A-Z 2021 K - Plain Tales from the Hills (Rudyard Kipling, 1884-1888)

We may as well start today with addressing the elephant in the room.  Rudyard Kipling was absolutely a believer that British colonialism was fundamentally a good thing.  He doesn't write of it as a uniform good, but in many ways this is because he sees that humans are flawed.  He isn't supporting colonialism out of a nationalistic notion of Empire, but rather, he sees it as an almost sacred duty of good European folks (though especially the English-speaking ones) to bring civilization and Christianity to other parts of the world, whether they already had perfectly good civilizations and religions or not.

We will not, however, be addressing any elephants in today's book, as despite their appearance on the cover of my copy, there are no elephants as significant parts of the narrative in any of Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills.  Sorry, Hathi, I didn't read the book you're in quite yet.

Plain Tales was Kipling's first widely-published work, so what we see here is a very young writer (these stories are from when the author was between 19-23 years old), working as a journalist in British India, turning his pen to (generally comic) fiction in order to fill a few columns in the newspaper he worked for.  This, then, indicates the initial audience as well; he was writing for English folks in and around Lahore.

Perhaps due to that audience, Kipling has a particular focus on English characters; few stories have "native" protagonists, and many have only white characters at all.  There are recurring characters at times, references to earlier stories abound, and it's very clear that the readership were following along from episode to episode.

The subject matter varies widely.  There are a number of short romantic comedies and tragedies alike, tales of pranks gone horribly wrong or spectacularly right, several stories told in a remarkable vernacular about the goings-on of a military regiment...  In short, a cross-section of what life in and around Simla during the mid-1880s was like, at least if you were an Englishman.  The mental imagery created in some of these tales is amazing, particularly in the case of the military regiment's offerings, one of which includes a ghost horse with a skeleton and a pair of timpanis on its back galloping toward a whole battalion.  It makes sense in context.

Kipling's narrator is a sort of self-insertion, usually standing to one side of the stories and simply observing what happens through his journalist's eye; while several times he is drawn into the narrative, this is rarely done in a way that gives him any great agency within the story.  Rather, this device is used to allow him to act as a sort of straight man for the other characters' foolishness (in one case, having to race on a horse in a dust storm to try and stop an unfortunate aftermath to a friend's proposal to the wrong sister; the obvious mistake having been to propose to someone you can't clearly see in a dust storm).

It's hard at times to tell if some of the things Kipling says about India and its people are actually his views or if they are intended as satire.  He clearly feels strongly for the country and its culture, but at the same time, he has an outsider's view, and especially feels that Western culture has some degree of primacy that should be brought in to sort of... improve on what's already there.

It's worth noting that the text that Penguin has used, at least in the edition I have (which is not identical to the one currently in print), is from the third compiled printing of these stories, which was partially adjusted by Kipling due to its nature as a book intended for the "Home" market, back in the British Isles.  This has required some adjusting of text here and there, largely to make things that would have been obvious to his readers in Lahore more clear for readers in London.  The endnotes provided do a good job of making it clear where this has happened, however, and much of the content that one looks at slightly askance now was there all along.  It's not a surprise that this is coming from the same author who would, ten years later, write "The White Man's Burden".

One last thing that I really have to wonder about, and do want to bring up, is the way of referring to race here.  For some reason, the Indian peoples are referred to as "blacks" if their race is mentioned at all, as if they're the same as Africans.  I really don't know for sure what to make of that; in a couple of places it's been described as looking similar to a "Spanish complexion", perhaps indicating that any darker complexion would be considered 'black' in this case.  This would line up with one of the knights in the Arthurian legends, Morien, a half-Moorish knight described as "black of face and limb", despite by all indications being someone who would have something akin to a middle-eastern or, indeed, Indian complexion.  This is one of those places where being American may be to my detriment in this case, as my specific cultural background gives a likewise-specific idea of what 'black' means that may not line up with literature that comes from a British background, particularly that from other centuries.

It's ultimately impossible to separate Kipling from the colonial views and mindset, in any case.  He's a product of his time and culture, and his writings show that.  While the racism on display isn't as hateful as, say, that of H.P. Lovecraft, it's still a clear through-line of sorts in the stories where Indian people appear.  This isn't to say that the English get away without some solid jabs, but the overall form of Kipling's work still celebrates imperialism.  It's simply impossible to escape from that in many of his works, and this early fiction puts it front and center.

A-Z 2021 D: A Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Defoe, 1722)

 

There's a tendency among many people to think that modern culture is more knowledgable about how to handle disasters.  That we've learned from the past, and won't repeat it.  We've got modern technology, we won't have the same kinds of problems arising that were around in the past.  Technology, however, can only go so far.  It doesn't get you past human nature, or sheer bullheadedness, and certainly won't get you around misinformation.  And so, we have a book about the 1665 plague epidemic in London that just... keeps... looking like what the last year looked like.  And thus, we get what we just lived through.

Let's address the nature of this book, first.  A Journal of the Plague Year is not precisely what it claims to be.  It's a work of fiction, and yet manages to be possibly the most authoritative book on the realities of urban life during a plague epidemic.  It was written as a warning of sorts, trying to give the people of London a heads-up as to what it would look like if the plague epidemic that was active at the time in Marseilles were to take hold there, and Daniel Defoe went out of his way to do a vast amount of research.  However, a nonfiction work wouldn't have necessarily gotten to the masses the way he needed; it had to be formatted as a novel instead.

What Defoe crafted here is, ostensibly, a document that relates the experiences of a Londoner who lived through the epidemic, combining statistics and primary documents with anecdotes and narration to create what is less a journal and more a long-form history of the titular plague year, beginning with the first deaths from the plague in early 1665 and finishing with the return to something resembling normalcy at the end of the year.  It's formatted as something akin to the narrator writing down a remembrance after everything has ended; several times the Great Fire of London is alluded to in a religious context.  The narrator (a "Dissenter", as Defoe himself was) posits that the "Visitation" (itself rather a telling word) of the plague is God punishing the sinners of London, and that the Great Fire the following year is a follow-up when everything returns to the old ways so quickly afterward.

Defoe's narrator often goes on tangents, breaking midway through discussing one topic to go to another, but manages to always come back and finish the thought.  This is most obvious in the case of an extended anecdote he delivers, making up close to 1/10 of the book, about several men making their way about the countryside over the months of the epidemic while trying to find somewhere safe to ride it out.  The story, which functions largely as a way to describe the effects of the plague outside of London, is introduced about 60 pages in, but then gets left aside almost immediately, and isn't returned to for another 60 pages.  There aren't any loose ends left of this nature; if something is brought up and left unfinished, it is always returned to.

So, how is this all relevant now?  Well, let me give a quick summary of the overall narrative we see in the book:

• News of the pandemic appearing overseas happens
• A couple of overseas travelers die of the plague in London
  
• Trade and travel from the location where the initial outbreak was occurring is shut down.
• The plague starts to gain a foothold in London
• Numbers are manipulated by those in power to make it look like everything is under control until the point where it's impossible to pretend otherwise
• People start to engage in social distancing, doing everything they can to not breathe near anyone who might be sick
• Most of the people with the means to isolate themselves effectively (e.g. clergy, rich folks) skip town, while poor folks have to take the crappy high-infection-risk jobs to make sure everything keeps working and they have food to eat, and largely get sick as a result
• Everything shuts down
• Quacks start peddling sure-fire remedies for the illness
• Everyone starts looking at everyone else suspiciously, nobody wants to let anyone from out of town into any village
• Death tolls rise, then begin to fall again
• Everyone decides that the numbers falling means it's all over, stop behaving intelligently while the disease is still present
• Numbers go up briefly but then resume downward trend
• Everything's fine, we can go back to normal now, everyone back into London and let's proceed without having learned anything from all this
• Next year, everything burns

So... in the current pandemic, I believe we're at the 'Everyone decides that...' step right now.  And unfortunately, looking outside, I get the sense that we're facing another year of 'everything burns', too.  I could write a lot more about the parallels here, but...  welcome to pandemic fatigue, I just don't want to.

