenor seems little more than divine racism and then tearing the world in two, punishing Elves and Men for the sins of Sauron is a fit of pique a two-year-old would be proud of.

Which observation segues into one of the more profound (and yet somehow irrelevant) critiques of Tolkien’s work: that it propounds a deeply reactionary message: some people are just better than others, some people’s ancestry gives them the right to rule their fellows. This is countered, of course by the fact that Frodo Baggins, a simple Hobbit from the Shire, saves the world in The Return of the King – but Frodo is also accompanied by his unquestioning servant, Sam; and, while Frodo sails off to retirement in the sky, Aragorn, descendant of the Kings of Númenor – a land that no longer exists – becomes king of Middle Earth (a large part of it, anyway).

All that being said, there is much that is good in The Silmarillion. The writing style, while antiquated – in different ways at different places – is carried off with an authority that makes you feel that you really are reading the collected myths and legends of a world. Many of the motivations of the human-scale characters are thoroughly believable and their often unpleasant ends have a sense of justice to them. And in terms of killing off characters, Tolkien definitely out-George R R Martined George R R Martin long before Westeros had been thought of.

I don’t think The Silmarillion is perfect, by any means, but anyone who’s enjoyed The Hobbit and TLotR should find their appreciation enriched by reading it. Or, given that the published form of the book was put together after Tolkien’s death by his son Christopher and Canadian fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay, they may just find it an example of barrel-scraping.

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Review of The Book of Atrix Wolfe by Patricia A McKillip

I picked this book up recently at What the Book? in Seoul. McKillip is not one of the more well known authors, but I’ve read one of her previous works, The Riddle-Master Trilogy, and remembered it as interesting, low-key, well written, but a little slow and dull. Like that previous story, The Book of Atrix Wolfe is short, gentle, thoughtful, but less than totally gripping. Even at less than 250 pages, it took me a long time to get through it – I had other things that just seemed to demand my attention more.

However, I still liked the novel.

The story starts with a prologue set twenty years before the main narrative takes places and shows how one of the land’s most powerful wizards – Atrix Wolfe – is persuaded, coerced – tricked? I’m still not entirely clear on the motivation – into working some sorcery to facilitate a war of conquest. The resulting magical entity is uncontrollable and kills many and ends the war. The Hunter is awakened a couple of decades later when the prince born on the night of the slaughter discovers a paradoxical spellbook written by the wizard. The spell that created the Hunter turns out to have wreaked devastation beyond the world of mortals; the fey Queen of the Wood has been seeking her lost daughter for two decades.

The main character, Prince Talis Pelucir, is a bespectacled trainee wizard whose parents were killed (one directly, one indirectly) by a malevolent magical being when he was a baby. Remind you of anyone? This book was published a couple of years before Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, though, so it’s OK.

Another main character is called Sorrow – or Saro (in an American accent I suppose they’re homophones) – and sorrow is a major theme of the novel. Everyone’s lives have been overshadowed by the murder committed by the Hunter – and, inasmuch as the Hunter is his proxy, by Atrix Wolfe himself.

Another theme is the paradoxical nature of the spells written in the eponymous book. When trying to extinguish a candle flame, Talis instead shatters every nearby mirror. The ambiguously named Saro is unable to speak, and yet she is capable of magic, although the spells often rely on language. I suppose you can read into this the message that language is a kind of magic – why else do we read fiction, if not to be enchanted by things that are not real and yet somehow true?

I enjoyed reading the shapeshifting battles of Atrix against the Hunter. Wolfe changes himself into animals, leaves, stones, stone, water in his efforts to evade his overly puissant creation. The mute version of Saro has lived her life in the Pelucir castle kitchen, working as a pot scrubber. The environment and social hierarchy of the kitchen is also fascinating; the place is populated with a head cook, a tray mistress, undercooks, pluckers, spit boys, mincers, peelers, musicians (who announce meals with a fanfare) and more.

I think The Book of Atrix Wolfe is a better story than The Riddle-Master books, and I really wanted to be more engrossed by it than I was. It has a uniquely gentle and subtle but definitely high fantasy feel to it. I’m going to try to pay better attention to the next Patricia McKillip book I read.

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Review of Saving the Appearances by Owen Barfield

I read this book with a Tolkien and the Inklings discussion group I’m part of here in Korea. Owen Barfield was one of the Inklings – the Oxford University literary group that included J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis. Barfield’s thoughts on semantics and nature apparently influenced his more famous fellows; he also helped develop theosophy and translated Rudolf Steiner. He died relatively recently – 1997 – at the grand old age of 99.

