Progressive Rock SF: "Devices and Desires" by K. J. Parker

When Tom Holt uses his K. J. Parker heteronym, at his best, is a very good genre writer: which is not to say that genre writers can't be as good as (if not better than) their literary counterparts - but they have not been taken as seriously, which is true even now. I must admit I found Gene Wolfe's work to be good too, rather than something to be proselytised for, or raved about. Moorcock's essay "Epic Pooh" is a good analysis in some respects (though perhaps influenced by Terry Eagleton et al, and Marxist Lit-Crit in general) and admits the fact the LOTR writing is at least accomplished. Of Moorcock's work "The Dancers at the End of Time" series is both funny and readable and "The Condition of Muzak" to me seems still his best. Folk finding Peake to be overwritten just proves what sort of literary world we now inhabit: Orwell's plain English has come back to bite us on our collective arse, and we can no longer cope with sentences with sub clauses, or paragraphs full of metaphor via elision. Oh, well. It's just that when folk write stuff like "The Book of the New Sun" is the best fantasy ever written, I must assume that they haven't read much to compare it to, genre fantasy or otherwise.  No doubt all shall be well in the ground of our beseeching, if that's the phrase I'm stretching for. 

Much modern fantasy suffers from a need to be perceived as dark, and combined with a desire to out-epic the competition it's led to something of a sameness in the huge-number-of-mutilated-dead count, tougher-than-the-last-tough-guy hyperinflation, and characters flawed by their amorality or brutality (Staveley comes to mind). Parker maintains a personal scale, even though world-changing events (though his worlds always have a sparseness to them - rarely any heaving multitudes), and his characters are flawed by their vulnerabilities. There's darkness aplenty - I find more horror in his themes of erasure or corruption of identity than in how many hundreds of thousands of anonymous bodies line roads to cities (Baker, Staveley, Ryan, Cameron, etc.). This approach pays dividends in his mastery of character development. His books follow anything but an expected path - unexpected events shape characters in entirely unforeseen ways, and while that can lead to great emotional investment on the part of the reader, Parker can be bruisingly unsentimental. That’s why I say fantasy is the progressive rock of literature. It has its ardent fans who champion its cause in the face of utter derision from critics. It has its fair share of pretentious tosh but there are nuggets of excellence to be found if you look hard enough with an open enough mind, a bit like its sister, science fiction. Another factor in fantasy's 'rehabilitation' that might be worth exploring is the prevalence of fantasy in computer and video games. Why does that work so much better than, say political fiction? Anyway, from someone who has read SF (science Fiction and Fantasy) for over 30 years, I’m still surprised we can still find writers writing non-magic fantasy. I like prog rock too, naturally, but that's another story... Parker is a peerless creator of genuinely unearthly mindscapes.

The other great thing about K. J. Parker is that even with his fantasy potboilers he still entertains me with his florid use of language, the weird and wonderful names, and the little details he drops into his stories, products of his wild imagination that elevate even the most mundane tales.

SF = Speculative Fiction.

"The Silkworm" by Robert Galbraith/J. K. Rowling

9:02 am 19 July 2014

The inner-monologues were great pieces in “Cuckoo’s Calling”. Here Galbraith/Rowling ups the game.

I was never much of a Potter fan when the books came out (I was living in the “wrong age” at the time…). Once again Galbraith/Rowling was able to show me why I love reading. We live in a media culture, where the image is stronger and more omniscient than the written word. In my opinion books do a better job of “transporting” me to Yonderland than any other medium, to get me to empathize, to make me think.

Being Portuguese, I’m quite familiar with Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms.

From where do heteronyms appear? What subject is behind them after all? In the case of Pessoa, they came from the inner self. With Galbraith/Rowling we don’t know. In this case we really cannot talk about an heteronym. Here it’s just a pseudonym. We don’t really have a literary persona, ie, we don’t really know who “Robert Galbraith” is. What I know is that Galbraith/Rowling’s writing is quite different from the Rowling/Potter’s books.

The desire to nail a personality to an author is so strong that even when the best effort is made to honour the creation of a pseudonym (or a heteronym come to that) and the new authorial persona it offers, those efforts are doomed to be undermined by the reading public.

