Age of Empire

Madam Crowl's Ghost by Sheridan Le Fanu

2011-10-29T17:19:00.000+01:00

Bringing up the Irish contingent in the Victorian ghost story sub-genre is Sheridan Le Fanu. He's a well-known writer of early spook stories, and was much-respected by the later greats such as M. R. James.

However, he suffers from having been over-influential. Today, virtually all of his plots and situations will be over-familliar to pretty much any reader, and the stories seem tiresome and hackneyed as a result. Perhaps in his day he was able to send shivers down spines, but after a few stories I really couldn't take another formulaic yarn about evil deeds done in creaky old houses.

Le Fanu does set a couple of his stories in Ireland, and it is interesting to hear his take on the rural accent... some things about it seem not to have changed even over one hundred and fifty years. For the most part, however, even his Dublin-set stories are interchangeable with the standard London-based horror fiction of the Victorian period. Le Fanu did occasionally make use of Irish folklore as part of his story-telling, but not in this volume.

I can't really recommend this book except as a curiosity, or to anyone who is tracing the evolution of Victorian fantastic fiction, and even then it isn't very interesting.

Sorry Le Fanu, I really did want to like your work! You being from the ol' sod, and all. Ah well.

Flashman And The Dragon by George MacDonald Frasier

2011-10-29T00:27:00.001+01:00

Man, it’s good to come back to Flashman.After a period of trying to broaden my palate with other popular historicalfiction writers of varying quality, it took less than one paragraph of Flashman And The Dragon to remind me ofwhat I was missing. I was beginning to think that I was holding other writersto some unfair or impossible ideal; but no, I have been reminded that Flashmanreally is that good. This is what historical fiction iscapable of, and there’s no excuse for anything less.

Chronologically, we meet Flashy here justafter his pre-civil-war adventures with Tom Brown in the USA (that adventure ischronicled in Flashman and the Angel ofthe Lord). Somehow he has wound up in Hong Kong, awaiting a ship home. Ofcourse, once again his attention for the ladies gets him into trouble, and our‘hero’ winds up running opium into the Chinese mainland, hoping to make somequick cash and get some attention from a smitten clergyman’s wife. But it’s alla ruse, and Flashy ends up getting a much closer look than he intended at thefighting that has been tearing China apart for ten years…

By 1860, when Flashman foolishly drifts upthe Yangtse, the rebels known as the Taipings were at their greatest strength.Years earlier, the movement had started when a humble clerk failed his examsand fell into a religious frenzy. He came up with his own crazed version of theChristianity that was being peddled by Westerners in China at the time, andgathered quite a following, which eventually snowballed into what waseffectively the biggest and bloodiest civil war of all time, with an estimateddeath toll up to sixty million. TheTaipings fought against the Imperial forces of the Manchu dynasty, the invadersfrom the north who had ruled China as a high caste for centuries, engulfingenormous swathes of China in their war. Somehow, this event has slipped off theradar in the intervening years, and Westerners, for the most part, have nevereven heard of this titanic conflict. Perhaps it’s because the TaipingRebellion, as it’s known, had the misfortune to have occurred around the sametime as the far more fashionable American Civil War (though it lasted eleven years longer than Lee and Grant’slittle spat).

Please excuse the excessive use of italics,but the real-life figures and history that Fraser has to play with here areabsolutely astonishing, especially given their little-known status in this partof the world.

But there’s more: in the midst of this mind-blowingstruggle, Britain decided to step into to once again force the issue of tradewith the stubborn Mandarins, inevitably causing more war. Hilariously, incities like London and San Francisco, immigrant Chinese were scorned and fearedfor their spreading of the opium habit- ‘a heathen curse on Christendom,’ asAlan Moore satirically put it in his Victorian-era League of Extraordinary Gentlemen- when in reality, opium wasoutlawed and almost unknown in China before Britain fought two wars to be able to import it there.

And that’s where Flashman steps in. He soonbecomes involved in his country’s efforts to negotiate (at the point of abayonet, natch) with the Mandarins at Peking. One of the most interestingthemes of the book (to an anti-colonial whelp like myself) is Flashy’sdescription of the Chinese at this time: arrogant, insolent and as racist as heis himself. What’s true is that before the mid-19^th century, Chinahad existed in a kind of dream-world for centuries, believing itself to beliterally the centre of the world (‘the middle kingdom’), with a god for anemperor. It wasn’t until the First OpiumWar in the 1840’s that China was forced to accept that there were other powersin the world besides itself, and that it would sometimes have to respect thosepowers. But the belief that Westerners were sub-human barbarians (not aided, ofcourse, by said wars) seems to have returned, and Fraser depicts them astreating the Westerners like scum, hampering their efforts every step of theway to Peking.

Now, my mindset would generally be that theChinese had every right not to aidthe British in getting their claws into the country. If they had any sense,they would obviously have seen what was happening in the rest of the world, anddone everything they could to keep the foreigners out. But Frasier’s point hereis that this policy was being proposed by a rotting structure of small-minded,bigoted Sino-centrists, to coin a phrase. And, to be fair, he goes a fair waytowards convincing me that he has a point. If the Chinese had had a morerealistic take on the world and its politics, perhaps they would have accepteda certain amount of trading (which was perhaps inevitable anyway) and playedtheir advantage to maintain a more powerful position among the nations. Insteadthey were crushed and humiliated because they refused to accept the reality of the situation. As usual, Frasier manages to convince me at least that there is another side to the story, or that the nations crushed by the imperial powers didn't always behave like angels either.

There’s a very high level of Orientalism inthe book too- quite enough to make Edward Said run crying to his harem. TheChinese court, and in particular the famous Summer Garden, are portrayed asbeing so alien as to be ‘not of this earth.’ It’s as evocative as it isconvincing. I have a particular love for a slightly unreal take on exoticcultures, probably as a progression from my love of the alien worlds of sciencefiction when I was a kid. My heart sings as Flashman wanders through corridorsof green jade and dragon temples, and however patronising it is, I will alwayslove this kind of thing, even if I know that it's all slightly silly.

Something else I love about this book isthat it’s one of the Flashman novels that really focuses on the history. WhileFlashy himself is the glue that holds the series together, I have always feltthat the books fall apart whenever the emphasis is on too many of Frasier’sfictional characters or unlikely coincidences (I rather loathe fan-favouriteJohn Charity Spring, for example). I far prefer the books in which Flashy isthrust through a series of real events, and FlashmanAnd The Dragon is played almost completely straight in this regard. Almostall the impossible events that the anti-hero bumbles through really happened,which adds a certain frisson to the proceedings. The only serious fictionalintrusion is Flashy’s dealings with the scheming Trooper Nolan (of note tothose looking for the Irish connection!), which falls rather flat compared tothe rest of the novel.

Alongside tantalising hints as to anelderly Flashman’s presence at the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and a brief walk-onpart for ‘Chinese’ Gordon (whom Flashy seems to have come to know better lateron- surely at Khartoum?), possibly the saddest missed opportunity here occursat the very end of the book, when Flashman’s American contacts catch up withhim, and shanghai him into what is surely the most lusted-after of Frasier’sunwritten books: the scoundrel’s adventures during the American Civil War.

FlashmanAnd The Dragon is an epic adventure through anever-never-land that really was, and will likely introduce the reader to aworld of extraordinary events and characters. Not to be missed.

Dreadnought by Cherie Priest

2011-10-02T12:28:00.001+01:00

Well, thisis a change. After plodding through the meticulously recreated (in militaryterms at least) 19^th-century of the Sharpe books, Cherie Priest’s Dreadnoughtcomes as quite a different flavour, to say the least. It’s a far morefree-wheeling, unashamedly fun take on the 19^th century that evenapologises on its opening pages for not really giving a shit about history.Right off the bat, we’re warned that we’ll be encountering zombies, atwenty-year American civil war, and all manner of other strange stuff.

See, Priest is part of a wave of writerswho write very deliberate steampunk.Unlike the founding writers, who were cautiously feeling their way into terraincognita and unwittingly creating a new genre, Priest and her ilk know exactlywhat they and their readers now expect from a ‘steampunk’ novel. These writersare light on the history (alternate or otherwise) and heavy on the zepplins andmen with brass goggles. The pseudo-Victoriana setting is often used as abackdrop for fantastic adventures rather than as a study of what might havebeen. All of which is perfectly acceptable, if the writer is any good. AndPriest is pretty damn good.

Mercy Lynch is a nurse at a Confederatehospital. When she finds out that her Yankee husband has died in a prisoner-of-warcamp, she decides to pack in her job and travel across the country fromVirginia to far-off Washington State to see her ailing father before he croaks.Of course, this being an alternate, steampunk 19^th century America,her trip involves airships, feuding steam-powered automatons, and armouredtrain engines built like battleships. This part of the book is tremendous fun;it reads almost like a road trip novel set in a world slightly askew from ourown. Anyone who’s ever enjoyed crossing continents will get a little buzz everytime Mercy pulls into one of her many stops Mercy is a fun protagonist, she’s aprofessional and level-headed woman. Her independence as she moves about thecountry, and the degree to which most characters accept it, might strike alittle bit of a false note for anyone who knows a bit about the real attitudesof the 19 century, but this is not a big barrier to enjoying the book. It is analternate reality, after all, so I’m willing to suspend my disbelief a little!Mercy meets a lot of characters as she travels, most of whom don’t stick aroundlong enough to affect the plot much. This kind of thing does annoy somereaders, but I found it added to the ‘road trip’ feel of the book, and added areal sense that anything could happen next.

Priest doesn’t really go to town with thesteampunk touches: apart from a few uses of improved technology and machinery,the setting is still a recognisably Victorian one. Most of these changes arerequired to drive the plot- in particular the battle-engine Dreadnought, which ferries Mercy outinto the wild, unincorporated west where the second half of the book takesplace. Here, unfortunately, the fun pace of the earlier chapters drops, andMercy’s train seems to drag quite a bit. Other small issues niggle too: theearlier hype about the train’s feared battle prowess seems to be forgotten asthe Dreadnought is attacked by apaltry group of Confederate raiders who manage to cause the train’s soldierssome real worry. I thought this was the pride of the Union army, yet it seemsto have real trouble brushing off some yahoos on horses!

Though there are definitely pacing issueswith the second half of the book, it’s Priest’s smooth prose style and likeablecharacters that kept me reading. Relatively late in the proceedings, we evenget an interesting insight into the politics of this America, and itsrelationship with the independent state of Texas and its southern neighbourMexico. I’d definitely have appreciated a little more of this.

My final criticism of the book concerns itsfinale. The plot slowly builds to a ‘revelation’ that is not only obvious toanyone over the age of five, but also features elements that have beenmassively over-represented in media recently. To be blunt, won’t everyone just getover zombies already?

All that said, I did enjoy Dreadnought and will probably pick upthe other books in the series at some time.

King of the Cloud Forests by Michael Morpurgo

2011-10-01T10:20:00.000+01:00

In empire-set fiction, a classic set-up forEuropean folks living in exotic climes is to have the main characters bemissionaries. Missionaries, by their very nature, go out into the wilds,spreading their own brand of Western interference exactly where it’s notwanted. In King of the Cloud Forests,the protagonist Ashley (oddly, Americans still insist on saddling male childrenwith this most effeminate of names) is the son of a Christian missionary in acity in western China in the nineteen-thirties.

I read this book as a child (well, most ofit) and it always stuck with me as being extremely odd. Though I never finished it,it lingered in my memory as that bookwith the yetis. An 80’s book, it’s considered a bit of a minor classic inchildren’s literature, and I originally found it in my school library, butbecause it takes place in a rather serious and grim time and place, it wasnever going to be the kind of thing I would have chosen to read as a child (I hated historical fiction then, and onlywanted to read about the future and fantastic alien worlds), but I ploughedthrough because I knew that there was going to be some cryptozoologicalelement. But I was to be somewhat disappointed…

Before I go any further, I’d like to notethat the classic, haunting cover remembered from my childhood in which amysteriously-shrouded figure makes its way through a howling snowstorm has beenreplaced in the Egmont Press edition by a CGI monstrosity. A horrible font,cheesy-as-feck ‘spooky staring eyes’ and a misshapen reject from a PS1 gamewandering among the Himalayas made me almost not want to open the book. You maybe ‘committed to ethical publishing’, Egmont, but Christ, get your act togetherregarding covers.

Anyway, the story opens with Ashley(heh heh) living a relaxed life with his father, his friends and a Himalayanhelper named Uncle Sung. Reading the book now, I’m impressed at how thereligious element is handled. Ashley’s father is a good man who’s devoted to hisfaith and helping others. Too often nowadays in all kinds of fiction, thereligious character is a figure to pity or mock. But the religious debatesthat are very briefly touched on (it is achildren’s book) raise unsettling questions about the possible conflict betweenfaithfully observing religion and being a truly intelligent and moral person.It’s played very subtly- so subtly that I doubt even religious folk would findanything objectionable- but there’s just enough there to leave the door openfor debate in the mind of an intelligent child reader (it obviously flew overmy pre-teen head). I like the idea that Ashley’s father is still a good maneven though his own worldview may not necessarily be very realistic. He’s alsonot portrayed as being any better or worse than the Buddhist Uncle Sung. Sung himselfis something of a realist, remaining cynical about aspects of even his ownreligion. None of this is idle background, either; Morpurgo is working up tosomething big.

Then the Japanese invade. Reading his bookthe first time around is almost certainly the earliest memory I have of beingaware of this terrible conflict. There’s no real detail about the war or whyit’s happening, and young readers are spared any mention about the many, many Japanese war atrocities committed.Instead, the war is played as a plot-device to get Ashley and Uncle Sung toleave the city and head into the Himalayas, bound for Tibet and ultimatelyBritish India, where Ashley will get a boat to England.

The hardships of their journey also stuckwith me for many years. It felt like an enormous, epic quest equal to The Hobbit. The two travel across plainsand high into the snow-covered mountains. The landscape is vast and cruel, thehardships broken only by rest at the occasional house or monastery. Alsointroduced to me by this book was the idea of Tibet as being a seriouslymystical place- Ashley and Sung encounter superstitious locals, including allama who tells Ashley’s fortune. He claims that Ashley will be a ‘king of thecloud forests.’ Sung merely scoffs. They also come across legends of the yeti,the wildman who supposedly inhabit the mountains.

The friendship between the two travellersgrows until, almost unbearably, Sung fails to return from a trip to gathersupplies during a snow storm. Ashley holes up in a hut, waiting for Sung’sreturn. Instead, he gets a very different kind of visitor…

Ashley gets taken in by a tribe of yetis,and this is where it all went south for me as a child. I remember losinginterest as soon as the beasts were revealed to be a lovable, caring bunch ofcritters. I wanted my crypto-creatures to remain mysterious, dammit! I neverhave had time for the ‘noble savage’ plot, and still find it boring today.

Anyway, Ashley has a lovely time livingwith the yetis, and over time he comes to know them all, giving them tokencave-man type names (you know the kind of thing: One-Eye, Big-Leg, No-Face,etc). True to the noble savage stereotype, they know no anger or selfishness, andlive in perfect harmony with their surroundings. He stays with them for almosta year until he realised that they pretty much worship him, and after their devotion causes a disaster to thetribe, he knows that he can no longer remain as a false God; he must leave. Ah,now it becomes obvious what all that religious sub-text was for earlier! It’ssubtler than I’m making it sound, and Morpurgo definitely deserves credit forgetting his point across naturally without any overt God-bashing.

I loved the scene where Ashley leaves thetribe during a goat-raid on a monastery. His first contact with humans in ayear does not go well, and he realises that he will probably never feel thesame towards his fellow man (or woman? The mind boggles) again. And to hiscredit, the author allows this trait to persist without sugar-coating it:Ashley is allowed to grow up as a somewhat isolated boy who, true to hisexperiences, never quite fits in and dreams of someday returning to hismountain idyll.

There’s also an odd reversal when Ashleymeets a man who has come to wonder if the yetis are after all not a step above mankind, given that they havemanaged to live a ‘better’ lifestyle than we do and exist in a sort orunspoiled garden of Eden, thereby putting themon a sort of God-like pedestal. Even though the book finishes on a note ofaching loss for this departed ‘paradise’, the subtext is clearly that reveringanyone as a perfect being, and surrendering reason to such worship, is an actof folly.

I would certainly recommend King of theCloud Forests for anyone who’s interested in challenging their children (orthemselves) with a haunting story that raises some uncomfortable questions, andprovides no easy answers.

Sharpe's Triumph by Bernard Cornwell

2011-09-18T18:00:00.005+01:00

As I've noted before, Cornwell's famous Sharpe novels seem to me to exist in a bit of a cultural and historical vacuum. The author provides just enough context and background to make the story work, but no further. In Sharpe's Triumph, for example, we learn that the Brits are now fighting the Mahratta Confederation, which is a conglomeration of Indian states and rulers who have banded together, and who are using some renegade European generals such as the German Pohlmann and the traitorous Englishman General Dodd, to lead their troops. From this set-up all Cornwell's heroes, villains and conflicts spring, and this he does well. But as in Sharpe's Tiger, there seems a curious lack of depth; a fear to look into any of the issues encountered when writing about the early 19th-century British Empire. Once again, neither Sharpe nor the reader gets more than a cursory reason why these mighty forces are opposed to one another.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh. The book is still very entertaining, and at heart it's a very well-written action extravaganza, and wants to be nothing more. It's just a shame that Cornwell, who clearly does know his history, and can write epic battle scenes like nobody's business, doesn't put the same care into recreating other aspects of his historical writing.

The book begins with Sharpe surviving a massacre perpetrated by Dodd, who has fled from the British ranks to avoid being punished for murder. It's a great opening that cements Dodd as an intriguing villain (this potential doesn't really come to fruition, but he's still a pretty good character). In the intervening four years since his last adventure, Sharpe's been comfortably stationed at Seringapatan, the former capital of the Tipoo Sultan. Nobody knows that Sharpe himself killed the Tipoo, nor that he still hides the dead king's jewels among his clothes.

Sharpe makes an appearance at the siege of the city of Ahmednuggur, where Dodd's men are stationed alongside the forces of the Mahratta Confederation. Scottish troops storm the walls, led by one Colin Campbell, who will later meet the equally fictitious Flashman(!) during the Sikh wars in the 1840's. Campbell joins Wellington as one of the few real-life people who have met both famous fictional Empire-builders. Meanwhile, Sharpe's nemesis Seargeant Hakeswill, who somehow survived his tiger ordeal at the end of the last book, is still alive and looking to make trouble for our hero...

The best part of the book comes when Sharpe and his mentor McCandless visit the Mahratta troops commanded by the General Pohlmann. Pohlmann takes Sharpe aside and tells him that he could join the Mahrattas and rise up the ranks. For once we get a look inside Sharpe's head as a real human being and not as an action hero as he is tempted by Pohlmann's offer- in the British army, he is cast forever as a low-ranking soldier due to his social class, with no hope of rising up the ranks regardless of ability, while as a traitor in Pohlmann's ranks, he could become a rich, decadent officer within a few years, because the Mahrattas value his skills.

There are some great scenes as Sharpe wrestles with this idea. After all, unlike the right-wing Flashman, Sharpe is an apolitical sword-for-hire who has been scorned by his own establishment and bears no real loyalty towards the British army or the East India Company. Unfortunately, Cornwell declines to use this plot point to critique the morality of the British Empire (I know, it's not that kind of book, but he came so close!), and a conveniently-timed act of treachery of Dodd's causes Sharpe to shelve any idealogical notions and once again side with McCandless and the British.

The book does finish with a tremendous (if exhaustive) description of the battle of Assaye: the battle that made Wellington's youthful career. Nobody else does battles like Cornwell, nobody else can handle the epic amounts of men, animals and troop movements. It's only disappointing that the aforementioned lack of context spoils things somewhat. The fact that we don't really know what's at stake, or what the Mahratta's motivations are, somewhat robs this superb technical exercise of its emotional heart. Nevertheless, it's exciting stuff, and the various plot points associated with the cast of heroes and villains tie together nicely- except of course, those necessary to set up the next book.

Of Irish interest, there is one or two fleeting references to the old sod, including when when a sly Indian fighting for the British asks McCandless about his Irish-bred horse.

'County Meath is in Ireland?' Sevajee asked.

'It is, it is.'

'Another country beneath the British heel?'

'For a man beneath my heel, Sevajee,' the Colonel said, 'you look in remarkably fine fettle. Can we talk about tomorrow? Sharpe, I want you to listen...'

Sigh. So close...

(Incidentally, if you get your hands on the book, please note the grossly misshapen faces of the soldiers on the front cover. At best, they're pulling faces that suggest they've just taken a spoonful of the Tipoo Sultan's elephant dung. At worst, their heads are twisted at an Exorcist-style angle. It's really a horrible painting.)

The Jewel Of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker

2011-08-30T20:14:00.006+01:00

Ok, so what if I'm always willing to give an Irishman another chance? So Dracula didn't do it for me when I finally got around to reading it; no matter. The old boy's such a big name in Victorian horror, and has been so influential, that there was bound to be something he'd written that I'd like. And after a chance viewing of the original 1932 The Mummy, I was on something of a Mummy binge. I watched the Hammer Mummies, I re-read refutations of Tutankhamun's curse, and I gobbled up every Victorian era piece of Egyptian horror hokum I could- and that didn't take long, because there aren't that many. Besides Conan Doyle's formative takes on the genre, and a few others (including The Beetle, and that crazy story where the mummy comes back to life in the far future), there was only one other serious piece of 'classic' mummy fiction that I had yet to tackle- and that was The Jewel of Seven Stars by old Abraham Stoker. And so we were to spend several more nights together, sifting through lumpy prose, spelunking for plot points and keeping a watchful eye in case any action showed up.

The action (or inaction as it'd be more accurately described), gets underway when a young lawyer called Malcolm Ross gets called to the house of one Margaret Trelawny. What's that you say? Not the daughter of the famous Egyptologist, Abel Trelawny? Why, the very same (Yeah, this is one of those universes where Egyptologists are household names)! Ah, but Stoker's playing it cool, and this plot-relevant tid-bit is kept from us for some little time. It's all part of his plan to make us think that Jewel is not a mystical horror story, but in fact one of those boring Victorian locked room whodunnits (look, I really don't care whodunnit, unless it was a mummy, in which case, GET TO THE MUMMY). Instead, we get to spend lots of time with several police officers who potter around in Trelawny's house, mostly not even leaving his room. They learn that old man Trelawny's been somehow put into a coma. Eventually, something that would have been immediately obvious to the characters is revealed to the reader: that Trelawny's room is absolutely crammed with Egyptian artifacts, including several mummified cats and even people.

At this, Malcolm and the policemen and doctors who are now on the case wonder if the artifacts could possibly be disseminating some kind of poisonous odour that the old man has picked up, so they start wearing face-masks when they're in the room. Strange things begin happening in the house at night, and suspicion quickly falls on young Margaret. This bothers Malcolm, because though he can see that she's the most likely culprit, she still makes his head go giddy and his stomach turn to mush. Well, that's something I can get behind, you know. I mean, we all know how much love sucks. But Malcolm is such a typical late-Victorian chaste goody-two-shoes romantic hero that he makes me a little bit sick myself. He puts Margaret up on a ridiculous pedestal constantly, making the love subplot contrived and unbelievable. His anguish and mood swings are the only things about him that strike a note of truth for a young man in love, but when it comes to Margaret herself, he never thinks anything that a real person would in such a situation. Did Victorian gentlemen really have to restrain even their thoughts like this? This part of the book goes on for way too long.

Anyway, after some time Abel Trelawny wakes up, and things start to look up for the reader. When one of his Egyptologist colleagues shows up at the house, Abel is forced to tell the gang some of the backstory behind the mysterious goings-on. It turns out that Abel and his man have something of a history of mucking about in cursed tombs- in particular, the tomb of one Queen Tera. Finally the story escapes the confines of Abel's bedroom (in the form of a flashback), and there's a few very effective chapters describing the history of this rogue queen, as well as the Englishmen's violation of her tomb.

Here Stoker manages to conjure up the mystic side of Egyptology, which really is what we all came for really, right? Tera's perfectly-preserved hand (notably white, mind you) gets removed, and starts turning up in some really weird places. My favourite part of the book is when they are lugging Tera's coffin through the desert after plundering her tomb, only to find their missing Arab servant lying dead with the missing mummy hand on top of him. If anyone is ticking boxes, yeah the Englishmen are accompanied by a bunch of untrustworthy, superstitious Arabs who come to nasty ends at the hands of the curse while their white masters, who instigated the tomb robbery, make it out alive. I guess the writers of the Hammer movies must have really loved that bit.

Tera's character herself is drawn pretty sketchily, and though she does control all the events of the plot, we never really feel like we know her. From what we do learn though, there's definite echoes of Ayesha from She going on- a powerful woman from an ancient civilization who uses sorcery to gain immortality. Tera plans to bring herself into the nascent 20th century in the 'northern land' she has always dreamed of: England. The particulars of her plan are very intricate, and Stoker has constructed a set-up of spells, amulets, and centuries-long plotting that Dan Brown would be proud of (err... might not seem like it, but that's a compliment). Another of my favourite bits is when the protagonists realise that the titular jewel of seven stars matches the stars of the plough, even though thousands of years ago, when Tera constructed it, they would not have been in the same position. It's a nice touch that brings home the vastness of the time involved and the perfection of her plan. There's plenty of other interesting Egyptological information, and it shows that Stoker really knew his stuff.

Meanwhile, the crew has relocated to Cornwall so that Trelawny can... help to raise the obviously evil (or at best extremely powerful, troublesome and unpredictable) Tera. He comes over all Doctor Frankenstein here, pondering on what modern people could learn from messing with Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. It's hinted that the Egyptians may have been far more advanced than us in many fields, including possibly having knowledge of radioactive materials (here Stoker again includes some ripped-from-the-headlines stuff). They begin to wonder what a successful resurrection of Tera would mean for their religious beliefs, which is a step further than most Victorian fiction usually goes! A good old-fashioned storm brews as they assemble the necessary equipment around her sarcophagus in a cave beneath their Cornwall house. Meanwhile, Malcolm is wondering why Margaret (who was conceived the moment her father had a mysterious 'missing time' episode in Tera's tomb, and who is the spitting image of the ancient queen) hasn't quite been acting herself lately...

It should be obvious that there is a lot of good stuff in The Jewel of Seven Stars. Stoker was something of a minor expert in Egyptology, and the book is better-researched than most of its ilk. There's definitely more going on here than just using Egypt as a handy place to pull spooky stories from; there's the fear that this time (unlike in Dracula), even science and modern technology might not be enough to save us from ancient evils. And like She, that evil will take the form of what a turn-of-the-century man would fear the most: a powerful, liberated woman.

But these interesting themes are marred by a pace that's slower than intercontinental drift, turning the non-Egyptological sections into quite a slog. And it would have helped if Malcolm wasn't such a wet blanket either. I would recommend this one only to those with a serious interest in the development of the 'Egyptian' theme in Victorian weird fiction. Well, that's what you get for trusting an Irishman...

The Table-Rappers by Ronald Pearsall

2011-04-03T16:53:00.010+01:00

The Table-Rappers is presented as a scholarly and exhaustive take on Spiritualism and other Victorian occult phenomena. It isn't that exactly, but it still makes interesting reading.

What the book really is, for the most part, is a sort of high-brow, skeptical version of the works of Charles Fort, or even the later books by Colin Wilson on the supernatural. In Table-Rappers, seemingly hundreds of individual cases and incidents are chronicled in an endless array of brief encounters. Like Wilson's books, there are many fascinating stories buried somewhere within each chapter, though the 'filing' system seems rather odd (some of Wilson's stories stuck in my head for years, prompting much flipping through his strangely-edited chapters to find them years later). And as an Irish connection, I was delighted to learn that gangs of occultists wearing 'all-concealing black robes' were operating in Dublin during the late Victorian period!

Rather than attempting a chronological history of the subject, Pearsall has opted to separate his chapters based on the various types of phenomena- seances, spirit photography, etc. In a way, there is a loose chronology, as there were slightly overlapping 'waves' of interest in these subjects, but it's done at the expense of a more meaningful, interpretive take on the subject. And while many of the incidents alluded to are fascinating, shockingly short shrift is given to many of the most important spiritualists who shaped the movement: the Fox sisters, whose 1840's table-banging marked the beginnings of Spiritualism, D. D. Home, the only psychic who was never caught cheating, and the Davenport brothers. The book gives little hint about how the movement was perceived in the world at large, or how important these characters were during their lifetimes.