Saving the Appearances starts off pretty innocuously, talking about how perception and reality are necessarily two different things. Barfield uses the example of a rainbow, arguing that the light and the raindrops are not directly perceptible to an observer – they are ‘particles’ or ‘the unrepresented’. He says further that the rainbow doesn’t meaningfully exist without an observer. The emergent phenomenon of the rainbow is a representation – something that can only exist because of the unconscious effect of particles on an observing consciousness.

Anyone who’s ever heard of subatomic particles will immediately understand the logic of this argument. The building blocks of reality are whizzing specks of mostly empty probability and yet we perceive things as solid objects. I couldn’t help thinking that photographic equipment easily proves the existence of rainbow absent a seeing, thinking being (although, of course, someone still needs to look at the resulting photograph).

He goes on to say some interesting things about how the pre-scientific mind may have interacted cognitively with the world. Namely, that, instead of recognising objects, nature itself, as being other entities, it was, to use the cliché, ‘at one with’ nature and things, it saw them as being no different from itself; it was pantheistic. This relationship to the world Barfield names original participation.

From here leads the crux of the book. The rise of Judaeo-Christianity and of science has led humanity to lose all sense of this original participation. Instead of perceiving self and world to be two sides of the same thing, humanity has categorised natural phenomena as other, independent, real, objective. In Barfield’s terms, the representations we perceive have become idols, and we, idolators. The book’s subtitle is A Study in Idolatry.

Original participation is a way of perceiving the world that can never be regained. It would be easy to brand Barfield anti-scientific (and in some senses, he is), but he takes pains to commend much of what science has achieved and he regards the scientific mentality as an inevitable and necessary part of the evolution of human consciousness. The next stage, he argues, is final participation.

I think final participation is not sufficiently explained or explored, but, putting it as best I can, seems to be an imaginitive, creative engagement with phenomena. You might call it a spiritual connection to representations; you might call it a kind of internalised pathetic fallacy.

Towards the end of the book, there’s lots of stuff about Christianity. He appears to regard Jesus as some kind of singularity in history, a fulcrum between original and final participation. Yet the friend who introduced this book to me via the discussion group I mentioned, swears that Barfield is not a Christian, rather a pantheist. Saving the Appearances belies that assertion; he clearly regards Jesus’s life as a divine intervention in history.

Barfield also appears not to believe in prehistory – he continually states that the evolution of consciousness and the evolution of nature have gone hand in hand. The implication being that, in some sense, nature – phenomena – did not exist before there was a consciousness to appreciate it. To put it in a way that I find easier to understand, pre-history is an ineffable wave function that is impossible to collapse without direct observation. Everything we believe about pre-human eras is a model. It’s a useful thing to bear in mind, but the idea that pre-historic plants, animals and geological processes didn’t exist – or can’t be said to have existed – is pretty ludicrous. You might as well say that no one can ever be convicted of a crime unless someone actually observed the perpetrator commit the act.

I think there are two main flaws in Barfield’s thinking. One is his anthropocentrism; the previous paragraph highlights this. Nature doesn’t meaningfully exist without people to, effectively, create it by perceiving it. There is some metaphorical truth to this, but accepting this as literally true seems to be far too great a leap of faith away from a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

The idea of final participation, that the best way to see phenomena is creatively, empathetically, is also very self-centred. The corollary of this is that how you feel about something is more important than the way something actually is. It’s quite a dangerous tendency, in fact. The sun, for instance, may be regarded as a god-like, life-giving, friendly, golden orb in the sky – but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a vast, continuous, cancer-causing thermonuclear explosion.

This leads on to the second main flaw, which is that the book basically urges a synthesis of scientific and creative views of the world – without apparently realising that they’re two different things that exist for two different reasons. Science is a careful attempt to explore and explain nature as objectively as possible. Creativity – spirituality, if you like – is a form of therapy – it’s a way of helping humans feel content in and connected to the world; it’s a way of explaining the world in a way that makes sense to limited human mentality. Science cares nothing for human feelings (except as a field of study); nature cares nothing for its own comprehensibility.