I admit to being partial to Galbraith, which is much more my cup of tea. Galbraith is much more Dickensian (wordy, descriptive) whereas in the harry Potter books we can discern a Stephen King flavour.

What did “The Silkworm” give me? It’s part hard-boiled, part satiric, part poignant and part romantic (Strike vs Robin for instance). What more could I ask? On top of that it’s superbly written.

Galbraith/Rowling three main distinctive “features”:

• The above-mentioned inner-monologues, ie, the ability to get inside Strike’s head;
• The characters never fall flat, ie, they are not reduced to mere archetypal roles but instead have a life beyond the page.
• Old-school Crime Fiction in its structure, ie, at the end of the novel Strikes assembles the suspects in one place for a Poirot-like speech of elementary deduction, but the way the curtain closes is not Agatha-Christie-like...

“The Silkworm” is classic Crime Fiction with a modern sensitiveness, written with intelligent humor and a Dickensian eye.

Motorcycle Emptiness: "The Book of Disquiet" by Fernando Pessoa

You'll admit I'm sure that many do indeed adopt nihilism/inner 'emptiness'/void gazing/ennui -- Motorcycle Emptiness for short -- as a social pose, as a way of attracting chums, sexual and otherwise. And this will of course continue no matter how many read Wallace or Lee Rourke or this here little chat.

So what I'm really driving at is this: what's the point -- literally; I'd really like to know -- of fiction (or art of any kind) that gazes into the void *and then keeps gazing*? Of what use is void-gazing writing to some impressionable victims? Let's not forget that Nietzsche is *not* recommending an overlong gaze into the abyss ('lest it also gaze into you'). And let's never forget that although Hamlet may peak with 'To be or not to be...' it does not *end* there.

Pessoa had a grand old time. Got through a bottle of wine most evenings, had a cushy civil service job where he was allowed to spend most of the time working on his private projects. He was friends with Aleister Crowley and I can only speculate about what they must have got up to. Honestly, we're talking about one of the world's great artists here! Too few know him outside of the Lusophone world. Surely after 100 years or so we can ready him safely enough.

It is not the glamour of ennui/emptiness that interests me; so the tears I find beautiful are those tears that Pessoa wrote onto the page - and those that were left behind in his trunk - and those he chose to ignore. I am interested in the beauty he saw in his mundane life. I am interested Pessoa's own intellectual sadness, yes. Not the actuality of it. How could anyone find despair beautiful?

Now, the 'meaninglessness' in Literature that interests me is something special: those voids, facades, created by the author. The fact that everything is lost; Blanchot hammering home the truism that once a writer has put pen to paper s/he has failed. Pessoa seemed, to me at least, fully aware that the very act of writing (not what is written) is meaningless, an illusion - hence his multitudinous personalities. For me the beauty I find in writing isn't necessarily what I read on the page, it's everything that is left, consciously or unconsciously, behind. For me the truth is never written. Nor can it ever be. Isn't that the epitome of all that is beautiful in Literature, yes?

I really don't think Pessoa is deconstructing Literature, although I feel he's revealing its translucency via playing with it's assumed rules, but it's a thorny one; on one level I'd argue that a writer is responsible only to themselves; however, I'd also argue that that self is the whole person, an adult with a full range of responsibility in the world. As such, the artist (writer) is responsible for looking squarely at the world and at their own responses to that world and for then making art that is true to what they see and that interrogates their responses. Not art that is hip, or art that will please an imagined readership, but art that is, on some fundamental level, true. The big problem is when a specific "stance" towards the world comes to be seen as the sole valid "artistic" position; when the would-be writer insists on being true to their idea of what art "should" be rather than accepting the responsibility. Worse still, they may decide that the stance they have adopted (which is, in effect, how they have chosen to respond to the world) is beyond question *because* it is "artistic".

So, the artist (writer) is responsible to her/him self only, but the whole self, the person who has friends and family who the would like to be happy, who requires clean air and wholesome food and a roof over their head, who has responsibilities to themselves and others, and who is always open to the notion that they could be wrong. Art (writing) that lives up to this responsibility (as opposed to looking for an audience or trying to be hip, for instance) is what I believe in.

Bottom-line: Pessoa wrote for himself, and, yes, heteronyms are irresponsible and lead to madness. Where's Ovid and Yeats by the way?