Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Title: Slaughterhouse-Five

Author: Kurt Vonnegut

Publisher: Dell Publishing (Random House)

Publish date: 1969

ISBN: 3 2300 01771154 6

Book quote:

 ‘Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, “I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living.”’

So, you know how everyone has a long list of ‘classics’ they think they ought to read at some point? If this book is on your list of to-reads, get the hell down to the local library and get yourself a copy because it’s freakin’ amazing. The Mysteries of Udolpho: disappointment. This one: not.

I don’t want to write a 5,000 word review on this that would barely scratch the surface anyway. In short…

Summary: The main character is Billy Pilgrim, a gawky, ridiculous private American soldier in WWII, who gets taken prisoner of war and happens to survive the firebombing of Dresden because he ended up in a subterranean meat locker. He returns to the States, marries a rich girl and becomes an optometrist, then after a bump on the head caused by a plane crash, starts insisting he was taken captive by aliens years ago, and has been time-travelling randomly for years before that. The story is sandwiched by a couple of slices of narration from the author, who also makes a small cameo appearance being incontinent in a POW camp.

In a quick scout along the review circles, there’s a lot of noise about the humour, the oblique portrayal of the supposedly central event of the firebombing of Dresden, and what the ‘message’ is. Strangely, the copy I have has a review-snippet from The Boston Globe on it saying: ‘Poignant and hilarious, threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement.’ Odd, because it seems that apart from compassion there is no moral statement made at all by the book. No claims, no pretentiousness.

The most extraordinary aspect of the book for me is the structure. The structure is, as far as I can ascertain, entirely unique, and mirrors the content and possibly the ‘message’ (if there is one) of the book. The little aliens that run through the novel have the peculiar quality of being able to see Time as a flat surface – that is, all points at once. So they describe their own novels as ‘There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.’ Which is pretty much what Slaughterhouse Five is. As Billy shoots about the linear timeframe, slipping from 1945 to 1969 is a morphine-induced haze or whatever uncontrolled state he’s in, we see pieces drift into place, slowly coming into focus, fitting in. It’s like a Hieronymus Bosch painting: a huge canvass with hundreds of participants, but nothing in central focus apart from a kind of whirling void, where the bombing is. You can look closely at each mini-scene, and there will be humour and pathos and grotesqueness and beauty. What they add up to is entirely open to the viewer, but we’re left damn sure it’s all part of an immensely bigger picture that couldn’t possibly fit into a 2d canvas. It also reminds me of a musical piece. A symphony, where recurrent motifs pop up in the middle of something. Ah, there’s that four falling notes on the oboe again, what’s it doing here? You’re not quite sure, but it’s definitely connecting those images. Orange and black. The POW trains crawling through the countryside, the boat outside the room on Billy’s honeymoon night, the stripes of the marquee at Billy’s daughter’s wedding. A hum, a buzz. Blue and ivory, on the feet and hands of corpses and those who are in some way coming close to death. This novel has abandoned both the linear form and straight descriptions, as there is no way to describe the central event. Instead we focus on the colour of boots, on the smell of ‘mustard gas and roses’.

The author’s words present the alien abductions and details as ‘the truth’, which simultaneously allowing the reader to note that all the extra-terrestrial details Billy experiences, as well as the whole aspect of time-travel and linear discombobulation, come from the writings of single science-fiction writer within the novel. We’re also told that many people found some solace in science fiction, as the normal parameters of morals and straightforward existence did not seem to function or be relevant in the aftermath of something like WWII. An alternate reality that may in some way make the completely irrational, acceptable.

Vonnegut comments about linearity and the nature of writing a retrospective narrative, comparing himself to Lot’s wife:

‘People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore. I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.’

I’m stopping there. The book’s an absolute rip-roarer of ingenuity and frankly genius. Five stomping moose-hoofs up. 

