One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey, 1962)

There's an issue that films often seem to run into, where they choose to simply view the general narrative of a book they are adapting, rather than the narrator or any of the deeper nuances of the book.  This happens all too often; entire characters might be removed, causing events to change their form, and eventually you wind up with a vastly changed narrative.

Ken Kesey disliked the film version of his first published novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  On an initial viewing, it might be difficult to see why.  The battle of wills between Jack Nicholson's Randle McMurphy and Louise Fletcher's Nurse Ratched is depicted well, and the way he builds up his fellow inmates in her ward at the mental hospital to rebel against her is well-scripted, well-acted, and paced brilliantly, with everything seeming slow-paced until the rising tensions make it all explode into a flurry of action in the second half of the film, with a breakout from the asylum, the theft of a fishing boat, and eventually a huge drunken party in the ward.

The filmic Nurse Ratched has a rather chilling way about her, being able to use just a few levelly-spoken words in a sort of 'mom voice' to utterly destroy any thoughts of changing their situation that her patients might express, keeping them in their places.  She holds all the power, until McMurphy appears and starts to disrupt the ward, but her power is ultimately limited to her little fiefdom.

The novel's version of Nurse Ratched is far, far more daunting of an opponent, however, and that is amplified in the text by how she is being viewed through the eyes of a hallucinating, schizophrenic narrator.  The Big Nurse is less a human and more the avatar of the Combine, a vast machine which, in "Chief" Bromden's eyes, is working to grind everything and everyone in America down into a homogenous sameness that makes everything run absolutely perfectly, and that sees variation as a danger to the system.

It is spelled out rather clearly, both by Bromden's narration and by the words of other staff in the book, that the Big Nurse actually rules over the entire hospital.  It's stated that hiring and firing is largely down to her preferences, that she uses dangerous and invasive treatment methods (such as electroshock and icepick lobotomies) punitively rather than therapeutically, that even the doctors are afraid of her.  Bromden sees this as her being a sort of giant; while he may be physically much larger than she, his spirit was broken long before he set foot in the asylum, his schizophrenic hallucinations beginning when he saw how the loss of his tribe's lands and way of life destroyed his father (the tribal chief), his deaf-mute affectation a self-defensive measure to keep himself from her attention, and his view of other's size is based on their force of will.  He sees everything through the lens of the Combine, orderlies viewed as robots, the Big Nurse's medical bag full of gears and machine parts, everything moving about on wires and strings to do the bidding of the machine, Ratched herself having a literally-molded face, her lips standing out garishly, her eyes the only sign of what is going on in her head.

This, then, sets up the ultimate nature of the novel's struggle: Randle McMurphy, the Coyote-like trickster who is armed with a quick wit, an irreverent attitude, and a need to assert his absolute individuality, enters the ward and clashes against the god-like figure of the Big Nurse, with her emotion-hiding face and gender-obscuring uniform.  The men on the ward make it clear what the stakes are in this conflict: McMurphy certainly can't win the war, and if he loses a single battle, he loses everything.

The general plot beats of the book do mirror the film, but in a way that leaves the film's version of the battle between McMurphy and Ratched seem watered down.  Where McMurphy's attempts to get TV privileges swapped around for the ward to watch baseball are a single incident on the film, it is a repeated event in the book, his act of civil disobedience in pretending to watch on the blank screen and giving a running commentary recurring in a way that deliberately draws attention for the other staff to the taking of power it represents.  Rather than simply sneaking out for the fishing trip that he takes the other inmates on, he plans it in the open, ostentatiously flaunting it in front of Ratched, and even drawing one of the doctors into it.

Perhaps the most important difference, the one that matters most, is in the final showdown between the two, with McMurphy trying to choke the life out of Ratched.  The film shows the aftermath of this being the nurse in a cervical collar, calmly reasserting her control over the ward, McMurphy's self-sacrificing attack on her having done little more than push Chief Bromden to make his escape on the night, after putting McMurphy out of his misery.

The book's version of this is vastly different, and serves to make McMurphy much more of a heroic figure.  His attack on the Big Nurse is much more intense, and allowed to last longer; the orderlies don't move to pull him off, and in the struggle her clothing is torn open, revealing her femininity in that moment of rage on McMurphy's part, but his attack isn't sexual; rather, it's an assault on Ratched's very godhood within her realm. The aftermath includes a far kinder nurse in her position until she recuperates enough to return, allowing the patients to begin their escapes, the voluntary patients checking themselves out or being transferred, leaving only those who can't leave to witness the ultimate destruction of her power, McMurphy's attack leaving her communicating via writing as she has completely lost her voice.  Where the film ends with Ratched maintaining the status quo, seemingly without any change to her confidence, the novel's McMurphy succeeds in bringing her down, the remaining patients very openly mocking her impotent attempts to control them with writing.