Most of the book is taken up with these brief accounts of Spiritualism, giving the feeling that the Victorian age must have been absolutely full of fraudulent mediums, all squabbling for their 15 minutes of fame and quick to besmirch one another's reputations. Pearsall's tone is skeptical throughout, assuming foul play and trickery in every case. It's true that most mediums were caught cheating at some point, but it's interesting to compare this book with Peter Lamont's The First Psychic, a book that's primarily a biography of D. D. Home, but which serves as a very effective commentary on the Spiritualist movement and the Victorian need to believe. Lamont never assumes that any mediums were cheating unless they were caught; he does eventually confess his own personal skepticism, but on an academic level his scrupulous fairness is impressive.

Later on in Table-Rappers, Pearsall includes a few chapters on other aspects of Victorian spookiness, including poltergeists and good old-fashioned haunted houses. For some reason I enjoyed this stuff better- perhaps because they're just stories, and he can neither prove nor disprove them with his slightly sarcastic prose. But because he was writing in the 70's, when the supernatural- sorry, the paranormal- was having a renaissance in credibility, he does let slip that although most Victorian 'mind-readers' were bogus, we of course now 'know' that there is definite evidence for telepathy (!). He cites some unspecified 20th-century research to prove this; I suspect that he's referring to the work of J. B. Rhine and the Duke University Parapsychology Lab, an interest subject in itself. (In fairness, Rhine seems to have been a serious, rational-minded scientist who worked extremely hard for decades, using only variants on the Zenner cards theme, to provide statistically significant evidence for telepathy without ever getting caught up in the silliness that often comes with the subject). There's also a fascinating chapter on the feud between the outrageous Madam Blavatsky (creator of the break-away movement 'Theosophy') and the mostly-rational Society for Psychical Research.

Late in the book, Pearsall does throw in a few chapter of analysis, but it's very 70's-type analysis that includes some of the odd ideas regarding the paranormal at that time. It's weird to find this skeptical author drawing a line between Spiritualism and manifestations, which he believes to be bogus, and clairvoyance and table-rapping, which he does not. It's still a worthwhile read, however, for the countless strange stories that characterized the 19th -century occult scene.

Sharpe's Tiger by Bernard Cornwell

2011-03-27T20:44:00.006+01:00

‘You like Flashman, right?’

‘Yeah. Love Flashman.’

‘Oh, man, you’ve gotta try Sharpe so.’

Fine so. I finally have tried Sharpe. And, while entertaining, I find myself agreeing with the Flashman fan who noted that Sharpe is ‘too straight an arrow by half.’

Bernard Cornwell and his fictional Napoleon-era soldier Richard Sharpe have a lot of fans out there- Sharpie’s probably one of the biggest names in British Empire military-themed historical fiction, only partly as a result of the popular tv adaptation starring Sean Bean. It’s really a bit of a surprise he hasn’t crossed my path before- probably as a result of my lack of interest in the Napoleonic Wars.

But despite the slight age difference, the parallels to Flashy are unavoidable- Sharpe is a British soldier who works his way up to a high rank, and has a long career around the globe, appearing in many of the famous military escapades of his time (including Waterloo).

I picked up Sharpe’s Tiger because I found it for two pounds in a shop in Yorkshire, but also because it featured Sharpe’s early adventures in India, which seemed more interesting to me than his later Europe-based adventures. It’s actually chronologically the first book in the series, though not the first one written.

Sharpe begins the book as a private, having signed up for the army following a scuffle at home. He’s a rough Lancashire lad with a troubled background; he spent some time stealing luggage from stagecoaches, eventually killing a man over a fight with a woman.

In the army, he becomes part of the slow British take-over of India. Come 1799, the redcoats are struggling against the mighty Tippu Sultan in what we now know as the fourth Anglo-Mysore war. The Tippu, a Muslim of Persian background, has come into control of the largely Hindu city-state of Mysore in the south of India. The French, always eager to see the British thwarted, have sent an adviser to aid the Tippu. And there is an Irish connection here: the last British leader to have taken a swipe at the Tippu prior to this was Lord Cornwallis, the same guy who surrendered to the Yanks at Yorktown and put down the 1798 rebellion on the Emerald Isle (I'm not a big fan of him, so).

During preparations for the siege of Seringapatam, Sharpe earns the ire of one Sergeant Obediah Hawkeswill, a tyrannical officer who goads Sharpie into assaulting him. A flogging follows, cut short only by the news that a senior British officer carrying sensitive information has fallen into enemy hands. Someone is needed to pose as a deserter and join the Tippu’s forces to rescue the man- is Sharpe up for the job? Already thinking of deserting for real, Sharpie volunteers, but is dismayed to find that he’s going to paired for this perilous mission with Lieutenant Lawless, an upper-class officer who has to also pose as an unruly deserter.

So begins the book. Later, there’s adventures, rescues and spills aplenty in the Tippu’s city as Sharp faces off against tiger-striped Mysore soldiers, a team of professional torturers, and even an actual tiger. It’s all pretty entertaining stuff.

Aspects of the novel are great- the play between Lawless, a decent but slightly effete man who needs to convince as a ruffian, and Sharpe, who’s the real deal, are among my favourite parts. It gives a glimpse into the injustices of the British class system of the time. Other small touches I liked include the French adviser’s shock at how the British army recruits and treats their troops- in France at that time, soldiering even at a private level was considered an honourable and respectable position, and officers often mingled with their troops. Hawkeswill too is a flat if hateful villain, sure to have the reader hissing from his first appearance.

So it’s an enjoyable adventure with some nice period touches. But compared to Flashman?

For starters, the history quite often simply isn’t there. Sharpe, as an uneducated private plucked from the gutter, doesn’t particularly care why the British army are in India fighting against the Tippu, and the reader doesn’t find out much about this issue either. In a Flashman book, the hero would have ended up learning much about the Tippu's point of view and coming to understand (if not appreciate) his culture, but here this fascinating historical figure is reduced to a generic villain. Late in the book, there is a very brief discussion about how trade is the main reason that the Brits, the Frogs and the Tippu have come to blows, but this interesting tidbit is kept tantalizingly brief. Throughout, other interesting topics are brought up and then discarded (such as the place of religion in the various characters’ lives) as though the narrative is afraid to look any further beneath the surface of what is essentially an action-adventure novel. Which is fine, but it could have been much more. In total, what we have here is a British Empire-themed novel that is not really interested in addressing any of the issues raised by the day-to-day realities of the British Empire. Compared to Flashy’s satirically scathing commentary on just about every aspect of Victorian life, it just won’t wash.

The writing is solid and occasionally striking, but it often retains an unremarkable airport-novel style that’s pretty bland and lacking the character of Fraser’s work.

As for Sharpe himself, he is somewhat more interesting than most thriller heroes. His rough background and pragmatism sometimes cause him to do shocking things- in order to prove his ‘loyalty’ to the Tippu, he is fully prepared to assassinate British officers if necessary. And the glibness with which he accepts that he’s been dumped by his up-to-then sweetheart is a bit shocking too. He’s angry at how the world has treated him because of his lowly birth. But by and large, he’s a far more conventional hero than Flashy. Which is to be expected, really.

Perhaps comparing the two isn’t fair. But the Sharpe novels were begun a few years after the original Flashman books, and were surely influenced in some way by them, so in that regard it’s a little disappointing to find them a similar idea carried out far, far more conventionally. The end result: Flashy would totally take Sharpe (probably by throwing sand in his eye and rogering his woman, too, the coward).

The Diamond Lens by Fitz-James O'Brien

2011-03-06T16:03:00.006Z

It is my privilege to rescue from obscurity an unfairly-forgotten writer from the annuls of history, and a man from my own county at that- the great Fitz-James O'Brien. Born Michael O'Brien in County Cork, very little seems to be known today about him (I reckon there's a decent English thesis in there somewhere, as the chap definitely deserves a revival).

What we do know about him is that he moved to America in the 1850's, changed his name and whittled away a sizable inheritance living the lavish lifestyle of a dandy. By all accounts (not that there are many), he was a raucous, rollicking man to have at a party, and he supposedly entertained and palled with many of the famous writers of the day. Like many an Irishman, he fought with the Yankees in the US Civil War, and died after being wounded

Fortunately for my own purposes, he also dabbled with ink himself. One of my favourite of his compositions is The Demon of the Gibbet, a rattlingly good Poe-esque tale of a late-night horseride past the Gallows Tree, where a demon is said to haunt. In every alternate verse, the demon speaks to the protagonist, telling him that he's going to steal his cloak, his wine, and eventually his woman as well! The existence of various locations around Cork city named for being former sites of gallows and hangings (Gallows Green, for example) makes me wonder if he had the Cork landscape in mind when he wrote this. The nature of this poem seemed to be crying out for a melody, so I did once put it to a tune, and played it many times with my group, The Thirsty Scholars, in our haunting ground, An Spaipin Fanach. Perhaps it will end up on Youtube someday!

Anyway, O'Brien also frequently wrote proto-sci fi stories for the American Victorian magazines almost thirty years before Wells was on the scene, which is pretty remarkable, especially seeing as how well he fares against the Grand Old Man of Victorian fiction. His tale What Was It?, though not one of my favourites, is thought to be possibly the earliest use of invisibility in fiction, predating The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce, The Horla by Maupassant and Predator. True to my own heart, he was massively influenced by the Arabian Nights (moreso even than Lovecraft, perhaps), and liked to inject his speculative fiction with a jolt of Orientalism, setting tales in Arab or far Eastern countries.

But for today's selection, I've chosen a tale that could have slipped easily into the Wells canon, except for one twist. The Diamond Lens at first appears as if it's going to be a classic Victorian sci-fi yarn- a a story of new science gone wrong. Here's the plot: Linley is a boy who grows up obsessed with microscopy. He loves it so much that as a child, he tears the eyes out of fish and animals in order to use the lenses within. Eventually his family buys him a real microscope, but this only fuels his obsession.

In order to live his life without interference from his family (who expect him to become a doctor), Linley enrolls in a medical course in a New York university and gets himself an apartment. He never turns up for lectures and spends his parents' money on more microscope equipment. But it's never enough! He wants to see more, he wants to see deeper. He curses the limitations of physics.

On the advice of his shady Jewish roomate (Wells would have approved), Linley does what any mid-Victorian gentleman would do when he had a problem- he goes to see a spiritualist. In a rather loopy twist, she puts him in touch with the father of microscopy, the eighteenth-century Dutchman Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek. The spirit of Leeuwenhoek tells Linley that to gain the clarity he craves, he must use a certain type of diamond to make the lens.

And what do you know? Upon returning home, the Jewish roomate (he's also French, just to add insult to injury) reveals to Linley that, through shady means, he's come into possession of just such a diamond! So what's a guy to do? Linley immediately decides to kill him and steal the diamond. After all, he reasons with himself, the Jew must have killed someone himself to get it (it's implied that the Jew had some background in South-American slave-trading). And thus, a perfectly good evening of wine and tipsy indiscretion ends in murder.

Linley carves the diamond into a lens, and finally gets the view he has always dreamed of. In a single drop of water, he discovers worlds that seem like fantastic gardens of colour and splendour. But then he spies something else in this world- a creature that looks like an exquisite, miniature girl. Linley is smitten. For days he cannot leave his microscope- even seeing the drop of water she inhabits depresses him, as it reminds him of the uncrossable gulf between them. I won't spoil the ending, but if you're thinking that this unnatural love will eventually destroy Linley, then have yourself a drink.

Man, I do love this story. It's simple, creepy and effective. It's also wonderfully old-fashioned and harsh in its themes of obsession and karma. From youth, Linley's obsession is depicted as driving him to unnatural acts, viz. the mutilation of animals. And the fact the he receives the information on how to make his breakthrough by supernatural means wonderfully foreshadows its later effects on him. Via consulting with spirits, theft and murder, Linley has achieved his goal. He has broken the natural order, and what he discovers will ruin him in the most personal way possible- through love (a touch that Wells would never use).

The writing is solid and far less annoying than even much later Victorian prose (Stoker, I'm looking at you!). The descriptions of the new world that the hero discovers are stirring, and the sense of wonder-turning-to-horror is masterfully handled. Who else but a Corkman could do as well?

Read the story here, if you would.

The Magician by Somerset Maugham

2010-12-17T19:30:00.006Z

When Alan Moore decided to source all the fictional representations of famous occultist Alesteir Crowley for his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century, he soon found that he had his work cut out for him. It seems that the Wickedest Man in the World made quite an impression on any number of writers during his life, many of whom decided to pay him the questionable compliment of including a facsimile of him in their works. Somerset Maugham famously disliked Crowley upon meeting him, thinking him an outrageous humbug, but clearly found the man interesting enough to base The Magician on him.

Arthur and Margaret are English lovers hanging out with the artsy crowd in Paris during the late belle epoque. Their friends are dandies, bohemians and Impressionists and their lives are the stuff of Renoir paintings. That is, until, one Oliver Haddo comes into their lives. Haddo is an obese and boastful man who is rude and crude, yet not without some wit and charm. Though nobody seems to actually like him, he fascinates all who know him with his tales of travels in the East, and his hunting prowess. His absurd boasts invariably turn out to be true, so people afford him a grudging respect. And his favourite subject of all, and one on which he can converse endlessly, is the occult.

At first Margaret can't stand the man. But after Haddo is humiliated and physically abused by Arthur in their studio home, Haddo begins to use his strange powers to affect a change in her attitude towards him. Her perfect (chaste- and this does become a plot point later on, as well as being an example of prudery) relationship with her fiance Arthur comes to an abrupt end as she embarks on an unthinkable affair with the repulsive Haddo. But what does the magician really want with the beautiful, virginal Margaret?

This is my first Maugham book, so I didn't really know what to expect. He almost disowns it in the introduction, claiming that he doesn't even remember writing it, and that he seems to have been trying out a flowery continental style that he later regretted. His prose is readable but a little stilted. He draws his characters somewhat naively, they're flat characters who are either good or bad. We are constantly told how lovely and beautiful and innocent Margaret is, and this is supposed to make her fall even more tragic. Instead, it's kinda of annoying- it's 'tell- don't- show' storytelling, and there's kind of a lot of it in this book.

It's pretty obvious that Maugham has little real interest in the occult. He sticks in just enough information about magical matters to make the plot work, and in the introduction he muses that he must have spent at least a few days researching it in the British Museum. A few pages of this slim volume are given over to the works of Paracelsus and his ilk. Compare the later work of Dennis Wheatley, another writer who claimed that he had no particular interest in the occult prior to using it as a plot device in his fiction. Someone's been telling porkies, because even the casual reader of The Devil Rides Out can tell that Wheatley must have become an enthusiast at some stage- why else would he have included such a tremendous amount of research?

In any case, the magic that Oliver Haddo concerns himself with is not Satanism nor Spiritualism, but alchemy. In particular, he's interested in creating a homunculus. Unfortunately, not much time is given over to the mechanics of how he intends to achieve this, nor to what end. His motives remain decidedly nebulous.

Instead, much of this slim novel is taken up with the foibles of Arthur and Margaret's friend Susie as they ponder how to combat Haddo, though 'combat' might be too strong a word. There's a lot of crying, a lot of broken hearts, and a lot of cups of tea in the studio, and a lot of inaction. The only character who seems likely to do something is Dr. Porhoet, a kind of Van Helsing character who has lived his life in Alexandria, and so is knowledgable about the occult. Unfortunately, even he's so cowardly that Arthur has to force him to use his knowledge to help out Margaret.

SPOILERS

By the time this group has stopped sniveling and decided to take action, it's too late and Margaret is already dead. They have a poke about Haddo's English mansion, and find a laboratory full of occult paraphernalia. Then, hidden in his attic, they find the most interesting thing in the whole book: Haddo's attempt to re-create that scene from Alien Resurrection, eighty-nine years before it will be released to an uncaring public:

'...but what immediately attracted their attention was a row of those large glass vessels... each was covered with a white cloth. For here too, was a strange mass of flesh, almost as large as a new-born child, but there was in it the beginnings of something ghastly human. It was shaped vaguely like an infant, but the legs were joined together so that it looked like a mummy rolled up in its coverings. There was something that resembled a human head, covered with long golden hair, but it was horrible; it was an uncouth mass, without eyes or nose or mouth. The colour was a sickly pink, and it was almost transparent...'

Arthur removes the coverings from the other jars, and they see

'...abominations so awful that Susie had to clench her fists not to scream. There was one monstrous thing in which the limbs approached nearly to the human. It was extraordinarily heaped up, with fat, tiny arms, little bloated legs, and an absurd squat body...in another the trunk was almost like like that of a human child, except that it was patched strangely with red and grey. But the terror of it was that at the neck it branched hideously, and there were two distinct heads, monstrously large, but duly provided with all their features...'

Well, I can tell you that I woke up a bit after reading that. Unfortunately, Maugham does nothing with this great set-piece. It explains nothing about Haddo's magic, or how he killed Margaret, or what he needed from her.

So is there anything else worth noting about The Magician? The orientalism factor is extremely high. Once again, any character who has been to 'the East' has experienced impossible things and knows that the supernatural is real. Dr. Porhoet speaks to Arthur about his childhood in the 'Arabian Nights' world of Alexandria. When Haddo seduces Margaret, he talks of

'...strange Eastern places where no infidel had been. He spoke of the dawn upon sleeping desolate cities, and the moonlit nights of the desert, of the sunsets with their splendour, and of the crowded streets at noon. He told her of the many-coloured webs and of silken carpets, the glittering steel of armour, and of barbaric, priceless gems. The splendour of the East blinded her eyes. He spoke of frankincense and myrrh, of heavy perfumes of the scent-merchants, and drowsy odours of the Syrian gardens. The fragrance of the East filled her nostrils... it seemed to her that a comparison was drawn for her attention between the narrow round which awaited her as Arthur's wife, and this fair, full existence.'

Yep, once agin those mysterious Easterners are decadent and wondrous, barbaric and yet knowledgable about ancient powers. If only there had been a bit more of this stuff in the book and less of Arthur and his chums faffing about like an far less effective parody of Dr Quincy Morris and co from Dracula, there might have been a happy ending. As it stands, The Magician seems to be a book that Maugham wrote about a subject that he wasn't particularly interested in, and he didn't even put much magic into it anyway.

From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

2010-12-15T11:14:00.015Z

I first encountered Jack the Ripper one of those big ol' potboiler book of unexplained mysteries that every kid should have. It had an introduction by Colin Wilson and an article on Nostradamus that scared seven shades of hell out of me by claiming that the world was going to end-

In 1999 and seven months

From the sky shall come the great king of terror

Brr. Those words haunt me still. Thankfully, old Michel's prophecy was off (by at least two years anyway!) and I'm still around, sharing reminisces about childhood trauma. Anyway, the book also featured a terrific article on Jack the Ripper. Ok, the writing was poor, but all the elements were in there- spooky, fog-shrouded Victorian London (which I already knew about because of Dracula and H. G Wells), a mysterious killer who was left-handed and had expert SURGICAL KNOWLEDGE, and sent taunting letters and half-eaten kidneys to the police. What a character!

I think the fact that the Ripper was literate and consciously stoked his fame (vis-a-vis the letters, though I didn't find out till years later that he probably didn't write any of them) made him more interesting to me than boring, sordid, ordinary crime stories (still hate 'em, actually); it made him a character. More Springheel Jack than Jack Jones. And add to this that he was probably a doctor, and an upper-class one at that: I pictured Jack as a flamboyant, skilled and charming madman who wanted to give the world something that would shock and awe them- something the world would never, ever forget.

I still feel that some of this is valid. Look, if you've already decided to be crazy and commit some terrible and motiveless crime (and obviously the best option is not to do that at all), than at least you could do it in a way that's creative and memorable, instead of just seedy and depressing. It's a fact that people are obsessed with war and murder. A guy once cut up five prostitutes, and one hundred years later we're still talking about it. We're fascinated by it. We use it as a window into his time and place, we use it as a jumping-off point to learn about the society he came from. Look at Hitler, to invoke Godwin's law. However terrible he was (in fact, because of how terrible he was), he will always be a million times more fascinating than the good people who struggled against him. We may admire them, but we don't buy books about them and we don't make movies about them.

How many books or movies have you seen about Detective Abberline?

Have you even heard of him?

Ok, I'm going to step down from the soapbox now. The other feature of note about the Unexplained Mysteries book that needs mentioning is the imagery that it used- all taken

from Punch and the Illustrated Police News. The former was a Victorian magazine that is still famous for its satirical cartoons such as dropping the pilot and the Rhodes Colossus. The latter is probably best looked upon as an ancestor of Britain's loathsome tabloid culture. Both featured great line-drawing art that solidified Victorian London in my mind as a dark, sordid place full of horror and mystery.

Around every monochrome corner in this imaginary London, it seemed that serious-faced men in mutton chops found the shattered corpses of fallen women. Elsewhere, mesmerists, mediums and even a few hapless bobbies did their best to track down those responsible. See for yourself:

Little did I know it, but out there waiting for me was From Hell: not only is it probably the most detailed fictionalization of the Whitechapel murders in any medium, but it's also one of the most immersive trips into Victorian London it's possible to take nowadays. This is due in no small part to the art of Eddie Campbell, who clearly based his vision of this period on the kind of lurid art featured above. Alan Moore's extensive research and all-round geniusness don't hurt either. Calling From Hell a comic book is a bit like calling the Sistine Chapel a wallpaper replacement. It's a many-layered piece that manages to comment on much more than just the Ripper murders.

But first thing's first: a little bit of plot. The story kicks off when heir to the British throne Pronce Albert has an affair with a Catholic sweet-shop girl that results in a pregnancy. This alerts us that Moore is using as his base the outlandish theories of one Stephen Knight, writer of Jack The Ripper: The Final Solution. It's an ingeniously complex conspiracy theory that even Moore admits is nonsense. Long story short, in order to avert scandal Queen Victoria herself orders that a small group of prostitutes who have attempted to blackmail certain parties with this information. Unlike much Jack the Ripper fiction (including the movie version), From Hell is decidedly not a whodunnit, as we learn early on who the killer is: Sir William Whitey Gull, physician-in-ordinary to the Queen (it's not a secret, he's on the front of the book for feck's sake).

Soon, Detective Fred Abberline in brought in to deal with the case. He's not happy- after years working in Whitechapel, he thought he'd finally left it behind after being promoted. Now he's back amid the poverty and prostitutes of London's East End. But it seems as if many on in the police force don't particularly want him to track down the killer...

From Hell is a huge book, and using the Ripper murders as a focus, it manages to comment on a great many subjects. Moore gives us one a feeling of what it must have been like 'on the ground' in Victorian London, and many aspects of that society are addressed: the social system, racism, political activism, art and history. A multitude of historical cameos occur- including from Irishmen W. B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde. And if you've ever heard the story about the cursed mummy case in the British Museum, well, there's a little something for you, too.

There's a lot of talk about the occult, too. The narrative kind of stops dead in chapter four as Sir William Gull gives his uncomprehending coachman an occult tour of London. It goes on a bit long, and contains perhaps just a bit too much information for the casual reader (restraint was never one of Moore's strengths), but to those who are interested, it's a masterful piece of work. Using entirely real places and working from photographs, Moore and Campbell provide a wealth of history, both real and imagined, about the various pagan activities that have existed around the British capitol. Even the more outlandish theories have some basis in history, as Moore proves in his wonderful appendix.

Moore seems to have it in for the Masons. Like in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, they live up to their legendary status as secret string-pullers in From Hell. Here, Moore provides a fascinatingly thorough look at how such an organization might actually function. Again, he claims that most of the information has been claimed as fact at some time or another, though he was not afraid to bend the facts to fit his story. The Masons are portrayed as an important group to get involved with if one wishes to advance themselves in Victorian London.

All this fanciful stuff aside, From Hell remains an excellent way to begin learning the facts of the true case. The appendix makes clear what is fact and what is fiction, and Moore has attempted to cleave as close to fact as he can (within the boundaries of Knight's outrageous plot). Having faces and characters to attack to the various persons involved with the case is helpful too, and spurs one on to read about the truth (Charles Warren, for example, was a far more interesting character in real life than the book hints at).

There's a whole lot of other great stuff chucked in as well. As Gull descends deeper and deeper into madness during the book, he has hallucinations that link his murders to others committed at different times throughout history. At first it seems like just an oddity, but Moore is working towards some tremendous ideas about the nature of history, paranormal experiences, and murder. Stick with it. And the final appendix is a self-contained comic quite unlike anything you'll ever read. It's a brilliant take-down on the notion that we'll ever really know what happened in Whitechapel in 1888. All the major suspects and theories are looked at in some detail, but the take-home message is that the mentality of those fascinated by the murders is as interesting as the original happenings.

The Ripper murders will obviously continue to fuel books and movies. But I can't see any of them improving on what Moore and Campbell have done.

And to mix and mash influences, I'd like to note that the reason I can still name all five of the 'canonical' victims is not any book, but in fact this.

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer

2010-12-15T10:20:00.007Z

Writers seem to love mash-ups set in the Victorian age above all others. Maybe it's because there was such a wealth of crazy characters about just then- both real and fictional. I mean, I can understand the temptation to pit Jack the Ripper, probably the world's most famous criminal villain who never got caught, against his fictional contemporary, Sherlock Homes. But some of the pairings out there are less obvious. In the ranks of professional fan-fiction, Holmes alone has battled H. G. Well's Martians at least as many times as he has the Whitechapel fiend. Nicholas Meyer is no stranger to the concept- after writing the Seven-Per-Cent Solution in 1976, he wrote the batty movie Time After Time, in which (hold your breath) Jack the Ripper steals H. G. Wells' time machine, and travels to 1970's San Francisco. Well, dammit if there isn't something about this same bunch of characters that makes people want to use them, over and over again, in different combinations.

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution has the potential to address some interesting aspects of the Holmes world that Doyle, writing when he did, could not. It takes as its theme a very serious issue which, to us, Doyle merely skips over- Holmes' cocaine habit. Watson, narrating a previously undiscovered memoir, decides that the time has come to correct some of the fictions his previous volumes created as a smokescreen, and reveal the awful truth: Holmes was a serious cocaine addict, at times being lost to dementia and unable to look after himself.

Watson, Mycroft and even Moriarty (!) conspire to bring Holmes, against his will, to Vienna, where he will meet the famous Dr Sigmund Freud, who alone has encountered success in curing cocaine addicts. Various hijinks ensue, resulting in a somewhat boring, tacked-on royal crisis that the group must solve.

There's lots to like about the book. 'Watson' recreates the world of Doyle's characters convincingly well- though he cannily admits in the opening that because he is writing in the evening of his life, we should not expect his style to be exactly as we remembered it. Most of your favourite Holmes characters show up at some point, and Watson really goes out of his way to tie lots of background information from the canon into the story.

However, the book does have an irritating Nannyish feel to it that Doyle never had. Having introducing the heavy topic of drug addiction, Nicholson doesn't seem to know what to do with it, and rarely goes into the horrors overly deeply. Maybe it's just me, but Holmes' withdrawal seems awfully quick, and within no time he's off again, following a new case. It seems to me to be kind of a cheat. I know Watson is a Victorian, but it still feels that this, his shocking 'tell-all', has had a strong dose of not-before-the-children. Holmes, fascinating because he has almost completely surrendered his humanity and emotions to pure deduction, begs lots of questions, but Meyer posits them only to ignore them, as if he doesn't trust the audience to handle a real look into the weaknesses of their hero as a human being instead of an ideal. Certainly, an opportunity to do something new with the character has been lost. Instead, Meyer churns out another serviceable piece of fan-fiction.

Freud too is disappointing. We learn pretty much nothing new about the guy that any average person could tell you- he's Austrian, bearded, and has some funny ideas about psychology. That's about as much depth as the plot goes into. What a waste of such a divisive figure; a man who's ideas shaped how we thought about the mind for a century, only to be debunked and scorned. Instead, Freud is treated as a magic 'get-well' figure who can cure Holmes without clogging up the narrative with little details like how.

Before long, the GreatDetective is back to battling Martians, Dracula Whitechapel murderers and whoever else contemporary writer decide to pair him with.

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

2010-08-27T02:30:00.006+01:00

For all that I bang on about Arthur Conan Doyle, I've gotta 'fess up to the fact that I'm not overly enamoured by his most famous fictional son. Mostly, I guess, because I simply have no interest in crime fiction, of which Sherlock Holmes was probably the most perfect kind. The mystery of a whodunnit always seemed rather paltry to me after an early diet of Clarke, Asimov, and of course, a cornucopia of mind-expanding 19th-century horrors. So what if one mammal kills another- boring. And you expect me to care about who did it? Bring on the Martian tripods, the undead half-breeds and the space-travel, please. I do have a passing familliarity with the Holmesian cannon, more out of a feeling of duty to my favourite author than because I've really enjoyed it. Well, I did enjoy The Hound of the Baskervilles, but it felt to me as though Doyle was somehow repressing his own natural urge to bring a wacky supernatural element to the story, just because, in the world of Holmes (though not, apparently, in the real-life world of Doyle), there has to be a more prosaic explanation.

In any case, I've finally gotten around to a viewing of Hollywood's latest tinkering with a classic, and wouldn't you know, I enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting- perhaps because I'm not too tied to the original source material. Basically, Guy Ritchie's sort-of made another one of his cheeky-chappie Cockney gangster flicks, except it's happening in the 19th century. Well, there's more to it than that, but still. Robert Downey Jr. and J*** L** play Holmes and Watson respectively. Predictably for a Hollywood adaptation, the movie ups the action and dumbs down some of the original material. But is it any good?

Overall, it's a gorgeous-looking romp that's good fun. Honestly, whatever sins Ritchie has committed by making Holmes into a two-fisted, pit-fighting dandy are more than made up for by the sheer liveliness and speed of the story. The relationship between the two leads has been slightly altered- they are now fast-talking buddy-movie leads, but the dialogue is pithy and hilarious throughout, and there are just enough elements from the stories left in, or slightly misused, to make you believe, at least for 100 minutes, that this is a legitimate interpretation of Doyle's character. Holmes is a flamboyant, over-intelligent misfit who doesn't live in or interact very well with the rest of society. Watson is a lady-killer who loses his patience with Holmes's eccentricities at times. And the two of them do have a brotherly affinity for each other in a kind of hetero life-mate kind of way (if not outright bro-ners) that is threatened when Watson gets married. So maybe Ritchie is stretching this stuff, but it's all there in the books.

Another thing Ritchie has done is to remind me why I'm fascinated by Victorian London. He makes it seem so fun (which it obviously was, if you lived in the right part of town). He even drags in an occult conspiracy that rips elements wholesale out of From Hell, whether he knows it or not. It's quite possible that he just reckons you can't tell a gothic London tale without this stuff, but the parallels are striking-

-a Masonic-type society that controls the empire
- secrets of the ancients
-a plan involving the occult architecture of London, including a scene with a giant map

What do you think?

The Lost City of Z by David Grann

2010-08-22T17:56:00.008+01:00

It's been a looong time since I've posted on Age of Empire, but I've got a very good excuse: I'm in the jungle. Yep, my lifelong love for tales of adventure in tropical climates and my education in zoology have finally conspired to land me a temporary position working in a small town in the steaming jungles of Central America. I think it's fair to say that my being here probably owes as much to Conan Doyle as it does to Wallace and Darwin- but there's at least one more figure there, lurking at the fringes of my subconscious, who should be named- Colonel Percy Fawcett.

Remember when you were a kid, and you borrowed the same book out of the library time and time again? Well, I recall the public library in Cork City serving me well in that regard, as back in the early 90's, I was consumed by a particular book about monsters. I used to borrow it every week for about a year. I've scoured the net for any info about this tome, but so far I've come to naught. I recall that the cover had a black border, with Monsters written on it in a bloody font, and a painted image of a sea serpent menacing a small boat. Man, there was so much good stuff in that book- my first introduction to the Loch Ness Monster, the Thugee cult, detailed analyses about more obscure monsters such as the Great Grey Man of Ben MacDhui, and of course, traumatising painted images of everything. But this book was also my earliest introduction to one Percy Fawcett.

In Monsters, or whatever it was called, I learned that Europeans sometimes headed into jungles wearing khaki and pith helmets to have Adventures. And Fawcett had the best adventures of them all, for he fought giant snakes while he was at it. The book recounted how an enormous diamond shaped head rose out of the river as Fawcett and his party were canoeing through the jungle. Fawcett emptied his machine gun clip and the enormous snake fell dead. The men guessed the snake to be at at sixty feet, though they had no measuring equipment, and this figure was never taken seriously by the scientific community at home. Somehow, the snake was still alive, and when it began writhing again, they had to scarper. Because they had no evidence, Fawcett became something of a laughing stock for this claim (one he never backed down on, either). This story lodged in my mind next to an early scene in The Lost World, where Professor Challenger loses all evidence of the lost plateau when his canoe tips over, and is unable to prove his findings when he returns to England. The frustration of it all! I'll never forget the black-and-white drawing in Monsters of Fawcett, a steriotypical Victorian explorer, emerging from the jungle and pumping lead into a terrifyingly thick, hooded (unlikely, for an anaconda) serpent towering over him. Man, I wish I could find that book again.

In any case, I was recently lucky enough to come into possession of a book-length rumination of Fawcett's life: The Lost City of Z. And if in my own head Fawcett has always hovered between fact and fiction, what with his Indiana Jones-like career, Professor Challenger-like personality, and larger-than-life tall tales, well in truth that is exactly where he belongs. Grann covers Fawcett's early years in stiff Victorian boarding schools, his military career and early archaeological discoveries in Ceylon, and his first descent into the jungles of South America. Originally feted as a British hero, 'the Livingstone of South America', Fawcett became more and more unstable as he became obsessed with exploring some of the most hostile terrain on earth, eventually being consumed by occult theories. By the time he disappeared forever into the Matto Grosso region of the Amazon while searching for the mythical city of Z in 1925, he had already endured ostracisation by the scientific community.

One point of interest I noted from an in-depth look at Fawcett's life was just how enmeshed he was with the kind of Imperialist adventure fiction that mirrored the realities of his life. Upon returning from his 1911 expedition, he gave a talk in London that was attended by Conan Doyle. When he spoke of the huge, flat-topped plateaus of the jungle, Doyle seized on the idea for his then-nascent dinosaur novel. The two became friends, and corresponded often by letters. The character of John Roxton from The Lost World owes at least as much to Fawcett as he does to Roger Casement. After the First World War, in which he served at the Somme, Fawcett seems to have had a similar breakdown to Doyle. Having seen the utmost of the horrors that man can do to man, both became disenchanted with material things, and turned to spiritualism and the occult for condolence, which probably deepened their friendship. This did not go down too well with the Royal Geographical Society, the austere scientific establishment that had funded Fawcett's expeditions in the past. It was this interest in the occult that eventually led to Fawcett's mania to discover Z.

Incredibly, Fawcett was also friendly with that other great Imperialist writer and inventor of the 'Lost Race' adventure (of which Fawcett was eventually to re-enact in real-life), H. R. Haggard. When Fawcett finally did disappear into the 'green hell' for good, he did so carrying a mysterious stone idol that Haggard has given him. Fawcett believed that it was evidence of a sophisticated civilization existing in the Matto Grosso.

Also interesting is the matter of Fawcett's brother, Edward Douglas Fawcett. An escapee from the stiff-collar world of Victorian high society, Edward became an early convert to Buddhism, and eventually occultism, long before his brother Percy showed much interest. He co-wrote books with the famous Madame Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy, and before his brother left England, he was penning Jules Verne-ian adventure fiction such as Swallowed By An Earthquake, which features living dinosaurs, and The Secret of the Desert, in which a world-famous British adventurer disappears in a remote Arabian desert and has to be rescued (good luck finding this book anywhere, but I love that cover). Eerily prescient. It never fails to amaze me just how small the Victorian world really was, and how many amazing people, each fascinating in their own right, knew or influenced one another.

Maybe the biggest character besides Fawcett in this story is the jungle itself, the 'green hell'. Having been to see a little of it myself, I can confirm Fawcett's experiences that it's one of the toughest places on Earth that man ekes out an existence. The climate, the insects and animals all conspire to make it a beautiful but difficult place to be to all but the most stubborn of men- and Fawcett was nothing if not stubborn.

Australian Ghost Stories

2010-05-16T18:16:00.004+01:00

So it seems that Australians had something of an inferiority complex when it came to gothic fiction: in the introduction to Australian Ghost Stories, editor James Doig explains that Australia was often not considered ‘old’ enough by its inhabitants to possess the key ingredients for a spooky chill-fest. Largely ignoring the potential of a vast, unexplored frontier land full of deserted mining towns, deserts, jungles and aboriginal folklore (later utilized so effectively in Picnic at Hanging Rock) for weird fiction, Australian writers instead bemoaned the lack of such superficial characteristics as ancient castles or ghostly traditions.

This is not a trivial point- it shows that writers of the 19th and early 20th century (the providence of Wordsworth, who trade exclusively in out-of-copyright material) drew a distinction between European and aboriginal folklore- the former was considered a kind of ‘real’, mature culture, and useful for the plotting of effective stories, while the latter was not. ‘There never were any fauns in the eucalyptus forests, nor any naiads in the running creeks,’ says Rosa Campbell Praed at the beginning of her tale, The Bunyip, almost apologizing for her use of indigenous folklore. ‘No mythological hero left behind him stories of wonder and enchantment. No white man’s hand has carved records of a poetic past on the grey volcanic-looking boulders.’ Thus with a broad stroke, the entire potential of the brooding landscape and wonderful mythology of the Dreamtime is swept aside.

What a waste. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel- read this lengthy quote from one Marcus Clarke:

What is the dominant note of Australian scenery? That which is the dominant note of Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry- Weird Melancholy… The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair. No tender sentiment is nourished in their shade… In the Australian forests no leaves fall. The very animal life of these frowning hills is either grotesque or ghostly. Flights of white cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls. The sun suddenly sinks, and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter. The natives aver that, when night comes, out from the bottomless depth of some lagoon the bunyip rises, and, in form like a monstrous sea-calf, drags his loathsome length from out of the ooze. From a corner of the silent forest rises a dismal chant, and around a fire dance natives painted like skeletons. All is fear-inspiring and gloomy.

Wow. What an evocative piece of writing. No master of fantastic fiction could create a more suitable setting for tales of the macabre and the extraordinary. Could anybody still be in doubt that Australia has the chops for gothic/weird fiction? Why has this location not been utilized as the American frontier has been? And yet, what’s disappointing about Australian Ghost Stories is how some of the best stories have very little to do with Australia at all.

Many colonial writers who wished to utilize the gothic style simply set their stories in England, for example the Irish/Australian Mary Fortune, who wrote The White Maniac: A Doctors’ Tale. It’s a typically gothic tale that takes place in England. A doctor becomes obsessed with a family who live in a house in which everything is painted white. They are, of course, keeping a terrible secret, and the twist at the end of the story is very of its time, but entertaining nonetheless. Apart from my disappointment with the lack of ‘Australia-ness’ in the story, it’s one of the best in the collection.

Other Australian writers wrote spooky stories in the manner of English gothic novels without utilizing any real Australian elements. The Mystery Of Major Molineaux by Marcus Clarke is a similar tale that takes place in Australia, not that you’d notice. It’s still a cracking tale with a kind of Le Fanu feel, and it’s one of the spookiest of the lot.

There are entries here that make good use of the Australian culture and countryside: The Haunted Pool, A Haunt of The Jinkarras, Spirit Led, The Bunyip and others do introduce us to ghosts and creatures that haunt the deserts and sweltering frontier towns, but as stories, their plots aren’t crafted quite as well as the gothic shorts mentioned above. Of these, A Strange Goldfield is probably my favourite- it’s an effective story about a bunch of men who discover a ghost town deep in the Australian desert that’s still haunted by its former residents. Another find is The Devil of the Marsh by H. B. Marriott Watson, in which a man keeps a tryst with a mysterious woman in a horrible swamp at night- a perfectly rendered gothic masterpiece. Below is an illustration for this story from the cover of another collection.

The editor clearly had to stretch his definition of an ‘Australian ghost story’ somewhat in order to fill the book- he includes a couple of south-seas tales, as well as a couple of pieces in which mysterious happenings turn out not to be supernatural (no spoilers on which ones they are!) And there is one story in the collection in which a really creepy, effective build-up leads to such an absolutely stupifyingly strange conclusion that it leaves me quite unsure how to rank it.

Overall, the volume is worth looking into. And Wordsworth editions are very attractively priced (usually 3-5 euros in the Republic), so you rarely go wrong with them. This one of varied enough in settings and action that it’s usually entertaining, even if there are few stone-cold classics. I still feel that the Australian location has been rarely used to its full potential (Picnic at Hanging Rock is an exception). I have a feeling that some Australia-related fiction may appear soon at Odds and Ends.

The Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley

2010-05-01T18:10:00.004+01:00

The plot here is basically the same as in the later movie version: two of Wheatley’s three modern day (by which I mean the 1930s) ‘musketeers’, the aristocratic Duc de Richleau and two-fisted American playboy Rex Van Ryn suspect that their close friend Simon Aron is in a spot of bother. Why? Well, neither of them have seen him for months because he’s been so busy with his new ‘friends’- a dodgy conglomerate of Johnny foreigners and deformed people. Clearly, something is not right. The friends bust Aron right in the middle of an ‘astronomy’ session at his new house, and the Duke forces him to admit that he’s been messing about with ‘black magic.’ Of course, the sacrificial black cockerel and white hen kind of gave the game away.

The rest of the novel details the three chums’ attempts to outwit the grand Epissimus, one Mr. Mocata, and his coven of acolytes. There are some memorable set-pieces, including a car chase through the English countryside, a black Sabbat on Walpurgis Nacht, and a tense night spent within the safety of a specially-prepared pentangle.

I’d sandwich Wheatley somewhere between Iain Flemming and P.G. Wodehouse. He was massively popular in his day for writing page-turning thrillers, but with a very early 20th century British twist. Even though his attitudes have not aged well, his writing certainly has: he uses a very clean, economical style that feels oddly modern, especially compared to other works from this time. In a way, he’s a bit like a 1930s Stephen King- known not only for his gripping books about the supernatural, but also for his smooth, no-nonsense prose style.

Wheatley has been frequently criticized for the racist, elitist elements in his books. In The Devil Rides Out, the Duke and his friends reflect Wheatley’s own sympathetic vision of the European aristocracy that he feels is about to pass into history. In an early chapter, the Duke’s living style is described-

'His forebears had ridden with thirty-two footmen before them, and it caused him considerable regret that modern conditions made it impossible for him to drive in his Hispano with more than one seated beside his chauffeur on the box. Fortunately his resources were considerable and his brain sufficiently astute to make good, in most years, the inroads which the tax collectors made upon them.'

Spoken like a true enemy of socialism (which Wheatley certainly was). We also learn that the Duke-

'-did not subscribe to the canon which has branded ostentation as vulgarity in the last few generations, and robbed nobility of any glamour which it may have possessed in more spacious days.'

All the characters in The Devil Rides Out live in a world that has since passed into memory- a world of footmen, butlers, country houses and private aeroplanes. Of course, for the reader today all this is part of the charm. Wheatley was also an expert on wines, and an inordinate amount of dialogue in the book is spent discussing when and what the characters shall have to drink. When the plot calls for them to fast for a time, one character bitterly laments that he has been denied that most basic and necessary of civilizing things- a fine rose with Morecambe bay prawns.

The racism in the novel is slightly trickier. Non-whites are treated as being inherently different rather than inferior- in fact, it’s mentioned that many Eastern races are formidable in matter of magic because they are more accepting of it.

'Very few white men can really get inside a Negro’s mind and know exactly what he is thinking- and even fewer blacks can appreciate a white’s mentality.'

This is a kind of Orientalism rather than outright racism (though many believe them to be the same). Knowledge of the power of magic is said to be an especially Eastern thing- the Duke learned all he knows of it during his time in the East, and the various magic practitioners have roots in the rituals of Africa, Madagascar and the Deep South. Mocata’s servant is a Malagassy, and he has the power to appear as a terrifying specter in an early chapter.

Over the course of the book, pretty much every supernatural or mystical idea you could think of is mentioned by the Duke, as he’s a shocking know-it-all, and he’s the mouthpiece for Wheatley’s impressive research into the occult. He is liable to bring up any aspect of the paranormal- witches, werewolves, Egyptian mythology- and give it a good airing. I’d imagine this book was the most elaborate and accurate rundown of the occult most people in England at the time were familiar with. Most of these ideas are introduced with astonishing clarity and consistency. Early on, the Duke convinces Rex of the reality of the supernatural using reasoning that is oddly persuasive even today.

The place of religion in The Devil Rides Out is rather unusual- for a novel about ‘satanism’, there’s surprisingly little mention of Christ or God. Wheatley’s characters are up against genuine Dark Forces, and while they do use crucifixes and prayers, the Duke explains that these are merely symbols that have been charged by centuries of powerful spiritual thoughts; had they been in the East, a Hindu swastika or horseshoe symbol would have been just as effective. ‘He who thinks right, lives right,’ he explains to them as they seek sanctuary in the positively charged (if pagan) shrine of Stonehenge, in the absence of any Christian churches. Makes a refreshing change from righteous religious dogma, doesn’t it?

But, as it turns out, thinking and living right are quite conditional. Early on, the Duke twigs that Simon’s new friends are clearly up to no good because they look unsavoury- an Oritental, an albino, etc. Their diabolical celebration of the Sabbat consists of everything any right-thinking 1930s Englishman would consider downright evil- eating and drinking to excess, dancing naked and engaging in a little free love. Wheatley makes much of their unattractiveness when naked- each is bloated or swarthy or just plain old. Compare this to the American Rex, whom the narrator is constantly telling us is tall, strong and totally in tune with Wheatley’s uptight mores.

Despite any such misgivings, it’s a cracking novel, and the abhorrent attitudes remain but a culturally interesting artifact of times gone by. The plot moves quickly, the set-pieces are excellent, and you’re never more than a page or two away from one of De Richleau’s lectures about the occult.

The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham

2010-04-18T18:28:00.005+01:00

The things that scared us as children tend to stick with us all our lives; just ask the good people at Kindertrauma. Many adults retain a fascination for things such as the Daleks and Pennywise the clown, to name two common examples.

But there are other, more subtle terrors. I read The Kraken Wakes when I was about 12 (in a lovely 1950’s penguin edition, too), and didn’t think it was too scary. Aliens, end of the world- I’d heard it all many times before. In this case, the unseen creatures cause mankind trouble on a scale that is simply geographic- they melt the ice-caps and flood the world.

But shortly after reading it I fell into a strong flu, during which I experienced intense, Kraken Wakes- influenced fever dreams. To anyone who’s never had a fever dream, it’s something like having dreams when you’re awake, and also something like an unpredictable bad-trip. My dreams revolved around floods and earthquakes, and they were horribly real. So, even though I thought the book was none too scary, it obviously resonated with me subconsciously on some level. Ever since, I’ve associated that terrible time with Wyndham’s book, perhaps affording it a gravitas far above its actual content.

Returning to the book many years later, how does it hold up?

Let’s have a little background on Wyndham first. He’s kind of like a very 1950’s version of H. G. Wells: an Englishman, he wrote some great high-concept science-fiction, and he wasn’t shy about the kind of destruction he wreaked on the world in his stories. Like Wells, Wyndham’s novels feel like big-budget summer blockbusters. His most famous novel, Day of the Triffids, is a classic that’s right up there with anything Wells wrote.

Even though Wells was writing fifty years earlier, during the prudish Victorian era, today it’s Wyndham who comes across as more of a stereotypical stiff-upper-lipped Englishman. Wells was originally working class, and had lots of politically radical ideas (he was a thumping great socialist, and was in favour of a world government). Wynhdam, on the other hand, never lets us forget his middle-class origins in his books, and is frequently criticized for this.

The most common dismissal of Wyndham is that his plots are ‘cozy catastrophes’. As far as I can see, this accusation results largely from two (broadly similar) books- Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes. In both books, terrible circumstances cause London (read: society) to break down, and though death, destruction and horror are all around (and Wyndham is not stingy with these themes), a decidedly middle-class hero will survive the catastrophe without much physical or emotional trauma. He will pick up a pretty girl somewhere along the way, and they will eventually make a new life for themselves in some quiet part of the country- a sort of simple-life pastoral paradise.

While this is broadly accurate for both books, and while they may be read as a kind of simplistic middle-class wish-fulfillment fantasy, this view really ignores many of the novels’ unsavoury elements.

In Triffids, suicide and depression surround the hero. He genuinely needs to find the strength within himself to survive this nightmare world. He learns constantly that in this new world, the morals and scruples of the old one are the first casualty. Is it right to smash a shop window to steal food? He does it. Is it right to help a blind person to commit suicide? He does it. Is it right to live in a society where everyone gets to impregnate your girlfriend for the continuation of the human race? Now wait just a minute…

Triffids was published in 1951, and was a huge hit. Wyndham decided that he was onto a good thing, so as early as 1953 he released the broadly similar Kraken Wakes.

Kraken begins as the narrator and his wife are among the first humans to notice the falling of unexplained ‘fireballs’ into the sea. It’s treated as a kind of anomalous phenomenon, similar to the then-current flying saucer craze. Later, characters theorize that it’s in fact the beginning of an invasion by some intelligence from a high-pressure world (Neptune and Jupiter are posited, but we never find out for sure). Over the course of several months and years, it becomes clear that something has taken up residence in the deeps of the world’s oceans. First deep-sea scientific expeditions, and then commercial ships become targeted by these intelligences. Worldwide sea travel ceases (in a move eerily similar to the Europe-wide lack of air travel that’s happening now as a result of that Iceland volcano business). And after that, things really get strange…

When Kraken works, it’s really creepy. I think that part of the reason I’ve always been fascinated by it is that we never find out a damn thing about those underwater critters. They might not even be aliens, they might just be Earth intelligences that have lain dormant until the 1950s. All we do know about them is that they like to screw with us. Some of the violence of the sea-disasters in the first half of the book is quite astonishing- hundreds and hundreds of people perish horribly (and off-screen, too). The horror is rarely in the protagonists’ faces the way it is in Triffids- it’s more of a paranoia thing: the thought that mankind has lost his method of long-term travel is oddly creepy.

And when the creatures do begin to show up on our beaches, they do so in a manner that answers no questions about their nature.

There are problems with the book, mostly linked to the ‘humour’. There’s loads of running jokes about how the narrator’s wife wears the trousers in the marriage, and they feel even more out of place than the bizarre joke about Josella’s book in Triffids. There’s also a joke about people confusing the narrator’s company, the fictional EBC, with the real-life BBC. In case you’re wondering, EBC stands for ‘English Broadcasting Company’.

There are tonnes of 1950s artifacts in the book- aside from the obligatory Red Scare scenes, both Britain and the US seem to lob nuclear bombs about quite cheerfully in an attempt to wipe out the undersea menace. And of course, it wouldn’t be Wyndham without his trademark 1950s British-ness; it’s almost impossible to read his prose without hearing someone with the received pronunciation speak it- and you know that’s worth something.

Pro.

Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean

2010-03-10T15:57:00.011Z

Who did you want to be when you were ten years old?

It isn’t a trivial question- you can tell much about someone based on who they admire. (For example, if it’s Jeremy Clarkson, then we’ve learned that this conversation is over). But there are different levels of ‘heroes’. I mean, in a very superficial way, most people wouldn’t mind being a rich heir(ess), and most guys have though at times that being Hugh Hefner would be pretty decent. But these fantasies satisfy merely the most shallow of our needs- they do not answer our burning needs to prove our worth or live meaningful lives- and what people find ‘meaningful’ will of course vary.

Some of my heroes include writers like Arthur Conan Doyle- those who created characters and ideas that have become a part of the public consciousness. But while I would be thrilled to be as talented as them, it isn’t their lives particularly that I would wish to emulate…

That lofty rank would be filled by characters like Percy Fawcett, Harry Price, Richard Burton, Tom Crean and David Livingstone- regardless of personal fame or success, they lived extraordinary lives, each endeavoring in his own way to push back the boundaries of knowledge. Whether they explored the forgotten corners of the world’s jungles or the borders of belief, they reminded us ordinary plebs that the world was a place that was still full of adventure; a place where fantastic things can still happen. Lost civilizations, haunted houses, cannibal tribes and giant anacondas- these are the things that make life worth living (or at least worth reading about).

My recent reading of the book Eastern Approaches has immediately catapulted its authur, Fitzroy Maclean, into this exclusive club. Good God, the man’s credentials are absolutely impeccable; it’s almost obscene that he hadn’t come to my attention previously. If even ten percent of what Maclean wrote about is true, the man was the greatest legend who ever blagged his way through a Soviet checkpoint- a real-life Flashman who seemed always to blunder onto the scene whenever epoch-making historical events were getting underway.

Eastern Approaches begins by chronicling Maclean’s exploits in the years immediately preceding World War 2. A member of the early 20th Century British aristocracy, he was already moving in notable circles (Winston Churchill and Evelyn Waugh were good friends of his) when his diplomatic career begun in Paris. Maclean immediately works his way into my good books by decrying his enviable lifestyle there as ‘boring’. Easy work, good pay, lots of high society champagne parties and warm summer nights on the Champs Elysee do become so tiresome, after all. So, to the amazement and delight of his supervisors, Maclean opts to be reposted to Moscow- something no British diplomat has ever willingly done. No real reason is given for this, except that he fancies a bit of adventure, and wants to find out a bit about the mysterious land of Uncle Joe.

After some time in Moscow, he decides to travel through the forbidden territories of Central Asia, which few Europeans had ever seen (especially since the birth of the USSR). Just for a bit of a laugh. Samarkand and Buhkara sound like exotic, difficult-to-get-to places, and this more than than justifies to him the dangerous journey he intends to take. I agree. This he achieves with an astonishing mix of bravado and luck. The NKVD (precursors to the KGB) follow him everywhere, but because he’s such a legend, their agents often become friendly with him (usually over a bottle of vodka, too). Maclean moves through the various ‘stans, avoiding the usual Soviet red tape by simply not informing the NKVD where his next destination is going to be, and by spoofing to border guards when necessary. This entire section of the book reads very like a real life version of Flashman at the Charge.

Maclean provides an absolutely fascinating document of Soviet life during the 1930’s. Though he deplores the Soviet system, he is never jingoistic or partronising. In fact, he pretty much never has to say a bad word about the Soviets, as the facts of the case speak for themselves- everywhere he goes, movement is restricted for both locals and foreigners, NKVD are an oppressive presence, peasants are relocated en masse and treated like prisoners, and shops are empty as food shortages are standard. He enjoys the company of pretty much every nationality he meets, having good things to say about Afghans, Tajiks, Uzbecs and other unfortunate citizens of the great Soviet experiment. And for an upper-class Brit, Maclean appears to have been remarkably laid-back, especially considering the time. Not a page goes by that he isn’t cheerfully slumming it over a bottle of vodka with a couple of Kyrg peasants in the back of a truck or train.

One other thing needs to be mentioned- Maclean occasionally notes the presence of attractive ladies he meets along the way. After noting them in the text however, they shortly fade form the narrative, seemingly without function. Is there something here that needs to be read between the lines? Something that the author couldn’t make overtly clear when the book was published? At these times I tend to turn to the only picture of Maclean included, at the front of the book-

-and then I just know he tapped that.

