Matter-of-Factness SF: "Roadside Picnic" by The Strugatsky Brothers

(original review, 2000)

Just started re-reading this yesterday and am already gripped. It's truly unsettling in the most understated of ways. It reminds me a little of John Wyndham's work; it has a similar quality of matter-of-factness about it that somehow makes it all the more chilling.

Pure literary gold...strangely put me in mind of "Stoner". You read and there is no way you can stop. Unless you need to go pee or drink a cup of coffee. Or you're really tired and go to bed. Or you've arrived at work and, seriously, you can't stand in front of class reading a random book; especially not on your smartphone. Other than that it's unputdownable.

SF is a genre, comic books are a medium. There are SF comic books, and there are comic books in just about any other genre under the sun. If you're referring specifically to the Superhero genre of comic books, well it's debatable as to whether that's Science Fiction or not, but it's certainly an allied genre within the whole Speculative Fiction umbrella. Star Wars is SF, specifically the subgenre called Space Opera which is a soft SF genre, light on science, heavy on futuristic action and adventure elements.

As for SF in general, I really feel I need to do more to venture outside my Anglo-American comfort zone. I've read a couple of works in translation which have been somewhat lackluster and that's put me off a bit. Having said that, I read Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers this week, and enjoyed it so much that I didn't put it down until I was finished. Also, I tend to buy books on impulse but have never found myself buying a translated book this way - there just doesn't seem to be that many, particularly for recent works. Consequently, although I could name a few old SF writers from around the world, I really have no idea who the Taiwanese equivalent of Adam Roberts is, for instance.

NB: If only someone could write a book where one would feel afraid to turn the page.

Russian Big Brother: "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “We”: both have constant surveillance of the individual, though through different means. Both have the protagonist discovering a class in society that is free, but powerless. Both have state control over passion, albeit in rather different ways. But “1984” (the new title) is rather turgid though. “We” by contrast is actually a lot of fun, I rather prefer it of the two; it's not afraid in places to be a bit silly and it's vision of the future is somehow inspired, with their transparent dwellings and privacy granted only for your allotted hour of sex with your pre-selected partner. If one sees a figure jerking about, and one sees strings attached to its hands and feet and leading upward out of sight, one would "infer" a "manipulator" entirely internal to the figure's movements- a puppeteer. Likewise, if one saw an opinion-herd trotting this way and that, inferring that the beasts were being directed passively (even if the 'puppeteer' in this case were simply the other beasts) wouldn't be an extra "assumption", would it?

Dystopias like "Nineteen Eighty-Four", “We” and “Brazil” make me wonder: sure, my opinions of a book or movie or person or whatever, and my political and spiritual commitments, my romantic infatuations, and so on, feel like they're "according to my own lights, which provide an adequate explanation for my reactions". And what else does one have to go by? Well, one thing one has to go by is the capacity for critique, the ability, perhaps the fate, to see one's own 'freedom' as a paradox.

It feels as though some are merely rattling their sabres by criticising the minor flaws of a masterpiece, like complaining about the way the napkins are folded in an exquisite restaurant. Surely the stately style and sketchy characterisation perfectly suit the novel's vision of a grey, authoritarian world? Or am I simply crediting Zamyatin with more subtlety than he deserves? In any case, I think the content of “We” is sufficiently high enough to excuse any clumsiness of style. Granted, it's refreshing to re-evaluate even the greatest work of art, but why butcher a sacred cow just to have some gristle to chew over? Anyway, I must be off; the clocks are about to strike thirteen.

Anti-literary-flab: "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy

(My own copy)

I was standing at an airport lounge as a teenager many years ago, and suddenly realised I had no books to read for my family holiday. I was a SF geek at the time (still am, but I’m reading other stuff now), but had read everything that W.H. Smiths airport bookshelf could show me. In desperation and dread I turned to the classics... I'd read Frankenstein and other English literary classics by that point, and had found all of them tedious and obsessed with melancholy and/or an absurd idealistic idea of romance. Plots were contrived and you could see them coming a mile away. Of them all, only Dickens could make me smile and identify with his caricatures, but even he stopped short of fulfilling at times. If Victorian England had truly been like all of that that, then no wonder we were so repressed and messed up today. So in desperation and partly in arrogance I picked up this weighty book. None of my peers had read it, and it's size seemed to daunt many. I thought of the smugness I'd feel in saying I'd read it, even if it had been as dry and full of itself like so many others... The next two weeks were the best holiday read of my life thus far. From a stumbling start in the opening chapter and trying to work out who the hell everyone was, I slowly and surely found my way into one of the most beautiful and compelling novels I'd ever read... Tolstoy has a way of showing the inner spirit of everyone. From the bullying cavalry-man, to Napoleon himself and above all our principle characters. How I loved that bumbling, foolish and ungainly Pierre as he grew and flowered, and the impish Natasha who could melt your heart in the first paragraph you met her. Even thinking of it now, I am touched by tender thoughts and memories, interspersed with the grief of conflict and war and the nobleness of the human spirit.