Clearly, both ways of understanding the world are very important for humans; life would be meaningless without art – but it would be intolerable without science. The Darwinian in me wants to point out that science is just an incredibly successful way of regarding the world; spirituality didn’t discover penicillin or put a man on the moon or create the internet.

Saving the Appearances, then, is certainly an interesting book, but ultimately not convincing and not more than a footnote in the debate to which it contributes. Finally, this particular edition – from the Wesleyan University Press – alternates between two (albeit very similar) fonts at random points in the text. Bizarre.

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Review of Taliesin by Stephen Lawhead

When I first started reading this book – which I’ve had in my possession for a few years – I thought it was pretty good – not spectacularly well written, but journeyman-like. Then I kept reading, and it got worse and worse, and worse.

Taliesin is the first book of the Pendragon Cycle, a re-telling of the Matter of Britain – although Arthur apparently doesn’t turn up until the third book. Taliesin (pronounced tal-i-ESS-in), the historical figure, was a renowned Dark Age Welsh bard, some of whose supposed works survive in The Book of Taliesin.

The story of this volume is Y-shaped – two plot threads slowly come together about halfway through. One concerns Charis, an Atlantean princess and her escape from the doomed continent. The other is about Elphin, a young Celtic lord who discovers the baby Taliesin wrapped n leather in a weir. The whole book constitutes the story of Taliesin’s life.

As I said, it started off promisingly. Actually, I always found Charis to be quite uninteresting – she was little more than a mopey teenager. Elphin, I found much more sympathetic – as an unlucky youth, his discovery of the apparently magical baby and his marriage to a similarly ill-starred woman, turns his life around, and I actually found it quite moving. As soon as Taliesin becomes a man, however, the now Lord Elphin pretty much drops out of the narrative.

The more I read of this book, the more its flaws became apparent. The characters are quite two-dimensional – Charis is a starts off as a mopey teenager, and turns into a mopey adult with mad ninja skills from her years as a bull-dancer; Elphin is essentially the perfect man – there is absolutely no evidence for his lack of luck apart from what the narrative tells you; a minor character, Morgian, Charis’s half-sister, is evil-for no better reason than that’s what the plot requires.

It’s also full of clichés. When Charis realises Atlantis is doomed, no one believes her – of course. When Morgian intercepts messages between Charis and Taliesin and substitutes her own, no one thinks to double check. When Princess Charis and Prince Taliesin decide to marry, their previously chummy fathers can’t handle it.

Worse than all this and the various extremely convenient reversals and turns of the plot, is the writing – it’s always the writing. It reads like it was never edited. These days, books don’t get effectively edited because publishing margins are so tight and editors are over-worked – Taliesin was published twenty-five years ago, though. The descriptions are adjective-laden – and they’re always the obvious adjectives. And the book, while not being a massive doorstop of a tome, is still too long; it’s full of passages – whole chapters – that don’t advance the plot and just aren’t interesting. Here’s one low point of the text:

The hours passed one after another as the sun made its slow way through the dull, cloud-draped sky. Charis remembered nothing about the rest of the journey, except the deepest deadliest pain she had ever known and the darkest, emptiest, silence that received her heart’s anguished cries. She moved as in a dream, achingly slow, burdened with the most enormous weight of mind-numbing grief.

There’s really not much more to say about this book after that.

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Review of Prince of Ayodhya by Ashok K Banker

Prince of Ayodhya is the first volume of a modern retelling of the Ramayana, the ancient Sanskrit epic about the ideal hero, Rama. I was quite looking forwards to reading it (even though I’ve owned this book for a good few years) – Indian or Hindu mythology seems to be very colourful and obviously part of a tradition just as august as the Graeco-Roman and Germanic mythoi (which is the plural of mythos) that inform our European outlook. In practice, though, reading it was a big disappointment.

The novel is set mostly during a single day in which Rama is declared the crown prince of Ayodhya by his father Maharaja Dasaratha and is taken on a journey by a millennia-old seer, Guru Vishwamitra, to kill a demon (or Asura) and protect a ritual the seer wants to conduct. This latter double task actually takes a week or more, but is squeezed into the last hundred or so pages of the 500-odd page novel. Much of the rest of the story is concerned with palace intrigue involving the maharaja’s three wives.