It's no surprise that this book was one of the top classics sold last year.  At least once, UK sellers actually ran out of copies of Penguin's edition.  It's basically a blueprint for... well... exactly what we saw happen this time around.  What's that thing where you don't learn from history?  Oh yeah, you repeat it.

But we're definitely a more advanced society now than in the 1600s.  I mean, they didn't even have cell phones or antibiotics or social media to tell them what to believe!

A-Z 2021 C: The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer, ca.1400)

 

My reading selections probably need to be more carefully selected at times.  Or I need to not be quite so ambitious.  There were choices made in this case that probably should not have been made.

So, let's start with the question of what I read.  This is one of five (!) different copies of The Canterbury Tales that I have, three of which are in Penguin Classics.  Because I'm me, and wanted to do the proper reading, I went with the unabridged, glossed-text version.  This led to a couple of discoveries.  First: Middle English isn't actually that hard to read once you wrap your mind around the verb tenses and the ways that spelling has changed.  Second:  There is a very good reason that most translations and adaptations skip over two specific parts of the book.  But more on that later.

This is one of the earliest works of literature that exists in recognizable English, and is largely written in verse, with rhyming lines and a remarkably deft ability to modify the voice and tone of the writing to suggest different voices.  This is useful, given the frame narrative that shapes the whole work.  At the outermost level, The Canterbury Tales is about a group of travelers, brought together by chance, having a storytelling contest on their pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral at the suggestion of an innkeeper who decides to join the group, with the promise of a free meal when the entourage returns to his inn at the end of the journey.  We don't ever actually find out who wins; the prologue suggests that the intention was originally for all 30 of the pilgrims to tell four stories each, but instead we only have 24 tales, three of them incomplete, two tales attributed to Chaucer himself (positioned in-text as one of the pilgrims), and one belonging to a character who joins the pilgrimage after it began, so eight stories are missing just from the first round of tales.  This can at least partly be explained by the fact that Chaucer died while working on the Tales, though two of the unfinished tales have their incomplete nature at least explained within the text as the narrators being interrupted, suggesting that Chaucer himself felt justified in stopping where he did.

The tales themselves cover a wide range of subjects, with the highest chivalry immediately followed by the lowest of sex farces.  At the same time, the narrators span a similar range of backgrounds, forming a cross-section of the entire population of pre-Tudor England.  More than anything else, this gives a general idea of what kinds of thoughts were on the minds of everyone in the era when they looked for entertainment, while simultaneously tempering the levity with religious morals and the wisdom of past philosophers.

That last part, though, brings up the biggest issue I ran into, and what largely caused my reading to take as long as it did: the two prose sections.  There are two of them, both in the second half of the book, and neither has a tendency toward appearing in translations of the work into modern English.  In fact, of the five various versions of the Tales that I have, "The Tale of Melibee" and "The Parson's Tale" only exist in two, this original-spelling version and Burton Raffel's 2008 unabridged translation for the Modern Library.  Raffel acknowledges in his introduction that English prose was a rather young art form when Chaucer was writing, and that he struggled to avoid "improving" the quality of the writing.  This... is definitely an issue in this case, because those two sections are anything but 'good'.  My suspicion is that The Canterbury Tales is a classic more in spite of the prose than anything else.  Chaucer's verse is spectacular (with the exception of "Sir Thopas", one of the aforementioned 'incomplete' tales, which is outright stated in the text to be horrible, though its rhyming scheme ), but... Raffel's description of these two tales as "not entirely readable" is perhaps generous.  I got stalled out for over a week on "Melibee", just trying to make it through the incredibly dense prose, which really felt more like Chaucer showing the reader how well-read he was than anything else, and it took having it pointed out to me that the important part is making the effort, not actually finishing every page, especially in the case of a collection like this.

So, what of the ending?  Well...  what ending?  "The Parson's Tale" is the last "story" in the book, and it does have a prologue that suggests its intention is to be the final of the first 'round' of tales, with the Host telling the Parson that everyone else has told a tale and now it's his turn, and the Parson turning around and basically saying 'Meh, tales are bad for you, I'm gonna give you a sermon instead' and spending 80 pages talking about penitance, the seven deadly sins, and salvation.  This is followed up by the final section of the text, but rather than being anything of the framing narrative, instead we get Chaucer saying 'Oh, by the way, I'd like to take this opportunity to retract anything sinful I may have said in any of my works, including the one you just read.'  We don't find out who won the contest, and indeed, it seems to have been entirely forgotten.  Instead, we get the sense that this is Chaucer making a brief confession of his sins, as this is very likely the last thing he wrote.

So what of our travelers?  How did they fare in the end?  Chaucer doesn't tell us; instead we're left wondering.  One way of addressing this may be through adaptations, however.  I mentioned before that I have five various versions of The Canterbury Tales, and perhaps the most interesting one isn't this original-spelling one (as fun as reading Middle English actually turned out to be), but instead is the Puffin Classics edition, adapted by Geraldine McCaughrean, which is (as all books on the Puffin imprint are) intended for children.

The children's version is kind of an interesting piece.  To start with, it only includes 13 of the original 24 tales, and the order they're placed in has been largely changed.  That said, what I found most remarkable was that McCaughrean chose to keep the original format in place; while they have little resemblance to what Chaucer wrote, this version does maintain the framing narrative of travelers gathering on a pilgrimage and having a storytelling competition.  That said, Chaucer never has the Summoner beating on the door of a closed inn and bellowing, "OPEN THE DOOR OR I'LL EXCOMMUNICATE YOU, YOU HEATHEN SON OF A BENIGHTED INNKEEPER!"  That's some interesting language to find in a book intended for kids, but there you go.  In the end, a winner isn't declared in this version, either; instead, the travelers can't pick a best story, and decide that they'll have a second round on the way back after the pilgrimage.  Perhaps that indicates just how well-established in the English literary canon The Canterbury Tales is; even adaptations that aim to give the same kind of experience in reading, and leave in the same position, with no clear winner to the competition.  Instead, it's the storytelling itself that is the important part.

A-Z 2021 - B: A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess, 1963)

 

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

First-person narratives seem to come in two general varieties.  There's the ones where everything is still written like a book, just from the viewpoint of one of the characters; in these cases, while that character's way of speaking might appear in the dialogue, it stays out of the narration.  Then there's the ones where it's formatted more as if the narrator is actually telling the story to you out loud, where everything is filled with the slang they use in their conversations with others, where even the most straightforward things might be obscured by the argot that they fill their speech with, so that until you crack the code, as it were, you need a glossary just to keep up.

A Clockwork Orange is perhaps one of the most quintessential examples of this second form of narrative.  Alex, "Your Humble Narrator", govoreets in nadsat as he tells the horrorshow good raskazz with aplomb, and no appy polly loggies if thou art no oomny lewdie who ponies the slovos he skavats, O my brothers.

