The Iron Heel

Another month, another work of classic science fiction ticked off the increasingly stable list. This time, it was Jack London's 1908 (a fact I only learned while researching this post - I guessed it had been written around 20 years later - and one that has given me a new perspective on the book) dystopian novel The Iron Heel.

London sets the book up in the form of a personal account written by an aristocratic woman, Avis, at the turn of the century who falls for an aspiring socialist politician, Ernest Everard - both romantically and for his ideas. This is framed in turn in the perspective of a 27th-century historian who has discovered the manuscript, and is interpreting it in the context of a world where humanity has finally got its collective act together and eradicated social inequality. As sci-fi goes, it's fairly soft, and for the majority it felt a lot more like a political manifesto by London and a speculative prediction of future conflicts.

The book starts slowly, as Ernest sets out his ideology in lengthy detail, always having an answer to any attempts to discredit his plans by the upper class company he finds himself a part of. There's something to be said for his idealistic vision of humanity as one, cooperating for the greater good and sharing wealth rather than a handful of monopolies hoarding it; but at the same time there's just something slightly irritating about the way London has written this character as a kind of socialist superman, immune to criticism and blessed with 20:20 vision for the future. Anyway, Avis is sold on what he says after witnessing first-hand the ways in which the capitalist system of America has failed so many of the working class, and decides to support him in his assault on the political system. When a number of Socialist Party politicians are elected to the senate but then arrested by The Man, the movement becomes a revolution as Avis and Ernest lead the increasingly aggressive charge against the government. The government fights back to protect their own interests (and money) and civil war ensues; at first largely covert, but then increasingly violent. We finally get some actual action in the last couple of chapters, a wonderfully surreal street battle in Chicago between government mercenaries, revolutionary agents and the chaotic blunt force of the rioting underclass.

All in all, I wasn't hugely impressed by this book. It's not long by any standards, but it certainly felt like it - London's writing plodding along as he pontificates through his mouthpiece of Ernest at great length. The futuristic footnotes serve more to interrupt the narrative than to complement it and the ending, while perhaps realistic, was a huge letdown. But as I said earlier, the fact that this was written so long ago does change things - with the hindsight of two world wars and a global economic collapse, it's likely London would have produced a very different book even ten years further down the line.

And it's not as if it's not relevant at all today: in fact, it feels like we're even further away from successfully breaking down the system of corporate influence and self-interest that keeps the poor poor and makes the rich increasingly richer - and that all of the problems that go along with that are far from being solved.

2.5/5

Raging against the machine, vintage style.

The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold: Adventures Along the Iron Curtain Trail

It had been a few months since I'd read any non-fiction, and so as the long winter nights started to draw closer and the weather finally started to take a turn for the worse, I decided to take a look at a book that would put those issues in perspective.

The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold: Adventures Along the Iron Curtain Trail is journalist Tim Moore's account of his utterly insane - but ultimately successful - attempt to cycle the length of EuroVelo's EV13 cycling route, better known as the Iron Curtain Trail. Starting at the top of Norway in the depths of winter and emerging in Turkey months later, having ridden 9000km through 19 countries, Moore documents his trip in agonising detail.

There's a lot crammed in to around 350 pages here - from the woeful inadequacy of Moore's bike (built in East Germany in the 1980s for short-distance use), to the tremendous physical and mental strain that such an undertaking entails, to the vast shadow of recent history that still looms over the entire region. Moore chooses to focus principally on the latter, and while his tales of dealing with murderous lorry drivers, aggressive dogs and the perils of saying the wrong thing in the wrong place never wear thin, it is his assessment of the successes and eventual failings of communism and the way this has affected the people, culture and even physical appearance of Eastern Europe into the present day that elevate this above your standard travel journal.