But is it a perfect book? No book is perfect. War and Peace is a brilliant book that should be read and enjoyed at whatever age a person is. It truly is a book for every age and every person. Let yourself into a world that will enrapt you. And a little request: can we in 2000 stop using the phrase "is not perfect ..." when describing something. Nothing in life is perfect. No book, no movie, no age, no accomplishment, and so on. Consciously refuse to compare anything to perfection and instead just enjoy something for what it is. Comparing something to the unobtainable 'perfect' merely diminishes that something and our experience. Don't be put off by folk complaining about the philosophical bits. There isn't too much of that anyway.I reread “War and Peace” recently, in no rush and over three weeks and was amazed by its richness and the development of character. Make no mistake, this is a Russian epic and you will find few books in a lifetime of reading which are as memorable.

(Bought in 1994)

Take Pierre for example who goes from being a young buffoon worshiping Napoleon to become someone with a much more critical view, hoping at one point for the chance of assassinating him. This development does not happen overnight! He learns from his experiences in prison and through his relationship with Platon Karateyev. At the end you are left thinking that the story is not yet over. Pierre and young Nikolai Bolkonsky, patriots both - are thinking critically about society. Exile to Siberia is definitely a possibility if they get involved in anything too radical. Pierre is just one major character in this glorious book. Start when you can but don't rush it. Literature of this quality needs time.

Reasonable defenders of “War and Peace” at (one of) its current length(s) might absolutely agree with being anti-literary-flab, and simply argue that this book isn't actually flabby. For example, the "side-track stories" are not "padding" or "excess", but rather constitute the "pacing" intrinsically needed by the "content" itself- so goes a point of view which I think is more care-filled than that of a "fanboy". Take a look at vol. II, pt. 5, ch. VI (it's only a couple of pages). Natasha has accepted Prince Andrei's proposal, and has returned to Moscow to meet the prince's father and get ready to get married. She meets Marya Dmitrievna, a society dowager, who intrusively 're-assures' Natasha about "old Prince Nikolai" and his resistance to his son's getting married. A tiny moment, particularly in that nothing in the plot changes as a result of this vignette, but we are shown: the social realities that Natasha is growing to recognize and understand; and the ego-centrism, diminishing, that's still the dominant tone in her character (she really sees this man whom she loves, but she thinks she can marry and 'have' him without marrying his family and being his socially positioned and positioning wife). You see my point? The story of the story doesn't change because of this little chapter, but our alertness to what Tolstoy is showing us is colored, or deepened, or enriched, or nourished (or whatever old-fashioned metaphor you like!) by this small facet.

Not sure what, in "War and Peace", some people mean by "cliff-hangers" and "many-a-time abrupt endings" as I’ve read elsewhere. I don't think "serialization" works as either a fault-generator or a mitigation; the book in your hands either holds together as you read it or it's de-coherently "over-long". Think of cricket. If you savor the pace of the game as it is, a five-day Test, or seven-game series, isn't 'too long'-- it unfolds at just the length it needs to. If you can't stand the sport, each batter's innings or team's at-bat is already an eternity of boring nonsense; forget about a match or game. Either way, it isn't the length itself that's guilty of generating one's antipathy. I can't see which 'thousand lines' of War and Peace one would 'blot'...

I have always been vehemently anti-literary-flab. The lack of an author's ability to distinguish what is essential and what isn't and to pare away the flab has always seemed in my eyes a weakness and not a virtue. It does not mean that I do not like long novels in and of themselves, I just find long swathes of them to be gratuitous flab (well written and brilliant though they might be). The Russian masterpieces act as a great case in point. “Anna Karenina”, “War and Peace” and “The Brothers Karamazov” (the three classic doorstops) were all written serially for the magazine The Russian Messenger. They were written in weekly installments by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky with word count and longevity of project strictly in mind (not that Tolstoy needed the money...). Now, the two authors knew that they were padding things out with side-track stories and story-telling devices, but we the modern readers know the books as they are and can't imagine any paragraph being cut (or in fact added to the end to smooth out the many-a-time abrupt endings, which are also legacies of the serialization). We like those novels for what they are and not for what they could theoretically be, but that doesn't mean that the modern author doesn't have the burden to perfect the pacing and content of his or her novel by removing the excess. There seems to exist nowadays a fanboy-like reaction to works even in cultured matters. People zealously defend endless novels, for some reason equating critique of length with critique of the total merit of the book. One can love a book and still critique its faults - we're not football ultras, we're readers.

Basically I say that a modern-day author has no excuses for writing over-long. It's a shame that some Modern (and some not so Modern) Fantasy writers can't manage to edit down their magnum opus.

Bottom-line: If you haven't read it, please do persevere past the first chapter and the strange names. It will reward you over and over in a way so few books do.

Droppingly Gorgeous Sentences: "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov

(Original Review, 1992-02-10)

I can speak and write English pretty well, and I am completely lacking in Nabokov's talent for prose. I do, however, wonder whether the fact that English was his fourth or fifth language may have enabled him to approach writing in a different way. He seems to be very aware of structural features, and I wonder if this skill came out of his ability to speak numerous languages? I'd have to say that's undoubtedly true: the more languages one knows the more one becomes aware of how each one works and, often, greater facility in manipulating them to one's uses.

