Furnace

A while back, I was looking to expand my fiction collection into areas in which previously I had not had much experience. A big one was horror in all its forms - from the gothic classics to modern cult works. I took NPR's semi-exhaustive list of the 100 best horror novels and stories of all time as my springboard - a list much debated in terms of its quality and completeness, but as I said this was uncharted territory for me, and so pretty much any source would do.

And so one book that caught my attention was Furnace. A collection of short stories by Alaskan writer Livia Llewellyn, I couldn't help but be drawn to the way the compilers over at NPR could talk about everything around it so enthusiastically, and yet seem to shy away from this one - ending with a simple warning: "read with care".

And they weren't wrong. Furnace certainly provided some of the darkest, most out-there writing I've ever come across. It actually doesn't get off to a great start; Panopticon is by far the least readable story of them all, an impenetrable mess of obscure prose with an unsatisfying build up - something about urban decay, I think? - and a conclusion that leaves more questions than answers. But once you get past that, there are some real masterpieces of the medium to be found. Llewellyn draws on the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, Chuck Palahniuk and most of all the queen of the genre, Angela Carter, as she weaves a host of confusing, spacey tales that remind us that the scariest thing of all is the unknown. Wasp & Snake reads like an Aesop's fable for the future, with a stern reminder of the importance of integrity. In the Court of King Cupressaceae, 1982 is cosmic horror at its bizarre best, and Allochthon at its most desolately heartbreaking. Better still were the stories that leaned to the side of comedy: Stabilimentum takes an amusing look at the things going on in the world that would be better left unexplored, The Last, Clean, Bright Summer twists Lovecraftian monster fiction into the perspective of a teenage girl - pagan birthing rituals are, like, so embarrassing - and my personal favourite It Feels Better Biting Down provided some genuine laughs as a pair of possibly supernaturally gifted twins bicker over who gets to keep their extra fingers, and whether they should tell their parents about the monstrous being they seem to be morphing into - after all, they're about to be called in for dinner. Lastly comes a much more straightforward piece of romantic fiction, from earlier in Llewellyn's career: The Unattainable recounts a chance meeting that turns into the satisfaction that a woman has spent her life searching for, but then finds herself needing more. It seems a bit incongruous, but is arguably the best written of the lot.

So there's plenty of diversity in the writing here, and in its themes and inspiration - but there are a few elements that link everything together. One is sex - unavoidable and in-your-face in every story, but still a lot more tasteful than you might imagine, and only occasionally tipping over into the territory of sleaze or shock factor. Llewellyn is certainly adept at moulding her prose style so as to transform the act into a primal, almost spiritual event. It's also worth noting that all of the protagonists here are female, and all interesting, well-developed characters - something lacking in a lot of what I read, but perhaps not in horror writing in general, which could be a reason to seek out more in this vein. And lastly, hanging in the background of everything here, is the dust and decay of America - of towns forgotten but still inhabited, of the vast expanses of emptiness, and of the lurking tide of nature always ready to reclaim what has never properly been taken away.

All in all it's an interestingly inconsistent, impressively written set of short stories that provided me with a fresh perspective on a field of literature not really on my radar - and I had to admire Furnace for that.

4/5

Earthy, eerie musings by a woman from the corner of the world? I'd go for this:

Manuscript Found in Accra

It's an odd game, translation. Give ten translators the same sentence and you can almost guarantee you'll end up with ten different translations - all of which may be perfectly valid. Because a big part of translating is interpretation of the text, deciding what the original writer would have wanted, but also understanding how your reader would want it to be reproduced. It was during my MA that I learned that Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho had been elevated from airport paperback-tier in his native country to a literary figure of world renown thanks largely to a very capable set of English translations that rendered his words far more highbrow than they had ever been in Portuguese. So it was that, despite my increasing proficiency in Portuguese, I thought that it might be best to start his back catalogue in English.

Manuscript Found in Accra is one book by Coelho that perhaps didn't need any help. While I can see that the translator may have had opportunity to make the prose more poetic or, dare I say it, biblical, in nature, it can't obscure the fact that the ideas on show here are certainly worthy of praise in their own right.

Following a brief contextual introduction that lays out what the book actually is - supposedly a set of parchments found in the Middle East in the early 20th Century - the majority is given over to the speeches of a mysterious figure known only as "The Copt" - a man of apparently Greek origin who finds himself in Jerusalem in 1099 AD, called on as a source of advice by Christians, Jews and Muslims alike as the Crusaders gather outside the walls of the city.

The book takes a loose call-and-response form, as members of the crowd ask The Copt about various topics and he answers at length. His speeches deal with things such as beauty, love, anxiety, the future... nothing that hasn't really been done before and in ways that seem lifted straight from the world's religious texts a lot of the time. A few select quotes should sum up:

"And to those who believe that adventures are dangerous I say, Try routine: that kills you far more quickly."

"What is success? It is being able to go to bed each night with your soul at peace."

"The enemy is not the person standing before you, sword in hand. It is the person standing next to you with a dagger concealed behind his back."