OK, it's not quite that bad.  But there's times where it's not not that bad.  It creates a kind of strange effect where the language is utterly jarring at the start, but as you read through the book, it starts to sink in, so that everything makes sense by the end and you're not flipping to your Nadsat-English glossary nearly so often, if you even have one available.  This is actually by design; Burgess created an entire slang for the teenage troublemakers in his novel, sort of a combination of the wordplay in Cockney rhyming slang and a sort of pidgin Russian, in an attempt to make everything have a quality that falls outside of any specific time and instead just evokes, well... a dense argot made of near-impenetrable vocabulary that requires the reader to work out meanings from context, unless Your Humble Narrator actually defines the term for you.

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

Alex is... not a likeable character, at least initially.  He's unapologetic, and just comes right out with it, talking about how he and his droogs get themselves high on milk laced with amphetamines, go out on the town to cause havoc, and just generally act like complete hooligans.  It's not pleasant; the nadsat patterns do a little to abstract it, to give a sort of versy quality that straight narration wouldn't give, but that doesn't change that the end result of the first two chapters is that they've beat up an old man, destroyed three rare books, broken into a tobacconist's and ransacked the place, gotten into a gang fight that ends with someone potentially blinded and another with his cheeks slashed with a razor, stolen a car (which is later dumped into a lake), and gangraped a woman before beating her to death.

Yeah, that's what it's going to be, then.

Alex is profoundly disturbed, clearly.  The first third of the book is largely devoted to illustrating this, and there's a lot of it that, well...  He seems downright proud of the chaos he's creating, and there's no getting around that he has no sense of the consequences that his actions actually hold, just living his life in a pattern of doing violence, going home, listening to classical music while fantasizing about doing more violence, sleeping, going out during the day and getting into more trouble (on the day we get to see, this involves statutory rape), then going to meet his droogs and starting the cycle all over again.  This all ends when his crew decides that they're going to break off from him, and contrive to leave him holding the bag, as it were, when they break into an old woman's house and everything goes sideways.  He gets knocked in the head, the droogs run, and he's picked up by the police and carted off to prison.

There's a two-year time skip after that, and we get to see that he's putting on an act of false contrition, working as the audio guy in the prison chapel on Sundays, and getting into conversations about religion with the chaplain, during the seven years he's been sentenced to.  He's a fan of the bible, but much more the first part, where there's all the sex and violence.  Not so much the later part that's all preachy.  It's almost like he's not actually learning anything, but it's at this point that the actual primary theme of the book comes out, the question of free will.  See, there's this new treatment that he's been hearing rumors about, where they'll train you to be a good person and then let you out early, and wouldn't that be nice?

Spoiler alert: It's not nice.

After an altercation involving the entire group of his cellmates beating up a new prisoner for making a sexual advance on Alex, and Your Humble Narrator going completely overboard on him after he's already down, Alex is 'volunteered' to be the test case for the Ludovico Technique, which he's initially pleased about, as he thinks this is a perfect way to get out early, and it certainly can't be that bad, right?

Spoiler alert:  It's very bad.

It takes a full day for Alex to realize what's actually going on here, and even when he starts to fight against it, he simply... can't.  Any thought of resistance makes him physically uncomfortable, so that he's rendered into a state of, well... effectively being an automaton, unable to defend himself, only able to act honorably and nicely toward others, and due to its use in the Technique, even robbed of his ability to enjoy classical music.  And then... he's simply turned out, after the proof of his utter rehabilitation has been publicized by the government as evidence that the prison overcrowding problem will soon be over so they'll have room for political prisoners.

Oh, hello there, totalitarianism.

The last part of the book focuses on how miserable Alex's life becomes in the days immediately after his release, culminating in his being manipulated into a suicide attempt by opposition agitators, and... the government undoing the brainwashing through hypnopaedia while he's recovering, and turning him back loose again with his ability to listen to music and his ability to choose between right and wrong restored... which means his ability to do wrong is also restored.

Here's the optional endpoint.  The American version of the novel ended here, on its initial release; Stanley Kubrick's film version was based on the American version; though he was aware of the final chapter's existence, he chose to take the indication from Burgess's manuscript and end it right here.  Alex comes full circle, and he's just been turned loose again, free will restored, and we don't know what he's going to do from there.  He's either learned from his experiences, or he's still a sociopathic monster.

And then there's the final chapter.  It starts out as a near-mirror of the first chapter; Alex in the milk bar drinking milk-plus laced with uppers before going out for a night on the town with his new droogs.  There's a few differences, though.  As part of their apology, the government has given him a job in the music archives, and he gets free discs as part of the perks.  So he has money, he doesn't need to steal it.  And when the crew gets ready to go cause some havoc, he... feels bored with it.  He doesn't really want to.  Instead, he tells them to go ahead without him, and leaves them behind, instead going to a tea shop for a cup of chai, and runs into one of the original droogs, who is now married and gainfully employed.  And he realizes... maybe being eighteen is too old to be getting up to all this stuff now, maybe he should see about finding himself a romantic partner, and perhaps dropping the nadsat and starting to talk like an adult.  In short, maybe he needs to actually grow up.  It was all just teenage directionlessness, after all, and you can grow out of that.

So instead of the unclear ending that could go any direction, we get a happy ending where he's off to become a productive member of society.  Maybe he'll be a composer.  He'd enjoy that.

...I honestly don't know if that last chapter is good or not.  There's a collection of essays from Burgess and reviews from others and various relevant writings in the back matter in the copy I have (almost 100 pages' worth, in fact), and it seems like opinions are rather sharply divided on whether that final chapter is or isn't important.  Even Burgess seems unsure, and he's the author.  It's a very sharp tonal shift from the rest of the book, and honestly feels like it wasn't written with the same vicious energy as the rest of the piece.  While it does further the question of what Alex's free will actually entails in the end, it also... just seems like it's not what the rest of the book was building to.  It kind of feels like taking the fairy tale Bluebeard and ending it with 'And they all lived happily ever after.'

Yes, she inherits Bluebeard's wealth and gives all the previous wives proper burials and gets herself remarried herself... but no way she's just living happily ever after.  Not after that trauma.  That's not how psychology works.  Darn fairy tales and their need for happy endings.

I dunno.  I genuinely can't decide if I prefer the book stopping with the open ending or with the happy ending.  I do think the happy ending is horribly flawed.

A tough, but ultimately worthy read.

A-Z 2021 - A: Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen, 1813)

 

Is this a kissing book?

        -The Grandson, The Princess Bride

I don't really know why it took me so long to get around to reading Pride and Prejudice.  Somehow, even with being very much a reader and focusing quite heavily on literature in my schooling in recent years, the only Austen I had read before now was minor works, and never any of the full-length novels.  At least in part, it's likely because I've traditionally had a preference toward reading sci-fi and fantasy, and perhaps away from romance novels, even ones considered major works of literature, such as Austen.

This is not to say that Austen is precisely what would be suggested by that simple genre label.  There is, after all, a big difference between the social satire that her novels contain and the Harlequin and Silhouette novels that are present in any bookstore and in most grocery stores, and it's rather doubtful that any of the latter are going to still be read 200 years after their initial publishing.  But what is it that makes Austen have such staying power?