The obvious comparison is Bill Bryson, and while Tim Moore does come close to emulating that style of humour, there's more to be said for this book. Moore does a wonderful job of relaying the maddening tedium and frustration of slogging through Finnish snow for hours on end, and the strangely comparable feeling of slogging up and down Balkan mountains in brain-melting heat. He also has a knack for capturing the essence of a people - from the resolutely serious Finns to the surprisingly laid-back Serbs by way of Germans who live up to every stereotype - and the way in which nearly all of them are friendly and welcoming to a stranger in a way that is much rarer in the West. And he makes sure to put the national moods of the present in their proper historical context. It was these passages that I found most interesting of all - for instance, how the Finnish army held off the Russians for over a year at the start of World War II despite being outnumbered effectively ten to one, or how Romania is still yet to recover from Nicolae Ceausescu's utterly hopeless economic policies. While he does not hesitate to criticise the effects of communism on the area based on a solid foundation of growing up in '70s and '80s Britain, there are moments where he admits there were positives, and in fact seems to have reconsidered his position by the end of the book having met so many people who aren't necessarily any better off today.

All in all, while The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold works on its own as an entertaining yarn about Europe's toughest road trip, it goes much deeper as an analysis of just how varied and perhaps divided the continent still is.

4/5

A bicycle can be many things, even a musical instrument...

The Great God Pan

As Halloween approaches, I thought I'd go vaguely thematic and expand my reading within the classic horror canon. Something that shouldn't take too long, as a lot of the new collection I have since acquired clocks in at well under 100 pages - including Arthur Machen's 1894 novella The Great God Pan. And as Stephen King has described it as "maybe the best horror story in the English language", the top of the pile seemed like a good place to start.

Machen wrote the story in parts through the 1890s, which perhaps explains its rather disjointed structure - jumping forward years at a time following a brilliant opening scene where an eccentric - dare I say it, mad - gentleman scientist performs an experiment on one of his servants that allows her to witness the spirit world before rendering her insensible. This first chapter sold the book to me with its melodramatic gothic tone; which is a shame because the rest of the novella, written after the opening had already been published, didn't really follow on. Instead we are treated to a series of episodes, firstly detailing the scientist's companion Clarke's obsession with the Devil, then a meeting between Clarke's friend Villiers and an old acquaintance who has been ruined by a marriage to a woman who he claims destroyed his soul. It is this latter thread that fills the remainder of the 70-odd pages, as it emerges that this woman has made quite an impression on everyone who has met her. Then, as various young aristocrats are found dead by their own hand, Clarke and Villiers start to join the dots and realise that this woman may not even be a woman at all...

The ending does do a reasonable job of rounding everything up, and I found Machen's writing style extremely entertaining: overflowing with Victorian poeticism without tipping over into the hyperbole that makes the likes of Dickens such a chore to read for me, and ultimately bordering on genius after the state of The '86 Fix. But overall I felt The Great God Pan had too much of a tendency to drift from the points it was trying to make, falling for the classic horror writing trap of "this thing was so horrific words cannot describe it" but then knocking down even the idea of this otherness with a pair of omnipotent protagonists who deduce and then solve all the problems presented to them without a second thought.

All in all, though, this was a fun little book that delved into some genuinely esoteric themes. And most of all I found it an almost comforting throwback to a bygone age, of a London society where everyone knew each other's affairs and where the biggest fear really was the Devil and his ability to tempt the innocent. A very English Devil too - as per the Bible, but with his roots much further back in the pagan tradition. No jump scares or gore, but The Great God Pan did manage to deliver the chills in its own way.

4/5

This caused just as much of a stir in the late 1800s, and for much the same reasons.

The '86 Fix

I had been feeling as though my reading was getting a bit serious lately, so decided to dive as far down the intellectual spectrum as my collection allowed. But I went too far, much too far...

Keith A. Pearson's The '86 Fix is, on paper, exactly my kind of book - a sci-fi comedy escapade in which a middle aged man is transported back in time to his teenage years and is given 48 hours to preemptively-with-hindsight right the mistakes he made at the time and hopefully end up much happier and more successful in future - distancing himself from the school bully who is about to fire him, preventing an unhappy marriage and perhaps even saving lives. And yes, it is all of the above things, but Pearson manages to obscure what should be an interesting (if not hugely original) concept behind walls of atrocious writing.