Novascapes (Volume 2)

Title: Novascapes Volume 2

Author: Various, compiled Cassandra Page

Publisher: Invisible Elephant Press          

Publish date: 2016

ISBN: 9780992554835

‘Novascapes’ is a showcase of speculative fiction short stories and poetry from the Hunter region in NSW Australia. I’m not sure why the wealth of talent in this corner of the world continues to amaze me. I should be used to it by now. Eighteen stories and poems, all startlingly individual, mostly from almost unknown authors. There is a fair variance in levels of expertise, but the overall standard is high. My favourite by far is ‘The Quiet Realm Of The Dark Queen’ by Jenny Blackford, with its visceral myth-telling, haunting lilt, which overshadows the whole collection for me. ‘Blake’s Angel’ by Janeen Webb touches a yearning and compassion with surreal earthiness that’s powerful and mystical. ‘Murirrugach’ by Megan Buxton has all the solid, creeping thrill of a good horror story, powered by the cold precision of calculated diction.

At this point I’ll ditch the adjectives and leave the rest to the reader. Caveat to this review: as I’m featured in it, I’m not giving it a moose-hoof rating, ‘cause that wouldn’t be fair. (My own story’s OK, but blink and you’ll miss it.) At the moment it’s only available in digital form from Smashwords, but we’re promised a hard copy edition sometime soon. I’m honoured to be part of this exciting team and community. 

Weight - Jeanette Winterson

Title: Weight

Author: Jeanette Winterson

Publisher: Cannongate

Publish date: 2005

ISBN: 3 2300 0117 5777 6

‘Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important.’
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‘Weight’ is part of a series (of which I’d now like to read more) of re-tellings of myths by some of our great contemporary writers: Chiuna Achebe, Margaret Atwood, AS Byatt amongst others. Jeanette Winterson was allocated the story of Atlas and Hercules.

As a re-telling of a myth goes, it’s very free. Winterson intersperses the mythological narrative with an autobiographical account of the ‘weight’ or the ‘globe’ she (or ‘one’) carries around: the weight of expectations, hopes, regrets, and everything we’ve woven for ourselves in between. The nexus of the narration possibly comes when Atlas lies in his ruined Garden of the Hesperides, unable to get up, weighed down by the immense mass of the tiny golden apples from Hera’s tree, which are his past and his future. They crush him so much he can’t pick up the third apple he needs to get: his present.

But the message is not, by any means, to live only for the present. Indeed this concept is embodied in the figure of Hercules, the archetypal hero, the anti-Hamlet, the one who does everything right now, right away, without thinking. Pure action. But even Hercules is bothered by the ‘thought wasp’ that starts buzzing about his head once he’s marooned temporarily with Atlas’s heavy load. Even when he’s freed of the task of holding up the world, the thought wasp still troubles him occasionally.

Winterson’s hero, her ideal alter-ego, is Atlas. How to reconcile oneself to the burden of the 'world', how to learn to listen to the smallest things and feel a symbiotic life with the whole kosmos, and how to shoulder that unmoving oppression with grace. These are the questions that seem to be ‘answered’ with most passion. Perhaps the surprise ending is a reward for such good behavior, and the self-knowledge that the author at least seems to think comes with it.

I liked this book a lot. I read it twice, mainly because iteration is the point of the novel. ‘I want to tell the story again,’ says the author, and we get another aspect of the story, another sediment of autobiography. It’s a personal take on the psychology of introspection and self-creation, of the nature of choices and what they really are as opposed to what we perceive them to be. The read has a hypnotic, lilting quality to it, interspersed and syncopated with Hercules’s boisterous doings which bring brusque and bawdy syntax and vocabulary along with them. I’m giving it four out of five moose hoofs up, with the one taken away only because it’s more an experimental piece than a highly polished one. This is unfair, because being experimental is in its nature. But as Winterson notes within the pages, unfairness abounds, and polish is a criterion of a moose hoof.