My absolute sole criticism of this portion of the book is that it contains one chapter so gripping and terrifying, it stops the narrative dead in its tracks- a detailed description of Stalin’s show trials. After much light-hearted bouncing about Central Asia, this chapter comes as a bit of a shocker. Maclean finally lets a more serious tone creep into his writing, which is fair enough given that he's dealing with one of the most blood-chilling aspects of Stalin's reign. Given a ringside seat, as it were, Maclean reports the trials lucidly and without colour. Former high-ranking Party officials are hauled bleary-eyed into the court to testisfy to absurd (and often impossible) crimes. According to this testiomony of the damned, the Soviet Party was riddled, almost from before its conception, with traitors and conspiracies. Any citizen who was ever known to have dealings with foreigners was a spy; every food shortage was deliberately caused by malicious inside jobs, not government mismanagement. Maclean's narrative deepens considerably here as he leaves high-spirited hijinks to one side and instead delivers a fascinating physocological deconstruction of the Soviet regime. He tries to explain how living in a state of constant terror and misinformation has made it possible that, in some horrible doublethink manner, the audience (and even the accused) actually do believe the absurd deceit they are constructing. Positively chilling.

After this exercise in real-life horror, the madcap central Asian backpacking that Maclean indulges in over the next few chapters seem a trifle thin.

Strangely, the other 2/3rds of the book didn't strike me as being quite as interesting. Perhaps if they had been published separately, they might have had more impact. Anyway, when World War 2 begins, Maclean turns down his position as a local politician, and sign up for the army. Despite his privileged background, he willingly joins as a private and gets sent to North Africa to fight against Rommel's troops. Cue lots of strangely repetitive missions sneaking into desert cities and bluffing past German and Italian troops.

After this, in a truly Flashman-esque move, Churchill himself asks Maclean to parachute into Bosnia to meet the mysterious Tito. Tito is the leader of the Partisans, a guerilla movement who are fighting the Nazi occupation. Trouble is, nobody outside Yugoslavia knows who Tito really is. When Maclean finally meets him, he is impressed by Tito's leadership skills and independent streak. Maclean hides out in the Yugoslav hills for several months, fighting with the Partisans and trying to talk Tito out of his Communist ideals. Again, Maclean does not come across as a condescending, jingoistic Brit- he really does respect Tito, and his fear of Communism is based on experience, not xenophobia.

Even if his WW2 adventures were less interesting to me than his Central Asian odyssey, Fitzroy Maclean is never less than entertaining, and he has solidified his position as one of the great characters of the 20th century.

The Wolfman

2010-02-15T12:22:00.022Z

Pity the poor lycanthrope. With no distinguished source material to draw upon, and no big-name author to place before the title, it seems the wolfman is barely holding onto his position among the monstrous big-hitters. Dracula and Frankenstein must shun him at parties. Hollywood has had to base their recent wolfman effort on the 1941 original, and though the charmingly low-tech practical-effects wolfman is present and correct, it isn't the 1940's feel that causes the viewer to howl.

Instead, it feels as though the filmmakers have taken a cheesy 70's Hammer script- a relic of a simpler time when certain tropes were not quite as hackneyed as they are today- and filmed it in 2009, with a decent budget and played absolutely straight. It's the only explanation for the way the film plays every single Victorian horror cliche without irony and without any attempt to present them in any new way.

Decaying Gothic mansion? Check. Fair enough. Fog-shrouded moors? Check. That's allright, too. But in the same movie as mystic gypsies, torch-wielding superstitious villagers and cruel Victorian asylum 'scientists'?

Damn, I'm making this sound like the greatest movie ever. Any film containing such a cornucopia of treats should be a winner. But believe me- whatever you have in your head right now is almost certainly a thousand times more entertaining than the Wolfman actually is. There's something about how these elements are presented- I feel they would only work if the audience had absolutely never seen a horror movie (or a Saturday morning cartoon, which is where most of these elements now belong) before. Maybe if this movie had been made in 1941, or in 1971, it would have been a masterpiece, its strong visual style setting trends for decades to come. But The Wolfman instead trots out time-worn plotlines and expects us to be affected by them.

Ditto for the dialogue- maybe I'm just close-minded, but I feel as though the day has passed when you can put such downright corny words into a script and still play it straight. When Anthony Hopkins first appears (wearing a hideous tiger-skin jacket that in no way telegraphs the later 'revelation' of his bestial nature) to greet his recently returned son, I literally begged him not to quote 'the Prodigal son returns'. Just as he said it. The film is full of moments where you think 'ah, now if this were a cheesy movie made before 1979, they would say X here'- and The Wolfman never disappoints. As soon as Emily Blunt is shown researching werewolf lore in a dusty library, we know that we're gonna be confronted with this:

Yeah, so there hasn't been a werewolf movie made yet that doesn't feature this woodcut: So far, I've noted it in The Wolfman, The Howling, and the X-Files episode 'Shapes'. But usually the pain is eased somewhat by having it introduced by Dick Miller (everything is better with Dick Miller).

The key to where it all goes really wrong lies in the asylum scene. Del Toro, who knows by now what he has become, is being studied by a demented 'doctor'. He's one of those Victorian sadist scientists who thinks that the best way to cure dementia is to cut out the patients' brain, or dunk them in freezing water. This particular trope has been used in From Hell and other movies to great effect, but here, the scientist is a ridiculous cartoon character who understates the horror we should be feeling. He straps Del Toro into a chair before an audience of doctors and students, in order to prove that no transformation will take place when the moon turns full. Of course, Del Toro knows all too well what will happen, and his desperate pleading is taken as being no more than proof of his dementia. It ought to have been a tense, physchological scene with the scientists waiting to be proven right, and Del Toro (and the audience) waiting for the carnage they know is about to occur. Instead, everything happens in a rushed manner reminiscint of a music video. Del Toro is strapped in, he warns the scientists, the moon appears immediately, he wolfs out within seconds. The resulting violence (and it is a great scene) feels light and pointless because of the botched foreplay.

The Wolfman does look great- dark and brooding- but ultimately, this is another slick trick to distract the audience from the fact that there is no substance. The edits are cut so tight that the film seems afraid to linger on anything for more than a moment, as if aware of how hollow the plot is. And apart from some howlers (the dodgy-looking were-Gollum should never have got past the script stage), the use of CG is mostly used to augment the wolfman as he leaps about, while he is portrayed for the most part using practical effects. And if I haven't mentioned any characterisation yet, well, that's because there isn't any.

King Solomon's Mines by H. R. Haggard

2009-12-24T22:21:00.006Z

Nothing works perfectly the first time you try it out, right? Doesn’t matter if you’re fumbling with a girl in the backseat of a Fiesta or shooting at a lion in the African svelt, the first time you do it, you probably won’t get it quite right. Such is the case with King Solomon’s Mines, the famous first ‘lost race’ novel. Written by H. R. Haggard in 1889, it features his hero Allen Quatermain, who would go on to star in a number of other tales of high adventure set in Africa. While an entertaining novel, Mines features many devices and tropes that have had their effectiveness blunted by years or re-use.

Things get started when Quatermain meets Sir Henry Curtis and Captain John Good on board a steamer leaving Cape Town. He learns that they intend to locate Good’s brother, who went searching for the legendary mines of the biblical King Solomon. The mines are supposedly located in an interior kingdom never before seen by white men. Trouble is, it’s surrounded by treacherous mountains and an impassable desert, and anyway, nobody really knows exactly where it is located. Except that Quatermain then reveals that he knows where it is, because some time ago he came into possession of a map made by a Spaniard called Jose da Silvestre two hundred years earlier. Silvestre died upon finding the exact spot, and in a nice dramatic touch by Haggard, the map is written in his own blood. Being a sensible man, and by nature no seeker of dangerous adventure, Quatermain has thus far had no reason to test the map’s accuracy for himself. But being a poor man, he agrees to accompany the two on their trek upon securing a handsome payment, with which he intends to pay for his son’s education. Decent chap, Quatermain.

The three Englishmen pick up a Zulu named Umbopa to accompany them, and all four brave the terrors of the desert and the mountains and eventually discover a new country, Kukuanaland. There, they become embroiled in intrigue that climaxes in a civil war.

It’s hard to imagine the reaction this book must have provoked in its day, as so many of the tropes it uses have since become standards. The mere idea of white men going off into uncharted Africa and having adventures was a groundbreaker for the literature of the time (though not, I note, for real life). Haggard lived in South Africa for six years, and was present during the British takeover of Bechuanaland. He even read out the declaration of the takeover, as the officer who ought to have done so was sick on the day. His love for Africa, its landscape and cultures, shines on every page, but his writing style is so plain that it often does not overcome the familiarity modern readers will have with almost every situation in the book. In terms of style, he’s certainly a full step down from the likes of Wells and Conan Doyle. There are some great touches, such as the map written in blood, and the dying man who presents it to Quatermain, pointing to the far-off mountain top as the sun goes down. The perilous trek through the desert is also suitably hair-raising. But there are also some childish ‘humorous’ parts that have aged badly, such as the Kukuanas’ awed reaction to John Good’s lack of trousers.

Quatermain himself is quite a likeable character. While no coward, he’s genuinely humble (instead of just continually saying that he’s humble, like some fictional characters I could mention). He’s certainly not afraid to admit when he’s quaking in his khakis, and though he usually swallows his fear and does the right thing (he is a Victorian gentleman, after all), he indulges in heroics and violence with a certain reluctance that makes him far more realistic than the likes of, say, John Carter. He’s pretty much the first and archetypal ‘great white hunter’ character in fiction. As for the rest, they’re a distinctly more forgettable bunch than their counterparts in the later Lost World. Apart from Umbopa, who’s got his own plot-o-matic storyline going on, they simply exist to provide a bit of banter for Quatermain to indulge in.

The Kukuanas in particular are a perfect example of the totally generic ‘African tribe’ in literature. They live in huts, they have a corrupt king who needs to be deposed, and they worship the white men as gods because of their superior weaponry. Yawn. Haggard heavily based them on his own experiences with the Zulus, but their culture is never really explored in any more depth than the plot calls for. Umbopa, to the surprise of no reader over the age of ten, turns out to be the true king of Kukuanaland, precipitating the inevitable climax. Surely, this kind of thing was already old hat in 1889. Also, the lack of any truly fantastic elements make the novel less dramatic than those that followed it (including even Haggard’s own novels). The Kukuanas are, really, just another tribe.

Haggard has often been complimented for his comparatively progressive attitude towards race. For the most part, Quatermain recognizes a ‘gentleman’ whatever his colour, and he respects the pride and bravery of many of the natives he meets. He knows the different tribes of South Africa well, and differentiated between them in terms of character based on experience, not prejudice. As I said above, he’s a pretty likeable guy. But, like most ‘lost race’ novels before and since, the Kukuanas live in the shadow of a distinctly white civilization that scored pretty much all the major achievements in the kingdom. In particular, there is a long, wide Roman road running through their valley, lined with impressive statues. Now, one of the real-world inspirations for Mines was the discovery of the ancient city of Zimbabwe in what was then Rhodesia. At the time, it was unthinkable to European archaeologists that a black civilization could have built such a grand structure. Right up until the independence of Zimbabwe, great leaps in logic were employed to convince the populace that a white or even Arab civilization was responsible. It seems that even Haggard was not immune from this kind of thinking. But compared to other literature of the period, his books still provide a refreshing and humane depiction of black Africa.

King Solomon’s Mines is a largely enjoyable read, but its now-common tropes and somewhat childish tone marr it somewhat. It provides an interesting base from which to compare his later, better novels.

(check out this here comic while you're at it...)

The Great Work Of Time by John Crowley

2009-12-13T13:48:00.007Z

At the end of this novella is a brief editor’s note in which John Crowley lists the history book Pax Brittanica as a reference, and thanks its author, Jan Morris, for ‘many hours spent dawdling in a world more fantastical than any he could himself invent.’ It’s a quote that reminds how much the British Empire is a perfect setting for sci-fi. With that in mind, I’ll delve into The Great Work of Time.

The narrator is unsure exactly when to begin his tale, being that in this convoluted universe, everything he describes has both already happened and is yet to happen. He finally settles on one Caspar Last, a quirky American genius who discovers time travel in 1983. Little interested in the practical applications of what is, to him, an idea only interesting for its theory, Last concocts a scheme to make himself rich after only a single use of the machine. He travels to British Guyana in 1851, and returns to the present carrying a stamp that is now worth millions. He then destroys the machine, hoping that his trip will have had no other consequences.

But Last’s venture into the Empire’s past has unwittingly caught the attention of the Otherhood, a secret organization created by Cecil Rhodes. Their goal is to ensure the stability of the Empire by whatever means possible, and in Last’s Apparatus, they have found their most powerful tool yet…

The Great Work of Time is a deeply strange piece. It’s a time travel story that really rises to the challenge of presenting a complex but consistent set of rules for its chronological meddling. It’s a warning about the nature of chaos and stability. But for me, its most powerful attribute is its affecting description of longing for a world now lost. This is most clearly expressed through the character of Denys Winterset. Winterset has lived in a peaceful world shaped by the Otherhood- a world in which the Empire never fell and the world wars never occurred- but he has also lived in a world much closer to our own.

The contrasts between the two are constant yet subtle. When Caspar Last travels to Guyana in 1983, he does so by a suffocating and cheap package-tour flight full of noisy tourists. Arriving at his destination, he finds it a rotting tropical backwater kept afloat only by the shoddily-built American facilities that cater to tourists.

When Denys Winterset travels to Khartoum in the alternate 1954, he does so on the luxurious Cape-to-Cairo railway. Designed by Rhodes to pass right through the spray of Victoria Falls, it is magnificent, efficient and proud. It turns out that in a 20th Century without world wars or a powerful America, the development of technology has been somewhat slowed by the dominant British Empire-

-a great beast without predators, and naturally conservative; it clung to proven techniques and could impose them on the rest of the world by its weight.

This is a little whimsical fantasy on Crowley’s part- in real life, the British Empire greatly hastened the modernization of the world throughout its time by spreading steam power, electricity and the telegraph everywhere it went. The fact that the Empire happened to be on the way out just as the motor cars and telephones became ubiquitous is, I believe, slightly off the point. I guess Crowley is thinking of a world without a dominant USA and its drive towards a world of Model T’s and assembly lines. It’s a fantasy that allows Crowley to make his alternate Empire one in which airships and trains still dominate transport by the 20th Century- a common enough trope in Empire-themed science-fiction.

It’s also part of what makes the alternate 1954 so pleasant. Everything is more laid back than in our own world. People who work for the Empire have pride and purpose. It’s all fantasy of course- little is said of how native peoples feel about this Empire, for example- but some throw-away lines indicate that the English have become more enlightened about their inherent ‘superiority’ than they were in the 19th Century.

Ultimately, it is slightly frustrating that, having created this fascinating world, it is not explored in much detail. The novella is short, and much time is spent on other worlds. Some of them are interesting, such as a well-researched section on Cecil Rhodes. Others are so distracting that it feels as if they belong in a different book, such as a future London that is inhabited by several non-human species. The ultimate result of all the Otherhood’s meddling is a far future that is puzzling but visually memorable.

The writing throughout is great, and there are plenty of treats for fans of sci-fi and Empire alike. The tortured logistics of Caspar Last's attempt to enrich himself using his machine are hilarious and thought-provoking- in Crowley's time-traveling universe, it's much harder than it sounds. Recommended.

(photo by Isabelle Grosjean)

Vathek by William Beckford

2009-12-06T14:15:00.005Z

I’m going to have to plumb a bit deeper than usual into the depths of weird fiction in order to review an early example of Orientalist literature- the cod-Arabian Nights fantasy Vathek, written by the demented William Beckford in 1786.

Beckford seems to have been something of a card. At one time the richest man in England, he inherited the blood money squeezed from a slave plantation in the West Indies. This allowed him to live out his insane fantasies, most of which were influenced by the then-nascent neo-Gothic movement and the recently popular Arabian Nights. According to the introduction to the Wordsworth edition-

“…he used his immense wealth to creatc what was in essence a small kingdom in Wiltshire where he indulged himself in all the human excesses. …he exercised his love of Gothic architecture by creating a monastery-like building on his estate… One entered the building through doors forty feet high, so carefully counter-weighted that they could be opened by two fantastically garbed dwarves in Beckford’s employ.”

Sounds like my kind of guy, apart from the fact that he was eventually outed as a paedophile (it does say all the human excesses). The bastard probably even specified that he was looking for dwarves when he put up his ‘help wanted’ signs, or whatever they did back then.

Anyway, to further indulge in his passion for this kind of thing, Beckford wrote Vathek, a novella in the style of the Arabian Nights. The only version he would have had access to at that time would have been Galland’s 1776 French translation- the original document that sparked an enthusiasm for all things mysterious and Eastern across Europe. Suddenly, no dignified upper-crust European was without a hookah and a funny little round cap. For some reason, another development of this was that all Oriental tales henceforth composed by Europeans were written in French! By the time Vathek was translated into English, it was being falsely claimed as being a genuine Eastern legend, because its author was now shamed and living in exile.

The titular Vathek is the Caliph of the Muslim world and the grandson of Haroun Al Raschid. Raschid was a real-life super-Caliph who reigned during Baghdad’s glorious hey-day, but he was also famously fictionalized in the Arabian Nights. By making Vathek his grandson, Beckford shows us immediately that 1) he knows his Orientalism, and 2) Vathek is a badass. It’s a bit like writing an American novel and having your protagonist be Abraham Lincoln’s grandson, or something.

Like his creator, Vathek is a hedonist. Probably unlike his creator, he can kill men stone dead with a look from his eye when angered. He builds a tower from which he can overlook all of his kingdom, and he adds five wings onto his palace, each of which caters to the pleasuring of one of the five senses. At the beginning, he’s not such a bad guy. He’s happy to share his good living and his pleasure palace with all and sundry. But when a mysterious Indian appears at the palace selling weapons that fight by themselves and other powerful items, Vathek becomes obsessed with acquiring such power. Like Faust, he makes a deal with a demon in order to gain it. And whenever he lags in his commitment to this cause (such as when he falls in love with the daughter of an Emir), his witch of a mother ensures that he continues on his path to damnation. Soon the two of them are merrily sacrificing first-borns and stripping naked in front of pyres full of mummy bones and eyes of newt. Will it all end happily?

Despite being one of the oldest texts I’ve read for the site, Vathek is a relatively smooth read. The characters do talk in a kind of mock-Shakespeare vernacular, with plenty of ‘thees’ and ‘thous’, but by and large the prose rattles along at a pleasant rate. And like the Arabian Nights themselves, the novella is light on character and long on incident. The frequent detours the plot winds into are sometimes tiresome, though it’s hard to remain critical when each is so chock-full of dangerous journeys, wise Viziers, loyal eunachs and graveyards full of helpful ghouls. Even old Mohammad himself makes a brief late appearance- not sure if that’s the kind of twist that goes down well east of Suez.

Vathek himself is clearly a stand-in for Beckford, and an early Gothic anti-hero. Byron himself claimed to have modeled himself somewhat after him. His only weakness (and it’s a whopper) is his desire to experience all things and learn all knowledge. While I don’t advise you to emulate him completely, tracking down a copy of Vathek is recommended for those interested in experiencing what’s largely regarded as being the finest European imitation of the Arabian Nights.

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

2009-11-29T10:48:00.009Z

Carl Sagan has a lot to answer for. In 1980, the famous astronomer and rationalist (Dawkins would have loved him) wrote the book and TV series Cosmos. The book kicked around my house until I was of an age to read it, and I found it a real treasure- a sprawling account of the universe and our relationship with it, told through science, myth, history and literature. No stone remained unturned- in a chapter on Mars, Sagan rightly devotes as much time on the impact writers such as H. G. Wells and Burroughs had on the public’s perception of the red planet as the 1970’s Viking missions.

Sagan grows particularly misty-eyed as he recalls the exploits of Burroughs’ hero John Carter of Mars. He recalls daring adventure, exotic locales and beautiful heroines. He recalls the best damn two-fisted adventures in the history of literature. All in all, he recalls too much.

It was many years later that I finally got my hands on a Burroughs book. It was A Princess of Mars, the first book Burroughs ever wrote (in 1912), and the first one that featured John Carter.

Carter is a good ‘ol boy from Virginia who, at the end of the Civil War, finds himself destitute, and with ‘his only means of livelihood, fighting, gone’ (Not to worry, John. There’ll be plenty of fighting where you’re going). While prospecting in Arizona, Carter gets trapped in a cave by some marauding Indians. Apropos of nothing, he suddenly looks up to the sky to the planet Mars, and announces that, actually, as a fighting man, he’s always had a fascination with the planet of the god of war, don’t you know. He finds his spirit somehow transported to Mars, while his body lies in the the cave on Earth.

On Mars, Carter encounters a version of the red planet that was very much in the public mind of the time- a dying world of dried-up seas, cris-crossed with canals as ancient civilizations carry out last-ditch efforts to make the planet habitable. He encounters the Tharks, eight-foot tall green men with four arms who live to fight. He fights alongside them and earns their trust and respect, and eventually goes on an expedition to rescue the beautiful (and notably more human) princess Dejah Thoris from the clutches of an enemy people.

As Sagan notes in Cosmos, the popular idea of an old, dying Mars was largely due to an American named Percival Lowell, who also influenced Wells. Lowell was an astronomer who believed he could see canals on Mars using his telescope, and produced remarkably consistent maps and globes of their positions over a period of many years in the late 19th century, even going so far as to name many of them. He was a respected astronomer and no crank, and whatever it was that he was chronicling is still something of a mystery today.

So that was the state of Mars in the public perception, circa 1912. What Burroughs brings to the table is that his Mars is a place of ADVENTURE! Unfortunately, what 'adventure' means to Burroughs is endless captures, escapes and fights. Carter faces pulpish creatures on almost every page- in cities, in deserts, in arenas- but he’s such a designated hero that none of it seems to matter. He’s such a hardass that we never believe he’s in the slightest danger. Couple this with a ‘heroic, manly’ attitude reminiscent of Sir Galahad, and Carter quickly becomes a bore.

I am not prone to sensitiveness, and the following of a sense of duty, wherever it may lead, has always been a sort of fetich (sic) throughout my life; which may account for the honours bestowed upon me by three republics and the decorations and friendships of several lesser kings, in whose service my sword has been red many a time.

Not a humble chap, our John. He’s almost like Flashman played straight, and while this uncynical view of manliness and heroism is often part of the charm of early 20th-century fiction, here it grates immensely. Carter never admits a weakness. He’s nothing but a tremendous Mary Sue- a stand-in for the author, only faster and stronger and more popular. His black-and-white world view is vindicated by all the characters he meets- Thoris is good because she is a beautiful woman who knows her place and falls in love with him immediately. Tars Tarkas the Thark is good because, though a barbarian, he has a sense of honour and duty similar to Carter’s own. And bad characters are similarly flat- jealous and conniving from the moment they are introduced. Character development is not one of Burroughs’ strong points.

So is the novel saved by the exotic locales and fantastic events? For the most part, Burroughs neglects to describe the scenery and architecture of this I’m-sure-it-would-be-fascinating-if-I-could-see-it world. In fact, his most poetic prose appears instead on those rare occasions where he lets us know what the narrator is feeling- when he is scared, or anxious, or lonely. Of course, Carter is such a manly man that he doesn’t allow this to happen too often.

There are few ideas here beyond a straightforward adventure story. Attempts to flesh out the details of the Tharks alien society do add some depth and interest, but once we discover that these underachieving ‘barbarians’ are in fact merely squatting in the ruins of great cities built by a lost utopian race, who were of course wise, noble and very white, the charm does fizzle somewhat. As Carter is looking at the frescoes of one of the most beautiful buildings-

They were of people like myself, and of a much lighter colour than Dejah Thoris. They were clad in graceful, flowing robes, highly ornamented with metal and jewels, and their luxuriant hair was that of a beautiful golden and reddish bronze. The men were beardless and only a few wore arms. The scenes depicted for the most part, a fair-skinned, fair-haired people at play.

This is such a common trope amongst fiction of the period that it quickly becomes tiresome. Did anybody of the time, even just once, posit a utopian society that did not have elitist, racist undertones? Finding it in this novel, mentioned briefly and with no relevance to the plot, is quite disheartening. It’s like Burroughs interrupts the narrative to shout ‘hey kids, I know it’s not really relevant, but I thought I’d remind you that only white people can be civilized- even in fantasy!’

Perhaps it's unfair to ask such things of a rock-em sock-em pulp adventure. But the truth of the matter is that other authors have done this kind of thing, before and after Burroughs, far better. According to Sagan, there’s a lot more books where this one came from, but don’t be expecting a review of them to pop up here anytime soon.

The Devil Rides Out (1968)

2009-11-26T10:49:00.005Z

It strikes me that there are certain kinds of ‘supernatural’ occurrences or superstitions that most people take more seriously than others. Obviously, few adults are deeply troubled nowadays by movies that feature stock horror elements such as vampires, werewolves and the like. But mention demonic possession, or ouja boards, or satanic worship, and these same people will begin to harden their eyes and quiver their lips.

“Well, I’m not superstitious,” they’ll say, “but there are some things out there that are just not worth messing with, right? I mean, just in case.”

For some reason, these elements are in a vague way treated seriously, and even with some element of real fear, by otherwise skeptical persons. Moreso than other fantastic evils, they seem to belong in some arcane corner of our real world. We all know a spooky story about someone who messed with ouja, and we’ve all noticed those ‘satanic abuse’ scandals which occasionally pop up.

It seems almost like shooting credulous fish in a skeptical barrel to make a scary movie using these elements- The Exorcist, The Wicker Man, and today’s feature, The Devil Rides Out, are all excellent films that gain at least some of their power from the fascination the public has with their esoteric subject matter.

Many moons ago, as a child, I was prevented from watching a movie by my mother. No matter that I gorged myself on daily repeats of taped-off-the-telly VHS versions of Jurassic Park and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. As scary and brutal as those movies are, they seemed to her to be definitely ‘fantasy’, and thus not deeply unsettling. But this old-fashioned, plodding supernatural chiller about uptight Englishmen messing about with pentagrams and goats’ blood, though containing little overt horror, was, for some reason, a no-no. Her reaction left a deep impression on me- that this kind of horror was somehow more serious, perhaps because it was something that actually happened in the real world.

Years later, I was able to track it down using the wonderful ‘I Need to Know’ board on IMDB. Turns out it was The Devil Rides Out, starring Christopher Lee, with a screenplay by Richard Matheson. Now that’s pedigree!

Christopher Lee plays the Duc de Richleau, an upper-class English gent who discovers that his close friend Simon has become involved with the Occult. Eventually, it becomes clear that the somewhat naive Simon, along with the beautiful Tanith, has come under the power of the black magic adept Mocata (played by one-time Blofeld Charles Gray). The Duke and his stalwart companion Rex Van Ryn track down Mocata’s satanic cult, crashing their midnight sabbat and having lots of car chases through the British countryside.

Richleau lives in a 1930’s Britain where the attitudes and class system of Victorian days has not yet entirely faded. He is an aristocratic gentleman of leisure, of the kind that would not survive the next War- his friends are all upper-class, and have servants and nannies for their children. Despite the budgetary constraints of the Hammer studio, the period feel is wonderfully evoked through the use of old country houses, fantastic sets and beautiful 1930’s cars. It’s a fun look at a dying world.

One of the strengths of the film is its restraint- the horror builds through a growing sense of unease rather than through frequent horrific imagery. Of course, in a movie about the occult, the film-makers are going to have to show something supernatural sooner or later. Aside from one early apparition, the film delays doing this for as long as possible- and with good reason, for the special effects are mostly disappointing. It’s really the only element at which the low budget really slaps the viewer in the face. It is strange to hear Lee constantly enthuse on the commentary that the film would have been much improved by the use of elaborate CGI boogies- seemingly missing much of what makes the film so effective.

Lee seems to have been a bit of a Dan Ackroyd for the 60’s, given his intense interest in the occult. He did much of his own research for the movie, making sure that all the Duke’s esoteric ramblings have a ‘genuine’ background in lore. Its something the movie shares with the source material- the 1931 novel by Denis Wheatley- and adds to making the subject seem credible.

All in all, The Devil Rides Out is an entertaining watch for those with in interest in Hammer films, British society in the early 20th century, and of course, those who enjoy performing the age old rite of the sacrifice of the white hen and the black cockrel when the planets are in alignment.

And for real Grand Masters of the Left Hand Path, here’s a link to a documentary about Hammer films.