Pride and Prejudice comes at this in several ways that give it some literary heft.  The first, quite simply, is that the first half of the book doesn't seem to be acknowledging that the protagonist is actually in a romance novel.  Elizabeth Bennet is quick-thinking, rational-minded, with an acerbic wit, and quite willing to express herself, even to those who exist on a different social stratum.  Fitzwilliam Darcy, the male lead in the piece, makes himself decidedly unlikable in his first introduction, acting aloofly toward anyone he doesnt already know and refusing any invitations to dance when it's rather a social faux-pas to not take part.  Lizzy pretty much hates him immediately, and this remains her position for much of the story.

The book was originally published in three volumes, and these actually function remarkably well as dividing lines for the action, as the first covers Darcy's initial visit to Lizzy's home township of Meryton, the second covers events when Lizzy runs into him again while staying in Kent, and the last detailing her brief visit to his home of Pemberley and the aftermath of that encounter.  We see how Darcy is slowly won over by Lizzy's charm, and how the mutual misunderstandings of the people around them both has brought about unfortunate consequences for Darcy's actions, to the point that he surprises her with a wedding proposal that she very firmly declines.  And yet, this mutual misunderstanding can be fixed, the actions remedied, and in fact Lizzy's hatred can be turned to admiration, and his essential good nature brought forward to counter his pride, letting him admit that he misread situations and is able to forgive past injury when it's best for all involved.

There is kissing in this book (sorry, young Fred Savage), but not between the characters that might be expected; this isn't a "kissing book".  In fact, all of the kissing is either familial in nature, or one case of a brother-in-law kissing Lizzy's hand.  Notably, not only is no physical affection between Lizzy and Darcy shown, but in fact anything more than walks in the country or organized ballroom dancing is kept out of sight; even the four marriages that happen are all 'off-screen', either happening far from Elizabeth's sight or between chapters.  It's not what I suspect most readers would expect out of a romance novel.

Perhaps my favorite set of interactions in the book, truly, were the verbal sparring that happened between Elizabeth and Darcy's aunt, Lady Catherine.  I had a sort of mental image, though both characters in the book are younger than this, of the way that Lady Violet and Isobel Crawley reacted toward each other on Downton Abbey.  Lady Catherine is quite open about her disapproval of the very idea of a man marrying "beneath" himself, and is very much set on trying to force a match between Darcy and her daughter.  This goes so far as to have Lady Catherine visit the Bennet household purely to threaten Elizabeth with societal ostracization if she doesn't decline an impending second proposal from Darcy.  She is quite unprepared to handle Lizzy's utter lack of fear of her threats, and Darcy's own response to her subsequent attempt at interfering directly with him only results in, well...  The very proposal that she didn't want to happen.  Oops.

The general, overall theme underlying the comedy of manners that makes up the book is that people shouldn't trust their first impressions of others.  This seems to have been the original intention; Austen's original title when she first wrote this novel in the 1790s was to be First Impressions, though there is evidence that it was substantially rewritten over a decade later.  It is difficult to say what that earlier manuscript might have looked like, as there is no evidence of its continued existence; perhaps that is in some ways for the best, however, as what was published is an excellent read that I honestly wish I had picked up a lot sooner than I did.

The Naked Civil Servant (Quentin Crisp, 1968)

I really don't read as many autobiographies as I probably ought to.  There's a lot to be said for being able to get a look at someone's life through their own eyes, especially when they're a person who has a vastly different lifestyle to your own.  Add in a remarkably self-deprecating sense of narration, and it's difficult to say that The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp's autobiography (actually the first of three), isn't worth spending the time to read.

Prior to this, I didn't actually have an idea of who Crisp was.  I'm in the middle of doing the local library's 'Own Voices' challenge, where they want participants to read literature coming from various marginalized communities, and one of the categories was LGBTQ+.  I was reasonably certain at the time that my shelf didn't actually contain any queer literature, so I did a quick search to see what options exist in Penguin Classics, and this one stood out, largely because the description mentioned the author's dry wit.  I'm always down for a bit of dry wit.

Yeah, I've been focusing almost exclusively on Penguin Classics lately.  It's a good way to curate a selection of literature, even if it's taken until comparatively recently for them to start getting a decent selection of non-European literature.  I'm trying to reflect that at least somewhat on my shelf when I buy online rather than getting what I can find at thrift stores/used book stores, but it's slow going.  It does give me a good, inexpensive way to fill the gaps in what I've read, with solid translations and (usually) plenty of context notes, though I wound up reading this book with my phone at my side so I could look up names and unusual terms when necessary, as there weren't any notes whatsoever in this one.

Anyways.  This covers about the first 50 years of Crisp's life, starting with his realization that he was "different" and the difficulties in dealing with that, quickly moving into his decision to lean into his effeminacy, a decidedly problematic choice to make in 1930s Britain, particularly when homosexuality was very much against the law in that country.  He goes over his difficulty in maintaining employment, his struggles with keeping financially afloat during the first half of his life, and his general view that, well... everything that wasn't himself was pretty hard to maintain interest in.

I don't really get the sense that Crisp was a particularly likeable person to get close to.  There's a general tone to the work where he's sort of leaning into this; he's rather open about how he was almost confrontational about his camp aesthetic, and being out in the open with it rather than keeping it to the underground clubs that most gay men of the era limited their expression to, but it's very much camp; he outright states that he only actually dressed in drag once, and doesn't seem to have enjoyed the experience.

Crisp spends much of the book going through various art/design-related jobs, doing book covers and logotypes for films and the like; he outright states at several points that a large part of why he perhaps struggled to keep these jobs was the combination of 'no formal training', 'rushes to get it done quickly', and 'never learned how to be detail-focused'.  He has a general dislike of art and, in fact, all culture; the brief period he talks about in which he was going to movies on a regular basis is explicitly described as not having included anything with English-language audio, but also he actively refused to go to anything alone, preferring to have a companion, as if the idea of being alone in attending a film was somehow anathema.

During the Second World War, Crisp was actually quite willing to go, but received a discharge when he reported, due to "sexual perversion," so that he instead remained in London.  This resulted, however, in his first encounters with Americans, and particular with the many gay servicemen who passed through Britain when on leave, especially sailors.  This actually surprised me, in large part because of the numbers of servicemen involved; given the U.S. Military's rules at the time, congregating as groups could easily have resulted in mass delivery of blue discharges, which could have been seen as an easy way off the frontlines, but just as easily caused a lot of problems upon returning home, given that such discharges were treated as 'dishonorable' in many cases.  And yet, here are large groups of sailors aiming to sleep with Crisp, even if he was much more interested in just talking.

It's clear, in fact, that he's very interested in talking about himself.  He states as much, it's true, but we're talking about someone who wrote three autobiographies, had a successful one-man stage show, and had a healthy career as a raconteur in his later life, after this particular book's timeline ends.  The beginnings of that career are visible as he has his first few times speaking, as it were, during the period covered (though rather than public speaking as one might expect, they were instances of speaking at a mental institution).  He's quite open that he's not sure what anyone expected out of him in that case, especially as he told them up front that he wasn't much good at talking about any other topic.

The book's title comes from his primary employment during the second half of the book, working as a (mostly) nude model for various figure-drawing classes at local universities, a job which eventually came to feel less as exhibitionism and much more as a sort of government job.  He acknowledges the difficulties involved early on, the physical demands necessary for maintaining a pose for hours, and that his flamboyant style made the students actually dislike him because he tended to make exaggerated poses that were anything but 'usual' for the classes.