Maybe I'm elitist, maybe I'm spoiled by having had the opportunity to read a lot of classic literature, maybe I should have tried harder to put the issue to one side, but this is a relentlessly badly-written book. The protagonist, Craig Pelling, sees fit to spell out his every thought and emotion, relevant or not, explains his life in painstaking detail and describes his teenage mistakes to the extent that the solutions he eventually comes up with - and it's not until a ludicrous 50% of the way through the book that he actually travels back in time - are predictable long before they happen. What should be easy prose drags drearily on (at one point we are treated to a description of putting on trousers that essentially amounts to "I put my right leg in one hole. Then I put my left leg in the other hole."), there isn't a single likeable character to be found, and while the action taking place in the past is slightly more compelling, Pearson fills the second half with further events that hadn't even been hinted at before, leading to a cut-and-shut plot that then comes abruptly to a halt in a somewhat rushed manner. All in all, it made the likes of Nick Spalding read like Oscar Wilde - low-rent, easy-reading comedy can be done well in the right hands.

Couple that with endless forced references to '80s Britain - it's set 5 years before I was born and I've never heard of the likes of Texas Bars or Quarto soft drink, so they can't have left that much of a mark on the nation - and The '86 Fix was a book that I just couldn't get on with. And yet I finished it, so have to give Pearson some credit in terms of just about keeping the action rolling along. There was the occasional humorous moment or memorable one-liner, and Pearson does do a good job of portraying a character who knows his flaws and can't help but dwell on them. I hate to admit it, but the ending did leave me wanting closure, so I will probably slog through the sequel at some point in future.

1.5/5

So. Many. References.

Nocturnes

As much as I enjoyed Blood Meridian, I felt the need to follow it with something slightly less heart-stoppingly brutal. Kazuo Ishiguro's short(ish) story collection Nocturnes seemed just right - selling itself as "five stories of music and nightfall" it sounded about as relaxing as reading gets.

I should have known better. I read Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go a while back and found it a hugely uncomfortable experience - a truly insidious exercise in drip-feeding the reader with information and implications about the disturbing world its characters live in, and the realisation that they know something is wrong with it but don't know why, and choose to accept it anyway.

While Nocturnes is much more grounded in reality, all of these things are still present. The five stories are really variations on a theme, all dealing with potential unfulfilled, opportunities missed and marriages falling apart. Ishiguro again leads the reader into his situations slowly, which of course makes things worse - it's much more painful to have things torn apart bit by bit than to see them shattered. The result is a thought-provoking but ultimately melancholy set of stories, and things aren't helped by the fact that all of them are left largely unresolved.

But that's not to say that there's nothing to enjoy here - as both a music lover and a musician I appreciated the way in which Ishiguro fixated on the release that music can provide, as well as how it can easily become an obsession for those who see it as the only thing for them. And of course it's well written, with the occasional touch of gentle humour and the feeling that, for all misfortune that befalls his characters, the author does feel some empathy towards them.

Time to read something more fun, though.

3.5/5

Nocturnes don't get much better than this:

Blood Meridian

Since discovering how broad the field of literature really is around the age of 16, I have always been on the lookout for books that challenge me, both as a reader and in terms of my view of the world. Often touted among the most important writers of the late modernist era, a foray into the works of Cormac McCarthy was long overdue. Cited by many as his best work, Blood Meridian was the obvious choice.

Make no mistake, this is a spectacularly brilliant piece of writing. McCarthy adapts the supposedly true (but almost certainly exaggerated) journal of Samuel Chamberlain, a former soldier who rode with a band of outlaws in the mid-19th Century, adding in a fictional anti-hero protagonist ("the kid") and presumably augmenting still further the real-life John Glanton, the gang's ruthless leader, and Judge Holden, a mysterious figure who travels with them. But more than that, Blood Meridian is a treatise on human nature, the birth of America, and notions of good and evil.

The violence in this book is relentless. From the very start, the kid finds himself stumbling from one violent encounter to the next, beginning with bar fights and working his way up to riding with Glanton's crew for the majority of the book as they tear through the southwestern states destroying everything and everyone in their path. But for all the scalpings and massacres, headshots and hangings, not once does McCarthy set out to shock or appal with his prose or plot; he merely reports as a passive bystander, his characters bearing unfeeling witness to the atrocities before them - be they perpetrated by the characters themselves or merely a reminder of the myriad other tragic stories that are occurring elsewhere in this brutal world. It must be said that the quality of life in that area at that time was actually a lot better than what we are shown here, but McCarthy still provides a stark reminder of how comfortable we have become in the modern world, and perhaps how far we have yet to go.