Young Indiana Jones Chronicles- Ireland, Easter 1916

2009-11-14T14:51:00.010Z

One of the great common archetypes of Empire-themed fiction (and reality) is the civilized white man who immerses himself in some alien culture, becoming involved in local affairs and generally having colourful adventures. The country he visits will, of course, be a Hollywoodized version of its real-life counterpart. Naturally, the exoticism of the country will be ramped up the max, and at every turn the hero will encounter interesting historical characters and events, despite the fact that they may not have been around at the same time. It's kind of like history as a theme-park, if you will. How exciting it is, so, to see Ireland finally portrayed in such a manner.

So Indiana Jones spent a little time on the old sod? According to the dubiously-canonical 1990’s TV show Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, he did. With unfortunate timing that Harry Flashman would be proud of, he arrives during Easter in 1916. Pulling into the port of Queenstown (now Cobh) bound for Europe and the Great War, he quickly leaves this writer's home county behind and heads for the capitol, where adventures await. Sean O’Casey, W. B. Yeats, the Abbey Theatre and the Easter Rising are all ahead of him. Ah well, at least there’s no snakes. Young Indy even finds time to romance the sister of future Taoiseach Sean Lemass (!).

As crazy as it sounds, this episode is actually one of the less cringe-inducing Hollywood versions of Ireland (or Diddely-Ireland, as Colin Murphy once called it). Because Young Indiana Jones Chronicles appeared to have been rather a big-budget show, they immediately trump 99% of movies set in Ireland by 1) actually filming on location, 2) actually getting Irish actors to play Irish characters, and 3) actually doing their homework regarding the history. Diddley-Ireland does occasionally raise its freckled face (there is a bar fight while stereotypical music plays), but its most conspicuous occurrence is rightly lambasted minutes afterwards.

When Indy first meets Lemass and his friends, the sister, who has no interest in nationalism, takes him to the music hall, where the audience sings along with a maudlin performance of ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’. It’s played dead straight. Indy thinks that this is grand, until he meets the frustrated socialist playright Sean O’Casey.

“Have ye been to the theatre?” asks O’Casey. Indy says yes, but O’Casey bitterly corrects him on the difference between the stage-Irish of the music hall and the reality portrayed in the plays that run in the Abbey Theatre. O’Casey is wonderfully played by John Lynch. Throughout, the show does bravely attempt to hint at the complexity of the situation, but it’s through the character of O’Casey that this really comes out. Having said this, my favourite line in the whole thing is still when he calls Yeats a bollox. Neil Jordan was never so brave.

When the rebellion does get underway, the show does not simplify the nationalists by making them unquestionably heroic. They are rightly portrayed as brave men who knowingly sacrificed their lives for what they believed in, though through the character of O’Casey the show also questions the necessity of their violent methods. Nor does it whitewash the anti-nationalist sentiment that was common amongst the populace of Dublin. When the proclamation is read from the front of the GPO by Padraig Pearse- a moment of Irish history made sacred by decades of Fianna Fail education, and one that still causes a twinge in this writer’s innards-randomers in the street express skepticism and grumble about not being able to collect their pension.

All exteriors appear to have been shot in Dublin, with the city’s many beautiful Georgian streets providing an easy period feel. The GPO, acting as itself, provides a dramatic focus for the action scenes during the Rising. It’s really stirring to see such a seminal event in Irish history portrayed with a decent budget in the actual locations. It’s great to place the Rising alongside other epic set pieces of the British Empire- Rorke’s Drift, Balaclava, the Indian Mutiny, etc. Each of them was tragic, epic, dramatic, sad, and not at all simple. But sometimes it helps to have a fictional portrayal to bring it all home.

While Young Indiana Jones Chronicles is naturally primarily concerned with the tribulations of its foppish title character (young Indy is quite likeable, actually), the research and care given to this episode make sure that the Ireland he encounters is more than just a colourful background.

Most of the episode is viewable on Youtube- check it out here.

Flashman and the Mountain of Light

2009-11-08T11:50:00.005Z

The British Empire- as some wit once said (probably a Belgian, too)- was acquired in a sort of ‘fit of absence of mind’. In this volume of old Flash’s adventures, G. M. Fraser shows his distain for this particular myth, and attempts to educate the reader (by way of Edgar Rice Burroughs) as to the real state of affairs in many of the Indian native states before they were ‘invited’ into the civilizing embrace of the British. Dipping once again into his well-thumbed volume of ‘Queen Victoria’s Little Wars’, Fraser comes out with an almost forgotten campaign to chronicle- the Anglo-Sikh War of 1845.

As the novel begins, the Punjab is in a state of unrest. Incompetent leaders shamble drunkenly on and off the throne as their own relations scheme against them. The Khalsa- the living embodiment of the Sikh nation and the most powerful, well-trained native army East of Suez, is spoiling for a fight, with its beady eye on the power-hungry East India Company to the south. And into this hellish situation is thrust one Harry Flashman. The table is set for a rare feast of literary delights.

As usual for late-period (though chronologically early: why doesn’t Flashman remember meeting John Nickelson again in 1857?) Flashman, there’s a political point to be made. See, in this case the British don’t want to own the Punjab. In fact, it’s useful to them as a buffer state against the hostile Mohammadan hordes of Afghanistan. It’s just that the damn Sikhs, being Oriental and all, can’t keep their affairs in order. Their rulers are so corrupt and debauched, with endless drinking and rutting going on at the Lahore durbar (court) that the country is about to tear itself apart. It all sounds rather jolly to Flashman of course, until he hears about the wanton cruelty of the ravishing Maharani. Yep, the Orientalism factor here is high enough to make Edward Said snap his hookah in half with anger. Oriental rulers are, by and large, barbarous, decadent and sensous; with Fraser’s famous historical accuracy, it's difficult to know how much of this is true and how much is Imperialist bilge. Many of the excesses of the native Indian state rulers were absolutely mind-boggling-witness the recent Victoria & Albert exhibition of Nabob finery. Regular parades, with elephants bedecked with jewels as big as your head, were the order of the day- and this at a time when most Indians were lucky if they could afford a nice patch of dirt to burn their wives on, as Flashman might have put it.

So eventually the British have to step in and sort all this out. How will it end?

Now while almost every Flashman book serves up a delightful curry of exotic thrills, Mountain of Light does a particularly sterling job of keeping historical accuracy and Fraser’s political commentary firmly within the boundaries of telling a rip-roaring good story. ‘Like a page out of Burton’s Arabian Nights’, says Flash frequently as he languishes next to dusky maidens in moonlit pleasure gardens, or clashes steel with blackguards and badmashes in a Lahore dungeon. Of course, he’s referring to the lavasciously-illustrated versions you could only get on the continent (that Burton, eh? Chap had a touch of the Flashman himself, I’d say). And the rub is that it was all- more or less- real. Palaces, beauties, dungeons, back-stabbing Viziers- it’s all in the history books. As if to make this point clear, Fraser includes Dr Josiah Harlan and Alexander Gardner (and comes close, by association, to including the incredible Joseph Wolff), both adventurers whose real-life careers were, if anything, more incredible that Flashman’s own. Sometimes the reader’s just gotta be reminded how strange truth is before (s)he’ll accept the fiction.

Though all the usual treats are present and correct, including Frasier’s ability to make the events of the past seem alive and real (they were, you know), Mountain of Light reads like the most fantastic adventure story ever concocted. In fact, when he hits this kind of magic equilibrium, his writing provides the kind of thrills that Edgar Rice Burroughs fails to provide for anyone above the age of 14 (I was intensely let down by Burroughs when I finally read him. Can you tell?).

No, it isn’t just the sex, juvenile and Flemming-ish as it is. There’s more to being ‘adult’ than that, I hope. Mountain of Light is simply an adventure story that functions on a higher level- it takes the basic framework of a Burroughs novel, but adds great writing, emotion, historical interest, politics and fully-rounded characters. There’s no reason why anyone who was intensely affected by John Carter of Mars or The Lost World as a teenager shouldn’t be able to get the same thrill as an adult, but the writing must rise to the occasion. Flashman and the Mountain of Light is the answer to this conundrum, and is simply one of the most enjoyable entries in the series.

Empire by Niall Ferguson

2009-09-03T19:51:00.009+01:00

If it goes without saying that the British Empire is a great setting for tales of adventure and derring-do (and it should), then it must also be stated that, properly considered, the British Empire itself was really the greatest adventure of all. Of course, it may not have appeared that way to those executed in Delhi in 1857 or in Dublin in 1916. But to those who were in a position to appreciate it, the Empire certainly provided ample scope for thrills aplenty as fortunes were sought and squandered across the breath of the red-tinted globe. Not a view many would have qualms with, however they may now scoff at the seemingly simple-minded Victorian interpretation of events. But in Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, Scottish historian Niall Ferguson seeks to convince the reader of an idea which may today seem far less palatable to many- that, by and large, the British Empire was a good thing. How well does he succeed?

The book functions by taking the reader on a whistle-stop tour of the Empire from its nebulous beginnings to its still-ongoing dissolution. Ferguson feels that the Empire (and thus the book) can be divided into certain periods- the scattered early Empire founded by pirates and privateers for strictly profit-based reasons, the continent-run-by-corporation that was early British India, the consolidation of government control in the mid 19th century and the more familiar (and frequently ridiculed) 'missionary' period during which Britain felt it was its moral and spiritual duty to 'better' the worlds lot. And all in under 400 pages.

Quite literally, it's a terrific story; as much a page-turner as any novel. Ferguson shows his skill at being able to juggle events occurring thousands of miles apart over a period of several hundred years and manage to keep them in some kind of context. Of course, many, many important events have been minimised or even left out. Pretty much anyone from a nation once affected by the Empire will have their own particular bugbear about this (my own is his one-line dismissal of Ireland's wartime policy of neutrality as 'shameful'), but considering what Ferguson is trying to achieve- an overview of the entire Empire in under 400 pages- there is surprisingly little to quibble about. He gives a fair indication of what attitudes and actions were prevalent in the Empire during the various time periods by focusing on certain key events. It seems beyond the wildest notions of even the most fantastic tales of Burroughs or Conan Doyle that events as varied and fascinating as the American Revolution, the Indian Mutiny and the Opium Wars could have their roots in the same political juggernaut.

As may be evident by now, Ferguson is not shy at exposing the brutality, hypocrisy and greed of those who ran the Empire. His is no one-sided polemic, and he refuses to whitewash the Empire's many sins. But his overall thesis is that, on the overall 'balance sheet', the good outweighs the bad. Yep- railroads, democracy, free trade and the end of slavery- all the usual suspects are present and correct. But Ferguson, known for his 'counterfactual' history, goes one step further and challenges us to answer some tough questions- what if the British Empire had never happened? How much better off would the poor, downtrodden colonies be?

Ferguson's rather convincing answer to this is- they'd be under the heel of some other Empire, and quite likely one that was a lot rougher than the British one. He chills the reader with visions of elseworld scenarios where Russia's brutal 19th-century land gobbling continued worldwide; where the Japanese empire followed the horrific rape of Nanking with the rape of all south-eastern Asia. Weather these visions strike you as realistic or ridiculous, they certainly provide some food for thought. These (and others) were 'political organisations' that did not construct Civil Services to look after the rights of conquered citizens. They did not punish members of their own race who wronged said citizens. And they certainly did not have cabinets at home full of liberal politicians always ready to sympathize with the colonised, criticize the colonisers and (however ineffectually) rally constantly for the independence of dominion states.

Certainly, Britain did not command the most evil empire in the gang, and things could certainly have been worse. Much worse. But does that excuse the evils that Britain did perpetrate? That's a debate for another day. Meantime, Empire does a terrific job of presenting a readable guide to the Greatest Adventure of All. Huzzah!

And for good boys who eat all their vegetables, here's a bonus link: Ferguson's recent and difficult-to-upload comments on Irish attitudes to Empire.

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea

2009-08-23T15:35:00.012+01:00

There's one very good reason why I have not yet tackled reviewing the Wells/Verne oeuvre of 19th century early science fiction, and it's name is Jess Nevins. Were I to post a link to his site, you would simply never return, for you may rest assured that he is simply the best and most complete chronicler of Victorian-age fantastic fiction ever to suck ether. After he has completed one of his famously thorough reviews, anything left yet to be said on the subject is but the feeble-minded gibberish of an opium-sodden Pathan. Nevertheless, I will venture to provide a few words on the subject of Mr. Verne's book, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Though one of the two best-remembered pioneers of what we now know as science fiction, Verne has always been regarded as the poorer writer. While many of his characters and ideas, in particular Phillias Fogg, Captain Nemo, the Nautilus and the moon-shot, are still well known today, his books are simply not often read. It is War of the Worlds, not 20,000 Leagues which is today on school curriculums worldwide. Why is this the case? For one thing, Wells used his science fiction to explore social issues, making them ripe for boring English-class over-analysis. Yep, you though you were reading about time travel, alien invasions and future worlds? Sorry mate, but you were actually being secretly lectured about the British class system, colonialism and socialism (probably at length too, knowing Wells).

Verne of course, being a Frenchman, and writing several decades beforehand, had no time for such nonsense. He wrote science fiction with an emphasis on the science. Leagues, for example, is really nothing more than an excuse for Verne to plan exactly how his most recent Big Idea (in this case, the Nautilus) would actually work.

Proceedings get off to a jolly good start when the French Professor Arronax, his odious assistant Conseil and designated asshole Ned Land set off to discover (and destroy) a mysterious 'creature' which has been attacking ships all around the world. Arronax, being a naturalist, believes it to be some sort of gigantic narwhale. Of course, to the surprise of nobody except cultural philistines and those who haven't read the back of the book, the 'creature' turns out to be none other than the Nautilus, a submarine-like craft that is well ahead of its time. It is piloted by the enigmatic Captain Nemo. Nemo rescues the other characters from a watery grave, and so begins their travels throughout his watery domain. Though they will see many marvels and wonders unseen by terrestrial man, Nemo makes it clear that they have sacrificed their freedom- he will never let them leave the Nautilus.

It has to be stated that Verne is a stiffer read than other writers of his type, and most readers will make their way through Leagues a good bit slower than they will through anything by Wells. The characters for the most part are so flat that they'd become invisible if they turned to the side, and really only exist to drop massive infodumps on the unsuspecting reader.

Oh God, the infodumps...

Verne has always been infamous for this kind of thing, and Leagues is no exception. It occasionally feels as if he's decided to write the book simply to show off all the research he's done. One character will say: "Why look at that curious island there on the horizon. I wasn't aware there was an archipelago in this area. What is it?" And another character will say: "Well, I'm glad you asked. You see, those are the Sandwich Islands, which were first scouted by the Portuguese in 1656, and later colonised by..." History, biology, geology- no subject is safe.

This can be pretty interesting when it's Captain Nemo talking about the Nautilus, for Verne has, as usual, worked out the exact dimensions and workings of his creation, and it is fun to see how such an incredible craft could have been constructed using only 1860's technology. Verne does cheat somewhat by having Nemo use an unknown 'type' of electricity, thus allowing him to perform feats that electricity was not known to be capable of at the time (and how come there's no mention of decompression?). But when Arronax and Conseil drone on and on about the kinds of sea life they encounter, the readers' eyes start to glaze over. These infodumps tend to consist of enormous lists of species names (often in latin) which will mean absolutely nothing to 90% of readers (now or then!). And if you're really unlucky, that little twerp Conseil will even start reeling off the taxonomy of each species. Why would Verne include this kind of thing? There's often no explanation at all for what he's talking about. Not everybody out there has a zoology degree, Verne (though ironically enough, Wells did, and he never felt the need to go on about it).

Lest we get carried too far out into the sea of negativity, I will mention that the Nautilus is an extremely cool idea, and one which has rightly continued to fascinate writers and filmakers. But it is Nemo himself who is probably the best thing about the book- a misanthrope who has cut off all ties with the land due to some undisclosed past horror (Indian Mutiny, anyone?). He's suitably moody and mysterious, and he plays a mean organ to express his inner anguish. He always knows how to get out of a jam, and this makes him quite smug. His genius may have made the world a better place but instead the world rejected him, and he has taken all he loves (great works of art and nature) on board the Nautilus and quit the land for good. This is definitely an attractive idea.

Verne works best as a kind of wish fulfillment, and when Leagues sobers up from its educational sermonizing and remembers that its supposed to be an adventure story, it does this quite well. Personally, I've always though that when it came to being stuck indefinitely in a sweaty tin can with several other men, Verne's other famous misanthrope Captain Robur (who flew an airship) had one over on Nemo. The freedom of the sky beats the freedom of the sea for me. I mean, even if you were obsessed with sea life like Arronax and C*****L are, wouldn't it get a bit boring on board the Nautilus? Verne tries hard to hide the fact (Arronax constantantly says that he's so 'busy' reading and looking at fish that he doesn't have time to be bored), but being unable to even go for a walk for months on end doesn't sound like wish fulfillment.

Leagues is worth a look, but had Verne spent more time on characterization and less on the infodumps he might still be read today instead of just fondly remembered.

Incidentally, do check out Jess Nevins' page here. And also this detailed, well-researched page on designs for the Nautilus.

Tales of Unease- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

2009-07-29T15:13:00.024+01:00

As a child, I knew that when a bunch of well-educated men in old-fashioned dress got together in their 'club' (whatever that was) and started to tell tall tales around a great warm hearth, there were only two ways in which things could pan out- they would inevitable end up (a) somewhere exotic, such as jungle or a desert, or (b) in a haunted house. In either case, an adventure would ensue. Of course, no women would be present during it, for they are troublesome, meddling creatures. Such is what comes of consuming the Right Sort of Literature.

Eventually, I discovered that the particular time and place during which these adventures usually seemed to occur was Britain, about one hundred years ago, and that the reason these educated, civilized men so often wound up in wild countries was that they, in fact, owned them. Ah. And so, as night follows day, as the training-montage-scene must follow the inspirational-speech-scene, my interest in tales of adventure and the supernatural led to an interest in the age of imperialism. But what has all this got to do with the creator of Sherlock Holmes?

Tales of Unease is a collection of Doyle's non-Baker St related stories, and wouldn't you know it, it turns out to be a veritable taproot of the archetypes I mentioned above. These stories are set in a world where upper-class twits (sorry, Brits) discover ghostly goings-on in every drawing-room and college dormitory (Oxford, naturally). I've aired my grievances over Doyle's use of spiritualism in fiction before, but in this collection he gets the balance just right. His characters, though mostly Mary-Sue type author inserts, are not fools and require about as much convincing as you or I would that something supernatural is truly afoot. This adds to the mood Doyle is attempting to create with these stories- the feeling that the world is a much stranger place that we had ever dreamed, and that we are on the brink of some great, if uncomfortable, realization. Of course, most of this will take the form of tables banging in dark rooms during seances, but you can't have everything, right?

One thing you can have though, is mummies. Plenty of 'em. In classic tales such as The Ring of Thoth and Lot 249, Doyle appears to have contributed to the then-growing idea of Egyptian curses and mysticism. These stories in particular appear to have been among the first to introduce the elements of immortality, reincarnation and lost love to the mummy cycle. Lot 249 in particular is one of the most enjoyably creepy shorts in this collection. There's little doubt that these stories influenced most of the ideas regarding Egyptian mysticism that followed, climaxing with the 'real-life' curse of Tutankhamun in 1922, as well as the 1932 Karloff movie.

Special mention must go to The Captain of the Polestar, in which the crew of a whaling ship in the frozen north begin to see strange things out on the ice. Here, Doyle is drawing on his own experiences of being ships' doctor on a whaler, and the resulting images of the endless white desert are indeed haunting. It's a great example of 'less is more'- knowing that whatever is in the readers' imagination is surely more wondrous than whatever he can provide in the narrative, the author plays it subtle with this one.

Special mentions also to The Horror of the Heights, for being the best (and only) damn story ever written about the possibility of giant sky-jellyfish living in our upper atmosphere. 'Aeroplaning' had only been around for less than twenty years when the story was written (1913). Doyle makes it seem almost reasonable-

'A visitor might descend upon this planet a thousand times and never see a tiger. Yet tigers exist, and if he chanced to come down into a jungle, he might be devoured. There are jungles of the upper air, and there are worse things than tigers that inhabit them..."

It's the kind of open-ended 'anything's possible' logic that Charles Fort would be proud of, but it does allow for a thrilling adventure. (This story in particular has always stuck with me, and I used the idea in my comic Laissez-Faire. Click here to read it!)

As for the rest, well they're a mixed bag, including some downright failures (there's something about a prehistoric cave-dwelling bear-creature wandering around South Kensington that just isn't scary). But there are plenty of Victorian-age novelties scattered throughout to tide the jaded reader over. Egyptians are mysterious, Turks are inscrutable and at every turn doughty and fearless (but modest)Englishmen swallow their fear in order to confront the strange mysteries that lie just beyond the veil. Even in the most horrific of circumstances-

'-there lies deep in every man a rooted self-respect which makes it hard for him to turn back from what he has once undertaken.'

In every man? I sure hope so!

Actually, though this kind of bluff claptrap is common among Victorian fictional heroes, Doyle might just actually have meant it. The man did attempt to enlist as a private in the British army during the Boer War (when he was 40) and again during the Great War (when he was 54!). He does seem like a chap who practiced what he preached.

As is well known by fans of genre fiction, Doyle rather hoped that he'd be remembered for stories that did not involve cocaine and violin-playing. Though not famous for it today, he was as good at constructing a genuinely creepy 19th-century ghost story as any more famous names you may care to mention. And of course, there's nary the rustle of a petticoat in the whole thing, as H. R. Haggard might say. At least, not the petticoat of a living woman. Muster up some of that late-Victorian can-do attitude and track down Tales of Unease.

Flashman and the Redskins

2009-07-17T21:44:00.012+01:00

(Note: For my overview of the Flashman series, click here)

The wild west has always been of the classic stock settings for tales of high adventure. Incidentally, I've been there to see what's left of the place myself, and it's still an awe-inspiring part of the world. Truly an extreme environment in every sense of the word. Areas of vast emptiness incomparable to any part of western Europe are punctuated only by the occasional ghost town or abandoned mine to remind travelers of the tough hombres who once eked out a life in this parched country. And, as with most hellish parts of the Earth, it was probably inevitable that Harry Paget Flashman would wind up spending a little time there.

While most of Harry Flashman's transatlantic exploits have resulted in some of the more disappointing books, it seems that his creator, the late G. M. Fraser, had a bit of a soft spot for the bastard child of the British Empire. He really went to town on this one. For this book truly is the epic of the series- over 400 pages and 81 friggin' notes. Being a direct sequel to the much-inferior Flash for Freedom, this tome finds our 'hero' in need of a quick exit from New Orleans, circa 1849. After accepting passage with a traveling brothel (what else?), the old lecher effectively becomes one of the 'forty-niners'- those first colonists who headed west in that year following the discovery of gold in the Sunshine State. Thus, in his own words, he has seen the West 'almost from the very beginning'. To Fraser's credit, many hoary tropes now associated with Westerns are avoided- there are no sheriffs, saloon brawls or shoot-outs at noon. Instead, the first half of the book takes Flashy through largely wild, Indian-controlled country. The second part picks up over twenty years later, as he returns just in time to visit his old comrade-in-arms General Custer in the fateful year of 1875...

As usual with Flashman, anyone with leanings further left than the port side of a Nazi U-boat on its way to a BNP meeting will probably find something to be offended by in this chronicle of the old cad Flash Harry's adventures way out west. But in Flashman and the Redskins, the old apologist has his boistrous Briton produce possibly more racism than even I thought he had in him. Yep, as usual old Flashy is not shy about expressing his disdain for the natives of a foreign land, but this time I finally couldn't chuckle along with him. Perhaps it's because in this book above all the other, Fraser really sets down his agenda regarding the treatment of natives by the western nations, and the reader can no longer entertain the fantasy that the opinions expressed are there for 'period accuracy' alone.

But behind all this, there are places in the book where Flashy really engages the reader in some honest debate, and leaves one feeling that there is at least another side to the story. An opening debate between an aging, experienced Flashman and a clueless strawman liberal about the treatment of the native Americans in particular is fantastically written. The conservative old goat is truly allowed to vent his bile in this set-piece scene, and with all the authority of someone who was actually there, he mercilessly destroys the dewy-eyed romanticism his nemesis holds for the Indians. A quote might be in order-

'"-try to enlighten a Cumanche war party, why don't you? Suggest humanity and restraint to the Jicarillas who carved up Mrs. White and her baby on Rock Creek? Have you ever seen a Del Norte Rancho after the Mimbrenos have left their calling cards?"'

Despite such sentiments, it seems Flashy does possess a little respect for the red man. His overall attitude regarding the winning of the West for the white man seems to be-

'"I don't condone it", says I, holding my temper. "And I don't condemn it either. It happened, just as the tide comes in, and since I saw it happen, I know better than to jump to the damnfool sentimental conclusions that are fashionable in college cloisters, let me tell you-"'

And as usual, it's Fraser's remarkable storytelling ability which carries the reader safely through the sea of racism, misogyny and ambiguous morality. And in this book, I think Fraser may have shown once and for all that he is one of the greats. As comedy, as historical fiction, as an adventure story, and as a piece to prompt some serious discussion about our changing attitudes towards race, Empire, and history, Flashman and the Redskins is distinctly top-class. The reader may not agree with his ideas, but rarely will he or she have encountered 400 pages that fly by so easily. Admittedly, the first part of the book is far superior- after Flashy's early Western adventures end, the novel seems to come to a natural, satisfying conclusion. The second part of the book occasionally feels like an overly-long tacked-on afterthought. But containing as it does a fascinating portrait of General George Custer, it is certainly not lacking in merit.

Now, to finish- a little story. I once read a Ray Bradbury tale about a man from the future who brought novelist Thomas Wolf back from the past, because he believed there was no man alive in his own time with the ability to convey, in words, the incredible future world he lived in. Rockets leaping from star to star, with tongues of fire in their belly (you know what Bradbury's like, right?)- what man had imagination enough to capture this time? No man since Tom Wolf, apparently.

Conversely, I reckon that almost no writer before Fraser could convey the old West in quite the same way. This book is not simply the obligatory 'Wild West' entry in a series of 19th century-set adventures. Instead, it should be an important entry in anyone's collection of Western-themed literature. So why not mosey on down the trail, hang em high, and break out the Back to the Future Part 3 soundtrack as Flashy heads West?

The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick by Peter Lamont

2009-07-12T21:20:00.018+01:00

I owe a little something to Peter Lamont. For years I have been fascinated by the Victorians' tendency to portray Eastern cultures as being alien and mysterious, but I never thought to question why they did so. In this book, Lamont finally nails the reason. He has also necessitated this review, which incredibly is the first mention of British India in this blog! Salaam, sahib!

Lamont is a Scottish magician, and like the many magicians throughout history that he describes in The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick, he has a particular penchant for spoiling other people's tricks, and for pointing out that if something seems too wonderful and fantastic to be true, then it probably is. In this fascinating volume, he deflates the famous myth which perhaps most typifies the mystic image of the East.

Everyone thinks they know the Indian Rope Trick. A fakir (or faker, if you prefer) causes a rope to rise into the air. A small boy climbs the rope, and disappears at the top. The fakir will often ascend the rope after him, and in more extravagant versions of the trick, will chop the boy into pieces that will be re-united at the end of the trick. It's generally accepted that, even if it's nothing but a legend, it's an age-old Indian legend. Explorers from antiquity such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta are often claimed to have reported seeing the trick during their travels, thus apparently cementing its timeworn status.

With admirable scholarship, Lamont proves that this is not the case. The trick, in fact, was mostly invented by a now-forgotten American journalist called Wilkie in a 1890 article for a Chicago newspaper. Because Wilkie included elements from the real life tricks of Indian fakirs and jugglers (such as those seen by Polo and Battuta), his Indian Rope Trick became quickly accepted as part of the canon. Thus Lamont skilfully shows how easily fiction and fact can become intertwined. Within decades, witnesses were claiming to have seen the trick during the mid 19th century, and academics produced 'evidence' showing that the trick had been around for centuries.

Lamont's most interesting point concerns the reason why the idea of the trick caught on, and why it proved so difficult to discredit. Essentially, his thesis is that the West created a 'mystic East' just at the point when it needed it most- the 19th century, when its own sense of mystery and superstition was being killed off by that new candle in the dark- science. It seems that mankind, on some unconscious level, needs the world to be a bizarre and inexplicable place, and if that isn't the case at home, than it must be so someplace Other. India in particular was portrayed as a land of murderous thuggee cults, rampaging juggernauts and gravity-defying yoga mystics. In short- a world where the ordinary rules don't apply. A natural home for a wonder such as the rope trick, eh memsahib?

For imperialists, this view also served as a handy justification for colonization- a useful reminder that natives of foreign lands were naive and superstitious, and therefore in need of direction from worldly Europeans who were of course above such things- or so they thought. For the Indian Rope Trick was conceived and perpetuated entirely in the West. In fact, no-one had even heard of it in India itself until the 1930's, after which it somehow became accepted as a part of Indian 'culture'.

The book is written in a very peculiar semi-humorous style. Several aspects of its construction seem to mess with the medium; such as when Lamont quotes a historian who wrote about the need to check primary sources- and then admits that the quotation, and the historian, are both fictional. With stunts such as these he reminds the reader of the strange relationship between print and belief.

Like David Standish, Lamont frequently appears to look down on his subjects, and humiliates them simply by quoting them at length and allowing them to 'hang' themselves. The book also concludes rather unexpectedly with a searing attack on tourism and wonder-seeking in modern India that is as witty as it is cringe-inducing. But despite such quirks, The Rise of The Indian Rope Trick comes highly recommended for anyone fascinated by 19th century magic, spiritualism, or the nature of belief.

By focusing on the Indian Rope Trick alone, Lamont describes our need for this 'mystic' India. Given the still-current fascination with Indian yoga and spiritualism, it seems this need is still very much with us.

(If you're interested, check out some videos of the rope trick here- which comes with the standard bogus history, and here for a more modern version.)

Khartoum (1966)

2009-07-01T16:24:00.033+01:00

The great British public have always loved a good failure- Scott, Shackleton and Oates (to name several Antarctic-related examples) all became national heroes because they did not succeed in their efforts, but put up a jolly good fight none the less, and showed the world that the British upper lip remains stiff till the end. To this distinguished list one can add Charles 'Chinese' Gordon, the Governor-General who died at the siege of Khartoum in the Sudan in 1885. In 1966, following the success of Lawrence of Arabia, he finally appeared on film.

The shadow of that earlier movie looms large over Khartoum. Once again, a charismatic English military man is sent into the burning sands to live amongst Arabs (and Europeans in blackface!) and rally them for a historic battle. Sound familiar? In this case that man is Charlton Heston as 'Chinese' Gordon, hero of the Crimean and Opium Wars. British Prime Minister William Gladstone sends Gordon back to the Sudan, where he had clashed with slave traders just a few years before. Trouble is brewing there in the form of one Mohammad Achmed (Laurence Olivier), the self styled Madhi, or 'expected one', who is uniting the various Sudanese tribes against Anglo/Egyptian rule.

The politics of this time are not easily understood, and to its credit the film does try hard to hint at their complexity without getting bogged down in too much detail. If you'll bear with me, I'll provide a little background: Britain under Gladstone was at an unusual point in its Empire-building career. While he was virulently anti-colonial, the British Empire ironically grew faster under his watch than at any other time. Despite his protestations, events continually conspired to cause Britain to engulf country after country.

The Khedive of Egypt, while nominally a subject of the Islamic Ottoman Empire, was in reality completely under the influence of the British and French due to the massive debts the weak ruler owed to European countries. Britain, criticized for allowing Egypt to go to ruin, 'reluctantly' decided to take a more hands-on approach. Thus Gladstone also inherited an unwanted responsibility towards Egypts own 'empire'- the Sudan. Egypt, however, was clearly not up to the task of combating the Mahdi's uprising. Gladstone was left in the unenviable position of having to prevent a humanitarian crisis (the large amount of Egyptians and Europeans who would be massacred should Khartoum fall to the Mahdi) while not wanting to directly involve the British government or army.

So, one's interpretation of the situation (and of the film) may be, to a large degree, depend on one's opinion of Gladstone himself. He is played as a bit of a villain in the film. As an Irishman, I certainly have a lot of time for the Grand Old Man's distaste towards Britain's habit of acquiring colonies. But having inherited what was already the largest Empire on Earth, this attitude frequently caused him to flip-flop on issues. His refusal to commit to the Sudan- a situation that Britain was already up to its starched collar in- was bound to end in disaster. In place of official British intervention, Gladstone unofficially sent the one man he knew he could distrust- Gordon. But enough history. Is the film any good?

Damn straight it is. For starters, anyone who questions Chuck Heston's ability to carry off charismatic characters like Gordon deserves a bayonet through their DVD collection. Granted, the Omega Man is an extremely unusual choice to play a 19th century British officer, but there wasn't a man alive in 1966 who'd done more to prove his chops for carrying historical epics. His accent tends to migrate more than a wandering albatross, but he brings just the right sense of pathos to Gordon, as the man who fears failure but not death slowly realizes that Khartoum will bring him one of both of these things. Laurence Olivier also makes the most of his part- his Mahdi is a character to be feared from a distance more often than encountered, but his (fictional) meetings with Gordon do not disappoint.

The music is also truly awesome- it ranges from stirring military marches to the kind of exotic sensationalist Orientalism that would have Edward Said choking on his Turkish coffee. Hell, if you're not a fan of un-PC depictions of Eastern culture, then stay away from 19th century British history, and stay the hell away from Khartoum! This is a world of minarets, dancing harem girls and blackface white actors praising Allah. Having said that, the Madhi in particular is played as a smart and complex man, who points out to Gordon that their aims are not so very different. And if he's also portrayed as a barbarian who collects the heads and hands of his enemies- well that's ok, because the real Mahdi was a man who collected the heads and hands of his enemies. So its not all Arabian Nights fantasy.

As I've stated above, this movie does suffer by comparison with Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence is a British film made by a visionary director comparable in style to Stanley Kubrick (in fact I believe I made this very comparison myself in a previous review). Khartoum is very much a straightforward American-style movie, and fits very much into the 1960s 'epic' movie cycle. The shots are slightly more artless, and the desert is used as a slightly arbitrary location rather than as a character. Perhaps comparisons would be unfair- were it not painfully obvious that Khartoum clearly got the green light because of the success of Lawrence. It even steals the 'overture' and 'intermission' structure of David Leans movie, slightly watering down the concept in the process.

But such gripes aside, the quality of the movie is good evidence that it ought to have been made regardless of circumstances.

Hollow Earth by David Standish

2009-06-23T12:57:00.015+01:00

One to file in the 'I Can't Believe Somebody Actually Wrote This' category (alongside that study of the films of Steven Segal, Segalogy perhaps). Standish's book claims to be 'for anyone interested in the history of curious notions that just won't go away.' In his case, the notion he is referring to is the idea that the Earth is hollow, and that the inside of it is filled with lost continents and advanced civilizations.

It's an idea with some pedigree, as this book demonstrates- famous names such as Edmund Halley, Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe and Edgar Rice Burroughs all took up the Hollow Earth cause- some more seriously than others. If this book accomplishes nothing else, it ties together a number of disparate but fascinating characters, uniting them under the common banner of the Hollow Earth. Through this single idea, Standish gets to treat 19th century geology, age-of-exploration literature, early science fiction, crackpot science and early 20th century pulp fiction. All of which I have a serious penchant for.

The idea started because of this- in the early days of science, lots of unusual theories were floating around, because all of them were difficult to prove or disprove. If one believed that the earth was birthed from a cloud of cosmic gas that formed a hardened shell around an inner sun, well, that was probably no more outlandish than the next guy's theory. And if you claimed that the entrances to this inner world were located at the poles, nobody could disprove you. Yet. It was certainly an interesting time, during which science and religion were curiously intermingled. Edmund Halley proposed an inner world, and Isaac Newton wrote numerous volumes on alchemy (from the Arabic al keme, meaning 'of Egypt', according to some).

Then, throughout the 19th century, the idea of the Hollow Earth served as a useful location for writers, scientists and dreamers to locate their fictional utopias. Many of these utopian novels were American, and Standish covers them in some depth- a section of the book I found especially interesting. The dream of a vast, unspoiled paradise ready to be utilized by man began to appear consistantly in literature at exactly the same time as America was turning out to be anything but. This is essentially Standish' thesis here, and I found it very convincing. Of course, not everyone believed their utopias were fictional. The survival of the hollow earth idea is due largely to an American called Symme who spent his life trying to fund an expedition to the hole he believed was found at the North Pole.

Once the idea became popular, it was used for good and for ill by writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs (damn his eyes) in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Standish elaborates at length on these, which is ok by me, as their high-adventure fantasies are probably about as important to the world as any crackpot scientist ever was.

Then, in the mid-twentieth century, the cause was again taken up by those who believed. A man with the improbable name of William Sharpe-Shaver began to publish stories in Amazing magazine claiming that he was under the control of creatures that dwell beneath the Earth's crust. This now being the age of UFO's and conspiracy theories, the high-adventure was replaced with sinister plots and overwhelming paranoia. Standish's overall point is how this one strange idea was recycled many times, on each occasion being used to fulfill certain time-specific longings. (For those interested in this story, click here to read Sinnott's Last Scam from Black Lagoon Comix, my fictionalization of this story, featuring a totally unrelated character called William Sharp-Shearer).

Throughout, Standish maintains a rather sarcastic attitude towards his cast of deluded dreamers. His standard technique is to allow his subjects to talk at length (via the use of very extended quotes), and then use their own words, however ridiculous, against them in a kind of deadpan sarcasm. It certainly catches the readers' attention, and can be quite funny in a dry way. But if a good book, as Holden Caulfield says, ought to make you want to meet the author and have a good chat with them over a cold beer, then I don't know if I want to meet David Standish. Granted, he is fascinated enough by the same things as I to write a book about them (and a more thorough and complete book about the Hollow Earth I challenge you to find), but I find his attitude throughout somewhat negative. He often seems to be condescending rather than affectionate towards Symme and those who followed him.

Overall, Hollow Earth covers in admirable depth many fascinating tales from history and fiction, but is undone somewhat by the author's occasionally snide tone.

Into Africa by Martin Dugard

2009-06-19T12:21:00.014+01:00

'Doctor Livingstone, I presume?' Sigh. If only Henry Morton Stanley knew the can of misery-worms he was about to unleash upon the world. His famous discovery of missing British hero Dr. David Livingstone opened up an interest in the dark continent that was to result in untold horror for millions. With the extraordinary King Leopold of Belgium at the helm (and Stanley as his aid, to his eternal shame), Africa was torn apart in a new age of Imperialism that opened wounds that still hurt today.

But preceding this, of course, came the greatest colonial tale ever told round a campfire to warm the quinine-soaked heart of a wayward explorer- the Stanley-Livingstone story.

In this book, Martin Dugard retells the famous tale in fascinating detail. Livingstone, a working-class Scot turned Christian missionary, traveled across central Africa looking for the source of the Nile. While he was away, he became something of a hero at home, so when contact was lost with him in 1871, several individuals began to rustle up funds to mount a rescue attempt. The politics of this are twisted and tortuous, but eventually, one Henry Morton Stanley, an American journalist working for the New York Herald, left Zanzibar and plunged into the heart of darkness in pursuit of Livingstone.

Dugard plays up the differences between these great men. Stanley is by far the more interesting of the two- escaping from a hellish life of neglect and abuse in his native Wales, he reinvented himself as an American in the Deep South. Dugard paints him as a self-doubting oddball who worked hard all his life to achieve success and hide his true origins. Even before his African adventure, Stanley had a resume that fans of 19th century history will find impressive. He had fought on both sides in the US Civil War, covered the Abyssinia Campaign (where he allegedly met Flashman!), and traveled extensively through the territories of the Ottoman Empire. In Livingstone, Dugard notes that he sought the father figure that had searched for all his life.

Pretty soon into the proceedings it becomes clear that even before the mass intervention of Europeans, Africa was not a land of candy rainbows and gumdrop smiles. Local chiefs sold entire tribes as slaves in return for beads, trinkets and firearms. Nor were these chiefs naive or easily-manipulated by outsiders, as they have often been portrayed. They were often sharp and callous business men with extensive information networks. Whenever Stanley entered the territory of a new tribe, the local chief would know exactly what goods Stanley was carrying (via the 'bush telegraph') and demand a hefty tribute. He would frequently have to avoid villages, despite badly needing rest and medicine, because he could not afford the tribute. A cruel death was often the only alternative. Dugard is not trying to make any political point by mentioning these facts- its simply the way things were.

This book really makes clear the hardships these incredible men faced in those days. Tribal war, wild animals and especially disease made travel a nightmare. Characters in this book contract malaria and dysentary more frequently than I would have thought possible. When Stanley finally meets Livingstone and utters the famous words, its a positive relief for the reader. While the book is occasionally flawed on a prose level, the story is so good that you probably won't notice.

Hardy Bucks

2009-06-15T11:02:00.011+01:00

(This not really an Empire-related article- but I've stuck it here anyway.)

There's a well-known, if apocryphal, story that frequently does the rounds in Ireland stating that the show Father Ted was turned down by RTE (the main Irish TV channel), and was then snapped up by the British Channel 4. Of course, following this, Father Ted went on to become not only one of the all-time classic comedies, but a part of the Irish cultural landscape for years to come. It's difficult to underestimate the impact this show had on our little country. Finally, we had a show which lovingly parodied our own culture without patronizing, and it was actually funny to boot! All the great Irish writers and comedians of the time were finally put to good work, and only English capitol could make it happen! We could watch it and recognize aspects of our culture, regardless of how ridiculously they were being exaggerated.

Coming out at the same time as the first major Church scandals, Father Ted also allowed people to laugh at the Church perhaps for the first time. We were able to see (and reassess) the Church's position in our society. In a very real way, Father Ted chronicles a period in Irish life which it itself helped bring to an end. Truly great comedy is capable of such feats.

This (untrue) story reinforces the common notion that RTE are insanely conservative, and wouldn't know good comedy if it slapped them in the face with a wet fish. Now they may be about to do it again. And again, it has taken an outsiders' perspective to make the definitive statement about Irish life. I'm talking, of course, about Hardy Bucks.

Hardy Bucks is an internet series that crams more truisms, laughs and memorable lines into its 10-15 minute no-budget episodes than an entire series of Killnascully (which wouldn't be hard, anyway). It chronicles the lives of four young lads living in Castletown, County Mayo, and their ongoing feud with local smartass The Viper. They live in a tiny rented cottage. They drink, they smoke, they fight, and they dream of making it to the 'big smoke'- Galway. Underneath their bravado however, they occasionally appear smart and sensitive. The unspoken theme is that they're not idiots, and that they recognise how they're trapped in their small-town situation . A state of affairs I'm sure many will identify with.

Two of the shows' creators, Chris Tordoff and Martin Maloney, are English but spent their teens growing up in Mayo. Moloney in particular, who is in actuality a Scouser, pulls off a flawless West-Ireland accent. Perhaps it's because of their background that they have been able to parody the Irish small-town scene accurately and affectionately.

Of course, this would all be so much pretentious nonsense if the show wasn't funny. But damn is it funny. It gives the impression of being very lightly (if at all) scripted, with most of the lines being ad-libbed by the talented and likeable cast. Special mentions must go to the incredible wit and voice talents of the Viper (imitating his ridiculous sneer will become a national passtime), though Hardy Bucks is definitely an ensemble project, with all involved spouting memorable lines. And almost every line is immensely quotable. They're just lads that you'd find in any town in the country. They're lads you'd know yourself. Perhaps the shows' true point of reference is not Father Ted but the Canadian Trailer Park Boys- there are few 'jokes', the humour coming instead from knowing and liking the characters. It's a show that rewards rewatching.

Hardy Bucks is rapidly becoming an underground cult hit. Their catchphrases are heard everywhere in Ireland, and even their 'deleted scenes' videos get more hits that their peers' full projects. All episodes are available on Youtube, and the lads also have Bebo and Facebook pages. Check them out.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

2009-05-17T12:51:00.014+01:00

This was intended to be a mini-review.

(That's right. I didn’t think I had too much to say about Lawrence of Arabia.)

The reason for this is that it's a classic, and you should go see it, and that's all there is. If you still need more persuading, let me tell you that this movie features Alec Guinness out in the desert wearing a brown cloak. Given the evidence of Star Wars, that can only be a positive thing.

It's the War to End All Wars, and on the Arabian peninsula, the scheming Brits intend to overthrow the ailing Ottoman Empire by uniting the various squabbling Arab tribes. Granted, compared to the epic slugfest going on in central Europe, it’s a distinctly second-tier affair. Guinness plays the Arab leader Prince Feisal, and Peter O'Toole (repeat offender!!) plays T. E. Lawrence, an Englishman with conflicting feelings of identity. Lawrence is fey and a little bit fruity (not sure if O'Toole intended to portray him as being gay, but it's a possibility). His superiors don't quite trust him, but before you can say 'the Judland wastes are not travelled lightly', Lawrence has recruited Feisal and other chiefs, and sent them on their merry way to raid that hive of Turkish scum and villainy, Aquaba. The Arab Revolt is underway!

This film gets everything right. It's epic without ever being boring or ponderous, and that's a tough line to straddle. Not many four-hour long movies achieve it. The first half of the movie is especially stirring- watching Lawrence whip his rough-and-ready camel commandos into shape as they score some early victories is thrilling. Like djinns, they appear out of the desert leaving the Turkish guns at Aquaba pointing uselessly out to sea. Huzzah! The second half focuses more on political machinations, as Lawrence begins to wonder exactly what the British have planned for the Arabs after the war. Things do slow down a bit here, but it's still fascinating viewing.

The film is similarly rough-and-ready with history. There are inaccuracies and plot holes large enough to march the 11th hussars through, but it all makes for a better movie. The cinematic Lawrence is made more sympathetic by his ignorance of the Sykes-Pycot agreement to annex Arabia, which in real life he was well aware of. Such discrepancies rankle less than they might- often simplifying a complex situation allows a movie to flow better.

In terms of sheer cinematic craft the film is unmatched. When Lawrence first announces his excitement at being sent to Arabia, there's a jump-cut from a lit match to the first burning rays of the rising desert sun that rivals the bone/spacecraft cut from 2001: A Space Odyssey for sheer pretentiousness. In fact, much of the movie is very like Kubrick's classic in feel. Like 2001, much is hinted at rather than explicitly stated in long, lazy scenes.

A note on the score- upon arriving at the top of a hill or mountain and suddenly being confronted with a dramatic view of the surrounding landscape, a suitably dramatic theme is required. I once had a friend who hummed the Lord of the Rings theme to himself in such situations. Not me- for me its gotta be Maurice Jarre's immortal Lawrence score that sums up the right kind of majesty. I've heard it said that the mark of a good movie is how it affects you in your life afterwards- I guess this applies even to trivial things like the above statement.

The most powerful character in the movie is the desert itself, portrayed with stark beauty by director David Lean. The visions of impossibly remote and desolate dune-scapes are awe-inspiring. It’s a harsh, unforgiving and inscrutable world of mirages and quicksand, sandstorms and vicious bedouins. Somebody once called the Arabian campaign 'the last picturesque war'- a somewhat thoughtless but fitting epiphet, given the evidence of this movie.

Deserts hold a fascination for me- the combination of endless flatness and murderous sun is almost the complete opposite of the wet greenery of home (Ireland!). It’s a completely alien world. In an early scene, Lawrence journeys alone through the desert to meet his British contacts, and sings that old music-hall classic 'I'm the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo' to keep his spirits up. He's singing to himself, but the song echoes off the rocks and is reflected back to him. It’s a bit like staring into the abyss, and having the abyss stare back, I guess- this inhospitable environment will mirror aspects of a man's character back at him that he didn't know were there. Indeed, Lawrence finds his life's worth in the desert. It's the old colonial fantasy of the white man who leaves his starched-collar world behind and lives as a native in a more primitive environment where men can be real men (except if they're gay. Maybe).

I guess I did have a bit to say about Lawrence of Arabia. Who would have thought?

Tutankhamun- The Exodus Conspiracy

2009-05-16T15:27:00.018+01:00

What do you get when you mix British colonialism, Oriental mystery and the occult? Questionable history and a stonking good story, that's what. (Dashed horrible cover, though. Bad early-noughties' CG married with overly dramatic use of religious symbolism? No thanks.) Tutankhamun- The Exodus Conspiracy is at least partly a retelling of one of the classic tales of discovery. True to form, the details of the case make fascinating reading, even disregarding the authors' bizarre claims in the latter half of the book.

Cast your mind back to Egypt at the beginning of the twentieth century. As western countries became more rational, they increasingly needed to view the East as somewhere strange and Other. Life at home may have had all the mystery sucked out of it long ago, but elsewhere- the inscrutable Orient- were lands where the impossible could still happen. To men like Howard Carter and Lord Canarvon, Egypt was still a land of myth and mystery. And it was here, amid the burning sands of the desolate Valley of the Kings, that an extraordinary narrative was about to unfold.

Talk about having your cake and eating it too- the authors behind The Exodus Conspiracy cram in various (and sometimes tenously connected) aspects of the Tutankhamun story, each fascinating in its own way. So, the story of Canarvon funding just one more year's dig (after several fruitless seasons) resulting in Carter's lifelong dream coming true's not enough for you? How about Carter's personal and moral struggles against ruthless pressmen and Arab beaurocrats who (quite rightly, to be honest!) had the nerve to suggest that maybe the priceless treasures of Egypt shouldn't go directly to the British Museum? How about Carter's secret entering and resealing of the burial chamber three months before the official opening? What? You want more? I haven't even gotten to the curse yet!

Authors Collins and Ogilvie-Herald place this classic tale of discovery where they feel it belongs- squarely in the occult-obsessed culture of the upper-class Brits of the time. Belief in weird things was still common as tables floated in darkened parlours all over London and Paris. Lord Canarvon in particular is painted as having been strongly influenced by the occult. He held seances in his Gothic castle in England. He visited several psychics and mystics, some of whom warned him that if he continued desecrating tombs, he would never leave Egypt alive again... Several famous occult figures of the time turn out to have been linked to him- even old A. C. Doyle found time to comment on his doings in Egypt. And all the while, newsmen spun tales of creeping dread that preyed on Canarvon's mind. A popular fiction in newspapers of the time stated that 'death shall come on swift wings to he who disturbs the rest of the Pharoah'.

In this atmosphere, the 'curse' of Tutankhamun seems almost like the next logical step. Canarvon seems like the kind of man who would have taken such things rather seriously. By the time he dies from an infected mosquito-bite in a Cairo hotel room, raving that 'a bird' is scratching his face (and during a mysterious blackout, to boot!), you'll begin to wonder if there isn't something to this 'curse' nonesense after all. Even Carter, who famously scoffed at the curse till his dying day, turns out to have had his moments of private uncertainty and fear.

Perhaps I'm giving the wrong impression. The authors aren't writing to convince you that the curse was real- they spend quite a few pages trying to explain how several deaths associated with the tomb could have more logical explanations. But the fact remains that its a damn weird story, and some of the coincidences are very striking. But that's how conspiracy theorists think, and we're not here to read about them. Or are we?

Well, hold onto your pith helmets, because this is where things start to get really weird. I'm not going to get into it here (this review is damn-near long enough already), so if you want to read about how Tutankhamun was also the Pharoah from the Exodus story, you'll have to track this book down yourself. And if you're a conspiracy theorist who'd love to know about how Carter tried to blackmail the British authorities regarding the controversial birth of the Nation of Israel, then put on your tinfoil hat and head off to some other blog.

Zulu Dawn (1979)

2009-05-16T10:34:00.013+01:00

Somebody once said that Richard Attenborough's Ghandi is 'not a movie, but a laboriously-illustrated textbook' (thanks, World's Greatest Hollywood Scandals!). For all the croaking people do about Hollywood's free-wheeling take on history, there are times when a movie gets so entangled in historical minutia that it forgets to be, you know, a movie. Which brings me to Zulu Dawn.

Made 15 years after the original Zulu, today's feature tells the tale of the battle of Isandlwana, which took place prior to the battle of Rorke's drift. Isandlwana was the single greatest defeat the British suffered during their empire-building heyday. The fact that it occurred at the hands of a primitive people probably wounded their pride a whole lot, and they've spent the century since trying to figure out exactly how such a thing was allowed to happen.

Director Douglas Hickox remains scrupiously fair at re-creating and re-analysing this famous event. In the film, many officers (including Peter O'Toole and Bob Hoskins- repeat offender!) are shown contributing to the British downfall at Isandlwana, and there's no easy decision to be made regarding who was at fault. Because of this, the movie feels a little flat, especially compared to its predecessor. There are no characters to root for in quite the same way as we did for old Hooky and his gang in Zulu.

On its own merits, Zulu Dawn would be considered a classic historical movie. There's endless shots of the South African landscape being all majestic, and endless scenes of troops and cannons crossing rivers, but for some reason it's all a bit dull. The campaign seems complex and muddled compared to the simple scenario in Zulu. I have no doubt that the campaign was complex and muddled, but that's not always what makes good cinema, as stated above. Because of its illustrious ancestor (which I will review one day, damn your eyes!), I feel this film is destined to remain just an interesting relic.

The Lost World & Other Stories- Part 2

2009-04-30T16:37:00.025+01:00

Having read part one, you will have been left in no doubt that Professor Challenger and his scientifically-questionable methods had a large influence upon my youthful self. So I simply couldn’t wait to crack into this new book which promised more Challenger adventures. I was rather disappointed then, to find them, on the whole, brief and unremarkable. Perhaps the story When the World Screamed comes the closest to recapturing some of that Challenger magic. The Poison Belt, however, feels like a second-rate take on a H. G. Wells scenario.

Other factors rankle also. Challenger had held unconventional and unpopular views before in The Lost World, but then he had had solid proof that his crazy ideas were true. His continual ranting about having the correct scientific attitude held up, because he had good reason to know that he was right. In these new stories, Challenger continually leaps to incredible conclusions, and he’s proven correct just because the author makes it so. If Challenger claims that the world is a giant echinoderm (a sea urchin, to the zoologically-challenged) based on no evidence at all, then he’s right. Just because. I know it’s anal to berate fantastic fiction for lack of scientific rigour, but Doyle had got that mix just right before (he was a trained doctor with an above-average understanding of science), and in this volume I feel he does the good Professor an injustice by slighting it. Challenger is supposed to be a genius who’s unafraid to go against the status quo, but in The Lost World he would never propose these kinds of ideas without evidence. And in fact, this idea turns out to be more relevant to this article than I had first supposed…

No matter, I thought. There was one final story left in the collection, and it was a whopper. The Land of Mist. The only story in the book of comparable length to The Lost World. Ah yes, I thought. Doyle has been holding out on us, but here’s where the real meat is. This is where he’s been hiding his aces. Everything’s going to be okay.

So Lord Chelmsford may well have thought before the battle of Isandlwana.

See, between writing The Lost World and The Land of Mist, Doyle became pretty heavily involved with Spiritualism. This interest had begun to bleed, more than a little, into his writing. He turned his considerable talents of propaganda-writing towards promoting his new religion, giving lectures to packed halls on sell-out tours all over the Empire. This happy thought is never more than the length of a silver-cord from your mind as you peruse the pages of The Land of Mist.

Now, one of the chief pleasures of reading turn-of-the-century fantastic fiction is the wealth of bizarre ideas which were still taken for granted at this time- ether, spirit-writing, mesmerism, the hollow Earth, social Darwinism and the like. Science was in its adolescence, and was confidently expected to finally prove things that everybody already knew- that God was in his Heaven, white men were fit to rule the world, and that the lower classes were happy with their lot. Souls could be weighed and fairies and spirits could be photographed (because the camera never lies, right?) Of course, it didn’t quite turn out like that. It's a fascinating period, and in a way, I find Arthur Conan Doyle to be an apt representation of it as a whole.

As a young man, Doyle turned his back on his Catholic faith. No-one in this day and age could believe such nonsense, right? Science (and Darwin in particular) had banished the age of superstition, right? The future creator of Sherlock Homes declared that he would never again believe anything that could not be proven. But fast forward to the end of the Great War, and the picture is very different. With Europe in ruins, with every last Victorian ideal of decency and honour lying strangled and mashed in the muck of the Somme, and with his beloved son dead from Spanish flu, Doyle discovered (as much of the world did) that the gap left by religion has to be filled by something else. But not just anything- for once you embrace rationalism, there’s no going back. Traditional Christianity would clearly not do. Some new idea that could return meaning to life, but which was amiable to the new mechanistic nuts-and-bolts universe that science was revealing was in order.