The story is colourful – with larger than life characters like the preternaturally mature Rama and his half brothers, the evil governess Manthara, the weary king Dasaratha – it has lots of Brahmanic magic going on and some big fight scenes at the end. But it’s also very shallow. The all the good characters are pure in thought a deed, while the bad ones are ugly or corpulent and simplistically single-minded. There is one minor demoness who has a conflict of motivations, but only because she has a crush on the fifteen-year-old protagonist. Rama, his brother Lakshman and Vishwamitra conquer their foes without any real danger to themselves. Well, Lakshman does get killed, but is resurrected at the cost of a soul … conveniently enough, that of the Asura they’re supposed to get rid of.

Worse than all of this, is the language and quality of the writing. It’s weak. It’s laden with lots of Hindu or Sanskrit terms – which isn’t a big problem, as it does lend a lot of authenticity to the text and there’s a moderately helpful glossary at the end. However, these words are used a little too liberally, especially when, for instance, you read a new word – ‘astra’, clearly a weapon of some sort from the context – towards the end of the book and turn to the glossary for an explanation and it just says ‘a weapon’.

The worst flaw of the book, though, is the use of modern idioms in a story set in ancient India. When magical beings transform from one shape to another, they ‘morph’. Rama, right on the very first page of the book, is described as a having ‘tight abs’. On more than one occasion the Vedic unit of measurement, the yojana, is compared to ‘Western’ miles. Perhaps such anachronisms were used to try to appeal to a global mass audience, but they end up making a mockery of the dignity of this ancient tale.

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Review of The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

The Secret Agent (1907) is the story of Mr and Mrs Verloc (along with the latter’s simple young brother). The former is ostensibly an anarachist in London, but he is also in the pay of the embassy of a European power (it’s never specified which). On being called in to see the new ambassador, he is given an ultimatum: provoke the anarchists into some act of terrorism or lose his income. The consequences of this are, without giving too much away, tragic and somewhat farcical.

The novel is subtitled ‘A Simple Tale’, and so it is. The book is centred on the terrorist action and takes a long time to really work up to it. Once it happens, indeed, the narrative takes a step back to work through the sequence of events from other characters’ points of view. Besides the Verlocs, there are Ossipon, an anarchist and ladies man, the Professor, an intensely dour little purveyor of explosives, Chief Inspector Heat, who is aware of all of London’s anarchists but takes quite a laissez faire aproach to them, and Heat’s superior, the Assistant Commissioner, who takes the investigation into his own hands for his own ends.

The storytelling is pretty inconsistent, moving from one character to another, perhaps in an attempt to give equal thought and prominence to each. The technique leaves the novel with no real focal character; the story is almost a baton passed from one protagonist to the next.

There is lots of time given to the minutiae of each character’s personality and motivation, but none of them really comes to life before they’re forgotten by the narrative. In effect, the plot is less a story (in the literary sense) and more a series of consequences, a toppling chain of dominoes that leaves you with nothing but a mess of fallen dominoes. The two policemen are quite interesting characters, but their rôle in the outcome of the story is so slight as to call into question why so much time is spent in their heads; ditto the Professor.

Actually, all the characters were quite interesting and I would happily have read a longer book if there had been more story to go around. As the introduction points out, it’s a very dark tale; perhaps the narrative style was a way of diluting the impact of that darkness, to make it more palatable to Edwardian sensibilities. Having read and enjoyed Lord Jim earlier this year, I was disappointed by this book, although it contained lots that was worthy of reading (such as the descriptions of London as a wet and dismal place, the streets and buildings forming slimy chasms like the bottom of a drained ocean).

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Review of VALIS by Philip K Dick

Philip K Dick is, of course, one of the greatest science fiction writers of the twentieth century and most of his novels (those I’ve read, anyway) are set in the future or in an alternate reality. VALIS is rather different, though. It’s fundamentally an autobiographical account of a period of Dick’s own life – a period that saw him suffer a breakdown and come to believe in some pretty strange stuff.

The book is written in a strange combination of first and third person perspective. The first person is Philip K Dick himself and he refers to himself as being a science fiction writer and so on, although not until well into the novel. The third person is ‘Horselover Fat’ – a kind of split personality of Dick’s. (The name is a translation of ‘Philip Dick’ (from the Greek ‘Philippos’ and the German ‘dicke’ (presumably related to ‘thick’).) This device works very well, because Horselover is the one who has the breakdown and the delusions (for want of a better word) that are the core of the story.

