"Denizens of the Deep." Kraken

I don’t know about you, but Squiddly-Diddly used to irritate the hell out of me. He was quite clearly not a squid, but an octopus. Actually, he was a hexapus, as he had only six arms. He was some sort of deformed hag-born cephalapod, and they kept pretending he was a squid.  I mean – bloody Nora!

Normally, anything with a cephalapod is enough to rope me in. Twenty-thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Little Mermaid, any number of documentaries. Not only did I read Peter Benchley’s Beast, I watched the mini-series. It made Jaws look like North by Northwest. Actually, put an octopus and a hunchback into one book and you couldn’t stop me. I’d even pay to see a Nicole Kidman film if there were tentacles and a hunchback. (Now I feel I’ve just described a rather distateful Japanese porn film.) The lastest book to rope me in with promise of many-armed action is Kraken by China Mielville.

(And while we’re on krakens, what the hell was a beast from Scandinavian mythology doing in ancient Greece? And what the hell was it? I know cephalapods. Cephalopods are friends of mine. You, sir, are no cephalopod. )

Anyway, Kraken takes place in modern-day London but we almost immediately shift into an alternate London almost entirely unfamiliar. If it’s ringing bells chiming Neverwhere for you, I was almost deafened by them, right down to a ruthless pair of timeless killers.  A giant squid is stolen from the Natural History Museum, which is impossible, but it’s gone. Its curator, one Billy Harrow, soon finds himself in a world of alternative religions, cults, crime gangs, and magic.  There is a policewoman who is a witch, a talking tattoo rules the underworld with terror, oral messages are sent by post and delivered by street lights. People worship squids and badgers, bullets and the ocean. And somehow, at the centre of it all, is a dead squid in a very large glass case and a fast approaching apocolypse.

Mielville’s alternate London is very different to Gaiman’s. Gaiman’s is on an alternate plane, Mielville’s is here, we just don’t notice it. And Gaiman creates a magical place that I imagine thousands of readers have yearned to experience, while with Mielville, you feel rather glad you don’t know about it. With Mielville, the threatened apocolypse may occur.

My biggest trouble is I was trying to read a Gaiman book while reading a Mielville book. Here is a picture of Neil Gaiman:

Here is a picture of China Mielville:

You’d think their imaginary worlds are quite different, and you’d be quite right.  Miellville’s world is more brutal, more punk, harder and meaner. Characters die painfully and stay dead, no magic rebirths. The world at the end of the book is a very different one from the start, and the main character, and many of his friends and allies, have lost much.

Kraken, apart from being a fantasy novel, seems to be examining the power of faith, in having it, in learning it, and in losing it, what good it can do, and what harm. It being a fantasy, of course some of these effects are more literal than you would expect in realism, but the ideas provoked are interesting and worthwhile.

Mielville‘s greatest weakness, for mine, is his characters. They fail to come alive, which is a pity for they have great potential. I wanted to love them, but it didn’t happen. He also seemed to get lost in the world he was creating, losing narrative pace. There seemed to be a lot of wandering about searching for answers without a sense of the characters getting somewhere.

Still I did enjoy the book and it kept me reading. I may read it again, and read it as a Mieville book from the beginning. I will try another of his novels. He certainly knows more about squids than Hanna-Barbera ever did.

"I'm not dead yet." Neil Gaiman and (kinda) Douglas Adams

Phew! After two world wars and the Holocaust – not to mention one of the angriest men to get on a playing field – I was happy to find lighter reading: two novels of fantasy. Both have enormous popular and critical followings, and both bridge the popular and literary genres. They like killing off characters who sometimes aren’t nearly as dead as they appear to be - sometimes. They have something else in common.

Television and film are not the only areas happy to trade on past glories, remaking classics and relabelling old material and presenting it to us as new. They are all after money and a market and the easiest way to sell something is to sell something the buyer already knows and likes and wants more of. And it’s a lot easier than thinking of something new.

However, literature is not immune from this concept. For a while there, it looked as if we were under attack from the League of Living Dead Writers. Virginia Andrews would not lie down, Alistair McLean kept publishing, and Desmond Bagley apparently took his typewriter to the grave, sending his agents new manuscripts.  Closer inspection of the covers of these would reveal other authors “from an idea by” or “based on the characters of”.  To be honest, I’m not sure how many ideas Virginia Andrews had before she died but they seemed to be awfully similar. And these were all genre writers and one could argue how distinctive they were in the first place. Still, one is tempted to brand all this as somewhat cynical.

Douglas Adams however seems a different case. A beloved writer, almost to the point of cult worship in some cases, he had a distinctive voice and worldview. It would seem almost blasphemous to attempt to write more of his material, yet it was his widow Jane Belsen who let Eoin Colfer do just that. In 2009, he released ...and another thing, the sixth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy.

Adams’ last book Mostly Harmless was in his own estimation a bitter and dark book, written during a bitter and dark period of his life. He killed off everyone of his beloved characters. And he often said he wanted to write a sixth book, but his early death circumvented that. So on the 30^th anniversary of the publication of his first novel, Colfer’s addition was published, as a commemoration and celebration. There is no attempt to fool us even briefly that this is Adam’s work. The title and the author’s name are the largest print on the cover by far. The series and Adam’s name appear at the top of the dust jacket. It is Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl series, writing a story using Douglas’ characters.

This was a big risk for the Belsen and Colfer. If it failed, they would look at best ridiculous, at worst greedy and cynical. Happily, it does not fail. (I’ve no idea how well it sold.) It comes across as a solid Adams book, laugh out loud in parts, but perhaps lacking those moments that Adams could do. Like his hero Lewis Carroll, Adams would include throw-away jokes or stories that would suddenly suggest enormous ideas about life, the universe, and well, everything. But it’s great to be back with Dentarthurdent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Breeblebox, and Trillian. To add a cherry to the cake, the god Thor appears, but sadly, Marvin the Paranoid Android does not. The book has an open ending with Arthur seeing familiar yellow ship appear in the sky. This is of course where we came in, and I suspect this is where we say goodbye – for the last time.

Neil Gaiman is far from dead – I hope. But he is also a man who likes to recycle and revisit old stories and old characters, his own as well as myth, legend and fairy tale,  and fashion something new from it. His novel Neverwhere is based on the TV series he wrote for the BBC, which was televised in 1996, the same year the book was published. I have not seen the series, but I am assured the book contains much that was cut from the series for time, budget and other considerations.  I often find that stories are best encountered in the format the creator first envisioned for it ie the novel is better than the movie, unless the movie came first in which case the novel is dire. Gaiman seems to have been writing the novel and series concurrently so each is the original version – a situation that seems appropriate to the author.

Neverwhere is story of a man who falls through an act of kindness into London Below, a mysterious world with odd parallels and enormous differences to the city above. There are black friars under Blackfriars, an Earl and a Raven in their respective courts, an angel named Islington, and more. We meet some of these characters, others we only hear of, but it is a world that is magical, frightening, both alluring and forbidding. And our hero, with a dream of being killed by a great beast, may or may not survive to return to his safe life in London Above.

I love Gaiman’s writing, and this book lived up to my expectations. I read it in hours. It doesn’t have the scope of his later novel, American Gods, but has the imaginative dazzle of Gaiman’s best work. It’s also had another life as a graphic novel, adapted by another writer. I preferred the book. None of the pictures from the TV or the comic have lived up to the ones in my head. I guess that’s why we keep returning to words, words, words.

"There’s something kinda eeurrrgh about a boy who doesn’t like baseball." Summerland by Michael Chabon

Baseball has a place in the American psyche like that of cricket in the English – or the Australian - psyche. Maybe it’s more like the Indian. In any case, baseball represents a purer more innocent America, of freckle-faced children playing scratch games in the parks and yards before Mom calls them home for pot roast and apple pie, which is why scandals like the Black Sox throwing the World Series, or the more recent steroid scandals have the power to shock a jaded population.