In Other Worlds - Margaret Atwood

Title: In Other Worlds – SF And The Human Imagination

Author: Margaret Atwood

Publisher: Virago             

Publish date: 2011

ISBN: 9781844087112

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Being neither fiction nor poetry, but a collection of essays and lectures, I feel out of place reviewing this but hey, it’s a book and I’m a reader. The collection explores Atwood’s lifelong obsession with Sci Fi and its influence on her writing.

As you can imagine, the prose does not disappoint. Quirky, imaginative, witty, incisive… All the Atwood usuals. But as far as readability goes, it’s abysmal. The book reminds me of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, a tome where this brilliant and restless mind shares with readers what books and influences went into the shaping of just such a mind. Theoretically it should be fascinating. But by its nature, it’s fragmented. Reading both the Biographia and In Other Worlds I feel I’m in a continual movie-time travel sequence, flashing from one point to another amidst jagged spurts of lightning. One sentence jumps from the next in tangential acrobatics, leaving you either agreeing, disagreeing or baffled, but without any holdfast or continuation. It’s like wandering about in an endlessly extended and built-upon castle complex without any idea which room you’re coming to next, where you’ve left and certainly not anything about where you’re going to come out at the end. Ok, supposedly, things are grouped into sections. There’s even an introduction (by Atwood), pointing out the organization. This raises alarm bells in the first instance, and turns out they’re justified. If you need an introduction to explain something, the explanation’s obviously not there in the text.

However, if you are game to follow through, go for it. More than enough food for thought for an evening in a quarter of a paragraph. It would be a good book for fans to acquire, and perhaps dip into a few pages at a time and mull over. Borrowing it from the library and chewing through in a few days as I did isn’t the best approach. If Sci Fi is your genre, it should probably be almost compulsory reading, just for the necessary discussions on what the genre is and isn’t (not that it comes to any conclusions or dogmatic precepts).

Alas, for readability per se, a mere one moose hoof up out of five. (Sniff.) For brilliance and potential inspiration and sheer insanity – such as leaping in one bound from Zeus to Wonder Woman’s belt -  and suggesting an overwhelming wealth of reading material and literary and cultural connections, five moose hoofs up out of five. You’ve got to want the insanity and brilliance to want to read it.

Breakfast With The Borgias - DBC Pierre

Title: Breakfast With The Borgias

Author: DBC Pierre

Publisher: Hammer        

Publish date: 2014

ISBN: 987 0 09 958623 4

Book Quote:

‘He was probably only in his fifties but a lifetime of disappointment seemed to hand under his eyes and drip from the end of his words.’

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Like an idiot, I failed to observe who the publisher was on this little book, and like an even bigger idiot I (as I inevitably do) failed to read the blurb. Sometimes it’s good to be an idiot. It meant I approached the piece with no preconceptions at all – which, having a quick scan around the reviewing circles, shows instantly are what ruined the read for a great many.

It’s when the ‘Waiting For Godot’ ambiance really started raising question marks (about a fifth of the way through) that I flipped to the back and saw ‘Hammer’. Ah. Now what.

Plot? A quantum mathematics guru is stuck on the Sussex coast, en-route to a conference in Amsterdam where he’s also rendezvousing with his besotted protégée and lover. Ariel and Zeva, they’re called. It’s unambiguous to grasp we’re meant to be spanning some distance here, the Alpha and the Omega.

From being mildly amused (1/20^th of the way through) to mildly bored (1/5^th of the way) to mildly irritated (1/4), I passed through bafflement, intrigue, and via wonder and synaptic chaos to some kind of cohesion and at the end some disappointment at landing back in reality – though ‘reality’ is hazy as the fog that surrounds the Cliffs Hotel in this case. It’s certainly not a slap-dash piece, as many reviewers seem to conclude. Impressionistic, maybe. But that’s kind of the point, with the interjection of quantum theory woven into the text and grammar in a dizzying Beckett-Woolf modern hybrid of associative syntax and vocab.

