Month: June 2024

June 2024: superlatives

We’re halfway through the year! June has been a great month for singing and socialising. We had an amazing gig with one of our chamber choirs featuring Eric Whitacre’s seventeen-minute excavation of grief, When David Heard (listen to it the next time you need to get to grips with a heavy feeling; it will do the trick for you). My cousin got married at a castle and we spent a weekend living it up with my parents, my brother and his fiancée, aunts and uncles, cousins, my grandmother (who also turned 88 that day!), and the first great-grand-baby of the family. My parents are about to return from a week’s trip to Yorkshire, so the socialising will continue, but while they were there, I got to celebrate my best friend’s successful PhD defence, with flowers and a nice dinner near Covent Garden. This past weekend, we visited old friends and their two kids (one of whom is my goddaughter) in Oxford and went to Charlbury Beer Festival, which is one of the nicest, most community-led events I’ve ever attended, with perfect weather and a delightful range of ciders and perries for me, a person who makes a face whenever beers are wafted towards her. In amongst all of this, I read some twelve books. The first six 20 Books of Summer entries are covered here and here, and June’s library roundup is here. Here’s the rest.

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worst relationship: Hangover Square, by Patrick Hamilton (1941). A riveting portrayal of an emotionally abusive relationship. Hapless alcoholic George Harvey Bone is deeply in love with failed actress Netta Longdon, despite her inability to have sincere emotional reactions of almost any kind, let alone be nice to someone she’s not really into. (One fascinating chapter dives into Netta’s psyche, describing her as “a fish”: semi-passively and cold-bloodedly drifting in whatever direction seems to present itself without much volition.) George suffers from what the novel’s epigraph calls schizophrenia but which is probably more like dissociative identity disorder: every so often, his head goes click, he loses all memory of what he’s doing and where he is, but he recalls with urgency that he must kill Netta in order to be free of the suffering she inflicts on him. The repeated cycle of cruelty, wounded retreat, re-burgeoning hope, and tragic return to the abuser, is so well drawn. I particularly love the way Hamilton enhances George’s pathos by giving him one actual friend: Johnnie Littlejohn, a young man he went to school with who truly likes him and wants to help him, but whose life is so much fuller and healthier than George’s that he actually can’t imaginatively reach him until it’s too late. Unsurpassable, if also very sad. Source: secondhand from the Oxfam bookshop in Herne Hill

most Miévillean while also rejecting quite a lot of the assumptions that constitute Miévilleaneity: The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekara (2024). Lots of resonances with the work of the great C.M. in this fantasy novel, from the vast and byzantine city of Luriat, which runs on a fundamental commitment to unseeing (à la Beszél and Ul Qoma in The City and the City) and which contains such meta-rejections of fantasy tropes as support groups for failed prophets (reminiscent of Perdido Street Station and Kraken), to the hypnotic voice of one such character, Caduv, and the strange “devils” which the protagonist Fetter sees but no one else can (both elements reminded me of different bits of Embassytown). And yet, as Abigail Nussbaum’s review—upon which I cannot improve, so go read that instead—notes, Chandrasekara’s novel is really about the fundamental unknowability and even the smallness of this supposedly vast canvas. A truly Miévillean novel would let us settle in to enjoy the experience of getting to know the city-as-character-in-its-own-right; Chandrasekara is more interested in revealing what Nussbaum calls “[Luriat’s] endlessly convoluted history whose manifestation in the present seems designed to defeat any attempt at comprehension, much less repair.” The Saint of Bright Doors has had a lot of attention and a lot of critics saying they can’t describe it, but I can certainly tell you that it’s extremely readable, even wryly funny; extremely thought-provoking; and, ultimately, satisfying in its very open-endedness. Much of it riffs on Buddhist mythology but you don’t need background knowledge to enjoy it. Well worth finding. Source: NetGalley proof

most intriguing B-Side: The Eternal Moment and Other Stories, by E.M. Forster (1928 [1903-1914]). I read all of Forster’s proper novels as a teenager, except for Maurice; for a time he was my favourite author. This collection therefore counts towards my B-Sides reading project and is also Book 7 of 20 Books of Summer 2024.