The overall feeling that one gets from reading Crisp's autobiography is that he didn't much care what anyone else thought of him, really; his more public later life included a number of controversies when he made comments that seemed either tone-deaf or actually anti-gay, and refused to retract them.  That would largely seem to be material in the other two autobiographies, which cover his life after this book was made into a film starring John Hurt, his relocation to New York, and the end of his life (the third autobiography having been published posthumously and actively worked on during the last year of his life).  That he lived to almost 91 may be surprising after the way this book ends, however; he gripes openly about the state of elder care, that nobody should be forced (or even allowed) to live past 60, and that there ought to be a Nineteen Eighty-Four-style "Ministry of Heaven" which would enforce this.

I'm definitely left with a good idea of why Crisp seems to have been a divisive figure, at the very least; his sardonic writing style at least kept me interested in seeing where his life went, and I could definitely see myself reading the other two autobiographies at some point, but for the moment, I think I'm more interested in just moving on to my next book.

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 Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame, 1908) (The Penguin Kenneth Grahame, 3/3)

 

And here we come to the third of Kenneth Grahame's major works, the one that he's perhaps best-known for now (and unfortunately the only one that Penguin currently publishes), The Wind in the Willows.  I was rather looking forward to reaching this, actually, I have a lot of vague memories of watching the 1980s television series, and of course Disney's take on the novel.  I know I attempted to read this once as a child, though I kind of bounced off of it.  Reading it now as an adult, I can see what went wrong at the time; I was looking for Mr. Toad's Wacky Adventures, and that's absolutely not what this is (mostly).

This is a decidedly different sort of work entirely from Grahame's two previous works, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its departure from the realism, albeit wonder-tinged, of The Golden Age and Dream Days.  Instead, we're in a world where certain animals dress and act in the same manner as people do, where the size of those animals in relation to humans seems to be based purely on what the narrative requires at that moment, and where an amphibian in a rather poor disguise can be easily mistaken for a human.

The first place to look for differences is simply in the nature of the work.  During the ten-year gap between Dream Days and this work, Grahame became a father, which significantly changed the shape of his audience.  Rather than writing for an ostensibly adult audience, as his newspaper columns were, The Wind in the Willows began as a series of tales that he was telling to his son.  This doesn't change his diction or his writing voice, but it does make this work rather less introspective.  Instead, it allows a shifting of perspectives between the characters to match the tone of each story.

There are three primary characters here, who are used as 'narrators' (though the whole work is told in the third person), though a fourth is generally considered a main character and has been included as a major character in all of the various adaptations over the years.  The character we spend the most time in the mind of is Mole, a simple but determined fellow who follows through on anything he's set to doing and tends to be easily drawn into other folks' activities.  Mole feels a sudden urge at the start of the book to leave his underground home, digs up to the surface, and is immediately overwhelmed by everything that is Springtime.  We're in a similarly pastoral setting to what was seen in The Golden Age and Dream Days, though without any time spent interacting with the nearby village.  Instead, the world of the animals is the wilds, with meadows, a river, a nearby forest, and beyond, the world of humans, which the animals prefer to steer clear of.  Mole quickly discovers the River, which is mindboggling to him, given that he's never seen anything of the sort.  At the same time, he meets Water Rat, a relaxed sort of fellow with a love of everything that has to do with the river and a taste for poetry.  Mole quickly decides to move in with Water Rat after the two share a picnic; the two will rarely be apart for the rest of the book.

Toad appears as a minor character, just spoken of, in the first chapter; he doesn't become a primary character until the second chapter, where a visit to Toad Hall results in him dragging Mole and Rat into his latest fixation, a horse-drawn caravan which he intends to go traveling the countryside in.  The characters are hesitant to get too involved, because Toad has a tendency to fixate on one thing until it loses some degree of charm for him, before moving on to something else; his exuberance for the idea of life on the road is able to push through his friends' reticence so that they end up going on his journey with him.  This goes well until the two rodents force Toad to actually do some of the work involved in this sort of travels, which quickly sours him on the prospect, aided by the caravan being run off the road and wrecked by a motor-car driving by at speed.  This sets up Toad's overall plotline (and the only actual ongoing plotline for the book), as he becomes obsessed by cars instead, and by the following morning has placed an order for one of his own.

We next meet Badger, a gruff sort of country gentleman of the sort who doesn't particularly care for society but is most welcoming to those in distress, who lives in the middle of the Wild Wood.  Mole and Rat come to his home during a snowstorm that leaves them stranded in the forest, and he gladly lets them in to stay the night and warm up.  He's a kind but stern fellow, whose biggest desire seems to be for there to be a certain degree of civility and stability to the countryside.  He's the sort that nobody particularly wants to cross, as well; Mole and Rat were somewhat threatened by the weasels and stoats who also live in the forest when they were caught after dark, and Badger makes it clear that they'll not see any further issues once it's known that they're his friends; after all, a badger is rather larger than most other mustelids.  At the same time, we learn that the Wild Wood is in a place where humans used to have a village; Badger's home is built in what is apparently a former basement.  This doesn't mean humans are gone, just they're not in that particular spot right now.

The small plotlines that continue in the book are similar small pastoral adventures, with Rat and Mole encountering a forest god (implied to be Pan) in one chapter (though they promptly forget, a gift from the god stated as being a way to ensure that their lives won't be seen as never reaching that peak again), and another having Rat be tempted toward running off to sea, until Mole returns him to his sanity.

The largest plotline, though, is Toad's misadventures as his arrogance and lack of common sense gets him in trouble, repeatedly; this is what the Disney film dealt with, and what the youthful me was expecting.  His fixation with motor-cars refuses to be sated even after he has wrecked six of them, and landed in the hospital three times; when Rat, Mole, and Badger attempt a forced intervention, he flees out the window, runs halfway to the human village nearby, steals a car, gets himself arrested, and winds up thrown into jail.  The subsequent escape (thanks to the warden's daughter who takes some pity on him because he's an animal) involves cross-dressing, sneaking aboard a train under false pretenses, stealing a horse, hijacking the same car again and driving it into a lake, and finally being swept up in the River's currents and delivered to Rat's door, across several chapters.  This leads to the revelation that the weasels, stoats, and ferrets from the Wild Wood have taken over Toad Hall, and finally a nighttime raid by the four friends to retake the manor from the invaders, and Toad finally learning a little bit of humility in the process.

It's obvious just why Toad is so beloved; children are obviously going to be amused by a goofy character who gets into all manner of slapstick scrapes.  But while his plotline may be the lion's share of the novel (six of the novel's twelve chapters deal with the Motor-Car fixation and its results, from beginning to end), the overall feel of the piece is far more in line with the lifestyles of Mole, Rat, and Badger.  These three are content with their lots in life; Mole may get homesick for his burrow, but he knows where it is and can easily stop by, and in fact does, and a more dependable fellow simply can't be found.  Rat may be swayed easily by a bit of storytelling, but the small pleasures of riverside life are more than enough for him if he just spends a bit of time writing.  And Badger stands by his friends, even if he's a bit of a scary old codger at times.  They serve to ground things against the rampaging id that is Toad, and where Toad is apt to give up at a small setback and rarely seems to think beyond a few moments ahead, the three of them together are more than able to offset Toad's shortcomings.