The piece looks at the nature of human existence through the angle of modern telecommunications, AI and quantum theory. Again, many readers seem to object that this is not frightfully original. Maybe not, but neither is it frightfully hackneyed. In hindsight the concept itself (or the ‘twist’) is an old classic, and many say they guessed it but I was clueless until more than half way through… that’s the whole thing about not noticing it was a Hammer novella. Anyway I like the way it’s done here. Four moose hoofs up out of five, with the one taken off simply because there are few bits and pieces that simply don’t gel quite perfectly. The brains, the vocab and sentence structures tying in with the concept are quirkily great.

Every Day - David Levithan

Title: Every Day

Author: David Levithan

Publisher: Text Publishing

Publish date: 2012

ISBN: 9781921922954

Book Quote:

“… we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. […] For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that’s different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.”

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Head-scratching time. I read through this at break-neck speed, almost traumatized each time something forced me to stop and carry on with a bit of Life. “Gripping” is an understatement. This book takes you hostage and throws away the key. But why? And how?

Plot: the main protagonist is a 16-year-old being who jumps at the stroke of midnight from one victim’s body to the next – not through malice but as a way of existence. Falls in love with a girl, would really like to hang around, but gets transferred to the next host as usual. Struggles to make this extreme take on long-distance-relationships work.

The author says he wanted to explore the viability of loving someone who changed every day – but as so often, the real agenda is the diametric opposite to the author’s stated aim. The real question and interest is the necessity of sameness in love – and by extension emotional well-being. In a book where the narrator changes literally every day, the main theme is stability, and its role in human existence, examined through the lens of extreme instability.

The review circles make fascinating reading. Polarized opinions or what. Love, hate, confused, but one thing they have in common is that they all needed to read to the end. I haven’t seen a single mention, even from the worst detractors, that the novel dragged. I’ve seen the word ‘Boring!’, but this is used in the sense of I-don’t-like-the-subject-matter-and-I’m-objecting. Many found the internal logic of the novel questionable, and the logistics not explained sufficiently. It seems that in general, the older you are, the less you’ll find this objectionable.

The younger readers seemed to object to the ‘preachy’ authorial tone coming through, via the overtly non-judgmental and accepting attitude he gives the narrator: on gender issues, body image, class, you name it. I found this response interesting, because as I read the novel I thought ‘well this is a bit facile and banging things home with a seal-club, but I guess the audience is YA, why not keep it clear? After all every novel has some axe to grind even if it’s buried – it’s its raison d’etre. Every novel is in some way about How To Be Human, this one just tackles it ore head-on than most. That’s good, isn’t it?’ But apparently not always. Moral: never, ever, EVER condescend to kids. It’s disrespectful and insulting and they know it. Condescending to adults often works quiet well – and sells. They rather like being told what to do. Interestingly, as I read I was reminded of John Green, on a careless day. Then I found that David Levithan and John Green co-authored a book called Will Grayson, Will Grayson. Huh. Specifically, I was thinking of The Fault In Our Stars (it’s the only John Green book I’ve read) which blew me over with technical wizardry and literary acrobatics hidden under 20 feather beds of easy-readability – none of which would be visible to 99.9% of adults let alone YA, but was carefully and respectfully planted there anyway. (I wrote a blog post on it at the time – here.) Levithan doesn’t do this. But he does have the same forward impetus and urgency of tone that tugs the reader forward without remorse.

Perhaps the must-know factor comes from the simple intrigue of how-the-hell-are-you-going-to-solve-this-one as circumstances change every chapter. There’s absolutely no predictability and the parameters seem impossible. We listen in with the wide-eyed suspense of a traveler's tale, a Marco-Polo or Gulliver or Crusoe of overcoming obstacles. Is that it? Perhaps.

I think it’s also because it’s a damn good love story. It has all the youthful hope and altruism and absolute blind need for forward thrust that comes with a good, deep, pure early love. Before we’ve learned to accommodate, or accept, or compromise, or differentiate self-projection and idealizing from the reality of what another person is. Before we’ve been beaten and weathered down and the world seems at best tinted, not polychrome. I’m not sure how a writer almost exactly my age comes up with this, but hey, good job. If you’ve never really fallen in love, don’t bother reading this. Save it for later.