But as trite as it may have been a lot of the time, it's hard to criticise Manuscript Found in Accra, simply for the fact that it's worth being reminded of these simple truths from time to time - less is more, as it were.

So while the book didn't change my life, it did help me take a step back and remind me that a lot of the answers in life are things that we've always known deep down, and that humanity could probably gain a lot by falling back on them.

4/5

Otherwise summarised like this:

Passport to Magonia

Every now and then, there comes a time when you need to wander off the beaten track for a bit; a time when you need to read a book about aliens and fairies and other worlds and questions of what came before us and what will come next and what, if anything, it all means.

So, aliens. Do they exist? I mean, probably. Just based on probability it seems reasonable that somewhere out there in the universe - it is quite big after all - some sort of life has managed to arise somewhere other than Planet Earth. But have aliens come among us? Has an extraterrestrial race developed the technology and the desire to master intergalactic travel, the ability to appear in a form that we can comprehend, and then come to steal some chickens off a farmer in rural Mexico? Well, that seems a lot less likely, and personally I don't believe contact has ever been made. But there are a lot of people out there who do believe - and a not insignificant number who claim to have seen or even been directly contacted by beings not of this world. So what's going on?

In Passport to Magonia, Jacques Vallée has a pretty decent stab at finding an answer to that question. Published in 1968, the book received its fair share of criticism on release: from the scientific community who took offence at the idea that anyone would suggest that such a topic merited serious scientific discussion, but, more surprisingly, also from the increasingly established ufology community. The thing is, the thinking at the time was that the sudden increase in activity post-World War II was a direct result of humanity's foray into nuclear warfare - a higher power keeping an eye on us, so to speak (and it is undeniable that the flying-saucer-with-flashing-lights-and-little-green-men type of reports have come exclusively post-1945). But Vallée goes down a different path, suggesting that such incidents aren't evidence of extraterrestrial life at all, but instead a continuation of a much older idea, one that has permeated virtually every culture on Earth since before recorded history.

His theories do make a lot of sense - having recounted a handful of the most prominent UFO and alien abduction cases, he draws a pretty evident conclusion: that effectively no two reports have any single detail in common. From the physical description of the flying crafts themselves to the appearance and actions of the occupants that sometimes emerge from them, there is nothing but inconsistency. Some aliens are huge, some dwarf-like, some speak French, some English, some Spanish, some another, indecipherable language. Some don't speak at all but communicate telepathically. Some creatures are here to collect plants, seemingly on a mission of scientific exploration, some mutilate cows, some just sort of stand around and then disappear when people get too close. So clearly, if these are truly aliens, we are being bombarded from hundreds of different planets and the chances of wider contact being established should be almost a certainty. Vallée proposes a different approach, and drags up stories from the past showing parallels - and here the consistencies do start to add up - between reports of close encounters from the 20th Century and those of fairies, goblins and angels of centuries past. He demonstrates similarities between contact stories - from the ability of these beings to "freeze" humans, to their generally benevolent intentions, to witnesses' reports of lost time. There's also the fact that alien technology seems to be advancing at a similar rate to our own, and that almost any given culture has a similar legend somewhere in its history - and that reporters do tend to frame things in their own cultural context. Essentially, people see what they want to see - but they do seem to be seeing something. And what lends all this weight is that Vallée emphasises throughout that none of this should be taken as irrefutable evidence of the supernatural, or the extraterrestrial. He goes out of his way to shoot down the "ancient aliens" theory by stating that any stories or relics that may appear to be evidence from that time can be dismissed as exaggerations or simply made up. And moving forward, he says that reports of fairies or aliens aren't necessarily any more true. But the sheer weight of material cannot be disputed: whatever the reason, there is something within humanity's consciousness that, throughout the ages, has resulted in people seeing things that they cannot explain, and that a serious, scientific investigation of the phenomenon could reveal some fundamental truths about humanity.

The second half of the book is given over to a compendium of a huge range of "flying saucer" reports since the mid-19th Century. This I found less interesting; it did, however, confirm how global these sightings are, and the wild discrepancies in accounts - craft range from half a metre to a hundred metres across, and aliens from 30 centimetres to 4 metres tall - it just can't all be the same thing. And a lot can be explained away by the usual means: experimental aircraft, weather balloons, owls, hallucinations or just plain old storytelling. But the volume of reports, the range of witnesses, some of whom really have nothing to gain, and the occasional, intriguing similarity, all add up to a curious read.

Passport to Magonia is completely unlike anything I have read, but it's not without its flaws. A lot of Vallée's sources are questionable at best, although to his credit he does admit this; The Flying Saucer Review may be a legitimate publication but it's far from a neutral one. And he does damage his credibility somewhat with a tendency to sensationalise - sometimes even resorting to outlandish 60s-style clickbait within his own chapters. Several phrases along the lines of "after reading this account, I'm sure the reader will be amazed" left a lot to be desired.

Half a century on, I wonder if Vallée would have written a very different book today. In a much smaller world where everyone can get video evidence at a moment's notice, we're still not really any closer to finding out the truth; but it all seems a little less plausible. Nonetheless, I can't help but feel he had something resembling a point here, and that there are indeed aspects of human nature that haven't been adequately explored.