That said, McMurphy has sacrificed himself in both cases, and where the film has him surgically lobotomized, a presumably controlled action (though the effects are clear enough), the book has him having received what honestly looks like it was a double icepick procedure, with both eyes left bruised shut.  It's even less clear whether anything of McMurphy remains within the husk that is rolled back into the ward; Bromden's mercy killing is less giving the man rest than putting down the spiritless body so that Ratched can't use it as a symbol of what happens to those who resist her.

Even Chief Bromden is changed by the experience; by the end of the book, he has begun to speak openly to the other ward inmates, has openly stood up to the orderlies (breaking one of their arms in the scuffle that earns an electroshock treatment for himself and McMurphy), and feels himself large enough that when he tears the hydrotherapy controls from the floor and throws them through the window to effect his escape from the confinement, he has no doubt that he's a big enough man now to do it, to return to the world, to see how the remnants of his tribe are struggling against the Combine in their own way, to return to the lands of his youth.

He's been away a long time.

Passing (Nella Larsen, 1929)

...wow.

For a thin volume like Passing, which is all over in a mere 120 pages, there's a lot of stuff to chew on, and I know from the start that I'm probably not especially qualified to talk about much of what's going on here.  There's this thing called white privilege, you see, and, well...  Yeah.

It's probably best to start with the title, "Passing".  I became most familiar with this particular definition of the verb through the trans* context, where it refers to the act of looking enough like your correct gender that a stranger wouldn't know you're trans*; the term is used here in the earlier racial context, specifically in terms of pale-skinned Black folk who are able to "pass" as being White.  Even people like me, who have no experience of being on the receiving end of racism, can see what the point of that would be, especially in the 1920s, but also, well...  motions at the need for the Black Lives Matter movement to exist

The lead characters in Passing are Irene, a pale Black woman (her skin is described as "olive") who grew up in Chicago but now lives in Harlem; and Clare, similarly pale-skinned, who grew up alongside Irene until her father died, then was shuffled off to live with a couple of White aunts until she got herself married to get out from under their thumbs.  Her husband has no idea she's not pure White, which seems to be rather playing with fire on Clare's part, given that he is incredibly racist.

The book follows a three-act structure, with sections titled "Encounter", "Re-Encounter", and "Finale".  The first is largely a flashback to Irene and Clare's first time encountering each other as adults.  Irene is in Chicago to visit her father and old family friends, and happens to encounter Clare while taking tea at one of the higher-class hotels (choosing to "pass" for that moment).  Clare is so far into her façade that Irene doesn't recognize her, while the reverse is anything but true; it takes a minute of trying to figure out where she might have met this White woman who knows her childhood nickname, and in fact Clare laughing, for Irene to figure it out.

Clare's separation from the Chicago neighborhood (and in fact all of Black culture) is so complete that it has become a sort of forbidden desire to get news, to attend gatherings, to surround herself with the Blackness that she very intentionally left behind.  This becomes particularly problematic when Irene is introduced to Clare's husband, a truly unlikable character who makes it clear that he so proud to have no N-----s in his family and he knows the whole race better than they know themselves because he only believes the negative things he's heard or read.  Irene holds her tongue, but only barely, and decides to cut off contact with Clare altogether.

This would work fine, right up until Clare shows up at her door in Harlem.

The second half of the book deals with Clare's increasing insertion of herself into every Black cultural event she can manage while hiding it from her husband, and the increasing irritation and outright anger that this causes Irene to feel.  Everything builds to a breaking point as Clare's intrusions start to appear to include an illicit romance with Irene's husband... And then Clare's husband encounters and recognises Irene shopping with another Black woman, and, well...  Things do not end well.

Clare is almost a sort of Icarus figure, here.  She has, through a combination of happenstance and pluck, a way to escape the racism inherent in the system; she's unable to resist the temptation to go beyond the safe limits of that escape, though, to try to safely get back the heritage that she has left behind. Ultimately, that hubris, her playing with fire and disregard of the warnings that Irene initially gives her, ends up destroying her.

Irene, meanwhile, knows her limits.  She's playing a somewhat dangerous game of her own, using her children as a way to hold back some of her husband's ambitions, but she's much more careful about it, keeping within her means and only starting to act in less than well-thought-out ways than Clare has pushed her to the breaking point.  The growing resentment in Irene is quite obvious in the narration; while the novel is told in the third person, everything is through Irene's point of view, her head the only one we ever inhabit.

I'm going to admit, there is a lot that I'm sure I missed here.  Even with the usual Penguin Classics introduction and endnotes, I'm about as far from having an understanding of the cultural politics here as it's possible to be.  I can look at what's in the text, and draw my own conclusions, and it does give me some understanding of the author's own viewpoint (Larsen herself being pale-skinned Black), but I'm ultimately not going to be able to appreciate this in the way that a Black reader, or indeed a reader from any outwardly visible minority group, is going to be able to.

My own first-hand experiences as far as "passing" goes are limited to situations where my neurodivergent mind has gotten in the way of what might be considered "normal," and that's usually situations where I'm failing to "pass".  Not having even realized that I'm not neurotypical until relatively recently didn't help, of course.  It does give me at least a little insight into why someone would want to hide aspects of themselves for the sake of making life easier, but it's still not the same experience.

I'm glad that I read this, though.  All too often, the "classics" are overwhelmingly things written by white guys in Europe, and this was a marvelous change of pace, even if it's nowhere near a "feel-good" book.  But then, how many of the books that are really worth reading are?

The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories (H.G. Wells, 1894-1915)

A man spontaneously has his visual perception relocated to a site on the opposite side of the planet, but none of his other senses are affected. 

There are four books that are sort of considered the 'core' H.G. Wells works: the novels The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The Invisible Man, and the novella The Time Machine.  This collection, The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories, includes precisely zero of those, but I think it might be more interesting exactly because of that.

An object from deep space crashes into Neptune, ignites into a small star, and plunges through the inner solar system on its way to the Sun, causing global disasters and devastation.

What's on display here is a sort of a cross-section of the range of fiction writing that Wells produced, showing just how far beyond his well-known science fiction works he actually went.  The stories aren't designed to have a lengthy or high-stakes plot, for the most part; the general construction of most seems to be that Wells came up with an idea that seemed impossible, then went through the thought of how to make that seem reasonable, and explores it and the ramifications.

A successful politician is haunted by a magical door that he passed through once as a young boy, then passes by every time he encountered it again, despite a desire to return to the mysterious garden beyond the portal.

The most stunning thing about this collection may be the specific variety selected.  We get examples of what seems to be almost pre-figuring many later sub-genres within science fiction, showing just how much the genre as a whole owes to him.  While space travel and the parts of sci-fi that are associated with that are quite outside of what's on display here (the two stories featuring Martians in any context leave them quite contentedly on Mars), we get stories that work with hard science, stories that attempt to prefigure future technology, stories that imagine a culture and investigate how it might interact with others.

A man under the influence of anaesthesia for a surgical procedure, convinced he is going to die while under the knife, experiences Cosmic Zoom.

It's clear that Wells is anything but uninformed, as well.  Perhaps that's not surprising; I have a 1930s  biology textbook that was primarily written by him, in fact the second such textbook that he wrote during his life, which perhaps shows just how studied the man was.  The science at work always feels believable, within Newtonian physics models, and even a story that completely misses the mark on how powered heavier-than-air flight is going to work manages to be a fun read, building up to a giant mechanical bird crashing into and destroying the Royal College of Science in London.

A mountaineer stumbles upon a hidden village of people born for generations without eyes, and learns quickly that the old adage 'In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king' is inaccurate in every possible way.

None of the stories outstay their welcome; each establishes its situation quickly, then progresses through exploring it until the logical endpoint, at which point the story ends.  In cases where further elaboration might be possible, as with a story involving a drug that speeds the taker's body and mind up to a speed one thousand times that of everything around them, future implications are alluded to but left to the reader's imagination, rather than Wells trying to create an encyclopedic examination of the possible effects.

A trip up the Amazon River leads to the verified discovery of a species of oversized, intensely venomous ants with abnormally high intelligence, which are engaging in an actively genocidal invasion of human settlements within the rainforest, and seem to be on the verge of successfully figuring out boats.

This collection honestly has a bit of everything in it.  There are several stories that seem to prefigure themes that H.P. Lovecraft would eventually deal with, alongside rather chilling, entirely-mundane-in-setting crime fiction.  There are visions of the future on display, but the longest story is about a particularly clever Neanderthal in the stone age.  For the most part, Wells always writes with a certain academic voice to his writing, which establishes The story that concludes the book is a rather humorous little tale of an author crossing paths with a devil who was cast out of Hell for abandoning his post at the wrong time, and has no science-fiction content to it at all, but all the same, it's a delightful yarn.  And that's really what one has to look for in a collection like this; a wide range of topics and genres, ending on a somewhat silly note, seems just the way to allow readers to discover how much more than 'just' a science-fiction writer H.G. Wells actually was.

Thankfully, Penguin Classics has 17 books by Wells, both fiction and nonfiction in nature, so I expect I'll be well-served in exploring his other works later on.

The Councillor (E.J. Beaton, 2021)

 

It might be rather less than a surprise to anyone who reads what I have to say, but I like books that give me something to chew on, mentally.  There's a lot to be said for conspiracy themes, then; they're like a literary puzzlebox, where the clues are there if you know what to look for, but you might miss them easily.  It's the same idea as fair-play mysteries, where the reader can see all the pieces after the end, and could perhaps have figured it out before the characters do, just with rather larger stakes for the characters.

As such, it takes a deft hand to not only write a compelling conspiracy thriller, but place it in a fantasy setting that has to be built at the same time.  It says a lot for E.J. Beaton that she managed to pull this off so effectively in her debut novel, The Councillor.

The titular character is Lysande Prior, a scholar in the employ of Sarelin Brey, the Queen of Elira.  We're dealing with a generally low-fantasy setting in this book; medieval technology rules, and what fantastical creatures explicitly existed (such as the chimera seen on the front cover) are established early as having been killed off.  There are 'elementals' referenced as part of the population, who are capable of manipulating the elements at will (we see examples of wind, water, fire, and mind-control is alluded to) but this is a decidedly downtrodden group, forced to live in hiding because their mere existence is considered criminal.  Hello, civil rights issues.

Elira itself is a nation made up of five city-states, each of which has its own leader.  There are significant cultural differences between the states, but in all cases, there's a strong degree of social stratification.  The leaders of all five states are largely hereditary, with a clear aristocratic class ("silver-bloods") maintaining power over the commoners.  There is significant poverty in some parts of the nation, and vigilantism is rampant against elementals, whether or not they have done anything to deserve it, given the state-sanctioned illegal nature of their existence, regardless of whether they even choose to be that way.

The first chapter ends with the assassination of Sarelin, apparently at the whim of Mea Tacitus, the White Queen (who attempted to lead an elemental coup some twenty years prior) and the discovery that, in the event of her death, as she has no heir, she has tasked Lysande with selecting the next person to wear the crown, from among the remaining city-state rulers.  However, an important question remains before the scholar: nobody knows who was able to execute the assassination, and it's important to ensure that the new ruler won't be a puppet of the White Queen.

From there, we're introduced to the leaders of the four other city-states, and Lysande starts trying to decide who would be the best ruler.  This initially seems like it is going to be a selection of 'tests of worthiness', but when further disasters start to threaten the potential rulers (a piece of metal specifically-sized to be a choking hazard hidden in food, a vicious wolf let free in the coliseum when it's not supposed to be... yes, there are blood sports in this setting), she decides that the best option is, instead, to put off selecting a new monarch until the threat of Mea Tacitus is sorted out, placing the four leaders as a ruling council, instead.  She herself is added to the group at the urging of one of the four, as a representative of the fifth city-state, despite having no claim to any throne, and in fact being "low-born".

With this new governmental structure in place, the narrative then shifts to a larger question, that of what the apparently unprovoked attacks on trade ships and attempts on the lives of the council itself might mean.  This is complicated by the introduction of international politics to the mix; one of the two bordering kingdoms believes that their ships are being attacked by Eliran vessels and wants things to be made right, while mercenaries apparently paid by that same country are causing problems.  Lysande's knowledge serves her well, helping her to figure out what's going on, but not quite quickly enough to prevent a diplomatic incident, and not the last one in the narrative.

So, we have a book that's working on several levels.  The primary narrative deals with this conspiracy, where the question of who the traitor in the midst of the council is drives the story forward.  While this makes for the puzzlebox level of the narrative, what drew me to the book in the first place, I found that the far more interesting level was Lysande's development over the course of the work.  She starts out as a devoted servant of Sarelin, who uses the fallen queen's words as a guide for how she should act and how she should lead.  Even at the start of her time as Councillor, while she sees where social ills can be sorted out easily, she's unable to bring herself to take anything more than the smallest steps toward sorting them out.  Her background as a low-born orphan who had it drilled into her head that the appropriate way to express herself is to "restrain, constrain, subdue," anything to keep from getting too many thoughts into her head of acting above her station.  This motto or mantra appears throughout the book, as she grapples with her desire to enact real change to make the lives of all Eliran citizens better, despite her social status.  Her development over the course of the narrative into a genuine leader who is able to easily win the hearts of the populace is interesting to watch, and her slow realization that her low-born status is more a boon than she ever realized.

Definitely an interesting book, and given that the author is already working on a sequel, I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.  The specific conflict that I spent much of the book expecting to see never quite materialized, but it's clearly still on the horizon, and two of the five city-states haven't been explored on a cultural level yet, so there's plenty of worldbuilding and narrative to see in the future.