The one point with Nabokov though which should not be overlooked is that although English was not his first language (likely his third, I think, behind Russian/French) he did speak it from a very young age. Indeed, his Anglophile father had hired an English governess. Now, for an alternative case, the great ancient historian Arnaldo Momigliano only learnt English in his 30s and become one of the finest twentieth century writers of non-fiction.

As far as I can remember, I haven't got Boyd's biography or “Speak, Memory” to hand, but the first language Nabokov spoke was English because he had English nannies, which caused his worried father to make sure that the toddler Nabokov got a good grounding in Russian (got a good grounding? I think that thrumming you can hear is the sound of Nabokov spinning).

I might have misremembered because I know he famously had a French governess and it could have been French, but I think I'm correct. He definitely didn't speak Russian first. It was common among Russian aristos - their first one was usually French, then English and German. Foreign tutors raised the kids, so by the school age they were fluent in several languages. Russian was considered somewhat pleb and coarse among super poshos (just like Normans considered Anglo-Saxon too common for the ruling class). Think Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” (all of the correspondence is in French, and Steva and Dollie’s - anglicised Stepan and Darya’s - wee kids are introduced in the scene where they are loudly arguing in foreignese). Some dainty ladies barely spoke their native language, so when Napoleon happened they dropped French in a surge of patriotism (see Julie) and had to communicate in broken Russian and, probably, interpretive dance :-) Btw, in his preface for the Russian translation Nabokov confessed that once he started writing, he discovered that, to his horror, his Russian got rusty and lost its nuances and fluidity (boo-hoo, baiting for compliments, eh?)

[2018 EDIT: It is my understanding that it is written English and written French that Nabokov learned first. He spoke Russian with his parents of course. In 2012, when I reviewed “The Secret Agent” by Joseph Conrad, I vented a little on how Nabokov wanted to undervalue other fellow writers. Alas, I think the same today as I did in 1992...there’s something missing in some of Nabokov’s novels. Had read "Invitation to a Beheading" and hated it. Had read and seen several interviews with Nabokov and found him to be insufferably smug and self-righteous, particularly in his attitude towards other writers as I said above. And "Lolita" has plenty of flaws - the ridiculously convenient death of Lolita's mother, the hammy quasi-theatrical showdown between the narrator and his rival at the end. Even those famous opening lines grated on me ("you can always count on a murderer to have a fancy prose style" - really?) But for the most part it is so exquisitely written, so witty and perceptive, with paragraph after paragraph of such jaw droppingly gorgeous sentences that (almost) everything else can be forgiven. Come to think of it, not all can be forgiven.]

Petty Judgementalism: "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy

(Original Review, 1981-02-24)

If you're not familiar with the The Orthodox Church's intricacies, don't bother reading the novel. It might also to understand the social context in which Anna Karenina is set, which Tolstoy doesn't explain because he was writing for fellow members of the Orthodox Church who would have understood the particular nuances. For Russian society at the time, an immoral act was one that offended all Creation and therefore God himself - it is quite common for Russian priests even now to admonish those confessing to serious sins by telling them that they are 'spitting in Christ's face'. Yet there are subtleties to Anna's predicament that are probably lost on Westerners: unlike the Roman Catholic Church, which forbids divorce for any reason, the Orthodox Church permits this where a marriage has irrevocably broken down, on the basis that it was never based on true love in the first place and thus null and void. So in the novel it is only Karenin's pride (which for the Orthodox is the greatest sin of all) that stands in the way of dissolving his tragically unhappy marriage. Anna's action challenges the hypocrisy of society and she brings down the anger of the hypocrites upon herself because she has the barefaced cheek to expect people to behave towards her as they did before her "fall" from grace. Her "friends", such as the poisonous Princess Betsy, desert her because she is an uncomfortable reminder of their own failings.

In fact, I'd go a little further and suggest that the absence of clearly defined mores has led to the proliferation of petty judgementalism infiltrating every aspect of life. It's like Jacques Lacan said about Dostoyevsky's famous quote, ('If God is dead, everything is permitted'), accurately turning it around to say "If God is dead, nothing is permitted." And so we all throw the first stone at one another...

The great Victorian judge and political philosopher James Fitzjames Stephen said that the main deterrent to crime is not the law, but public opinion. He was right. One of the reasons Arab countries have such a low crime rate is that a thief would be shunned by his family and wider community. The most judgmental people I know are self-described non-judgmentalists: they hate (straightforwardly) judgmental people, i.e. people with personalities, who don't have to cling on to PC BS in order to create a persona for themselves.

PS. Something I didn't know until recently was that Vronsky, like Levin, was based on Tolstoy's own experiences. He represented Tolstoy's own shallow, artificial lifestyle that he gave up and was ashamed of. Vronsky is mature, attractive and amoral. He sees nothing wrong with pursuing a married woman because society's hypocrisy allows for that, but he gets in deeper than he intended. Not the deepest of characters, but Vronsky's casting in this film was absolutely ridiculous.