The City of Shifting Waters

With my 20-book project complete a couple of weeks before the year's end and some free time before tackling next year's goal, I decided to get a couple of quick ones in while I could. And it turned out I enjoyed writing about books so much that I'm going to keep doing it, so here's my first stand-alone book review.

Every Christmas, I like to give the gift of cinema to my family members. This year I took a gamble on getting my dad a film I hadn't seen: Luc Besson's Valérian and the City of a Thousand Planets. A gamble in that reviews and public reception had been mixed last summer and it was based on source material that none of us were familiar with. We ultimately all found Valérian to be a highly imaginative and enjoyable adventure through the space of the distant future, and while I felt the plot ran out of steam somewhat, the visuals more than made up for it.

It inspired me to seek out the original series of bandes dessinées written by Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mézières, spanning a huge 21 albums across five decades. Personally I had never heard of the series, although feature adaptation aside the works have had significant influence on science fiction and the comic book medium, and are among the most successful in their genre. I was pleasantly surprised to find the first volume, 1970's The City of Shifting Waters, available for free on Kindle, and so dived in despite not having tried out any kind of book with images on that device before.

I found it to be something of a paradox. It is at once hugely inventive and also reliant on a range of sci-fi stereotypes - although on reflection, I suppose that its relatively early publication date means that it could well have served as the origination of some of those. The concept of "closing the loop" in its time-travelling story arc is certainly one that has been done many times since, but perhaps not before; and along with being given equal footing in the series' title, agent Laureline is certainly a progressive female character at a time when the likes of Robert Heinlein were dominating the genre.

However, it does also fall into the classic Dr. Who style trap of providing characters with access to unlimited travel across space and time and then sending them to 20th-century Earth with it. Albeit this is a post-nuclear disaster 1986 in which New York has turned into a tropical mangrove swamp and what little population remains is locked in a constant war of organised crime. Likewise, the villain Xombul, with his underground lair and plot to rule the world, is lifted straight from the pages of earlier superhero comics. Yet he is balanced by the charismatic blaxploitation gangster-musician Sun Rae and the endearingly nerdy scientist Dr. Schroeder, both of whom develop nicely as they help Valerian and Laureline in their mission.

So while the book is nowhere near as spectacular in its scope as the film, that can probably be put down to its age and the fact that this is where the series began. My experience of bande dessinée is effectively limited to Tintin and Astérix, both of which took a couple of books to truly hit their stride, and I wouldn't be surprised if Valérian didn't follow the same trend both in terms of writing and art as the years went on. I would certainly like to read more of it, and expand my knowledge of the medium in general.

3.5/5

Dane DeHaan was nowhere near as macho as the book version of Valérian, and Cara Delevigne not as ladylike as Laureline. But again, that could be the direction the characters take further down the line. In contrast, the film was a lot more bombastic than the book, which would be sound-tracked nicely by Air's sublime Moon Safari - French futurism at its best.

20 - The Devil's Ark

It was between the ages of 16 and 18 that I read a sizeable number of the books that anyone wishing to claim an interest in literature has to read. And it was during that same period that I managed to get back into reading in a way that I had been neglecting since my childhood. I came to realise that there was a world of literature out there that was essential to my intellectual development - and while I still have a long way to go in that respect, I am glad to have had the time and inclination to make the attempt.

My motivation can be attributed in large part to one man - Stephen Bywater. Taking charge of the literature side of my AS level in English Literature and Language, he taught the subject in the best possible way, opening my mind to entire new schools of thought and ideas that perpetuated my cultural curiosity through university and beyond. So it was only fair that, when he wrote a book, I should give it a read.

The Devil's Ark is an enjoyable piece of pulp-noir horror set in 1930s Iraq as a team of archaeologists attempt to excavate the ancient city of Nineveh. They are joined by photographer Harry Ward, who has been drifting around the world since his release from a mental institution that had been treating his WWI-induced PTSD, and now finds himself in the same region where he experienced that trauma. However his nightmares soon become the least of his worries as the team finds itself plagued by attacks of an apparently supernatural nature, and begin to clash among themselves as well.

The book is as good as you would expect from a writer who has devoted their career to the study of literature and language. Of course it's well-written, the characters are all well-defined and interact in a convincing manner, and the plot develops in a perfectly metered fashion as the tension builds (although contrary to the classic English teacher epithet, we are given a beginning, a middle and something that doesn't quite serve as an end). But what elevates it above being simply a technical exercise in fiction is the way the imagery interplays with the interior monologue, the exploration of mankind's darkest recesses (not surprising to anyone who has experienced one of his lessons on Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber) and a couple of genuinely hair-raising moments of pure horror. On reflection, it surpassed my expectations.