4.5/5

Then again it was the 1960s, so maybe everyone was just on drugs.

Fast Philosophy

Why do I read? Well, a big reason I forced myself back into the habit just over two years ago was because I felt that there were a lot of areas of knowledge out there that I had left untouched. And so over the past two weeks, I went from 0 to 100 in lightning speed on a subject that I had barely any concept of before: philosophy.

Fast Philosophy is a collaboration between  British-German writer Adam Fletcher and plain-German writer Lukas Egger, promising to cover the entirety of western philosophy in one hundred short, accessible mini-essays - with humour thrown in too. It seemed like as good a place as any to start.

I'll start by getting one thing out of the way - this book isn't particularly funny. I know humour is subjective and means different things to different people, but 99% of the jokes that are shoehorned into the chapters of Fast Philosophy are derivative, unoriginal or just plain predictable. This I found to be quite distracting at times, albeit not to the extent of getting in the way of the point of the book. And there were a handful of genuinely good one-liners lurking in there as well - "with great power comes big power bills" is one that has stuck in my mind.

But to disparage on this count is to ignore the actual purpose of the book; and as an accessible crash-course in the key themes of philosophy from its inception to the present day, it does a fantastic job. Starting, as one should, with the Greeks, moving through the Romans (with their extremes of stoicism and hedonism) and the soul-searching Germans to some of the problems and paradoxes currently occupying the world's thinkers. The likes of Confucius, Bertrand Russell and even David Foster Wallace get a look-in. Given that the fundamental questions of our existence - ethics, logic, God - are covered, as well as quite a bit that's not generally seen until degree level, the learning curve was steep, but everything was set out so neatly and concisely that I never struggled to keep up. All in all, a huge amount of information is conveyed in a very short space of time, but I quickly got into the flow of it, and my performance on the end-of-book quiz - 25 out of 30 - suggests that most of it stayed in too.

It is testament to the authors' skill that they are able to summarise so well and so clearly. Yes, it's limited, but I do now feel as though I have a solid basic knowledge of a topic on which I was previously very much under-informed.

4/5

And this goes even faster:

Crime and Punishment

Another year, another essential novel ticked off the list. It has become my aim to start each new year of my life with a book that I really should have read by now, no matter how long a read. 2019 kicked off 150 years in the past, with Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, a seminal work in that vast ocean of Russian literature so unexplored by me.

I was actually not unfamiliar with Dostoevsky's works going into it, having read a short story collection, you guessed it, somewhere between the ages of 16 and 18. Two stuck in my mind: White Nights and its heartbreaking depictions of loneliness, and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, a nihilistic examination into human nature. Crime and Punishment is quite substantially longer and more developed, but manages to draw on similar themes.

Written after the author had returned from exile in Siberia, the novel follows the misfortunes of Rodion Raskolnikov (or is it Rodya? Every character has at least two names used interchangeably, which took some getting used to) as he grapples with the turmoil of his own mind. Initially suffering from delusions of grandeur, he convinces himself that murder for the purpose of stealing money could be the catalyst that gets him out of his impoverished student life and on the way to the fame and fortune that he deserves. But having committed the titular crime, the resulting guilt and anxiety send him into a nervous breakdown as he fears capture and debates whether to confess. With the room of a full novel to breathe, Dostoevsky's prose finds opportunity to wander and the result is an often excruciating, relentless cascade of inner monologues. Everyone, it seems, has something to hide or something to prove in the claustrophobic yet impersonal city of St. Petersburg.

If this all sounds a bit heavy, well, it was a lot of the time; after all, we're dealing with some serious subject matter. But it's kept afloat by the writing. Thanks to an adventurous translation (I couldn't help but smile at characters threatening to "brain" each other), it's still an easier read than most of what was written around that time - looking at you, Dickens - and Dostoevsky ramps up the sensationalism and plot twists throughout. The dialogue is just brilliant at times ("you trashy Prussian chicken leg in a crinoline" is my line of the year already), we're treated to probably the best account of the hangover-induced "fear" ever committed to paper, and the series of love triangles, blackmailing and subterfuge that make up the secondary plots are worthy of kitchen sink drama.

And if all this sounds fun, well, it was a lot of the time. But I couldn't help feeling that there was something about this book that held me back from fully enjoying or appreciating it. It dawned on me about two-thirds of the way through, in fact: this is a novel about a time in a place that I will never truly be able to identify with. It's Russia, in all its grim glory: arrogance and alcoholism, poverty and pretension, hunger and God, political engagement and the revolutionary spirit. Crime and punishment - punishment being the very real threat of hard labour in Siberia. Communism, communism, communism - although it was still 50 years or so from becoming a reality, the foundations are clear to see in the ideas of many of the characters. It's an existence that I, in my detached house in the comfortable Anglo-sphere, will never have to endure. And unfortunately, while I was able to appreciate Crime and Punishment as a great piece of writing, there was always that detachment.

I won't give up on the Russian classics just yet - there's a lot out there and Anna Karenina beckons - but Crime and Punishment didn't quite top the list.

4/5

WITH RUSSIA FROM LOVE

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.