It’s most notable for the story “The Machine Stops”, in which everyone lives in isolated cells set within subterranean tunnels. Society is run by the Machine, which provides everything at the touch of a button: food, bed, dental and medical care, music, literature, instantaneous communication with others. When the protagonist Vashti’s son, Kuno, begins speaking of his experiences on an unauthorised trip to the surface, Vashti refuses to entertain the conversation, but the Machine’s apparent deterioration and eventual breakdown reveals the terrible helplessness of humankind. Viewers of Doctor Who will recognise the idea behind the recent episode “Dot and Bubble” (including some of the snobbery and self-interested lack of integrity that episode skewered). Forster didn’t usually write sci-fi, but you can perhaps trace the thesis of “The Machine Stops” to his passionate defence of human connection and the value of art in Howards End and A Room with a View. The rest of the collection contains some odd, brief, metaphysical shorts: “The Point of It” posits an inexplicable afterlife suffered by a man who abandoned honest judgment while alive, in favour of complacency, while “Mr. Andrews” and “Co-ordination”, which also deal with experiences of heaven and afterlife, are sweet but a bit thin, like sermon anecdotes. “The Story of the Siren” and “The Eternal Moment”, both set abroad, deal in different ways with the spiritually diminishing effects of exposure to tourism and money on isolated rural locations; again, you can see some of the preoccupations of Forster’s longer fiction here, as in A Passage to India and Where Angels Fear to Tread. This collection isn’t his best work, but it’s a very interesting sidebar to the career of a writer I usually think of as a champion of secular humanism. Source: Project Gutenberg

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best classic horror: The Shadow over Innsmouth, by H.P. Lovecraft (1936 [1931]). [Sort of spoilers follow] This is part of a huge Lovecraft Collected Works I bought for 37 p, which I’m reading through slowly. It would be hard to be an even marginally active reader, let alone one of speculative and horror fiction, and not be at least a little bit aware of what the shadow over Innsmouth actually is. Lovecraft’s racism, which I remember finding distinctly absent from At the Mountains of Madness, is rather more in evidence here: the fears and anxieties he evokes are clearly those of miscegenation and racial mixing, although I would argue that it is far more reasonable not to want to inter-breed with fish-frog creatures than it is to be racist about a mixed-race marriage. (Of course, the fact that Lovecraft clearly considers them analogous tells us all we need to know about his position re. the humanity of non-white people.) Something that always fascinates me about discussions of this kind of fiction—fiction that posits a kind of third, part-human race, and is repelled by it—is that it rarely seems to acknowledge rape. Most specifically, this happens when people talk about Tolkien’s Orcs. There are various accounts of their development (Tolkien wrote two or three, mutually exclusive, versions). None of them are really possible without accepting the presence of, at minimum, sexual coercion; logistically, it’s far more likely that there were rape camps. Yet Tolkien never mentions these, and neither do his critics. The same is true for the Innsmouth villagers: yes, it’s horrifying that their town fathers made this unholy bargain, but isn’t it more horrifying for the town’s young people, who were forced into planned inter-breeding by the power their fathers and grandfathers held in the social hierarchy, with no meaningful ability to consent or dissent? I don’t think that’s Lovecraft’s point at all, but that’s where the horror of Innsmouth comes from for me. The best part of this novella, as a set-piece, is the narrator’s nighttime escape from the dingy town hotel as a baying mob of villagers attempt to murder him; that really is chilling. If you read it as a portrayal of an evaded lynching—which is not an unreasonable reading for the 1930s—it throws an even more curious light on Lovecraft’s racial politics. Source: Kindle