5/5

When it comes to 30s-inspired noir cool, this song serves as as good a soundtrack as any.

So that was 20 books for 2017. I think I was rash to say in my introductory post that I had ever fallen out of love with reading, because the love of it never went away. But I have certainly found that rearranging my life to make more room for it has been beneficial in a number of ways. With that in mind, my target for 2018 is to read just one book - David Foster Wallace's 1200-page juggernaut The Infinite Jest. I may review that here too if I haven't forgotten about all this by then.

Final ranking of all the books read this year, because I like to do that sort of thing:

1. Catch-22 - still yet to come across anything on its level.

2. Micromegas

3. Station Eleven

4. Hard To Be A God

5. The Devil's Ark

6. Anthem

7. Les Steine de la Castafiore

8. Ubik

9. The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds

10. Stories of Your Life and Others

11. Bricking It 

12. Morning Crafts

13. Wake

14. The Road to Little Dribbling

15. Distraction Pieces

16. The Devil Rides Out

17. A Brief History of Time

18. Rushing to Paradise

19. Make Something Up

20. Meditations

19 - Morning Crafts

When it comes to the arts (specifically music, film and literature), I've often been accused of having a slightly weird taste. As such, I've given some thought over the years to what can actually be classified as "weird" and whether the concept can even be defined in an objective sense. By dictionary definition, the word refers specifically to the supernatural, or in a more archaic manner to ideas of fate and destiny. Yet that doesn't seem to be quite in line with its modern usage, which relates more generally to anything outside of the usual, mainstream or everyday. But again there's another layer - hard to pin down - to the word that lends its usage to situations or ideas that instil a sense in those experiencing them that all is not quite right; so I suppose in that way the original definition has been retained.

With all that in mind, Tito Perdue's Morning Crafts is a truly, objectively weird book. Just as a start, for the purposes of this post I realised I would have to look up the publication date, as I was unable to place it at all, and consequently couldn't really put it in a wider context. The answer turned out to be 2012, much more recent than I would have guessed, and I believe not consistent with the period in which the book is set - although to work that out would be almost impossible, dealing as it does with ideas of a post-consumerist, post-service-industry-driven society that have only emerged since the turn of the millennium, but at the same time appearing to be set in the rural Alabama of a hundred years earlier. And that is far from the only contradiction of its kind. The struggle between old and new seeps into the very prose of the work, Perdue's writing at times lyrical and flowery, at others colloquial and comic, at still others all of the above at once.

The protagonist, Lee, appears in nearly all of Perdue's novels, and is apparently based on the author himself. Kidnapped one day from his farm in the Deep South, he finds himself inducted into a mysterious cult that forces the values of the study of the fine arts and aestheticism on the company of boys it brings in each year. Lee himself is a contradiction, seemingly hating every aspect of his education yet remaining committed to it all the same, attempting to escape on a regular basis yet returning just as soon as he has left the commune's limits without any coercion. It turns out that, despite his humble upbringing, he has something of a talent for classical literature and language, and before long finds himself protected among the cult's elite as his classmates begin to be consigned to working the fields. As a coming-of-age tale it doesn't really work, as Lee's rebellious attitude remains firm, and his successes seem to come as a result of nothing at all. I suspect Perdue's aim was rather to show that if you've got it, you've got it, although as Lee comes to the end of his journey uncertain of where to turn next, Perdue does say that he is too far removed from his origins to return.

The plot's conclusion is just as dichotomous - on the one hand, Perdue seems to be condemning the cult, placing as much emphasis as they do on pure theory rather than perhaps using their intellect to solve the abject poverty of the towns and communities that surround them, as well as highlighting the dangers of wilful isolation. But there is more than a hint of regret at the fact that there may soon no longer be any place for such ideals.

Otherwise, despite all the confusion brought about by the general weirdness of the book, Perdue's writing still made for very entertaining reading. It brought me right into the centre of a part of the world I know very little about and will probably never see, provided the occasional laugh-out-loud moment and left me considering the possibility of reading more of his works to see what happens next in Lee's life.

4/5

This song isn't particularly weird as they go - although the video certainly is - but for some reason this book reminded me of it a lot.