The prose is relentless, plodding along without a single superfluous word like a mule through the desert - or perhaps like a vulture circling its prey. I don't think I have ever read a book so focused on maintaining its writing style, as bleak and barren as the worlds that McCarthy describes, and, in so being, as unfathomable and alien as well. The kid may be the main character, but we are not provided with so much as an interior monologue - in fact, entire chapters go by where he is not mentioned at all. Glanton is likewise a singular character, motivated only by his own personal gain, not afraid to kill with no questions asked and indiscriminate in the frontier justice that he and his men dish out. Far more intriguing, however, is the Judge: a man as bizarre in appearance as he is in character. Standing over seven foot tall, entirely hairless and possessing the strength to wield a cannon with his bare hands, he is also an expert linguist, chemist, philosopher, musician and naturalist. As the plot wears on, he begins to expand more on his world view, hinting at a supernatural background as he pontificates on the nature of the universe, extraterrestrial life and the origins of man. It's quite possible that he is meant to be an incarnation of Satan himself, or perhaps a combination of God and Satan, as he serves as judge, jury and executioner throughout - or perhaps he is merely a man driven increasingly mad by the death and carnage around him.

I thought that, in Infinite Jest, I had read the most thought-provoking book I would see for a long time, but Blood Meridian is right up there with it, in a much more convenient and satisfying package. This is a fascinating study into humanity's violent upbringing, the nature of man (or perhaps, more accurately, of men), and the huge questions of existence, belief and perception.

5/5

The Wild West has never been so metal.

Chess

Faced with the prospect of an eight-hour flight recently, I thought it might be wise to take some reading material that would keep me occupied for a decent amount of time. Stefan Zweig's 1942 novella Chess seemed like a solid bet - an intriguing-sounding study into obsession, memory and isolation that would also bring me back to the German-language fiction that I had been neglecting since my degree. And while I was finished with the book in just over an hour, it certainly kept my mind working for much longer.

Chess opens with the story of a chess prodigy, Mirko Czentovic, discovered in rural Eastern Europe, who learns the game after watching his father play and becomes world champion only a decade later. Our narrator, with an amateur interest in the game, happens to find himself sharing a cruise ship with the grandmaster and does his best to lure him into a game. He first manages to gather a group of fellow enthusiasts who are eager to join forces against the champion. Not forgetting his impoverished upbringing, or perhaps due to simple greed, Czentovic agrees only upon payment to take the group on, and wins the first game easily. The second game appears to be heading the same way until a voice pipes up from the crowd, advising the players and eventually leading Czentovic into checkmate. Amazed that the world champion could have been beaten by a complete unknown, the narrator tracks down the man, and learns his identity - a wealthy Austrian monarchist who had been kept as a political prisoner by the Nazis until quite recently. It was during this time, in solitary confinement in a hotel room, that he became an expert on chess - managing one day to steal a book laying out various historic games, he saw his only escape from insanity would be to play out each game, and then to learn them. Soon he tires of the games in the book and begins to play against himself, his personality gradually splitting into black and white as he becomes increasingly obsessed with trying to beat himself. The result is a mental breakdown that turns out to be his salvation as he is moved to a sanitorium and then released.

The length of the summary above is testament to the quality of Zweig's narrative - despite weighing in at just over 70 pages, there are very few moments in Chess that can be dispensed with without losing part of what the book is actually about. Zweig writes in a clear and concise style, saying precisely what he needs to say in exploring the depths of the human mind and the dangers of being alone with one's thoughts - as the prisoner rematches against Czentovic, it becomes clear that his fanaticism has done him more harm than good. Yet as cold and grim as all this sounds, Chess was not an unenjoyable read, an interesting insight into a time now almost forgotten and an exercise in how what could have been a good novel turned out better as a drum-tight novella.

4/5

As inappropriate as it may be for such weighty subject matter, I couldn't think of anything but this...