Dick’s authorial voice has a strange relationship to his troubled alter ego. He is a patient, but slightly despairing companion to Horselover, and most of the time you can visualise him as a voice in his head (which you could interpret either way). But he is also, simultaneously, a character in the story along with Horselover. So, when meeting friends, both Horselover and the narratorial Dick are contribute to the conversation. They are even able to spend time apart; towards the end of the book, Horselover goes off travelling the world while Dick and his friends stay at home and wait for news of his exploits.

As to the actual story, it’s a kind of hippy, trippy, mystical conspiracy theory. Quite fascinating in a way, but it took a while to get into – perhaps because I was expecting something more overtly science fictional. Horselover believes that he has had divine knowledge zapped into his head; this knowledge prompts him to take his apparently healthy son to the doctor, which saves the boy’s life. He begins to write an ‘exegesis’ in which he develops his ideas about the true nature of the universe, largely based on Gnosticism, but incorporating other mystical traditions and scientific ideas of the time (1981), such as holography. Here’s an excerpt:

49. Two realms there are, upper and lower. The upper, derived from hyperuniverse I or Yang, Form I of Parmenides, is sentient and volitional. The lower realm, or Yin, Form II of Parmenides, is mechanical, driven by blind, efficient cause, deterministic and without intelligence, since it emanates from a dead source. In ancient times it was termed “astral determinism.” We are trapped, by and large, in the lower realm, but are through the sacraments, by means of the plasmate, extricated. Until astral determinism is broken, we are not even aware of it, so occluded are we. “The Empire never ended.”

Much of the first part of the book is introspective and repetitive, dealing with these ideas and the death of a pair of women in Horselover/Dick’s life. In the latter part the book, they hook up with some people who have made a film about VALIS – Vast Active Living Intelligence System – an ancient alien satellite that has changed the course of history by discrediting Nixon and has now brought about the rebirth of Elijah/Jesus/Buddha (as a girl).

This latter part is actually a little less interesting than the convolutions of delusion that are revealed in carefully judged stages. The characters that are introduced later are pretty pathetic, and, in fact, even Dick and his friends (Horselover gets temporarily subsumed back into his parent personality by the two-year-old female messiah) think they’re a bunch of crazies.

The writing is generally very direct and accessible – even when talking about mystical experiences, it does so with a cool, scientific tone. There are quite a few passages where it becomes a little bogged down with long words and abstruse descriptions, but they tend to add to the quietly deranged quality of the novel. The fact that it is pretty much a true story (from the author’s point of view) is disconcerting, but the honesty and irony of the Dick voice makes it palatable and ultimately likeable.

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Review of Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie

I read the first book in The First Law trilogy, The Blade Itself, last year and thought it was decent but unoriginal and unspectacular – just about good enough to want to read more of the story. Which I’ve now done – and my opinions of it haven’t changed much; in fact, they’ve worsened.

The action continues on from the first book and is centred on three arenas: a cold northern land called Angland where a Union army battles a well organised horde of barbarians; a hot, dry southern land where crippled inquisitor Glokta must organise a hopeless defense of a Union colony; and a barren wilderness where a small band of viewpoint characters follow an old wizard to the edge of the world to find a magical rock.

Story-wise, structure-wise, I would use exactly the same word to describe this volume as the one I used to describe its predecessor: journeyman-like. Character-wise, it’s as basic as the earlier volume, except that this time there is much more character development. Even this evolution, though, is not much more than obvious and simplistic: snooty Jezal dan Luthar gets his face smashed in and learns humility; fierce, anti-social Ferro is shown a bit of kindness by Logen Ninefingers so she has sex with him.

Writing-wise, the book was pretty disappointing. Abercrombie never stops at one descriptive sentence or clause when several will do. Every chapter has a strictly adhered-to surfeit of long, dull paragraphs detailing what’s happening in the environment.

Many passages show a distinct lack of attention to detail. Here are three I noted:

Ferro knelt beside one of the pitted stones, her bow in one hand, an arrow nocked and ready. The wind made patterns in the tall grass on the plain below, whipped at the shorter grass on the slope of the hill, plucked at the flights of the seven arrows stuck into the earth in front of her in a row. Seven arrows was all she had left.

That’s right: one plus seven equals seven.

It was suddenly too late for heroics, and he knew it. It had been too late for a long time.

These sentences directly contradict each other.

Then he saw the grey face, if you could call it a face; a chunk of hairless brow, a lumpen jaw bursting with outsize teeth, a flat snout like a pig’s, tiny black eyes glinting with fury as it glared back at him.