Baseball figures heavily in American art, literature and movies; the Blocksox scandal is referenced in The Great Gatsby. Two of the most successful baseball movies I can recall were Field of Dreams and The Natural. The latter film changed the downbeat ending of the original Bernard Malamud novel to a crowd-pleasing upbeat ending, which I and millions of others loved. The former has the reputation of a film that makes men cry. Both films tap into something more than just baseball stories: father-son relationships, chasing a dream, second chances and greater powers beyond our rational world. Field of Dreams makes me cry, but it’s the character played by Burt Lancaster that does it. Lancaster is a small-town doctor who lost his first chance to play the big leagues as a kid, and abandons his mystical second chance to save a little girl’s life. Kevin Costner’s character says to him of his missed opportunity, his five minutes in the Major Leagues, that some men would consider it a tragedy.  Lancaster replies ‘Son, if I had only gotten to be doctor for five minutes, now that would have been a tragedy’. That moment never fails to have me tearing up, even now as I write about it. My Dad, still alive and kicking, was a doctor and is a lifelong cricket fan and player, though he never threatened state or national selection. You would never mistake my Dad for Burt Lancaster, but the spirit of that line is one he would share.

Michael Chabon’s 2002 novel Summerland is an attempt to create a particularly American mythology based on mixing liberal doses of baseball with Native American and Norse mythology, and American folklore (and fakelore) aimed primarily at ‘young adults’.  A boy, the worst baseball player in his little league (I had a lot of sympathy with him), joins forces with a girl from his team, an American baseball-playing fairy, a werefox , a sasquatch, a giant and a wererat  - and others - to save his father and not one but three worlds from the destructive trickster Coyote. Even in that brief synopsis you can see the problem. Chabon tries to cram as much as he can into this long book but for me it never gels. The elements never quite mix and we are left with a lot of nice ideas, good characters and story elements that never coalesce into a satisfying whole. J R R Tolkein criticised C S Lewis for cramming too many mythologies carelessly into Narnia. If you can see the seams in Narnia, you can spot the fraying threads in Summerland.

Another major problem is baseball. A lot of the mythology Chabon creates centres on baseball but the game itself doesn’t have a function. A lot of baseball is played but little is achieved by doing so. At most, the plot depends on sidebets on the game.  I was reminded of Douglas Adams’ Life the Universe and Everything where it is revealed that cricket is a faint race memory of the most destructive war in the history of the universe, the Krikkitt Wars, and the climax of the book is a game of cricket that could destroy the universe.  In Summerland, the destruction of the universe is a sidebet on the final game. There is an incident that brings on the climax, but it’s contrived and unorganic, almost literally deux ex machina. The mythology is supposed to be centred on baseball but the baseball feels tacked on.

And despite Chabon’s lyrical description of the games, you need a fair bit of knowledge before you embark, of terminology, tactics and jargon. It is a mark of the cultural domination of the States that I know who Ty Cobb, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Babe Ruth and many other famous baseball players are, despite never watching a game of baseball. But my ignorance of the game is profound. I had to look up ‘designated hitter’ in Wikipedia to understand one of Chabon’s jokes. 

Neil Gaiman created an American mythology in American Gods, finding a spiritual equivalent of the history of the United States through old world and new world gods fighting it out in the American heartland. Gaiman too loves to fill his books with strands from many traditions of myth and legend but the end result is like one of those old picture puzzles, with faces and objects hidden among painstaking woodcuts of trees, mountains and skies. Chabon has given us a collage put together in haste.

1. The book sold well in the States but I doubt it sold well anywhere else. I think if you believed in baseball like Chabon, and shared his knowledge of the game, you would find this book more enjoyable and more satisfying. Yet I loved both The Natural and Field of Dreams. Summerland, however, never gets beyond appealing to the baseball lover to find a wider audience.