The one thing that is perhaps the most perplexing about this piece as a whole is the question of just what an 'animal' is within this context.  There are a number of characters who are apparently of similar size to one another despite being far differently-sized in nature (particularly Badger alongside everyone else), and Toad in particular interacts with a number of clearly human artifacts, including his motor-cars and the washerwoman's outfit that he 'borrows' in order to escape from jail, and that's leaving aside the question of the manor-house that is Toad Hall, and, well, the success of the washerwoman disguise.  On the other hand, Rat's temptation toward the seas comes from encountering a Sea Rat on the road, who has apparently made a habit of sneaking aboard ships by climbing into rowboats or up ropes, and likes to bunk in the captain's cabin, which implies that he's, well... rat-sized.  Songbirds are kept in cages by both people and animals alike, but Rat is able to have conversations with migratory avians on the subject of why they go south for the Winter rather than sticking around closeby.  Toad's caravan is pulled by a horse, who clearly isn't the same kind of animal as the other folk; the horse he steals during his escape from the law is likewise little more than a pack beast.  And the warden's daughter apparently likes animals as pets, but knows better than to mention that to the captive Toad.

It's a strange dichotomy that is far from clearly-delineated, and serves to give a sort of dream-like quality to the work, that makes it a wonderful chaser for Grahame's other two major works.  It's the only one of the three that really felt like it had a fully-satisfying ending, though; where The Golden Age and Dream Days both ended with a sort of eulogy for childhood, The Wind in the Willows wraps up with the promise that while Toad may be a little less conceited and devoted to his impulses, the four of them are going to continue in their lives with the status quo re-established.  All has been brought back to the way it should be, and the pastoral life remains, a little slice of Arcady within the English countryside, complete with the god who mythologically lived in the Greek region.  It's a version of the world seen in Grahame's earlier works that can go on in adulthood, where there may be some strife between residents but existence is largely harmonious, and where the line between nature and 'civilized' life is blurred to the point of nonexistence.

Dream Days (Kenneth Grahame, 1898) (The Penguin Kenneth Grahame, 2/3)

There's something to be said for sequels.  While they might be seen by some as derivative, and there's always the sideways glance and comment that "it's not as good as the first one", the best sequels build on the groundwork laid by their predecessors and use it as a springboard to explore different grounds.

Kenneth Grahame's first 'big hit' work, The Golden Age, was a meditation on his own childhood, raised by "The Olympians" who took him and his siblings in after his mother's death.  It explored the childhood mindsets and world that he had grown up in, giving anecdotes of how that childhood life of whimsy and indifference toward adult concerns manifested itself, though without any particular degree of sentimentality; the narrator is quite aware of the things he does that get him in trouble, he simply didn't understand at the time that they were going to be problems.

The second of the pieces collected in The Penguin Kenneth Grahame is the follow-up, Dream Days.  This work shares the setting and characters with its predecessor (though the oldest brother, sent off to boarding school at the end of the previous work, only appears from afar, mentioned in flashback and in the form of letters sent home from school), but takes an altogether different approach to the childhood events, for much of the piece.

This work has longer chapters than The Golden Age, allowing each flight of fancy to be given more room to breathe, and Grahame uses this space to engage in a rather focused way on the realm of daydreams.  This brings along with it an entirely different sense to the work, where each story, rather than being about the little encroachments of whimsy on the reality of a child's life, instead goes so far as to override everything about the world, and engage entirely in that fantasy world.  Several stories actively seek to ignore the world outside of this imaginary space entirely, building to a chapter featuring an entire original fairy-tale, not featuring any of the known characters at all, before coming back to harsh reality in the final story.

The largest theme, then, is the place of imaginary landscapes and settings in the child's world.  The second chapter, for example, begins within reality; the narrator explains how, on this particular day, everyone around him was in a bad mood and that put him in a bad mood as well, so he decided to just start walking outside and let his mind wander.  From there, it jumps into a series of brief fantasies, where the narrator is considering what he might run away and do to make those around him realize how much he means, through his absence.  These are all examples of the sort of adventure yarns that might be seen in children's adventure stories; he imagines running off to join the army and become a great general, or becoming a cabin boy and working his way up to be a pirate captain, or even going to a monastery and becoming a monk, just to spite them.  This obviously misses the deeper, more spiritual reasons behind someone taking up the monastic life, but much of the depth involved in these fantasy-minded escapes is missed in the childhood whims, shaped as they are by what books he has read and stories he has heard but little else besides.

From this establishment of the realms of imagination as a focus, Grahame begins to explore the various ways that the imagination can be shaped, used as both a way to bridge two minds together and to simply add to what one has at their disposal, and how it can serve as an escape when necessary.  The following chapter features the narrator discovering the dangers of inviting someone you don't know into your imaginary world without considering how their own imagination and desires might shape that world.  While some of the daydreamscapes explored in Dream Days are shared with the narrator's siblings, this one instance where an outsider is invited in is almost devastating, given just how different the thought processes of the girl in question are.

Each chapter, then, focuses on a new sort of exploration of this general theme.  One chapter features the thought of using artwork as a window into a whole imaginary world of what happens in the background, then leads from there into the narrator encountering an illuminated manuscript with new wonders on every page, allowing him to venture deeper and deeper into an imagined setting.  Another details an instance where, after offending a guest with his childish behavior, he is sent into the nursery to keep out of everyone's hair, and imagines an entire high-seas adventure for himself while sitting in a child's bath placed atop a towel-horse (thus able to emulate the sense of swaying on the seas as it wobbles).

The longest chapter, and perhaps the best-known piece out of these two books about this somewhat-idealized English childhood, is the aforementioned fairy tale, "The Reluctant Dragon," perhaps best-known now for the short-subject contained within the same-titled Disney 'behind the scenes' film from the 1940s.  This chapter starts out looking much like any other, firmly within reality; the children are playing in the garden, find what one of them is sure must be dragon tracks, and they follow the tracks until they end in a neighbor's garden.  Upon explaining their intrusion to the neighbor, he offers to walk them back home, and tells them the fairy tale during their walk.

And what a delightful fairy tale it is, too!  Written with the same combination of childish whimsy and erudite sensibility that is displayed elsewhere in this pair of books, the story turns everything that might be understood about the typical tale of an English dragon in the countryside, complete with St. George on hand to fight it, on its head.  The dragon has never been in a fight in his life, always letting the other dragons do that; he's rather more an aesthete, preferring to laze about and compose poetry and appreciate the countryside for what it is.  Of course, the nearby townsfolk, with the exception of one boy who befriends the dragon, don't want to have anything to do with it; after all, dragons are "a pestilential scourge" and don't belong near civilized towns at all, so they send for help to remove it, in the form of St. George himself.  It comes down to the boy to act as a negotiator and talk some sense into both sides of the impending fight, and reach an end result that makes everyone happy without any particular bloodshed.

All good things must eventually end, though, and the final story in the book, after the particular high point of the dragon's mock battle with the knight, seems almost more of a eulogy to childhood than anything else.  This story deals with the day where the youngest of the children is deemed by The Olympians to be 'too big for those kind of toys any longer', and the resultant nighttime mission by the two youngest, along with the narrator, to recover just a few particularly cherished keepsakes from the crate due to be shipped to a children's hospital in faraway London.

Even after the rescue goes without a hitch, though, the children have an altogether different intention than keeping the toys for themselves.  Rather than bringing the toys back to the house, where they would likely be quickly found and subjected to the same fate they were rescued from, the three children instead go to a spot they're particularly fond of escaping to when they need some time to just be children, and dig a grave to bury the toys, acknowledging that their days of being played with are over, but also feeling that it's better for their most cherished toys to have never ended up in the hands of children who wouldn't have the same built-up sense of value for them, and that their continued future play on the same spot would let those toys remain as part of the proceedings in spirit, if not as participants.