best epic adventure: 1610: a Sundial in a Grave, by Mary Gentle (2003). There are shades here of Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and of Gentle’s own magnum opus, Ash, but 1610 is far less tightly plotted than the former and neither as long or as consistently wrong-footing as the latter. There’s actually nothing wrong with either of those things; it’s a little bit of a relief to know that one need not scrutinise every word of its 750 pages for clues. The book starts with our narrator, French spymaster Rochefort, being blackmailed by Queen Marie de Medici into arranging the assassination of Henri IV of France. He makes arrangements which he’s sure will fail, but by horrible chance they succeed, and soon he’s on the run with infuriatingly insouciant young duellist Dariole, heading to England. There, they encounter Robert Fludd, a (real-life) mathematician and occultist who in this world has mastered the calculation of probabilities. Fludd’s work tells him that, in half a millennium, the world will come to a disastrous end—unless, in 1610, King James I and VI of England and Scotland is assassinated, and his son Prince Henry placed upon the throne. We are therefore in a speculative realm, which I love, and which Gentle blends most effectively with historical truth. Rochefort and Dariole also cross paths with Saburo Tanaka, a shipwrecked samurai on an ambassadorial mission to James; Suor Caterina, an Italian nun hiding out in Cornwall (whence the strong flavour of Stephensonian unlikely-but-possible character interactions); Aemilia Lanier, a poet and playwright who actually lived and is here part of Fludd’s faction; and many others.

I am not sure how well the writing of Saburo holds up; I could find nothing overtly offensive about it, but he is often described as hard for Europeans to interpret and his arc involves some double-crossing. More troubling and fascinating is the way Gentle deals with rape, which walks a fine line between seventeenth-century attitudes (that a woman so violated is unmarriageable, “spoiled goods”, likely to kill herself afterwards, and so on) and early twenty-first-century ones (that healing is possible but will take a long time; that vengeance is often desired but rarely desirable). On the whole, I think, she manages to make clear the full devastation of rape without allowing it to destroy the character’s life, which feels right—but then it is not clear that she takes the rape of men or male-presenting people as seriously as she does the rape of women, given a scene near the beginning where Rochefort attempts to sexually humiliate Dariole in this way only to find that Dariole’s enthusiastic response renders it impossible. Also fascinating, and rather heartening, is her focus on submission kink, which provides a long-running—almost fanfic-esque—tension between Rochefort and Dariole. Near the end, it is suggested that kink might permit a means of rehabilitating the powerlessness of a person who has been raped, which has been borne out in contemporary studies of the kink community and its efficacy around sexual trauma and trust. I always have a soft spot for novels set in the past which show characters discovering their own sexualities in a manner both true to their personalities and congruent with that society’s vocabulary for and understanding of sex. Source: longest-owned unread Kindle book. This is also book 8 of my 20 Books of Summer.

What have you read in June? Are you also doing the 20 Books of Summer challenge, and if so, how’s it going?

Posted on by Elle 28

#LoveYourLibrary, June 2024

Hosted, as always, by Rebecca at Bookish Beck, posting on the last Monday of every month. There’s no set formula to this; you can post anything about libraries, whether you’ve recently been to an event at one, heard about an initiative at one, whatever! I use it for rundowns of my monthly library reading. Join in on your social media space of choice using #LoveYourLibrary.

June has been a relatively quiet month on the library front, although I did source three of my 20 Books of Summer this month from libraries. Other than that, I only have two titles to report, both of which are by the same author.

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Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead (2021): I found this hugely compelling while I was reading it: a tripartite crime novel—it’s almost three connected novellas, really—set over five crucial years in Harlem, 1959-1964. Furniture salesman Ray Carney starts out only a little crooked, occasionally offloading secondhand goods of unclear and unclarified provenance, but he becomes a serious fence when his cousin Freddie gets him involved with a harebrained plan to knock over the Hotel Theresa, Harlem’s Ritz-Carlton. It all unfolds from there. The colourism and snobbery of the drive towards Black bourgeois-dom (made manifest in Carney’s in-laws), the weight of his past as the son of a notorious criminal and his sense of responsibility for Freddie, all clash with the growing civil rights movement and its two faces, “respectable” and “riotous” (entertainingly complained about by Black élites in terms almost identical to those used in liberal circles about student protest movements today). Whitehead’s tendency to drop you in medias res is more exciting than frustrating, and the action scenes are tense and funny; imagine Chester Himes with a stronger historical perspective. His minor characters are also great: I loved Pepper, a taciturn, gravel-eyed man who ends up as Carney’s surveillance and backup guy. Not sure about the women: wife Elizabeth is a bit of a cipher, mother-in-law Alma a shrew, secretary Marie a purveyor of baked goods. And oddly, although I reserved the sequel almost immediately, I’m not sure Harlem Shuffle has the weight to stick in the mind six months hence. We’ll have to find out. Meanwhile, it’s nice to see Whitehead cutting loose a little.

Crook Manifesto, by Colson Whitehead (2023): The aforementioned sequel. Carney went straight for a while there, but in 1971 his teenage daughter May urgently needs Jackson Five tickets, so he hits up a crooked detective of former acquaintance, Munson, and again, it all goes from there. Same triple structure, which made me think of Whitehead’s Harlem books in the tradition of episodic crime drama or police procedural; each of the three stories that make up Crook Manifesto could easily have unfolded, origami-like, to a full novel all on its own. In the second, Pepper returns—it’s a delight to have him back in the foreground, he feels like an old friend—to find out where the actress in a locally-shot blaxploitation flick has disappeared off to. (It turns out she’s absolutely fine, but in trying to investigate, Pepper opens other cans of worms.) In the third, a child whose mother rents an apartment from Carney (who has bought the buildings where his furniture store is located, and therefore has tenants) is injured in a fire that was probably arson, one of the many insurance scams or city-redevelopment-loan grifts being run on Harlem in the late ’70s, and Carney would like to know on whose orders the fire was set. The answer takes us back to the closing chapters of Harlem Shuffle, which also pointed to downtown (aka city hall) as the location of those who really know how to score big. Vengeance is wreaked on the snooty bourgeois symbolised by the Dumas Club, but there’s a hollow feeling to it, a sense that something significant is being eroded out of Harlem. Female characters fare absolutely no better this time around (with the possible exception of Viola Lewis, a chicken-shop owner who gets a fantastic and totally throw-away flashback in which she hires Pepper to crack the safe containing the secret recipe of the chicken shop across the way). Once again, though, Whitehead writes with verve, glee, and extreme skill; a reader can easily relax and sink into this world. He has confirmed this will be a trilogy, and I can’t wait for book three.

Have you read any library loans this month?

Posted on by Elle 19

20 Books of Summer, 4-6: Fools, Out of Istanbul, The Separation

The next 20 Books of Summer batch came from a different one of the categories I made available to myself in the kickoff post: my line of longest-unread Kindle books. The first was an Arthur C. Clarke Award winner from 1995 (but apparently published in ’92? Confusing), the second was the first installation of a three-volume memoir by a bereaved Frenchman who set out to walk the Silk Road in stages between 1999 and 2001 (this covers the path between Istanbul and Erzurum). The third, an alternate-history novel set during WWII, also won the Clarke Award, this time in 2003. So I’m double-stacking reading priorities here, as I’ve also been semi-consciously making my way through the list of Clarke winners.

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Fools, by Pat Cadigan (1992/5): Either I’ve gotten better at reading cyberpunk that takes place in layers of virtual realities, or Fools is a little easier to follow than Synners, the other Cadigan I’ve read. Basically, three women walk into a brain. Or maybe it’s one woman, a split-off personality, and two faked-up ones. Or maybe it’s a different woman, two split-off personalities, and one faked-up one. Or maybe it’s one real woman, another real personality from a different body and two fakes. One’s an actress, one’s the same actress but she wants to sell out, one’s a junkie who works as a suicide-enabler to pay her debts, and one’s a cop. Fools is essentially three novellas—although given its theatrical themes, that might also be a nod to the concept of three-act dramatic structure—set in a world of brainsuckers and memory addicts, where Method acting taken to its logical extreme is practiced by actors who create their characters and literally cosplay as them, physically and mentally; where undercover cops are given new personae in the realest sense, and where a personality can be split into, and live in, half a dozen or more different heads. (“He didn’t know who was supposed to meet her—him as the whore, him as Dionysius, him as Sovay as Dionysius, Sovay as him, Sovay as him as Dionysius—he’d even lost all track of whether he or Sovay had been Dionysius.”—p. 215.) Cadigan differentiates each persona by changing font, which more or less works, although four characters is about as far as you can stretch that technique. I liked the noir atmosphere, the seediness and knowingness of the voice(s). One way to read Fools is slowly and microscopically, but actually, the mystery plot was compelling enough to pull me rapidly on. Overthinking might have been detrimental; letting it wash over me was enough to figure most of it out. Cadigan eventually explains enough that the uncertainty at the start doesn’t feel pointless. It would certainly bear re-reading, to see all the connections in the light of the ending. Source: longest-unread Kindle book.

Out of Istanbul: a Journey of Discovery Along the Silk Road, by Bernard Ollivier (2000), transl. Dan Golembeski (2019): At sixty-one, Ollivier—a French retired teacher and journalist whose wife had died of cancer a decade earlier, and whose sons were now grown—decided to walk the length of the Silk Road. He did it in stages, of course, three or four summers running, and this is the story of the first: on foot from Istanbul to Tehran in the dying light of the twentieth century. When you read travelogues like this, it’s all about the narrating voice: do you like this person? Do you want to spend 1,500 miles in their head? Mostly, Ollivier is likeable. Sometimes he’s pigheaded—he acknowledges that he pushes himself physically beyond what’s safe or reasonable, sometimes walking forty kilometres in a day—and sometimes his ’90s-era Eurocentric arrogance shows through (many Turkish men are described with the qualifier “little”, as in “little fellow”, “little tailor”, except for when they’re fat, in which case he’ll let you know; he understands that he can’t speak to many of the women he meets in the more rural areas, but doesn’t trouble to extend much imaginative empathy in considering their lives, other than a complacent pity). But his determination and self-awareness redeems him. Mostly, he receives extraordinarily kind hospitality, and he recounts with a touching humility, gratitude, and sense of true friendship the names of people who fed and sheltered him. As he proceeds East, though, the sentencing of Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan makes for a jittery rural populace, aggressive and unsympathetic authorities, and several instances in which he’s very nearly mugged and killed. (A tense night spent in a barn in an unfriendly village, detention by military police, and a day in which three men pursue him between villages, are particularly alarming episodes.) 1999 in Turkey was not a comfortable or risk-free place and time to be a white man alone on foot. But Ollivier can’t seem to help himself: he wants to see it through, so a life-threatening bout of dysentery just before crossing into Iran–which necessitated his temporary repatriation to France–frustrates him on an almost existential level. And I ended up willing him on; volumes two and three appear to be ebook-only now, but I’ll certainly read them. Source: longest-unread Kindle book.

The Separation, by Christopher Priest (2002): As in the only other book I’ve read by him, The Prestige, Priest is fascinated here by twins and doubling, shadow selves, and the road not taken. Set on the eve of, and during, WWII, with a ’90s-set frame story to which we annoyingly never return, The Separation is about twins, Jacob and Joseph Sawyer (both of whose initials are J.L., which causes other characters, and indeed the government, to confuse the two). Competing in the 1936 Berlin Olympics as a cox-less rowing pair, they see Hitler, Hess, and the trappings of Nazism. Jack, with frustrating naivete, is basically unaffected by the visit, but Joe understands that their hosts—and particularly the daughter, Birgit—are in trouble as German Jews, and arranges for Birgit to be smuggled out to England in the van that carries their rowing shells and equipment. From their different responses to Berlin, a more profound separation follows: Joe marries Birgit and becomes a conscientious objector driving ambulances for the Red Cross, while Jack becomes a fighter pilot. The novel starts off slow and very normal-historical. But soon, cracks start to show. Jack witnesses a German plane shot down by other Germans. Moments later, he sees the same thing happen again, but differently. Jack’s plane crashes and he survives along with the navigator, but then we hear from the navigator, who says Jack died. Joe is killed during the Blitz and Jack lives decades without him, but then Joe re-narrates the episode, in which he’s missing for a few days but eventually located, meeting Jack several times afterwards.

Joe experiences what he calls “lucid imaginings”: long intervals during which the circumstances of his life change minutely. He is aware that contact with his twin seems to spark these visions, but what are they? Quantum realities? Hallucinations brought on by fatigue and injury? Doublings and the truth of history are crucial sub-plots: Churchill and Rudolph Hess both appear to have body doubles (Churchill’s does his bomb-site morale tours for him; Hess’s seems to be the one who goes through Nuremberg and imprisonment after the war, so where has the actual Hess gone?) In one of these realities, Joe is deeply involved with the conception and delivery of a peace treaty in 1941, while the USA, Soviets, and Japan never enter the fighting. In the other—the frame story’s, so presumably our reality—the war proceeded as we know it and didn’t end until 1945. There is so much thematically going on in this novel, but regarding pace and writing I had doubts. The writing isn’t bad so much as dull: neither Joe nor Jack are engaging narrators, and while their factual approach may have been designed to make them more reliable in a reader’s mind, it makes the prose unexciting on the sentence level. Pacing is oddly slow, too; this isn’t a timey-wimey statecraft thriller, although it could have been and sometimes looks like it should be, but nor is it a deep, character-driven dive into the emotional fracture occasioned by war. Nothing is ever explained for the reader—not the nature of Joe’s “lucid dreams”, not the specifics of each altered reality—and you don’t have to explain as a writer, but then it would be nice to get more aesthetic pleasure from the prose. It’s brilliant as a thought exercise, but a slightly frustrating experience as a novel. Source: longest-unread Kindle book.

Posted on by Elle 11

20 Books of Summer, 1-3: Ceremony, Vathek, Erewhon

Here are the first three books and reviews of this year’s 20 BoS! The first has a one-word title but is technically not on the Guardian top 1000 novels list. That is very much a failing of that list: Ceremony has been highly influential and definitely deserves a place in either the “War and travel” or “State of the nation” sections. The second and third both have monologic (monologous?) titles and appear on the Guardian list (both in the rather broad “Science fiction and fantasy” section, in another instance of the literary establishment being unable to grasp the idea of multiple subgenres, modes, or traditions of un-realist fiction).

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Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko (1977): This tale of the gradual healing of a Laguna Pueblo man with severe PTSD from his time in the Pacific theatre of WWII strikes me as the kind of book it would be very easy to teach to high schoolers. That’s both not a bad thing and a somewhat telling thing. There’s a lot of symbolism (the herd of skinny spotted cows; the physiological trait of being light-eyed and what it means about a person’s ancestry; the role and function of alcohol in mediating between the novel’s characters, particularly Native men who are now-unwanted US Army veterans). There are a lot of parallels: the spiritual sickness of Tayo, our protagonist, and the spiritual sickness of the land in which he grew up, which now contains a mine for the uranium that went into the atomic bomb; the interspersed Native myths about quests to save the people from physical starvation and the efforts of Native healers Ku’oosh and Betonie to save Tayo from emotional starvation. It reminded me sometimes of a less oblique Winter in the Blood or a less self-consciously stylised Cormac McCarthy (the latter mostly in the matter-of-fact descriptions of action within landscape: “That last summer, before the war, he got up before dawn and rode the bay mare south to the spring in the narrow canyon. The water oozed out from the dark orange sandstone at the base of the long mesa. He waited for the sun to come over the hills.”—p. 86). It’s super atmospheric, even if it also seems to contain less plot than its length could hold. I’m not convinced by the ending, in which Tayo’s inaction leads to the death of another Native man at the hands of two more; the idea seems to be that by not resorting to violence, he has reached his cure or salvation, but it seems hard to reconcile to the fact that he might have been able to save a life and chose not to. I would love to read more considered criticism, especially Native criticism, of Ceremony; my edition just has a short, appreciative but not very informative foreword by Larry McMurtry. Source: bought secondhand from the Oxfam bookshop in Herne Hill

Vathek, by William Beckford (1786): When I worked at Heywood Hill, a customer once listed this as his favourite book. I found it an unusual choice then, but now—having read it—I find myself almost speechless, not because Vathek is poorly written but because Beckford’s extreme youth (21 when he wrote it), inconceivable wealth (heir to £100,000 p.a. in sugar money at a time when £400 p.a. guaranteed a life of leisure), and predatory nature (he was sexually abusing a thirteen-year-old boy at the time of Vathek‘s writing) is so apparent within it. It’s Gothic, but not as we know it: Radcliffean feudal tyranny becomes Arabian Nights-style oriental despotism, gloomy European castles become decadent Middle Eastern palaces. There’s some Faust and some Milton in Vathek’s appalling bargain: the sacrifices of innocent children and his own eternal soul for the gratification of curiosity and desire. The lingering, caressing gaze of the narration on the barely-adolescent boy Gulchenrouz is also squicky (Vathek ends up with G’s female cousin, Nouronihar, but Gulchenrouz gets all of the sensual descriptive imagery). But the novel, although legible as a moral fable about an overreacher’s fall, always seems more nuanced than that. Vathek has enormous drive and charisma, despite the despotism. There’s a lot of humour (“The subjects of the Caliph, like their sovereign, being great admirers of women and apricots from Kirmith…”, p. 10). It’s better written than many novels of its decade, the prose only rarely becoming empurpled, and remarkably well researched, with nearly as many pages of Beckford’s notes as there are of text. And the hellish palace of Eblis (Islam’s Devil) doesn’t scare Vathek’s mother, the extraordinary witch Carathis, who takes such full advantage of the few days’ grace before her eternal damnation that the narration can’t help but admire her dauntlessness. A fascinating confection. Source: borrowed from Bromley libraries #LoveYourLibrary

Erewhon, by Samuel Butler (1872): “You may say that it is your misfortune to be criminal; I answer that it is your crime to be unfortunate.”—p. 117. Thus does an Erewhonian judge sentence a young man who has been found guilty of pulmonary consumption to life imprisonment with hard labour—for in Erewhon, those who commit moral crimes like theft or fraud are carefully nursed back to the path of rectitude, but those who are ill, poor, or unlucky are considered criminals and punished accordingly. Butler’s “nowhere” utopia was famous for challenging ideas about morality, religion and the state when it was published, but in this regard at least it feels not unlike contemporary America and Britain, where reliance on the healthcare or welfare systems is painted as shameful parasitism and punished by deliberately unsympathetic government policies. The eugenicist results—no one in Erewhon is anything other than conventionally attractive and physically robust—are obvious, but all the more unnerving to the contemporary reader for going largely unremarked upon. The same is true of our narrator’s evangelicalism and extractive colonialist mindset: he only stumbles across Erewhon (implied to be in New Zealand) because he is seeking unclaimed land that he might be able to start exploiting before anyone else, while his belief that the Erewhonians are the lost tribes of Israel impels him to plan for his spiritual enrichment by being the one who converts them to Christianity, and later his material enrichment by forming a limited liability company to organise their enslavement. It’s hard to know how ironically Butler intends us to take any of it, and he’s not very good at character development, but I don’t regret reading this—an often thought-provoking, often infuriating example of the utopian travel story. Source: borrowed from Bromley libraries #LoveYourLibrary

Posted on by Elle 17