"What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?" Comics books and reading

I used to think that I didn’t read comic books as a kid. But lately I remember that I did. I was never an avid collector but certainly I did read Caspar, Richie Rich and other Harvey titles, Archie, Mighty Mouse, a Tarzan comic which caused me to ask my mother what an upside-down ‘i’ meant – turned out to be an exclamation mark – and lots of Commando comics. Indeed, if you ever need to tell a German ‘hands up’, ‘hurry up’ ‘pay attention’ or to hurl mild profanities at him, I’m your man. As I got into my teens though, I tended to think of comics as kids’ stuff.

But in my thirties I started reading the giants of comic books, the Marvel and DC superheroes. I blame Lucas Stibbard, comic book collector, fellow actor and good friend of mine. In 2004, he pressed into my hand a copy of Michael Chabon’s The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a superb novel of two cousins, one American one Czech who, to cut a long story very short, create a comic book in what is now known as the Golden Age of comic books. This is the era of the creation of Superman, Batman and many other classic characters, around WWII. The picture of this time, and the comic book industry made me go and actually read some comic books.  I was quickly hooked. Luckily, local libraries now carry comic books because they are ruinously expensive to buy. That said, I now own Return of the Dark Knight and four volumes of The Essential Thor, so the collecting bug did not leave me unscathed.

The novel also led me to other Michael Chabon works, and the comic books led me to Neil Gaiman. Reading does that. Good writing leads you to look for more good writing. A reference in one book leads you to read another. Years ago I talked about comic books with Paul Galloway, now a playwright. He had also read the Harvey comics as a child. He said quite rightly that reading comic books is a good habit for your children because it gets them in the habit of reading.  I remembered this conversation while reading Kavalier and Clay, as it followed the historic campaigns that wanted to ban comics as ruining children’s minds.

DC comics have an historic edge over Marvel because they created the archetypes of superheroes: the man given super powers by some strange circumstance, in Superman; the man who trains his body and mind to superhuman levels, in Batman; and the female superhero, Wonder Woman. All superheroes, I suspect, are variations on these three. Not that Marvel would be too worried by my assessment. With Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk, Wolverine, the X-Men, Thor, Captain America and others either filling or soon to fill the cinemas, they’re doing all right.

The superheroes themselves derive from older myths of gods and super-humans (not only does Marvel have Thor and the Norse pantheon on their side, they also have Hercules and the Greeks) and even precursors in popular culture. Lee Falk’s Phantom is a sunnier Batman with a healthy psyche and happy family life. But it was DC who turned these characters into a publishing phenomenon.

Nowadays, these heroes have such complicated back stories, relationships, and psychological issues, with different worlds, different universes, times, reboots and retrocons, that it may be difficult for the neophyte to get into them. In the main, I stick to the classics myself, the big names that I at least have some handle on. Looking up Wikipedia to find summaries is only more confusing. And never ask a comic nerd ‘Who’s this guy?” unless you have a good half-hour to spare.

The latest comic book I read is It’s a bird by Steven T Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen. Comic books, as well as becoming more expensive, have become much more sophisticated. No longer aimed at children, they have tended to grow older with their audience. This work is what may be termed a meta comic, or deconstructuralist, post-modern, or depost-something; it’s a comic book about writing a comic book. The protagonist, Steve, is a successful comic book writer who has been offered the big one – a Superman story. But he is reluctant for many reasons, not the least of which is that his first Superman comic was given to him while he sat in the hospital as his grandmother was dying.  His attempt to find meaning in the invulnerable man in red, blue and yellow tights in a 21^st century modern world leads him down many creative and personal paths, some with dead ends.  This could have been awful, but the result is quite the opposite. It’s revealing, the artwork is excellent, and the story is gripping. Will Steven take what should be his dream job? And if he doesn’t, why not?

So while I still don’t read comic books on public transport, I’m happy to out myself as a comic book reader in conversation or online (it turns out). I don’t need to refer to them as graphic novels, no more than I need to get the adult dust covers for my Harry Potter books. Stories are one of the things that make us human, and if someone is telling me a good story, I don’t much mind the form in which they tell it.