This ends up being the note on which we leave Grahame's childhood memories and meditations; after Dream Days, he didn't return to these characters, instead moving to other topics.  And so, we must also move on from these children being raised in their Arcadian surroundings, but even in this final act of solemnity, so different from the rest of these two books, there's something important being stated.  Even when we grow up, it's important to hang onto those fragments of innocence and fancy, lest we become as ill-humored and unable to engage with anything but the most serious and purely rational topics as The Olympians; we have to keep that little bit of childhood whimsy buried inside ourselves, always there to draw on, even into adulthood, to help us to take a step back from the real world when we need it.

The Golden Age (Kenneth Grahame, 1895) (The Penguin Kenneth Grahame, 1/3)

I'm sure everyone's seen or read something that makes use of the idyllic, semi-generic rural childhood setting.  You know the one, where everyone lives in either big manor houses or small cottages, and the children run around willy-nilly and get into all kinds of mischief and live in a half-fantasy world where their imaginations get them into all sorts of wild adventures with no real risk involved, and just across that hedge over there is a farmer's field and there's a little village down the way and the grown-ups are all serious and lack proper senses of humor because they just don't understand what's really important in life the way that the children do.

So, what happens if we take that setting, drop a few children into it to have the requisite low-stakes adventures, but then write it with an adult sensibility and sense of diction?

Well, we get some of Kenneth Grahame's works, for one.

Grahame got his start as a writer with pieces written for newspapers in the late Victorian era, a combination of short stories and meditations on life and the simple joys that one can find.  These were mostly collected in a volume called Pagan Papers, which is not at hand for me to read but I may be seeing if I can track it down later.  One particular one of these meditations, "The Olympians," focused on the difference between the priorities of the adults who raised him after his mother died, and those of he and his siblings who were in their care.  After one of his editors asked him to write more like that, he put out several of the 17 stories that made up The Golden Age, though most of the book was original at the time of its publication.  A sequel, Dream Days, followed; I'll be writing about that later.

So, what is it that we're actually looking at, here?  In large part, it's a very grounded set of tales about five siblings growing up in the English countryside and the little games they play with one another.  It's never fully laid-out, but I got the sense when reading that the oldest of the group was maybe nine or ten years old.  There's a sort of timeless sense about it all; the narrator (who seems positioned as a self-insert of the author, without any name ever given) seems to be the third of the five.  The stories seem to take place across about a year and a half of time, shifting lazily from season to season.  Some feature the narrator alone, others some or all of the group, but there's always a touch of ethereal quality to the events, as if the imaginations are layered atop reality in a way that makes them have a slight ability to actually be interacted with.

The central theme, though, is the disconnect between the children and adults.  Grahame's narrator is very in tune with nature, and knows that the most important parts of his world are the ones that he directly interacts with, whether that's the wind, guiding him through the countryside in the first story, or the small rivers that lead to several adventures directly into fantasy; sneaking under a fence in one case leads to a quiet Downton Abbey-like garden, which must clearly belong to a sleeping princess (who is, of course, on hand), while temporarily stealing a farmer's boat in order to play at Jason and the Argonauts leads to the discovery of a young Medea of sorts in the garden of another nearby manor.

There's a sense to the whole piece that Grahame is lamenting the loss of innocence that comes with growing up.  The children as a group get up to all kinds of mischief, but there are also moments where the reality of the world somewhat gets the best of them; one story features their governess leaving, and the children don't seem to quite understand why they feel so sad about it, and the final story deals with the looming departure to boarding school of the oldest of the siblings, with a conclusion that implies that the change from child to 'Olympian' adult comes with that separation from the childhood setting.

Not all adults fit into this 'Olympian' mode, however.  One chapter, which starts as a meditation on the old Roman roadways that still cross the British countryside, features a discussion between the narrator and an artist who seems clearly like-minded, regarding a fantastic 'perfect' city that's where all the spare suitors in fairy tales and minor knights in Arthurian legends end up after the stories; in another case, the 'sleeping beauty' garden's princess has already been 'awoken' by a suitor, but both of them are more than willing to play along with the young boy's surety that he's walked into a fairy tale.  Another time, it goes the opposite way; the children getting into mischief in the night convinces the new tutor that the house is haunted and sends him fleeing the next morning, to sell his story to a supernatural-themed tabloid.

It's clear from reading this that Grahame felt that there's something important in a child's experience of the world, and the sensibility that comes from a more innocent view of the world and what's really important.  Fairyland lies behind every hedge, around every corner, if one simply knows where to look.  The fact that this book was a particular favorite of both Theodore Roosevelt and Kaiser Wilhelm II (in the latter case, it was the only book, aside from the Bible, that he kept on his private yacht) perhaps speaks to something of the personalities of both leaders.  There's a lot to be said for keeping a bit of that sense of whimsy and wonder; every adult who comes across in a positive way over the course of this book is someone who retains some aspect of that, whether that's playing along with a child's fantasy or simply letting kids be kids.  And really, that seems to be the core message at work here: there's something special about a child's view of the world, and more of us might do well to let a bit of that view in.

The Time Machine (H.G. Wells, 1895)

 

This is not science fiction.

I know everyone thinks it's science fiction.  It's cited as an early entry in the genre.  H.G. Wells, it is said, is the father of modern science fiction.

(I'd point more at Mary Shelley as the mother of the genre, but Wells certainly does fit the bill, through some of his other works.)

The thing is, though...  This is barely a science fiction book.  If anything, it's a class-conscious satire, a Utopian work in a the same genre as Swift's Gulliver's Travels, but using a scientific framework based on then-current understandings of the world to hold it up and make its point.

Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman (E.W. Hornung, 1899)

 

There's an old saying, 'Don't judge a book by its cover.'  That seems a reasonable way to look at things, right?  Don't assume that what you see on the outside is an indication of what's inside.  Some part of me, deep down, wonders if this is why the classic Penguin Books cover is so plain.  There's a promise that comes with that cover, that what you find within its pages is going to be worth your time, even with a bare minimum of indication from the front as to what's inside.

That was what drove me to pick this up, initially.  I saw the telltale 'Vintage Penguin' spine on the shelf at St. Vincent de Paul, on a book title and author I hadn't heard of, and reached up to take it in hand, give it a closer look, and see what I had found.  I had initially thought it was an actual vintage edition, though this quickly changed once I had it in hand; I probably should have known better, as the actual vintage Penguins often have spines that appear upside-down to a modern English-language sensibility (not to mention that the actual vintage edition of this particular book was a green cover Penguin).  In any case, my interest was further piqued by the short paragraph on the back cover telling me it's tales of a gentleman thief, and the book's dedication reading "TO A.C.D. THIS FORM OF FLATTERY".  Needless to say, that set of initials in a work of late-Victorian-era crime fiction gets my attention, so I was happy to see what Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman had to offer me.

One of the things I really enjoy about classic books being published by Penguin is that they usually include some amount of context for the reader, whether in the form of an appendix full of notes to help with cultural things that may not be clear to modern audiences (in this case, the most obvious case where I needed this was when reference to "fagging" showed up very quickly in the first story, due to the title character and the Watson-style narrator having been at school together), or an introduction that gives a sense of the context in which the work was introduced or simply a bit of a bio of the author.  In this particular book, that introduction was somewhat mind-blowing simply in the way that it gives a bit of background not only on Hornung, but even on Arthur Conan Doyle; Hornung was married to Doyle's sister, and was apparently spurred to write these stories, upon suggesting the gentleman-thief idea, at Doyle's insistence.  Indeed, this seems to be one of the first examples, if not the first, of the the gentleman-thief trope in fiction.  But it goes further; at the end of this book, the titular Raffles purposefully goes over the railing of a ship, many miles from shore, and it's not entirely clear if he has survived (this intended as a way to end the series of stories, similarly to Sherlock Holmes going over Reichenbach Falls).  Due to the popularity of the stories, Hornung was convinced to come back and write more, revealing that Raffles had indeed escaped intact; Doyle himself later made use of this same device in bringing Holmes back in later years.