Firstly – you certainly could call it a face … because it’s a face. Secondly, ‘lumpen‘ is not a fancy synonym for ‘lumpy’, as the author (and others) evidently thinks it is.

Another criticism I have of this book regards the Union army. The Union is supposed to be a powerful, expansionist kingdom-going-on-empire with colonies to the north and south of its homeland. But on the basis of the characters in this book, its military is staffed almost exlusively by vain, selfish cretins who couldn’t fight their way out of a wet paper bag. Which leaves the story with a big believability deficit.

Nevertheless, I’m still – just about – inclined to get hold of the final volume in the trilogy, Last Argument of Kings, because, say one thing about Captain Maybe, say he’s a loyal reader who finishes what he starts.

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Review of The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M Banks

The Hydrogen Sonata (not to be confused with The Seth Rogen Sonata) is a Culture novel – a tale of Banks’s trademark galaxy-spanning meta-civilisation. This one focuses on the end days of the Gzilt (a civilisation that passed up the opportunity to be a founder member of the Culture ten thousand years ago) as they prepare to ‘Sublime’. Subliming is a process that involves an entire race (usually) deciding that they’ve had enough of reality and transporting themselves to mind-boggling, paradisiacal higher dimensions.

The thing about the Gzilt is that they have a holy book that – unique in galactic history – has turned out to be correct in its prophecies. The story kicks off when a ship arrives in Gzilt space with a message from the Zihdren Remnant (the remains of a long-Sublimed civilisation called the Zihdren) that may shed light on said holy tome’s provenance. This ship is destroyed by a Gzilt faction. As inveterate galactic busybodies, the Culture – an ad hoc committee of interested ships, at any rate – decides to investigate.

Much of the cast consists of the vastly capable artificial intelligences that control Culture ships – Minds. One Gzilt woman, Vyr Cossont – artificially four-armed because of her desire to master an almost unplayable piece of music on an almost unplayable instrument called the Antagonistic Undecagonstring – is recruited to recover the stored memory of a man (a ten-thousand-year-old Culture citizen) who may know the truth. A Culture woman is similarly (well, quite dissimilarly, actually) recruited to find the man himself. A Gzilt politician schemes with increasing desperation. A Gzilt general battles with the Culture and wishes he were a machine.

If you’ve read any Iain M Banks, you know what you’re getting with these characters. The book’s heroine is particularly reminiscent of the main character from Banks’s previous Culture novel – a non-Culture woman rescued and guided by a Culture ship. She doesn’t have much of a personality herself and is mostly a foil for what’s going on around her. Her limited human capabilities are rendered pretty much pointless by the hi-tech puissance of her ship mentor. The ships are the usual quick-talking, perceptive, cocky bunch. The politician is a fairly two-dimensional, unscrupulous smooth-talker.

The most interesting characters were some of the non-viewpoint characters. Like the Gzilt artist Ximenyr who conducts body modification. When he’s first encountered, he has dozens of penises grafted all over his body (and multiple hearts to pump enough blood to get them erect) and he conducts regular self-centred orgies. Or the android Eglyle Parinherm who is brought online to protect Cossont but who believes (because the technicians haven’t had time to reprogram him) that he’s in a simulation; he informs Cossont at one point that her reactions are unrealistic and advises the simulation designers (who he assumes to be listening) to have a rethink. Both are sadly underused. Sadly overused is Cossont’s sentient but stupid flying scarf, Pyan, which interjects nuggets of less than funny comic relief.

The previous Culture novel, Surface Detail was an examination of the idea of Hell – an idea that could be made real by uploading prisoners’ consciousness to gruesome, eternal simulations – while this book supposedly looks at Subliming. Except that it doesn’t – you don’t really get any insight into what it’s like except that it’s indescribable. When, at the end of the book, the Gzilt finally take the plunge, they do so (the humans, anyway) using basically the same method that Dorothy used to get home from Oz. This is certainly a joke on Banks’s part, but not a very satisfying one. (Humans declare their intent to Sublime and are transitioned to the higer dimensions by beings already there; AIs can do it for themselves.)

All of which may make it sound as if I didn’t enjoy The Hydrogen Sonata – I did, actually. It’s highly readable, if a little confusing in places – the various Minds and what they’ve been up to blurred together a lot. But it’s also pretty much more of the same, albeit from a great writer.

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