God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

When I was a teenager, I read - in hindsight, much too early in my life, a re-read is required - Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. When I was 18 or so, in that period where I read so, so many good things, his Slaughterhouse Five landed second on my all-time list of favourite books, where it has remained to this day. A few years later on, I waded through the supremely bizarre Breakfast of Champions which, while fun, just seemed to be trying a bit too hard to follow Slaughterhouse Five.

And now onto God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Sitting neatly in Vonnegut's bibliography between Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five, it charts the life of unwilling billionaire Eliot Rosewater as he becomes disillusioned with New York high society and decides to relocate to a small town in Indiana, in a county named for his family, where he dispenses good advice and occasionally money to anyone who needs it. Elsewhere a scheming lawyer in the employment of Eliot's senator father decides that this behaviour is sufficient grounds for Eliot to be declared insane, whereupon his fortune will be handed back to the family - the lawyer standing to make a tidy profit in the process. And then we are introduced to another Rosewater family in Rhode Island, much less well off but in fact distantly related to Eliot, who would stand to inherit his fortune - if only Fred Rosewater would open up the family history that has been sitting unread on his shelf since the death of his father.

As Vonnegut novels go, this was remarkably normal. Without aliens popping up out of nowhere or sudden shifts in time to derail the narrative, as enjoyable as that is in his other works, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater plants itself firmly in the real world, dealing with real problems - the distribution of wealth in America, the pressures of the class system, the little neuroses that go unchecked and build to something more in pretty much everyone. It belies the book's 1965 publication date that, quite clearly, it's not Eliot who is insane but society, man. Yet for all the political jabs that Vonnegut aims at the higher-ups and the working class alike, the overall tone is really quite soft. Yes it's still a cynical book, like all the rest; but it's a much gentler, more world-weary (or perhaps even optimistic) cynicism - laced with the feeling that answers to all these problems can be found, if only everyone would stop navel-gazing for a minute. And Vonnegut throws in profound pearls of wisdom at an almost comical rate, right up until the surprisingly happy ending.

So while God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater isn't as well remembered as a lot of Vonnegut's other books, for me it sits up there with the best. It's thought-provoking, funny, sad and does a sterling job of restoring faith in human nature.

4.5/5

Essentially, this.

The Road to Mars

As another year of commitment to expanding my reading horizons drew to a close, I was in the mood for something light - and a sci-fi comedy about comedy itself by one of comedy's greats seemed like a safe bet. I wasn't really aware of Eric Idle as a novelist, but was certainly familiar with his work as a writer, and as he was responsible for a lot of the more memorable moments in Monty Python's rather mixed history, I went into The Road to Mars with reasonably high expectations.

The Road to Mars operates on three levels. Most of all, it is a space-bound adventure reminiscent of the classic science fiction of the 50s and 60s, following two stand-up comedians as they venture through the Solar System trying to make a name for themselves but ultimately becoming embroiled in an interplanetary terrorist plot. They encounter a host of bizarre characters on the way and, like a lot of good sci-fi, the world(s) that develop around them serve to reflect satirically back on our own. At the same time, Idle uses the duo's android secretary Carlton as a mouthpiece to expound on his own theories on comedy's place in human nature - what actually counts as comedy, why we feel the need to laugh, and whether we should at all - as the robot breaks unprecedented ground by attempting to understand emotion in an academic thesis. The third strand follows a scholar decades after the main events who discovers Carlton's manuscript and attempts to pass it off as his own.

As much as the main plot is compelling, Carlton's theories are genuinely profound and the scholar's journey from adaptation to outright plagiarism is amusing to anyone who has written an essay, the result is a book that feels somehow both bloated and incomplete. Idle crams an awful lot of characters into just over 300 pages, some of them more memorable than others but all with detailed motivations, to the extent that the actual plot is a lot more complicated than it needed to be, and hard to follow at times; the ending also feels rushed and doesn't really do the build-up justice. The passages set further on in the future seemed almost like an afterthought, and a tougher editing process might have removed them altogether. But while the writing lacked the thick-and-fast humour of the likes of Life of Brian, there were still a lot of enjoyable set pieces and one-liners to be found, and as a sci-fi reader it was fun to take in a comedic reinterpretation of the cornerstones of the genre (Asimov, Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke spring most immediately to mind) by a writer who is clearly a fan himself.

But really these points pale into insignificance when taken alongside Idle's dissertation on comedy that runs in and out of the plot proper. He goes deep - from discussions on the evolutionary foundations of laughter to cultural variations in comedy, by way of why people end up becoming comedians and why society feels a need for them. There are some moments that give real pause for thought, but best of all is Carlton's "unified theory of comedy" - the idea that, while gravity is the force that allows the universe to exist, by nature it must be counterbalanced by its opposite: levity. Not only does it make sense as a concept, I can't help but feel that a lesser writer would have shied away from actually resolving the robot's search for the answer.

So while The Road to Mars tries to do and be too much at once, it does succeed in a lot of ways, and Idle has to be applauded for that.

4/5

Eric Idle is the second author since I started doing this to perform the song linked to his book - the first being Stephen Hawking with a song by... Eric Idle. Funny how the universe lines up like that.

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: