The Method to My Madness Part Two, or Yellowcake Springs: 40 in 40

I did it – I completed 40,000 words of my new novel Yellowcake Springs in 40 days, leaving me one more day of my summer holiday to bask in glory. I’ll get to basking in a minute. It was a struggle for much of this time and there were a dozen reasons why I could have given up, but I didn’t, so now I’m the proud owner of 138 double spaced pages of print. Yippee.

The madness is  in thinking that all of this means something, that I am (or at least might be) on the road to success, even if I can’t write an entire novel in 28 days or less – not without the relevant CD anyway The madness is in attempting to write a novel when you’ve got six weeks of freedom only, and by freedom I mean about two hours in the morning when my wife frees me from the need to look after my 3 and 1 year-old children. That’s the mad part.

The method is in having adapted my writing to fit around the strictures of my workaday existence.  I am now in the habit of writing novels over the course of two very distinct six week blocks, over the period of two years. I wrote The Kingdom of Four Rivers in Dec 06/Jan 07 and Dec 07/Jan 08 (with revision taking me up to April 08), and now it looks like I might be able to write Yellowcake Springs in Dec 08/Jan 09 (done) and Dec 09/Jan 10. I’m actually starting to like this method, as it gives me several months to chew over what I’ve done already with a view to preparing for the second stint. I’m relieved NOT to have the time to continue now, for I’m very definitely out of steam (and out of planning). So now I’ll turn my attention to my job for a while, and leave the subconscious to do the work I know it can.

Book Review – Shadow Lines by Stephen Kinnane

Shadow Lines is another book I hadn’t intended on reading. It’s a memoir written in recent times by Stephen Kinnane, whose grandparents were a very interesting couple indeed. This is part family history, part history of the oppression of Aboriginal people in Western Australia in the twentieth century. The two topics are intertwined. This is an imposing book – dense, heavy and sometimes ponderous – but it is well worth reading for anyone interested in Western Australian history or the struggle of Aboriginal people in this country.

Shadow Lines revolves around two people born a world apart, a half caste Aboriginal woman by the name of Jessie Argyle, and an Englishman named Edward Smith. Edward was born in 1891 and emigrated to Australia in 1909 as an eighteen year-old. Jessie was born in the Argyle region in the far north of Western Australia in 1900, and was taken from her family in 1906 under the newly created Aborigines Act of 1905. This book makes the often dry history of Western Australia since white colonisation come alive, and is probably a far better way to learn about the sordid history of this state than by way of the official history textbooks.

What Kinnane has done here is weave together a rich tapestry of historical tales, often with a fair degree of creative interpretation. It’s not quite a straight historical text but it certainly isn’t fiction either. One strand narrates Smith’s life, which was already half over by the time he met the woman who would eventually be his wife. This is moderately interesting, but no more. More interesting are the trials of Jessie Argyle, who was forced to live in places such as the Swan Valley Mission, various towns across the state, and the notorious Moore River Aboriginal Settlement. The third strand concerns Kinnane’s own travels across the state in meeting the surviving members of the earlier generation, many of whom are Kinnane’s own relatives. In doing so, Kinnane manages to turn the lives of his grandparents into an initally slow but ultimately very compelling story.

In the course of our reading, we learn a great many things about the oppression of Aboriginal people in the twentieth century, from the concentration camp that was the Moore River Settlement, to the Prohibition Zone that existed around the centre of Perth from 1927 to 1954, to the draconian regime of the Aborigines Department under A. O. Neville. Neville is this story’s antagonist. Kinnane invests a lot of time explaining how Neville’s actions in curtailing and controlling the lives of thousands of people went beyond the call of duty. According to Kinnane, Neville was more than a man of his time, but in fact a dictator carving out his own empire. This is a very depressing read at times, but ultimately uplifting in the sense that Jessie Argyle eventually sees the end of Neville. If Neville is the antagonist, then Jessie is the protagonist, and we cheer her life’s victories and lament her defeats. Jessie Argyle is a heroic figure in this story, and we can share Kinnane’s admiration for his grandmother.

There’s not much more to say. This feels like an inadequate review, but let me end simply by saying that I found Shadow Lines to provide an extremely interesting slice of twentieth century history, and one that sheds considerable light on the plight of Aboriginal people during this time. I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting to know more about the history of Western Australia, or the struggle of Aboriginal people more generally.

Book Review – The Wall of America by Thomas M. Disch

It’s taken me more than ten years, but I’ve finally ‘discovered’ Thomas M. Disch. Camp Concentration didn’t do it for me, I had mixed feelings about 334, but I’m proud to report that some of the stories in The Wall of America are among the best I’ve ever read. There are 19 stories in this volume, published over the space of around two decades. Many originally featured in science fiction magazines such as Interzone or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and others in literary journals such as The Hudson Review. Disch’s often uneasy blend of SF and literary fiction served partly to alienate him from both communities, much to his personal detriment. And yet he is one of the most intelligent and urbane writers I’ve ever read. Such is the paradoxical nature of the man and his work, and the fickle nature of the fields he worked in.

To the stories themselves: I felt that the volume’s best work was near the beginning, and as such I thought at one stage that I would enjoy all 19 stories in the book. It wasn’t to be: Disch is a far too varied and often idiosyncratic writer to please everyone every time. “The White Man” seemed to be set in the sort of perilous near-future Disch made his own stomping ground in 334. In it, a young Somali girl in the U.S. is stalked by a strange white man. The story has a devastating ending. “The Wall of America” is about a wall between the U.S. and Canada, which is used by artists in search of physical space and headspace. Very intruiging. “Ringtime” was a more traditional SF story, but an outstanding one. “The Owl and the Pussycat” was not only my favourite story here but one of the best pieces of work I’ve had the privilege to read. Ever. I can’t describe it, except to say that the reader’s mental picture changes several times over the course of the story. This is masterful writing. “Canned Goods” is a throwaway joke of a story, but it’s a good joke. And “The Abduction of Bunny Steiner, or, A Shameless Lie” is an amusing satire on Whitley Streiber and other UFO nuts.

Then I put the book down. This isn’t the sort of thing you can read all at once. These stories are dense, highly intellectual and will require further reading to appreciate fully. I don’t often feel that a writer is ‘over my head’ intellectually, but Disch sometimes gives me that feeling. Not only was he a supremely talented writer, but he must surely have been one of the most intelligent writers of his generation too. Intelligence and writing ability are not always one and the same, but they found a brain to share in Thomas Disch’s head.  Some of these stories missed the mark for me, often due to their flippant tones and annoyingly irreverent treatment of their subject matter. “A Family of the Post-Apocalypse,”  “Three Chronicles of Xglotl and Rwang,”  and “Torah! Torah! Torah! Three Bible Tales for the Third Millennium” fit this category for me. In the latter of these, it may simply be my ignorance of matters Biblical that was at fault.

The rest was variable. I especially liked the biting satire “The Man Who Read a Book.” This is a must-read. “Painting Eggplants” was interesting, if understated. And “The First Annual Performance Art Festival at the Slaughter Rock Battlefield” is so complex that I will certainly have to read it again, more closely this time. The Wall of America is a triumph, and yet I can see why Disch didn’t reach the audience he intended to reach. He was simply too bright and too multifaceted to capture mainstream attention.

I’ve been meaning to pick up Disch’s last novel, The Word of God, from Planet Books in Mt. Lawley, but now I read that my beloved Philip K. Dick is the book’s antagonist! I think. For some reason there was no love lost between Dick and Disch. The matter perplexes me…

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On the writing front, I’m up to 35,000 words in 33 days. I could probably make it to 45,000 in the 8 days left of my holidays, but I’m starting to run out of steam, so I’ll probably stop at 40,000.

Book Review – Poor Things by Alasdair Gray

I hadn’t intended on reading Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things, but now I’m glad I did. I picked it up in a second hand bookstore in Geraldton in the course of my travels, not having read a word of Gray. I have heard of him, however; his Lanark is fairly famous in the dusty halls of the history of science fiction. The other reason I picked this up was because, flicking through it, I saw that it had a number of weird and interesting illustrations and photographs. I have attained the station in life where a great deal of what I find before me (be it on the television, computer or in the street) bores me utterly, so I now have a policy that if something doesn’t appear to be of particular interest to me, I will look at it if it appears genuinely weird, strange or different from the run of the mill. And my sensors were wondering on this occasion, for I found Poor Things to be interesting and weird.

What we have here is a gothic tale set in Scotland in the second half of the 19th century, and a plot that owes a lot to Frankenstein and other ghoulish creations. In it, Archibald McCandless, M.D., falls in love with an initially childish but beautiful woman by the name of Bella Baxter. She lives with an ogre-ish but good man called Godwin Baxter. Bella Baxter herself is a creation of Godwin: he took her drowned body, removed the dying foetus, and splices the infant’s brain with the woman’s body, creating a wholly new woman. Right-o. These three form a bizarre triangle, and the novel revolves around them. In the course of their adventures (primarily Bella’s adventures) we are privy to a good deal of gallivanting around Europe and further afield, a fair few stormy relationships and even some scenes in a casino. Pretty routine stuff then. The plot isn’t so much what makes Poor Things interesting, for it is certainly derivative of those nineteenth century works on which it is based.

One of the more interesting aspects of this book is the layout and structure. Gray seems to have designed and illustrated this volume himself, and he has peppered it with images from Gray’s Anatomy, various other sources and a fair few illustrations he drew himself. Even better, the volume is structured around several different texts, the longest being “Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer.” We also get letters from Bella herself, and another man by the name of Wedderburn. All of this serves to maintain the reader’s interest and to provide the illusion that we are reading a bona-fide nineteenth century creation.

Poor Things isn’t a difficult read, despite its eccentricity, and it rarely drags despite its 300+ page length. The penultimate section is written by Bella, after her husband Archibald’s death, and in it she refutes much of what is said in the bulk of the book. But then the notes in the final section (purportedly written by Gray, i.e. the actual author) cast doubt on much of Bella’s account. So we are left on shifting ground. I doubt I’ll invest much effort trying to track down the elusive Lanark in the next little while, but I will certainly read it if I have the chance. Gray is a hardworking writer and book designer of a kind that seems to have almost vanished in the modern age, and I wish there were more writers who appeared to be as passionate about their material as he is.

Book Review – “Socialism is Great!” by Lijia Zhang

I fear this is going to be a short review. This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy reading “Socialism is Great!”, or that I’d hesitate in recommending it, but just that I’m not sure I’ve got much of interest to say here. What we have is a memoir of a Chinese woman called Lijia Zhang (or Zhang Lijia, more properly), who was born during the Cultural Revolution of the mid-sixties. For those not in the know, the Cultural Revolution was nothing like the bohemian unrest in countries such as the U.S. and France at similar times: it was an extended period of anarchy and murderous madness in which Mao (who had been pushed out of power) sought to wrestle back control using civil disobedience among his followers. Lynchings, murder, the like. Millions dead. Not a happy time to have been born, but Zhang’s tale is illuminating in that it explains how life in Nanjing began to improve over the following decades.

From humble circumstances, in which she lived in a small apartment with her mother, grandmother, younger brother and occasionally her father, young Lijia tried, often unsuccessfully, to improve her circumstances. In China at that time this meant trying to get into university, which was no mean feat. Unfortunately for her, at book’s opening (with Lijia sixteen or so), her mother plans to have Lijia take over her own job in a rocket-making factory. If Lijia Zhang has any ‘claim to fame’ at all, it is in that she was employed in a plant that built nuclear missiles intended to reach America. But so were thousands of others. So Zhang’s account is not particularly unique, but it does provide a ’slice of life’ account of Nanjing in the seventies and eighties.

Lijia struggles on, attending TV University (in which students watch their lecturers, you guessed it, on TV) and mournfully returning to her plant, which seems to have achieved the pinnacle in inefficiency (very little work gets done, it seems). As Lijia gets older she is drawn into a series of sexual relationships with various men, none of which prove to be very satisfactory. Eventually she falls pregnant, but manages to secure an abortion. This is interesting, as it shows the shocking and degrading treatment of women’s sexuality in China through the decades in question. China has an extremely long history of poor treatment of women, over at least 5000 years, and Zhang’s account corroborates much of this history. This is a gruelling read at times.

Toward the end of the book, Lijia becomes involved in some of the student activism associated with the Tiananmen uprising of 1989 and beforehand. This is where I felt the book inadequate, as it did not really provide much detail in this direction. Yes, Lijia did coordinate a march of workers at her plant, but that’s really about it. And the book ends rather abruptly, with her being fingerprinted by the police for her role in these demonstrations. Despite her life experience, Zhang does not appear to have much to say about the ills of Chinese ‘Socialism’ (I use the term loosely), nor of the student movement of the time. Here I sensed a sharp contrast between her account and the work of my favourite Chinese writer, Ma Jian, whose account of the Tiananmen uprising and massacre is given exhaustive treatment in Beijing Coma and to a lesser extent in Red Dust.

So “Socialism is Great!”, despite its apparently ironic title, isn’t really a political book. It is in fact a personal memoir about a woman of no particular importance to the scheme of things. In this I found it slightly baffling, but interesting nonetheless. Where this book excels, to my way of thinking, is in its description of the particular details of Nanjing life in the seventies and eighties. There is a wealth of small, trivial detail here, but I guess I am saying that I was looking for a bigger picture or thesis which did not prove to be forthcoming.

Not such a brief review after all! You can expect to see reviews of Disch’s The Wall of America and Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things in the next week or so. 

Yellowcake Springs – 25 in 24

Thousand of words in number of days, that is. I’ve crawled my way to 25,000 words in 24 days, which means I’m on track to reach my lower target of 40,000 words by the 29th of Jan. 50k seems out of the question, but I’m not overly concerned. Now I’m off to Dongara for a few days, but fear not, my trusty laptop will be travelling with me, even if it is missing the ‘c’ key. With any luck I’ll be up to about 30,000 words by the time we come back on Friday. Until then…

Book Review – The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

Chandler is every bit as good as Hemingway, Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and yet he probably isn’t regarded as being in their league. This is mainly because Chandler was pigeonholed as a crime writer, a low-brow genre in which writers were made to languish. This kind of story is very familiar to me due to my many years studying American science fiction. Both were ‘genres,’ neither were ‘big L’ Literature. And yet The Long Goodbye is a better book than The Great Gatsby. Guess which one they made me read in high school?

The Long Goodbye is Chandler’s crowning achievement. More than a work of crime fiction (although it is that too), it is a lament on the darkness of the human condition that echoes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In it, P.I. Philip Marlowe meets a strange man by the name of Terry Lennox, and is subsequently drawn into a net of decadence, corruption and murder. Along the way he becomes involved with numerous beautiful ‘broads,’ a drunken, forgetful writer, and a host of other memorable characters. Plot twists abound in all of Chandler’s novels, but the plot twists in The Long Goodbye are…uh, especially twisty. The one at the end came right out of the blue, for this reader at least.

That isn’t what makes Chandler a great writer. What makes him great are a number of qualities that every writer should envy. This one certainly does.  Chandler is very good at descriptions. He can sketch out a room in just the right amount of detail. His characters come alive in their dress sense (which he often describes at length), their patterns of speech and their mannerisms. More than this, though, Chandler created an utterly compelling protagonist, Philip Marlowe, with his own brand of aloof toughness and bitter romanticism. He’s a walking paradox – one of the best protagonists in all the novels I have ever read. Chandler writes with economy and with power. His scenes never drag and there’s precious little flab to be found. And he has the gift of speaking through his scenes, but it never seems like the scenes only exist to make a point.  He has the gift of the witty punchline and an outrageous way with similies. I could go on, but rest assured that I was frequently left shaking my head as to how good Chandler is.

The Long Goodbye, as its title would suggest, feels elegaic. It was the sixth Philip Marlowe novel, and though Chandler would write a seventh, Playback, this does indeed seem like a long goodbye to the world of bent cops, even more bent gangsters and Marlowe himself. Toward the end, we sense Marlowe’s deepening despair. Beyond tough, beyond hardboiled, he enters a realm of existential fury. This anger is well disguised, but always simmering. What Chandler seems to be telling us is that the society he lived in was utterly debased and corrupted by the very foundations upon which it was built. In this it reminded me of Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust, another very bitter novel set in California.

Chandler was right. If he was alive today, I have no doubt that he’d be sickened by the moral and economic bankruptcy of his United States. Hell, make that the whole Western world. His books are a tremendous gift to anyone who feels, as I do, that there is something very, very wrong here.

Book Review – Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

Farewell, My Lovely is Raymond Chandler’s second Philip Marlowe novel, and its the second I’ve read. So far so good. I was impressed enough with Chandler’s first, The Big Sleep, to consider reading the others. I believe there to be at least seven. And for the most part I was entertained enough by Farewell, My Lovely, although perhaps it lacks the punch of The Big Sleep.

Philip Marlowe is our protagonist, and if there is a better main character in genre fiction of any kind, I’m struggling to think who it is. Sherlock Holmes is nowhere near as interesting as Marlowe, even if he does smoke a crack pipe.  And for a character who supposedly brought the noir detective genre into existence, Marlowe sure is idiosyncratic. Okay, so he’s a tough guy, but he’s also bitter, somewhat prudish when it comes to women, and strangely stand-offish when it comes to money. He goes around poking his nose in other people’s business, getting drawn into a web of crime and deceit. He frequently gets himself beaten up, and steps back into the fray at precisely the moments when it would be advisable to walk  away. But he’s the kind of guy who bobs back up when you knock him down, and doesn’t hold a grudge about it either. The quintessential private dick, then.

In terms of plot, Farewell, My Lovely is all over the place. It seems that Chandler has little more idea of what is going to happen next than Marlowe himself does, not to mention the reader. It’s like he’s plotting one page ahead. This gives the prose an edgy, unpredictable, but somewhat convoluted form. If I perhaps didn’t enjoy this novel quite as much as Chandler’s first, it is partly because the plot veered off in an unexpected and faintly ridiculous direction. Chandler isn’t so much constructing a genuine plot as leading the reader on a whirlwind tour of the dark and seedy world of late thirties California.

And what a fascinating world that is.  Chandler has the gift of description, both of people and of places. These descriptions are narrated in a world weary style, which Chandler made his own. So we are given an insight into a world of crooked cops, illusionists and con men, murderous jewel thieves, and beautiful (and murderous) dames. It’s a tremendously familiar world as shown in hundreds of Hollywood films, most of which I’ve never seen. And this dark California, pre-WWII (for the U.S. anyway – this was published in 1940) is closer to our own world that would first appear.

Marlowe isn’t Superman, either. Watching the overly-hyped Ledger film The Dark Knight recently, I was annoyed at how invulnerable the Batman character had become. Modern moviegoers are subjected to a whole host of actual and supposed Supermen, and how I tire of the whole thing. Marlowe, on the other hand, is fallible. He’s human. And he makes mistakes. This makes him all the more endearing. The closest this novel has to a superhero is Moose Malloy, a bear of a man we see at novel’s opening looking for his lost love, Velma. This opening scene is possibly the best in the novel. Chandler even manages to work in a dig at Ernest Hemingway into his book, in which Marlowe gives a cop the nickname Hemingway, after ’someone who repeated himself so often you eventually thought it must be meaningful’ (I’m too lazy to find the exact quote).

On to The Long Goodbye, then.