Over the course of the 20th century, many people would come to fill this hole with UFO’s, automatic writing, electronic voice phenomenon, new age-ism, star people, Scientology, creation ‘science’, intelligent design, and dancing statues at Ballinspittle. But Doyle filled it with Spiritualism.

In The Land of Mist, Professor Challenger examines this strange new phenomenon. Of course, he begins as a sceptic. He applies the correct amount of caution. He is a scientist, after all, and he knows that Spiritualism is a mine-field rife with cads and charlatans. After attending several séances and witnessing the manifestation of his dead wife, he decides that the phenomenon is genuine. Doyle then gets up on his soap-box, and allows Challenger to make the case clear- death is not the end, spiritualists and mediums are really in contact with the dead, and a new and better world is around the corner for those of us who accept that this is really happening. Challenger (and thus Doyle) believes that this is the most important breakthrough in history. As you are reading this, remind yourself- this guy was knighted for his ability to create propaganda (which he did during the Boer War and the Great War).

I enjoy Spiritualism as one of the bizarre ideas that gives the Victorian period its flavour, but this book is just sad.

It’s sad that Doyle really believed that a bunch of fakers shaking tables in dark rooms were going to change the world.

It’s sad that the creator of the most famously-logical character in history also created this misguided polemic.

And it’s especially sad that he hijacked a bunch of my favourite characters to do it!!

Doyle truly believed that he had met and conversed with the apparitions of his dead son and others. He saw, smelt and touched them. In his own head, he was completely convinced. A recent book by Andrew Norman tries to prove that Doyle was slightly schizophrenic. I don’t believe such explanations are necessary. People seem to be hard-wired to believe weird things, and that’s the end of it. We know now, of course, that spiritualism was no more than a bunch of cads and charlatans. Challenger was right. I think it’s best to leave the old fellow have the last word.

The Lost World & Other Stories- Part 1

2009-04-18T12:43:00.014+01:00

More Professor Challenger? More stories featuring the gruff but loveable hero of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World? I couldn't believe it. But there it was- a horrible blue-covered 'classics' edition called 'The Lost World and Other Stories', placed innocently on the shelf, like a landmine of shit hiding amidst the snow-white flowers of the beautiful Bosnian landscape. I couldn't say no. How could this go wrong?

Sigh.

First, a little background. The Lost World (written in 1912) has always been one of my favourite old-time adventure novels, ever since I first stole a copy of it from a friend's house when I was in school. It features Doyle's not-quite-as-famous-as-Sherlock-Holmes character, the crackpot zoologist Professor Challenger, and his expedition to discover living dinosaurs in the Amazon rainforests of South America. He's a big, burly bear of a man with a booming voice and an arrogant, ignorant manner. His condescension towards the non-scientific world is legendary. Truly, he's a character who should only ever have been played in film by the legendary Brian Blessed, who's probably too old now. What a missed opportunity (no disrespect to Wallace Beery or Bob Hoskins).

Challenger disappears into the wilds with scant regard for personal safety like a true son of the British Empire, taking with him only a small group of those he trusts the most. Memorable characters include the brave adventurer John Roxton, and Irish journalist Ed Malone.

Roxton, interestingly, is reckoned to have been based on the British consul Roger Casement. As a thumping great Imperialist, Doyle probably had a lot of admiration for Casement's doings in the Congo, especially when he was exposing the cruelty of Leopold's Belgian Congo state. 'Bravo, Casement!', Doyle must have thought, 'show the world that those dastardly unsporting Belgians have no right to harass native citizens of foreign lands!' I wonder if Doyle saw any similarity when Casement was stripped of all honours and executed for conspiring against the British just before the 1916 Rising in Dublin. Hmm.

Malone is interesting chiefly because his involvement in the expedition is an attempt to impress his girl, Gladys. By the time he returns, she has become engaged to someone else. But that's okay, because by that time, Malone has learned that there's no bond like the bond between a bunch of lads that like to go out into the jungle together, shooting newly-discovered animals. Women in these boys-own adventures are strictly a nuisance, especially when they come between lads who just want to go out into the jungle etc...

There's plenty for the Imperialist to enjoy, too. Challenger and co run merrily amok, encountering (and shooting) incredible creatures, naming things after Queen Victoria (well, they would have if it had been ten years earlier...), and carrying out a little social hygiene on species they find to be literally 'sub-human'.

So basically, The Lost World is an absolute classic. It's genuinely thrilling, funny, has great characters, and plenty of that fin-de-siecle adventurous spirit that characterizes British fantastic fiction of the period. The comradery (a special bond within a group that is in no way erotic or homoerotic- thank you, Urban Dictionary!) between the characters is a big part of what makes the novel great. It's the old-fashioned idea that when you've got your buddies around, you can take on the world (as long as there are no troublesome women around!).

Challenger himself is absolutely hilarious, and is really one of the forgotten greats of fiction. Really, for a literary character not to be as famous as Sherlock Holmes is a bit like being a scientist who's not as smart as Einstein. So, hard cheese, old chum, but it's all in good sport, what?

(more to come about Challenger in part 2)

Da Vinci Code Knock-Offs

2009-04-13T20:47:00.012+01:00

I love obvious rip-offs- especially the ones that really don't even try to hide that they're rip-offs. I wonder if low-budget meisters The Asylum, for example, hope that some granny who doesn't know any better will buy a copy of their movie Transmorphers for her grandson, thinking it's Transformers. Perhaps one day I'll give this subject the attention it deserves and write an entire article about The Asylum, or even the endless Italian Mad Max/Escape from New York rip-offs from the 70's and 80's.

But that'll be a big job. For now, I'll just describe briefly a trend in rip-offs that I've noticed over the last few years- Da Vinci Code rip-offs. It seems that since 2003, every bookshop has been obliged by law to carry at least a truckload of these damn things. So I decided to make a list of every title I could find in the Cork area. I didn't have to look too far. Many bookshops even helpfully lump them together on the same shelf, regardless of author.

I am not including 'factual' books that have been written to cash in on the success of the Da Vinci Code. There's lots of them out there, each promising 'revelations' that will rock the Church to its very blah blah blah. They're a different, though definitely related subject. I am including fiction that was written or published before the Da Vinci Code, but was re-published with new titles or covers to cash in. These aren't rip-offs, but are being marketed as such.

So- what do these books have in common? I'm assigning a 'points' system to analyze this issue in the true depth it obviously deserves. While many of the aspects listed below are also features of paperback thrillers in general, I feel that enough of them are specific enough to help separate 'Da Vinci Code Rip-Offs' as their own sub-genre.

1) They will feature a secret or conspiracy from ancient or medieval history. (2 points)

2) The conspiracy will 'rock' the (usually Catholic) Church 'to it's foundations'. (5 points)

3) Various famous and interesting artists and scientists from history will be implicated in this conspiracy. (3 points)

4) Cutting-edge modern technology (often genetics) will be used to help uncover these secrets from the past. (2 points)

5) THE FRIGGIN' TEMPLARS. THAT IS ALL. (20 POINTS)

5) The main character will be an expert in some field relevant to the conspiracy (more often than not an archaeologist). He will be male, and an American. (3 points)

6) He will travel to various exotic locations around the world, with Rome or the Vatican almost always being on the itinerary. (5 points)

7) The prologue will take place hundreds of years in the past, usually in Rome or the Vatican (sometimes elsewhere in Italy). (5 points)

8) The cover will show
- an age-old scroll or parchment (10 points)
- a wax seal (3 points)
- some Christian iconography (3 points)
- the inside of a church or cathedral with a row of cowled monks (5 points)
-prominently-placed Templars (20 points)

9) The title of the book will have three words, including the words 'the' and 'code'. ( 10 points)

Pretty good, eh? From now on, you can rate every book you read and find out how Dan Brown-ish it is. Hell, on this scale, even that navel-gazing tripe-bucket The Secret gets an 18-point rating (largely on account of the thumping HUGE wax seal on the cover), and the Old Testament itself gets a whopping 15 points! There's a little Dan Brown in us all, I guess.

Anyway, here's the list-

The Messiah Code- Michael Cordy
The Genesis Code- John Case
The Gaudi Key- Esteban Martin & Andreu Carranza
The Sacred Bones- Michael Byrnes
The Judas Strain- James Rollins
The Gospel of Judas- Kasser & Mayer
The Last Gospel- David Gibbons
The Last Templar- Raymond Khoury
The Last Testament- Sam Bourne
The Sanctuary- Raymond Khoury
The Righteous Men- Sam Bourne
The Templar Legacy- Steve Berry
The Alexandria Link- Steve Berry
The Venetian Betrayal- Steve Berry
The Shakespeare Secret- Jennifer Lee Carrell
The Sign of the Cross- Chris Kuzneski
The Assassini- Thomas Gifford
Garden of Evil- Mayer
Crusader Gold- David Gibbins

Dios mio!

Picnic at Hanging Rock

2009-04-09T12:04:00.022+01:00

Everybody likes an unsolved mystery. Names like Jack the Ripper and the Marie Celeste never die, but live on in infamy. Every aspect of such cases can be scrutinized, but the fascination remains precisely because we can never know what really happened. In 1969, Australian writer Joan Lindsay decided to create her own literary 'unsolved mystery', with the book Picnic at Hanging Rock.

I'd been trying to track down this now-rare book for ages (ordering it off the internet would have been cheating, obviously). Finally it turned up in my local library. About time, thinks I. But is the book any good?

The basic plot is as ingenious as it is simple. On St. Valentines day in the year 1900, a group of girls from a local school, accompanied by their teachers, visit Hanging Rock, a local beauty spot in Victoria, Australia. Three of the girls and one teacher go climbing on the Rock, and never return. That's it. In order to discuss the book in any depth, I'm going to have to release a pretty major SPOILER right here-

-WARNING! SPOILER AHEAD!-

Now here's why the book is so haunting and memorable- the reader never finds out what happens to the missing girls. Search parties scour the Rock to no avail. Police question witnesses and learn nothing useful. This aspect lends the tale a strange kind of authenticity. It reminds me of various 'paranormal vanishings' throughout history that I've read about. What a terrific (and simple) hook. It makes you scour the events surrounding the disappearance for some kind of meaning (as the characters do themselves). Clearly, such a novel is open to a lot of interpretation. Well, roll up your sleeves- here goes.

I reckon that the Appleyard School for Young Ladies (or whatever it's called) serves as a microcosm of Victorian society, except that it's been transplanted to the Australian outback (thus also serving as a metaphor for colonialism. Nice). The headmistress is a stuck-up old tart with her corset pulled too tight, there's no talking without supervision, and gloves may be removed with permission only on the most boiling hot of days. Sounds like the impression we now have of those uptight Victorians, allright.

This aspect of the Victorian psyche I find particularly interesting. They colonised the world, but refused to alter their dress or behaviour while in even the wildest of places. It's as if wherever they went, they had to pretend at all times that they were back in England. Remember in Zulu when the lance-corporal chides one of the privates for having an unbuttoned tunic as they await the zulu charge? 'Where do you think you are, man?', he says to the unfortunate private. That's what I'm talking about (gads, another Zulu reference). Stiff collars and afternoon tea remained the same whatever the situation. When the twenty girls in thick, all-covering white dresses and gloves troop out to Hanging Rock, it's clear that the contradictions boiling just beneath the surface between the wild, untamed continent and the rigid conformity of the colonists are about to come to the surface.

One of the main characters in the novel is the Australian outback itself. The human characters look everywhere for answers after the disappearance, but fail to understand that it's their relationship to this ancient, brooding land that may hold them. It's a living landscape filled with insects, lizards and birds, but this is constantly ignored by the characters. They live on the land, but remain apart from it. I guess eventually, their unwillingness to understand Australia on its own terms was bound to somehow bite them in the arse. Hence the disappearance at the Rock.

As an aside, I'm reminded of a visit I took to Kylemore Abbey in Connemara in Galway a couple of summers ago. It's a fantastic gothic building with huge, well-ordered gardens. The location, however, is an incredibly wild and inhospitable one (it sure seems that way on a rainy day, at least). The contrast between the Victorian ideal of order and the surrounding landscape said a lot about how they thought back then.

I guess another interpretation of the book could be that life is unpredictable, and sometimes weird shit just happens. The remainder of the book focuses on the attempts of the remaining characters to deal with the disappearance. Due to the single inexplicable event, the carefully calculated order present at the beginning of the book begins to descend into chaos.

I was not at all disappointed after finally finding this book. It's all very well-written, and there are enough unusual sub-plots to keep you thinking. Perhaps the answer to the disappearance does lie within the book. Perhaps not. To add to the confusion, Joan Lindsay herself was always ambivalent about whether the book was based on true events (several non-existent newspaper articles are 'referenced' in the novel). Over the years, people have tried to prove that it really is a true story, which only goes to show how we seem to need there to be some mystery in the world.

The Big Pendulum

2009-03-18T23:27:00.016Z

When it comes to literary (or film) criticism, one can present incredible interpretations of the text in question without ever assuming that this is how the original author intended it to be interpreted. A sterling example is found in an article called 'The Return of Hobbes' by a chap named Galvin P. Chow (Google it, do I have to do everything myself?). This postulates that Hobbes from Calvin & Hobbes is somehow the same character as Tyler Durden from Fight Club. At first you think 'uh-huh, right' but then after reading some of it you realize that it's making sense, and by the end of the article, you're thinking 'damn it, that sounds downright plausible!' Chow piles on the evidence, and once you start to regard the issue correctly, the similarities become almost unavoidable.

Now, do I reckon that Bill Watterson or David Fincher really intended their works to be seen this way?

Come on.

Chow so expertly teases aspects of both works, re-moulding them according to his own wants, that he is able to convince us that there was an intended connection where in fact there must have been none (perhaps this is how conspiracy theories get started. But I am getting ahead of myself). This is a large part of how literary criticism seems to work. In school, while doing my Leaving Cert, I was often told that I could take any stance on a novel when writing an essay, as long as I backed up my idea with evidence and examples from the text. Any stance. Any text. There's a wide sargasso sea of potential stupid ideas right there.

Dipping my toes into this sea, I will begin by noting what I see as some bizarre similarities between The Big Lebowski, and the book Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. Yeah, you know The Big Lebowski, and if you don't, boy have you come to the wrong place.

Foucault's Pendulum, on the other hand... I will understand if you don't. It's a large, complex, demanding book about Italian magazine editors who concoct a super-conspiracy theory (told you I'd get around to them) that includes every other such theory ever flaunted. All your old favourites are trotted out- the Templars, the Jesuits, the Nazis, the Rosicrucians, Count St. Germaine, etc (Tellingly, Eco is even more fond of lists than I am). It's been described as 'the thinking man's Da Vinci Code'.

To be honest, this book will probably ruin conspiracy theories for you forever. The joke is that though the book deals with every conspiracy theory ever hatched (pre David Ike) with more detail and accuracy than you'll find (or want to find) anywhere else, he still understands that it's all nonsense. The reader is drawn into the narrator's paranoid way of thinking as the characters begin to believe their own hype. They find connections between events that can only (to their fevered imaginations) be explained by a vast, all-encompassing Plan. And yet we the reader know it's applesauce. The conspiracy theorist's mind, and his reasons for believing, are examined so convincingly that you'll never be able to take another 911-truther seriously again (if you ever did anyway).

Phew. All of which is a long way from the Dude and his soiled rug. Or is it?

Consider. Both deal with three middle-aged (or nearly middle-aged) guys who hang out together because they have too much free time, and have few other meaningful relationships in their lives. In Lebowski, the trio are the Dude, Walter and Donny. Dude is the laid-back main character. Walter is an angry, offense-taking overgrown child who is obsessed with being Jewish, though his racial background suggests otherwise. Though Donny does very little, he does serve a purpose (through his death, hard cheese). The Dude and Walter do not share one scene together in which they do not fight or fail to communicate with each other. Donny's 'funeral' is one of the only scenes where we realize that they really do care for each other. And though we may have suspected it throughout the film, the lack of anybody else at this pitiful ceremony shows for sure that these three guys (now two) are the only close friends or family any of them have. It's a touching (and hilarious) scene.

In Pendulum, our trio consist of Casaubon, Belbo and Diotallevi. Though a bit younger than the others, and a dab hand with the ladies, narrator Casaubon is still rather detached from society. He drifts further and further from his girlfriend as the three become immersed in their obsessive creation, the Plan. It is clear that until meeting the other two, he has never been so challenged or stimulated intellectually. Belbo is arguably the main character- his twisted genius drives the creation of the Plan, and his cynicism makes him the most laid-back of the three (though we do eventually find out that this is a front). He has few close aquaintences besides the other two, and he seems more or less okay with this. Diotallevi is the quiet, abused one, though a direct comparison with Donny would perhaps be unfair to him. However, the kicker here is that he is obsessed with being Jewish, despite his racial background. In his own case, it stems from his being a foundling. In his need for identity, he watches his Jewish neighbours preparing for Shomor Shabbas (which Walter is also obsessed with) the night before, longing to take part. In any case, both texts deal with the friendship and need between a trio of men who, unusually for their stage in life, have no other strong relationships.

Both the Dude and Walter are obviously products of the 60's- the Dude represents the hippie generation with his take-it-easy attitude and his history of protest, sit-ins and dope-smoking. Walter represents the other side of the same coin- obsessed with rules, firearms and Vietnam, he is everything the Dude stood against at that time. But they seem to get on fine.

Similarly, Belbo and co. have their background in the student politics of the 60's. Belbo and Casaubon first meet at a student protest during this time. Back then, they chanted slogans and marched, and got chased by the police. The only difference is their cynicism to the ideals of this era. Really, they take part in this stuff because they feel it is expected of them, or because they think they will pick up girls. Still, the connection is noticeable.

There is also the film noir element. I've already mentioned that Lebowski is basically a subversion of Chandler (a few scenes and plot elements are robbed from The Big Sleep, in particular), with the Dude as a clueless stand-in for Philip Marlowe. Dirty dealings, red herrings, L.A. setting- all present and correct. In Pendulum, Casaubon actively compares himeslf to noir heroes Sam Spade and Marlowe on more than one occasion.

Perhaps the final similarity is how the plots of both texts stem from misconceptions. In both cases, events quickly spiral out of control in terms of complexity, with a conspicuous nothing at the centre. In Lebowsky, all the characters believe there has been a kidnapping, and a twisted trail of deception develops around it precisely because nobody knows what's going on (it's a pastiche of the LA-set Chandler novels). Of course, there was no kidnapping. Eventually, one of the characters (Donny) dies, arguably as a result of the stress and excitement of where their adventure finally takes them. The script could have had him shot by the nihilists, but instead points out that it was a heart attack. We'll never know if he died as a result of the events of the movie, or if it was something that might just have happened anyway.

In Pendulum, the trio at first construct the Plan as a joke, knowing it is false, but slowly become convinced of its veracity, as do several other nefarious characters. These troublemakers assume that Belbo and his friends must know something because they refuse to tell (of course there is nothing to tell, the plan is false). By the same token, Belbo figures that the Plan must be real because these people already take it seriously. In both cases there is a case of 'much ado about nothing'. Towards the end, one of the trio (again, Diotallevi, the quiet one) dies. He contracts cancer, again something which may have happened naturally, but which he in his obsession views as somehow being caused by their association with the Plan. Convinced?

Perhaps the ability to make such comparisons between such disparate works is possible because any decent book, film, or whatever that's had any modicum of thought put into it will have some deep or fascinating ideas that can be easily hijacked to grind one's own personal axe on.

Alan Moore

2009-03-14T19:32:00.006Z

(This article was first published a few years before it became obvious that the Watchmen movie really was going to happen, and when I felt that some of Moore's works still needed a bit of explaining to the general public.)

Everybody has hang-ups- including legendary comics writer Alan Moore. To those in the know, Moore is the main man in comics. His work has challenged and changed the industry. He’s also an insanely bearded guy who worships a spoof Roman snake-god.

Almost all of Moore’s well-known works are preoccupied with super heroes- in particular, with making the super hero ‘genre’ somehow respectable. Comics have been synonymous with super-heroes since the 40’s. As a form of story-telling in which the story-teller is not bound by the limits of reality, budget or practicality, anything can happen. And yet most western comics on sale today belong to, or are indebted to, a single genre.

Moore’s first major work which is still popular today is V for Vendetta. Many will recall the (surprisingly good) film of the same name. Written in the darkest depths of Thatcherite Britain, it posits a not-too-distant-future in which Britain is a totalitarian state. It’s a setting familiar from 1984 and its many rip-offs. There are curfews, CCTV cameras everywhere, secret police, and mantras designed to drive all independent thought from the minds of men. Into this situation Moore throws the character of V- an anarchy-loving theatrical showman who blows up the Old Bailey to the strains of the 1812 overture. In the comic version, V was quite clearly a terrorist. Given todays political climate, this aspect of his character was toned down somewhat in the American-made movie.

Despite the dressing of the setting, Vendetta is a superhero story, and V is a superhero. He has a distinctive costume (his Guy Fawkes outfit), a secret identity, a distinctive weapon (his foot-long throwing knives), and he descends from the darkness to rescue helpless girls from bullying thugs. Perhaps Moore’s real point of reference here is not 1984, but Batman. Moore has worked hard to give this hero more depth than the traditional spandex-clad ones. V is morally ambiguous, possibly villainously homicidal, and definitely insane. Unlike the heroes of old, in V’s world the issues are not clear-cut. Though the government is portrayed as being corrupt, the actions V carries out against them (basically terrorism) are not softened of watered down.

Alongside Frank Miller, Moore helped to bring comics (and inevitably, superheroes) into the mainstream in the 80’s with works like Batman: The Killing Joke. In this regard his most important work is Watchmen. A movie version of this has been in development hell for about ten years. What’s good about the book is that its one of the earliest comics to construct an insanely realistic and thought-out world on such a scale. Close examination of the art shows that much of the action takes place over a single block in New York, and that the dimensions and geography of this area could be worked out (I wasn’t bothered, but it’s impressive anyway). In this alternate world, locations, brand names and histiry are used consistently for hundreds of pages. But Watchmen too is a superhero story.

The central conceit of the book is that in the 40’s, people were inspired by superhero comics to dress up in ridiculous costumes and actually go out and fight crime in the real world. Thus we are presented with a selection of heroes who are actually people with no real powers, but plenty of real-life problems. We’re not talking ‘Peter Parker’s gotta fight the Green Goblin while worrying about his date with Mary Jane’ problems, though. There’s Hooded Justice, who commits suicide after rumours of homosexuality ruin his life. There’s Nite Owl, who has become a lonely old man who fixes antique cars. The Comedian is a right-wing fascist who fights in Vietman for a three-times elected Richard Nixon. These characters are not the ageless, perfect citizens of comic lore.

I guess that Watchmen best displays Alan Moore’s hang-up about superheroes. The adventures of these super-powered beings clearly meant a lot to him as a kid (though they didn’t to me). At some later point he began to realise how patently ridiculous the notion was, and became fascinated with the idea of placing them in some kind of real-world situation. How would the simplistic, primary-coloured superheroes fare in an age of civil-rights movements, distrust of the government and international terrorism? How would they deal with loneliness, alcoholism, divorce and other personal problems?

Watchmen is a multi-tiered work in which every image is a motif that connects with what has gone before or will come after. It is told in fragments from different time periods, and reading them in order can be no more enlightening than reading them randomly. Like Ulysses, it can be opened at any page. Now there’s a pretentious recommendation. Basically, by the standards of any art-form, it’s damn good. Yet Moore himself has stated that however good it is, Watchmen can never rise above its genre. He has pushed the superhero story to places it was never designed to go… but its still a superhero story.

Choose Your Fate!

2009-03-06T14:21:00.005Z

You are standing in a bleak and alien landscape. The land is patterned in a black-and-white checkerboard formation that stretches to the horizon. Above you a blood-red sky boils angrily. Bizarre architectural ruins seem to hang suspended from the clouds in the distance. Your eye falls to the bottom of the paragraph where you notice that there are several options allowing you to decide what happens from here on…With mounting trepidation you realize that you are reading a critique of those old choose-your-own-path books which is itself written in the style of a choose-your-own-path book! A more cryptic and fiendish literary device you have never come across. A wizened old man approaches you and asks "Say kid, do you remember the 80’s?"
If you do remember the 80’s, read section 5. If not, read section 3.

Anger radiates from the old man. “You filthy cheater! There IS no Pendant of Scaramanga in this game! Dammit, that was always the problem with those stupid gamebooks-there was no way to stop cheating bastards.” He sulks and will not talk to you. Your adventure is OVER. We hope you’ve enjoyed this interactive conversation.

The old man pauses to swallow a bug that was buzzing too close to his mouth before beginning his narrative. “In the 80’s, before there were videogames, there were gamebooks. People wanted very much for there to be videogames that featured orcs and wizard’s keys and locked dungeons and villages where you had to talk to everybody in the town square to acquire the Pendant of Scaramanga in order to access the Trident of Aaaargorn and that kind of thing. They just didn’t know it yet, because all they had at the time was Pong and Space Invaders. So, they invented elaborate role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. While taking part in such activities was seen (and still is) as social suicide, at least it got you out of your dorm and mixing with other pointy-hat wearers. Gamebooks were like a condensed form of this, except you played them on your own.”

“Each book told a more-or-less Tolkienesque story broken up into 400 paragraphs. At the end of each paragraph options were given on how to advance the story.” You interrupt here to say that you are indeed familiar with this technique. “The parallels with modern videogames are striking. Each book had zero character development, a plot that makes Scooby-Doo look inventive, and gameplay that hinged on collecting ridiculously titled items to defeat bosses and challenges. The player invariably assumed the role of some adventure-craving Conan-alike that makes the marine from Doom seem like a complex and rounded character, and was sent off to the pit/castle/dungeon of Eternal Terror to defeat some hideous if uncreative adversary. The game mechanics meant that the player could not turn back or retry anything during the quest, which resulted in some bastardly unfair and difficult adventures. Some adventures were truly enormous, well thought-out puzzles, and part of the appeal was deconstructing the book and learning how the author thinks.”

“The most well known series was the Fighting Fantasy series, which had Brit authors Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone plastered on the cover even though they stopped actually writing the damn books less than halfway through the series. Weirdly, the first book written by a ‘secondary’ author, Scorpion Swamp, was written by an American also called Steve Jackson. These books had a pretty nifty system for keeping character stats which was simple but effective, and showcased how gamebooks were descended from RPG’s. All the creatures and monsters the player had to fight also had stats that were displayed like this”- as the old man says this an enormous snarling sabre-tooth tiger appears before you.

SABRE-TOOTH TIGER SKILL-6 STAMINA-12

The man waves his hand and the tiger is no more. There is no sound but the eerie whistling of the wind. The man smiles and says “The Fighting Fantasy series also had great pulp magazine-style painted covers featuring monsters which were frequently super bad-ass and cool. Sadly, like all fads, the gamebooks died out. They sold like hotcakes from 1982 till about 1990.” You are about to say that you think you saw a re-released gamebook in Waterstones recently when the old man stares at you intensely and says “Now, in order to survive this final task, you must possess the Pendant of Scaramanga.”
If you possess the Pendant, read section 2. If not, read section 6.

You sense that he doesn’t believe you. An angry snarl appears on his face. Read section 6.

‘Of course’, says the old man sagely. Old men are always wise and sagely in fantasy. “You look about old enough. According to Wikipedia, one of your generation’s defining characteristics is a particular fondness for 80’s nostalgia- Transformers, Michael Jackson, that kind of thing. However for some reason one bizarre yet hugely popular 80’s phenomenon, the choose-your-own-path gamebooks, is totally forgotten about today! Seriously, even the biggest nerds you’ll ever meet, the guys who have every Yu-Ghi-Oh card ever don’t know about them, and yet they were huge in their day.” What will you say to the old man?
If you wish to tell him that in fact you were a nerd in the 80’s and you do remember these gamebooks, read section 4. Otherwise read section 3.

You realise with horror that you have stumbled upon an Instant Death Paragraph. The ground beneath you begins to tremble. The checkerboard earth heaves as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse erupt from the bowels of the planet to drag you to the 7th layer of Dante’s Inferno where you will be forced to listen to both Killers albums. Simultaneously. Your adventure is OVER.

Rebels of Total Recall

2009-03-05T10:30:00.012Z

Rebels of the Red Planet by Charles Fontenay- a review

It's pulp time again, so we should all know what to expect. I picked up this volume many years ago, in a now-defunct bookshop in Enniscorthy, Wexford, and it's one of my old favourites. It really shows that there is a difference between good and bad pulp fiction.

Trashy novels (back in the day, at least) sold based on what fantastic and sensational thrills the cover depicted. This cover shows a 'futuristic' city (complete with monorail, natch) and a forest of hands raised as if pledging their allegiance to some grand revolutionary cause. One of them appears to be holding a passport. Will any of this be relevant to the story within? Read on (surely with barely concealed anticipation).

In this tale, Mars is a newly-colonised world under the grip of the tyrannical Marscorp. They control all supplies from Earth, and in particular they control the supply of air to the people of Mars. Of course, a rebellion is brewing, under the control of an organisation called the Phoenix (sound familiar? More on that later). Spies and counter-spies ply their trade across the scattered cities. Amid all this political strife, a man returns to Mars City. He is Dark Kensington (!), former leader of the Phoenix, a man thought to have perished twenty years earlier. Where has he been? What is his connection to the mad and strangely-named scientist Goat Hennessy (maybe he's from the old country!) And what role will the misunderstood, dying race of Martians play in the proceedings? The stage is truly set for some pulp nonsense of the highest order.

The proceedings begin, uncharacteristically, with a fine piece of purple prose. See for yourself-

It is a sea, though they call it sand.
They call it sand because it is still and red and dense with grains. They call it sand because the thin wind whips and whirls its dusty skim away to the tight horizons of Mars.
But only a sea could so brood with the memory of aeons.
Only a sea, lying so silent beneath the high skies, could hint the mystery of life still behind its barren veil.

Now I don't know my Heaney from my Hemmingway, but that's fairly poetic stuff coming from a novel about ray-guns and space monsters. Doesn't it conjure the endless majesty and loneliness and barrenness of the Martian desert? Fantastic stuff. Tellingly, there's nothing else in the bok as good as it. Fontenay soon drops this kind of style and gets down to the business of telling a nice two-fisted adventure story. More power to him.

Anyway, Dark Kensington (Dark Kensington!) hooks up with his old intelligence buddies, and it turns out that the rebel base on Mars City is located in... a barber college. The book is truly chock full of strange details like this. Yep, up front it's a fully functional barber college, while out back there's secret rooms full of rebels being taught how to lift sticks of chalk and pour buckets of lambs blood using only their minds. You see, they aim to become independent from Marscorp by transporting all supplies using ESP. From Earth.

And of course since this is the future-as-imagined-from-the-sixties, everyone smokes. Big black cigars. In a confined colony on an airless world. (This bizarre cultural oversight, once commonplace, can still be noted as late at 1997, in Event Horizon. Watch for the scene where they all spark up. In space).

There's a memorable scene near enough to the beginning of the book where the college is raided by the authorities, and the rebel boss escapes in a helicopter(!) that punctures the dome of Mars City. Immediately, shutters close on all buildings to contain the atmosphere. This scene functions to establish early on the theme of the inhospitibility of Mars (sound familiar?) and the importance and scarcity of good quality O2 (except when you need a good smoke, of course).

There are several more great (and strange) scenes scattered throughout the book, including Goat Hennessy's disturbing attempts to create a human that will survive the martian atmosphere and a seductive spy's bungled attempt to arrest Kensington at a Martian holiday resort. The whole shebang climaxes with a showdown at a hydroponic plant, by which point Fontenay has amassed a rogues gallery of bizarre heroes and villains. Essentially, it's a silly tale well told.

I'd imagine that this book is fairly obscure. Pick it up if you see it in a charity shop (you are unlikely to see it anywhere else). Now, how likely do you think it is that this book graced the desk of someone in Hollywood during the late 80s? I mean, who reads this kind of stuff anyway? And yet, the similarities to Total Recall are numerous and unavoidable. If you don't know Total Recall, you've sure come to the wrong place (think Red Faction, another take on the same idea).

Both feature a rebellion on a frontier-like Mars. Both have shadowy rag-tag revolutionary organisations fighting against The Man. Both feature rebels with ESP powers. And in both cases, Mars is not an arbitrary setting, it is almost a central character. Both deal, as an ongoing theme as well as a climactic plot-device, with the problem of breathing on Mars, though they approach it from completely different angles. Many of these aspects are absent from We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, the story that Total Recall is based on. Strange.

There's something about Mars. It occupies a special place in our myths, our hopes and fears. Percival Lowell, H.G. Wells and John Carter have helped created a mystique about the place. Because of this, there's a certain responsibility to setting a story on Mars. It isn't interchangeable with any other planetary location. It must feel like Mars. Both Rebels of the Red Planet and Total Recall achieve this admirably.

The History of Mars Attacks

2009-03-04T12:47:00.012Z

In 1996 Warner Brothers released Mars Attacks. It featured more big-name stars than it knew what to do with, so it killed most of them off- none of the top-billed actors lived to see the end credits. This aside, it was very much a Tim Burton movie- the photo-realistic (at the time, anyway) rendering of a completely ludicrous B-movie situation was oddly creepy, and had the familiar Burton mix of merriment and the macabre (Jack Nicholson’s death scene is particularly memorable). The eerie, skeletal Martians and their array of cheesy but terrifying weapons and vehicles were ludicrous and straight out of a cold-war era 1950’s communism-parable invasion movie. However, the characters within the movie accepted this situation with po-faced seriousness, and as the script was unafraid to serve up horrible deaths to them, the audience was forced to take it seriously too. A quick scan of the net shows that this movie traumatised quite a few youngsters during its original run.

The inspiration behind the film came from an unusual and far more disturbing source- it may in fact be the only movie ever made based on a set of trading cards. In 1962, the company Topps, who specialised in baseball cards and bubblegum, released Mars Attacks, a series of cards that featured science fiction scenes. Topps had previously scored big with a civil war series of cards popular with the kids due to their high gore content. The idea of the Mars Attacks cards was to up the gore while presenting a loose retelling of a ‘War of the Worlds’ type invasion story, updated with 50’s sci-fi staples like flying saucers, ray-guns, marauding robots and giant insects.

The art was by Norm Saunders, a man known for many a lurid cover during the pulp-magazine era. These covers hinted (usually inaccurately) at the wonders within- scantily clad broads writhed in the grip of hideous monsters and unscrupulous Nazis, and square-jawed heroes and detectives shouldered open doors to come to their rescue. Saunders brought to the Mars Attacks cards a kind of hideous and gritty comic-book realism.

The plot wasn’t much to write home about- Mars is about to self-combust due to a build-up of internal pressure, so the big-brained Martians send thousands of warships to clear some new real estate for themselves on Earth. This they achieve with a violence that is genuinely astonishing. Flying saucers with mysterious heat-rays deal death onto army bases, topple skyscrapers, burn entire herds of cattle, leave Washington and New York in flames, slice passenger planes in two and make human torches of individual civilians. The scenes of death and destruction feature gory close-ups of humans with pained and agonised expressions that are occasionally quite unsettling. The Empire State building tumbles, trapping thousands of workers in a hellish blaze while hundreds more kill each other in the panic to leave the city by car. The cockpit of a fighter plane becomes a ‘’flaming coffin’ for a valiant pilot foolish enough to try to intercept a saucer.

Throughout the story, the sense of hopelessness is palpable. People hide out in basements until forced by hunger to leave their homes and walk streets where marauding bands of Martians exterminate humans on sight. Any brave attempt to resist or fight back is rewarded only with instant and horrible death. Martians capture beautiful girls to perform sadistic experiments on (there is a card depicting a dying mans’ removed heart being shown to him by his grotesque surgeon) in order to learn how to more effectively dispose of us, something at which they are extraordinarily creative. Saucers with giant shovels clear the streets of people and crush them against walls, Martians shrink humans to nothing or make frozen statues of them, and gargantuan robots walk the streets crushing humans beneath their spiked heels. Any prisoners captured by the Martians are no use to them due to the language difference, so they are strapped to the exhaust ports of their enormous machinery to be blown to oblivion. The diabolical scientists of the Red Planet have also devised a way to enlarge insects, and soon the world is overrun with a new horror. The US army is overwhelmed by a horde of homicidal spiders and the Eiffel Tower is consumed by a monstrous caterpillar- all in lurid comic-book Technicolor. And all the while the masters of the invasion watch and laugh from Mars.

Finally, the combined military of the ‘world’ (though only WASP American soldiers are shown) gets its act together and sends rockets to Mars to counterattack. This part of the story is gloriously ludicrous- because of a forcefield around the planet that prevents orbital bombing, soldiers wearing military helmets under their glass spacesuit helmets (why?) parachute to the surface and enter the Martians domed cities to deal out some vengeance. And yes, the cities have monorails (all ‘futuristic’ domed cities from the 60’s have monorails). The soldiers use their weapons to rip open the Martians huge, exposed brains. Nice. Actual earth tanks with US symbols on them (!) roll across the sands of Mars and smash their civilization into the ground. Eventually, the stars and stripes is hoisted on Mars and the soldiers leave just before geological forces tear the planet apart. All in all, it’s an enjoyably silly and unapologetic end to an otherwise harrowing tale.

Unsurprisingly, the cards were pulled from shops due to parental complaints. They are extremely rare nowadays, and a full set is worth around 2,500 US$. Scans of the cards are easily found on the Internet, and many of the images still have the power to shock. Due to the cult nature of Mars Attacks, in the 80’s a similar series was released called Dinosaurs Attack, which similarly featured a fanciful sci-fi premise, ridiculous amounts of gore, and scant regard for scientific or paleontological facts. Perhaps the most disturbing descendant of Mars Attacks is Don’t Let it Happen Here, a‘patriotically’ themed set of cards with artwork depicting scenes of hideous torture, terrorism and human rights abuses in countries other than the US. Scenes include an Iraqi man having his tongue cut off for speaking on television against Saddam Hussein, the Tokyo underground nerve gas killings, and young women in Bangladesh being scarred with sulphuric acid for rejecting suitors, a crime which, according to the card, is endorsed by their government. Presumably the reader is expected to think ‘thank God I live in America where nothing bad ever happens!’

Trading cards are not a phenomenon that ever really caught on outside the States. Just don’t get me started on Premier League Stickers…

Black Dossier Review

2009-03-04T12:29:00.006Z

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier by Alan Moore

The following is a review first published when this book came out, back in 2007. It's probably still unavailable in Europe. I haven't checked recently.

Comic fans will know that this, the eagerly-awaited and serially-delayed third instalment (though strangely, not the third volume) of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is currently only available in the US due to copyright issues. It is, after all, a series which exists solely to bring together various pre-existing fictional characters in a sort of ‘communal memory’ universe. With this latest volume, Moore expands his vision further, seemingly indicating that the world of the ‘League’ consists not only of characters from fantastic Victorian fantasy, as in the previous volumes, but the multitude of characters from all of fiction, be it books, comics, film, television or radio. But is it any good?

Moore presents us with a 1950s Britain in which Big Brother and the Ingsoc government from Orwell’s 1984 has just fallen. (Apparently Orwell originally intended his terrifying parable to take place in 1948, but was convinced by his publishers to set it in that fateful year instead.) Against this backdrop, the remaining characters of the turn-of-the-century league struggle against their supervisors for possession of an item chronicling hundreds of years of secret League history- the titular Black Dossier.

As is frequently the case with Moore, the chief pleasure of the Black Dossier is perusing the detailed panels spotting familiar characters. Enthusiasts of 50’s era culture will not be disappointed, with appearances and nods to Emma Peel (from the Avengers), Jack Kerouac, James Bond, and that timeless hero of British comics, Dan Dare. Even the newspapers note the antics of aging screen legend Norma Desmond (from the classic film noir Sunset Boulevard) and Roy of the Rovers’ team, Melchester Rovers. It’s the unusual nature of some of the source material, as well as the treatment of some of the more well-known characters that provide much of the enjoyment in the Black Dossier. For example, the James Bond that features is Flemming’s Bond, not the more well-known screen incarnation- and as such is far more misogynistic and hateful than most readers will expect, as befitting his actual literary origins. All this is conveyed through the distinctive scratchy-yet-crisp drawing style of Kevin O’Neill which gives the series its flavour.

This fiction-based name-dropping is taken to a whole new level with the inclusion of excerpts from the Dossier itself- each written in a different style, reflecting the facet of society that created it. Thus we are presented with the history of the League as told through a sequel to Fanny Hill, an undiscovered work by Shakespeare, a beat novel, and a miniature 50s porno comic. To Moore, all are as valid as any ‘real’ art when it comes to representing culture. Moore utilises the very substance of the book to make his point- different paper types, sizes and textures are used to create different atmospheres. The tale finishes with a metaphysical trip to a 4-dimensional land where characters seem to realize the true nature of their existence- presented to us, the reader, in 3D (via a pair of glasses that come with the book). It’s not just a gimmick- it’s a bizarre attempt to alter the relationship between the reader and the book, to use mixed mediums to tell the story, such as it is.

And therein lies the sting- for all Moore’s genre-busting (and medium-busting), some of the terrific dialogue and characterisation of the previous volumes has been lost. The plot is merely a vehicle for Moore to cram as many self-indulgent references into his universe as possible. A little restraint can go a long way. Moore and O’Neill aimed high, producing a unique creation which succeeds at being quite unlike anything which has gone before, yet ultimately fails at being a satisfying comic book. That said, its still better than most shelf-cloggers in the comics shop, and hardcore fans are doubtlessly off to Amazon.com as you read this.

Tales to give you Goosebumps

2009-03-04T12:15:00.012Z

Horror High
Chapter 1

I’m Josh, and I’m thirteen years old. I was just leaving my third period maths class with my best friend Stacy at Timber Falls Junior High when this whole mess started. “You’re such a dork Josh… I can’t believe you’ve never even heard the legend of the Timber Falls Vampire. Every kid in town knows that story!” Stacy was always crazy about spooky stuff. I figured her parents let her watch too many dumb movies. She’s the same age as me, with curly black hair, and an ok fashion sense. I guess she’s kinda cute as well. Anyway, she was just about to tell me the legend of the Timber Falls Vampire. “They say his body still rests in a hidden basement somewhere beneath the school…” I told her to quit it, not because I was scared or anything, but because-
At that moment there came from the next classroom a terrifying and blood-curdling shriek. My stomach turned to jelly as somebody screamed in agony “ THE VAMPIRE! HE’S BACK!!!”

Chapter 2

We breathlessly ran into the classroom to find…my bratty cousin Norman! He’s a real jerk and he’s always paying tricks on me. “Stop laughing Norm you creep, I wasn’t even scared!” I yelled at him. Stacy was laughing as well, so the whole scene was really embarrassing. “I can’t believe Josh fell for it,” Norman congratulated himself, “ As if we’d introduce the monster in chapter 1! Come on let’s get out of here, I want you guys to meet the new kid in school, he’s from Europe or something…”

Should any of the above seem familiar to you, then it is certain you remember the Goosebumps fad. Above I have recreated the opening of every single book ever written by the prolific (or diarrhoeic) R. L. Stine. (That’s almost certainly a nom de plume, and it really sounds to me like it’s supposed to be a pun or something. Try saying it out loud. R. L. Stine. Nope, still don’t get it.)

The Goosebumps books were seemingly a ploy to get kids to read by using simple language, short chapters, and the promise of big scares within. Each book told a simple and usually derivative spooky story about young teenagers encountering some kind of strangeness. Many of the books were scaled-down domestic versions of classic horror sagas – hence It Came from Beneath The Sea becomes It Came from Beneath the Sink, Phantom of the Opera becomes Phantom of the Auditorium, and Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles 2: Secret of the Ooze becomes The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena (it's a loose adaptation, granted). The stories invariably employed the kind of shock ending known as the ‘jar of marmalade’ ending. Bear with me on this one, it requires some familiarity with bad-writing terminology.

A ‘jar of marmalade’ story is a story constructed solely to spring some completely unrelated and silly surprise on the reader; a story constructed only so the author can cry ‘fooled you!’ at the end. Imagine a tale set in a desert of orange sand surrounded by an impenetrable barrier – surprise! Our heroes are actually MICROBES LIVING IN A JAR OF MARMALADE. That kind of thing. (thanks to the Turkey City Lexicon for that one- hey, it's public domain!) For example-

-Warning! Spoilers ahead! -

One of the books features a kid who applies a mysterious lotion to his face and finds that he is suddenly growing thick unsightly hair all over his face and body. The book relates his quest to hide this unfortunate condition from his family, friends and the girl he likes while trying to figure out who made the lotion and how to reverse the process. In the end, however, he finds out that the real reason he is growing this hair is because the entire town is actually a gigantic testing lab and ALL THE KIDS IN TOWN ARE ACTUALLY DOGS WHO HAVE BEEN MUTATED TO LOOK LIKE PEOPLE, BUT NOW THEY’RE TURNING BACK INTO DOGS. The lotion was completely irrelevant. Kudos for originality and willingness to break the mould, but that ending makes the whole book pointless, really.

Regardless, the books were a phenomenon in schools at the time, mine very much included. Kids would collect the books, read them in one night and spoil the endings for everyone the next day in school. Nobody really seemed to enjoy reading them because aside from the premise and the screwed-up ending there was only an interchangeable sequence of events that had nothing to do with the outcome, but everyone wanted to be the first to have read the newest ones.

Encouraging kids to read is not an ignoble goal, and like all good ideas (rock & roll included) it soon got hijacked by the Man. Many other companies saw that there was gold in them thar literary hills, so they started producing their own Goosebumps knock-offs. A quick search through the recesses of my own book cupboard reveals items from several identically themed series aimed at 9-12 year olds -Shivers, Bugs, Max Power. The legacy lives on.

Chapter 20

The entire basement filled with a strange glow as Desmond, the vampire-kid from Europe, collapsed and became a heap of rotting flesh. “It’s finally over”, I gasped as Stacy and Norm crawled a safe distance away from the bizarre, decomposing corpse. “We defeated his evil powers!” But Stacy didn’t seem to be listening. Her eyes bulged and turned a fiery red. Eight enormous arachnid legs erupted from within the confines of her dress and spread across the room. “You fools” she hissed, “ Desmond wasn’t really a vampire. This was all a ploy to get you alone down here so I could feed you to my children”. As I was fed to her hideous mutant arachnid progeny my last thought was “Dammit this makes our entire adventure completely irrelevant!”

THE END

The Flashman Series

2009-02-23T14:20:00.012Z

Huzzah, pish-posh and tally ho. If I hesitate to label the late George Macdonald Frasier an empire apologist, that’s only because ‘apologist’ is too soft a word to describe a man who reckoned the British Empire was the best thing ever to have happened to an ungrateful world. It’s not an attitude that fits in very well with today’s world of globalisation and political correctness. But damn could the man write.

To whit- Britain today is not a bad place to live, overall. A bit grey perhaps, a bit twee. Not so much better or worse than here, really (Ireland, that is). It’s certainly not the stuff fantasies are made of. And yet, not more than a century ago, Britain was the beating-heart of a globe-spanning Empire, the setting-off point for thousands of well-meaning stiff-upper-lipped adventurers who departed for exotic climes in order to civilize the world. In the face of malaria, cannibals, hostile tribes and common sense, these brave souls sought to paint the map red (quite often literally) in order to spread the virtues of christianity and afternoon tea to all the most exciting, alien parts of the earth. The contradictions and mores of this time are fascinating, and are particularly relevant to the Irish, having been (in many cases) on both sides of the great colonial ‘adventure’. No wonder the British are getting a kind of ‘Empire nostalgia’.

In 1969 George MacDonald Fraser had a capitol idea- what if there was one man who had been through all this? One unsung hero, present at every major offensive of the nineteenth century, somehow absent from the history books, to act as our guide to this turbulent time? His name is Harry Flashman. He’s fought Afghans, Sikhs, African slave traders and Indian Mutineers. He was at the charge of the light brigade, and fought alongside Michael Caine against those dastardly Zulus at Rorke’s Drift. So far, so Young Indiana Jones.

But this man is no hero. He poxes around the empire with no thought in his head beyond where his next wench is coming from. He skewers the hypocrisy of the age through his own lack of artifice- he’ll cheerfully tell you that he’s only looking out for number one, and he’s got nothing but scorn for the pious Empire-builders that surround him, all trying to mask their greed, ambition or racism. Flashman feels no need to mask his greed, ambition or racism. He may admire the bravery of others in battle, but through a film of wonder that anyone could be so careless about their own well-being. He’s cheerfully racist against anyone who’s not English, and makes no excuses for it. Anything less would have been unconvincing during this period, especially from such a cad.

And yet, Fraser’s own politics do come to the fore. Flashman claims that his brutal honesty and acceptance of his own shallowness make him a reliable narrator (he has no real biases, and calls it as he sees it). He is likely to respect a brave Afghan chieftain, or to deplore a fellow British officer, and accepts that other peoples are not all savages, but he at no point questions Britain’s right to colonise or control other countries. This viewpoint is to be expected from Harry Flashman circa 1857, but it occurs so frequently that it must be close to what Fraser himself believed over one hundred years later. Thus, as well as being stirring reading, the Flashman books provide plenty of opportunity for discuss about the morality of Empire (if you’re into such things).

The books read fantastically, the attention to historical detail combined with Flashman’s more earthy thoughts remind you that the past was a real place, peopled with persons just as mortal and flawed as yourself. Battle scenes are vivid and memorable, characters are hilarious, and the dialogue is incredible. Flashman uses a catchy but period-appropriate vocabulary of salty terms, including more than a few you won’t have heard before but will use after. And the best news of all is that there are twelve books in the series. Many of the same elements re-occur throughout the series, and if they become a bit Iain-Flemming-crank-em-out, well, they’re the best damn crank-em-out books ever written.

George MacDonald Fraser died in 2006, so we’ll now never know if Flashman was sent across the pond to sort out those beastly Fenians. Perhaps it's for the best.

Classic Review- Copperhead Road

2009-02-23T14:06:00.005Z

Despite its reviled status, country music has often been an influence on other, more respectable genres. Creedence, the Band, Tom Petty and others were nor afraid to get their twang on as part of the melting pot that made up their sound. All the time, however, disguised as folk or rock n roll.

Not so for Steve Earle, the refugee from Nashville who was too tough for the country music scene there. Even before he got addicted to heroin and became incredibly fat in the 1990s, he was a country artist who was too rock n roll. It’s a tough line to straddle. But in 1988, Earle got the balance right with his classic third album Copperhead Road. The fantastic cover with the sewn-on skull-and-crossbones logo first lets you know that you’re in for a treat.

It’s a brief album with few mis-steps. Earle has crafted a bunch of songs here that have the authenticity of age-old folksongs, each telling a tale, and each casting us into a world of weary gunslingers, hard-drinkin travellers and outlaw bootleggers. His distinctive drawl says he’s seen it all but never lost the urgency or belief in what he has to sing. Mixed in with these classic cowboy motifs are more-recent, then-contemporary issues- pot-smoking, oil-wars, and busted-down Vietnam vets (remember, this album was made a scant three years after John Rambo returned to the jungle to get those hostages). Earle blends these elements into the mix perfectly, making them seem epic, creating a kind of mythology out of the times he lived in as well as harking back to the past. He creates a time and place that you will want to learn more about (go rent Sling Blade, maybe).

Take the incredible title track Copperhead Road- even the name ‘copperhead’ is a kind of viper, because everything is badass in Steve Earle’s world. This song tells the tale of a family of self-described white trash bootleggers who ply their trade in rural Texas, and of their multiple scrapes with the authorities. In the climactic final verse, the youngest character returns from ‘Nam (the first of many references to this conflict) determined to grow pot, and is unworried about the authorities scouting out the area with helicopters. It turns out that he ‘learned a thing or two from Charlie’ during his years away, and so they’d ‘better stay away from Copperhead Road’. I’m not sure if he’s actually insinuating that he’s gonna take down the choppers with a bazooka or something, but it’s a great end to the song.

Earle does some unexpected things on this album- the bizarre use of bagpipes, or a collaboration with the Pogues (of all people!) but he never forgets to rock out, except of course when he’s opening his heart to us on a tender ballad, which he’s not afraid to do (because, as we know, every cowboy sings a sad, sad song). After you’ve listened to the album a bit, you’ll notice a strange thing- both the ballads and the country-rockers are, in a weird way, only a few steps away from 1980s cheese rock. Be it the arena-sized guitars or the song-writing itself, were it not for Earle’s southern drawl and the addition of some acoustic instruments, this could almost be a Poison album. If, that is, Poison ever dreamt of writing a song as masterful and foot-stomping as 'Devil’s Right Hand'.

Copperhead Road takes everything that is good about country music- the attitude, the big hats- and melds it to other styles that you probably have more respect for. Check it out.

The Wrestler Review

2009-02-23T14:04:00.002Z

It’s the sort of thing one picks up through osmosis, pro wrestling. You may turn a blind eye to every bout of pretend pub-fighting that occurs on Smackdown come Friday night; you may turn a blind ear to every comment around the water-cooler come Monday morning. But if your friends are into it, you will succumb. At night it crawls into your ear, camps out in the Eustachian canal, and refuses all eviction notices. Pretty soon you will know what a ‘heel’ is, what a ‘face’ is, why nobody does a piledriver on Hulk Hogan anymore, and why Chris Benoit is now referred to only as ‘a certain Canadian’ (may he rest in peace, the murdering bastard). The trivia is as fascinating as it is- well- trivial.

It’s the kind of thing that could only have been born in the good old US of A, where even genuine sportsmen step up to bat to their own theme tune. It’s a world where the sport has taken a back seat to the spectacle. And it’s this which makes for such thrilling viewing, and such harrowing drama when it all goes wrong. A glittering façade of high-flying moves, memorable catchphrases and predetermined endings- but what does it hide?

The Wrestler opens with scenes of an aging Randy the Ram (Mickey Rourke) recovering from a small show in a school gym in the backwoods of Nowheresville, USA. He pants. He pukes. His glory days are fifteen years in the past, and he’s got no insurance scheme. The promoter appears to give him his fifty bucks. He’s been screwed again.

My God, breathed the wrestling fans in the audience. It’s too real. At last, here was a vision of the seamy side of ‘the business’ that they recognised. Rourke is a likeable screw-up who loves what he does even though it’s literally killing him. His life is so tough that at times it’s hard to watch, but he makes the best of it with admirable good humour and attitude. He befriends a stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold (Marisa Tomei) and tries to get in touch with his long estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood). If all this sounds a little like Oscar fodder…well, it really is. If the schmaltz is a little heavy and frequent to be overlooked, then at least its well-handled schmaltz, with just the right amount of humour to boot. This is truly the only film featuring the ‘Necro Butcher’ that you can take your girlfriend to see. Rourke is amiable, and we want him to have some measure of success, though we know it won’t be anything unrealistic. It’s like a Rocky you can take seriously.

Wrestling fans know what they don’t want, and they’re pretty vocal about it. They know what happens to washed-up wrestlers in real life (they’ve seen them ‘perform’ at Neptune stadium), and you can’t sell them a Hollywood ending in this kind of story. The film doesn’t even try. It keeps its cred, even among the diehards, by getting all the details right. These guys know how wrestling works at the highest levels, and more importantly, at the lowest levels. The fights are convincing and accurate (more than you can say about this weeks’ Smackdown, probably). The crowd chants are cruel and thrilling as they are at a real event, and oddly infectious. You will laugh, cheer, stamp your feet and wince in pain. There is great enjoyment for fan and neophyte alike to be had from this peek into the bizarre demi-monde of pro wrestling.

Welcome to the Vanishing Point!

2009-02-23T11:07:00.000Z

Here I shall be posting the various reviews and aricles I have written over the years for the University College Cork magazine EX2. Some of them were written to order, some of them were just about subjects I thought were cool or interesting. Hopefully this page will eventually become a repository for articles about weird and interesting stuff in general.

Knock yourself out.