I’m giving it four and a half moose hoofs up out of five. I simply can’t give a full five because of the condescension mentioned earlier, and because he mis-uses the word ‘enormity’ ELEVEN times throughout the novel. The fact that I’m giving this much even with that hideous fault stomping all over the book shows just how impressed and intrigued I am. But please, dude. I know that eventually enough dim-wits and language abusers will misuse the word for it to become accepted usage. I know language changes. At the moment ‘enormity’ does NOT mean ‘enormousness’ and authors should not be the ones to promulgate discord and misunderstanding. Use another freakin’ word.

Anyway, go read the book. If you’ve ever fallen in love.

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams

Title: Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

Author: Tennessee Williams      

Publish date: 1940 – first performance 1955

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Holy moly. Although I’m now sweating with irritation I’m glad I re-read that one. I don’t think a teenager in the 80s got a great deal out of it.

For those of you who have completely forgotten it (like me) and are left only with vague images of Elizabeth Taylor looking young and black-haired-white-frocked, the story is a squabble between members of a Mississippi cotton plantation owner’s family, essentially over money. He’s dying and no-one wants to tell him, everyone wants in on his will – which isn’t made. The play sticks to the Aristotelian unities but that’s pretty much it as far as application of any normal or accepted standards of writing are concerned. And the thing apparently won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. I didn’t even know there was one.

I started gagging right at the start with Maggie’s histrionic evil fist-biting routines, which Williams insists on finding charming. The stage directions are insane. They go on for so long you really wonder why the hell he didn’t write a novel or just get onto a soap box instead. The dialogue is shit – everyone has the same diction, only more or less of it, and we’re reckoning here on southern drawl interspersed with out-of-place formal or literary vocabulary to carry us through. I guess in productions the actors have to make it their own, gloss over some things, accent others. On the page it’s infantile.

But you keep reading and start getting over the initial gut-reaction shock of the insane objectification and downgrading of women. It’s hard to do this because Williams buys into it so much himself, you hate everyone on stage, and the playwright.

Then you start to look. Hang on, it’s not only the women being forced to beg and being incapacitated. Brick is isolated for the mere thought he might have homosexual tendencies – in fact he rejects any possibility of it in himself and would burn it down fast as any of the other characters. Big Mamma is demeaned for being fat. Gooper’s rejected for being sober, Brick is rejected for being drunk. Mae is rejected for having children, Maggie is rejected for having none. Everyone (apart from Brick, who’s a spoiled brat and is currently only interested in the bottom of the bourbon bottle) wants money, because they think it’ll lead to something good. And the fount of this money, Big Daddy, is left entirely on his own while they break the news of his cancer to his wife. He’s rejected because he’s a good as dead.

I remembered an internet-circulated mini-video I saw just yesterday, with the title ‘Objectification of women hurts everyone’. In which they proceed to list the ‘type’ of woman it hurts – mothers, daughters, friends, grandmothers. Further casting pigeonholes and roles onto the very people they’re trying to support, and completely ignoring the fact that objectification of women also hurts men, and vice versa. Objectification of men – as breadwinners, as strong, as whatever typecast you put on them – deprives women of those roles as well as dooming men into their allotted pigeonholes. We still can’t grasp this. We still buy into all the advertising and the commercialism and the nothing-is-good-enough that Williams was so sick of he wrote this bananas play nearly eighty years ago. Sick of but still part of it, trying to tear it off as the characters are without knowing what or where it is. Like Big Daddy’s cancer, ‘it’s past the knife’. The rawness of render and uncontrolled frustration channel themselves directly past the characters, turning the whole play into a soapbox where the playwright does an unconscious show-not-tell on the state of society which, alarmingly, seems not to have changed from the 1940s.

I can’t give this moose-hoofs. Glad I re-read it but would prescribe it with a health warning attached. Take as necessary.