There's a common view that, because of the relationship between Doyle and Hornung and the nature of these stories focusing on the criminal rather than the sleuth, these are somehow an "inversion" of Holmes.  That seems a bit of a misinterpretation of what is at work here; an inversion of Sherlock Holmes must, by necessity, be a character in the shape of Dr. James Moriarty, the sort of character who wields the same powers as Holmes but uses them for criminal gain and the material enrichment of themselves, rather than enjoying simply solving the puzzle for the greater good, as Holmes himself does.  This does not describe A.J. Raffles, at all.

So, what is it that this thin paperback actually contains, then?  Unlike most instances of the gentleman-thief archetype, A.J. Raffles is in it for profit, not for the fun of it.  While the character clearly enjoys the game, as it were, and claims he's but an amateur, he engages in his cracksmanship as much for a way of making his living as for the challenge and rush of the crime itself.  He has no apparent job outside of simply living the appearance of a proper upper-class gentleman; all of his income seems to come from either gambling (he's introduced at the end of a poor night of Baccarat for the narrator, Harry "Bunny" Manders) or his heists.  This book, the first of an eventual four dealing with Raffles and Bunny, contains nine stories, each detailing a criminal escapade.  Most of these are, as could be expected of a gentleman-thief, heists, though not all successful.  The stories are perhaps less stand-alone than might be expected of a collection like this, where most of them were previously printed in magazines; there are numerous callbacks to prior stories as you go through, with one of the stories even being a direct sequel to an earlier one.

Raffles isn't exactly a likeable character.  Admittedly, we're seeing him through Bunny's eyes, and Bunny has known him long enough that many of Raffles's less endearing traits are coming across in his view as 'Oh, that's just what he's like.'  There's a repeated plot beat of Raffles assuming that some machination of his or another as part of the heist they're involved in is just going to be obvious to Bunny, then getting huffy about it when Bunny doesn't understand what he's supposed to have done.  This comes across as rather less charming than "Elementary, my dear Watson" does; one would expect that when a heist requires two people working to pull it off, both people should necessarily be on the same page.

That said, I did enjoy the stories here, and definitely want to get my hands on the other three books.  Hornung was clearly having some fun with the concept, and did his research; apparently, some of the tactics that Raffles makes use of (particularly his way of getting through windows) actually saw a rise in their usage by real-life burglars after the stories were published.  Many of the characters and storylines also based largely on real people and events; a recurring police-detective character, Mackenzie of Scotland Yard, is directly inspired by Melville Macnaghten.  I do find myself wondering where the further books might go, however; unlike the case of Holmes, where his return would be a surprise but wouldn't likely have any significant dangers for the sleuth, Raffles goes over the railing because Mackenzie has caught him in the act and has warrants based on two other heists as well, so his return from the apparently-dead wouldn't be a case where he could keep his old identity.  That in itself suggests that the further books might have some interesting twists; if A.J. Raffles can't be A.J. Raffles, what can he do to maintain the 'gentleman' side of gentleman thief?

Jólabókaflóð 2020 (2): XX (Rian Hughes, 2020)

Let's talk about the I for a moment.

Not the letter, but the concept.

The self.

Consciousness, sapience, the awareness of one's own existence.

What is it that makes me, me? You, you? Is it simply being aware that you exist, that you are thinking, that you have the proof of your own identity? As Descartes put it, "Cogito, ergo sum"? Or is it something more than that?

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Descartes himself worked within a somewhat more nuanced framework than simply that brief statement; there is more to it than just that one thinks.  Rather, Descarte's philosophical construct was based on a more thorough question, the question of what we can be sure exists.  He begins by doubting everything.  The one thing he can be sure of, at that point, is that he is, in fact, doubting.  Even if he assumes that all other things are a deception, logically, he must exist in order to be deceived, must be able to interpret and consider the deception, to doubt or believe if he wishes.

You doubt, therefore you are thinking.  You are thinking, therefore you know yourself to exist, because you cannot be deceived about that, even if everything else is nonexistent.

Descartes' demon may be crafting the world we know; the Matrix may be a simulation, but you're a real entity nonetheless.

So, what does that mean about the self, if everything else can be doubted?  If every bit of input we receive can be disbelieved?

It means, for one, that the self isn't necessarily dependent on its vessel to be defined.

Let's expand outward, now.  Our conception of I, our definition of ourselves, is more nuanced than simply existing, after all.  We are more than just that one thought.  We consider our bodies to be part of ourselves, for example.  All of the beliefs we carry, all of the knowledge, all of the lived experiences that form our memories and skills, those are part of the self, as well.  Are those part of the I?

Your heart beats on its own.  You can't consciously control it.  Would you want to?  Having to think, dozens of times per minute, thousands of times per day, whether awake or asleep, 'OK, ventricles, it's time to contract now.  OK, now you can relax.  OK, time to contract again.'  But if it runs on automatic, if you can't control it, is it part of the self?

Is Jean-Luc Picard less of a person because he has a mechanical heart?

Has a heart-transplant recipient become a blend of two people?

If your leg is amputated, are you still the same person?

...is the body part of the self at all?

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Knowing that one exists is fine, of course, but you can't define yourself against yourself.  If the self is all that exists, then how can you see the self?

Instead, we define ourselves by drawing a line, between the I and the not I.  You know what you aren't; the dividing line between the things that you are and the things that you aren't becomes the barrier that protects you from dissolution.  We proclaim our existence by shouting "I am" at the blinding, deafening volume of sensory and semiotic input that makes up our world.

As humans, that dividing line can be seen as coterminous with the shape of our bodies.  We extend our influence outward from there, into the great not I, through hands, tools, voices, words.  A skilled carpenter's tools are like extensions of their body; the carpenter knows where the tools are, what they can do, how they can influence the shape of the materials being used for the project.

Where does the project come from, though?  Where did the plans for the house come from, originally?

Before the carpenter starts work, an architect must design the house.  But where did the architect get the design?

Before the nail can be driven into the board, the hammer must be in the carpenter's hand.  But where did the hammer come from?

Where, in the time before hammers, did the thought, 'Og tie rock to stick, make hit things strong' come from?

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Let's take a little different view, then.  What if we define the I as the sum of the experiences, lessons, and beliefs that create us?  It becomes, then, a bundle of ideas.  A self-aware idea, perhaps.  An idea, set aside from the whole like an oxbow lake, able to define itself by its separation from the sea of ideas that pass by.

An idea that, itself, births new ideas.  Fleeting thoughts, which may or may not be set free.  The earliest ideas may have been simple by modern standards, but even so, they were ideas that we still use.  That rock rolls down the hill when you toss it.  What if you put things on the rolling rocks?  What if you used the rolling rocks to help you move things?  What if you made better-rounded rolling things?  Perfect circles, even?

That water pushes things when you stand in it.  What if you put a rolling thing partway in the water and attached it to something else, so that the water pushes it but it can't be moved from its spot?

Age-old ideas, still in use today.

The first ideas had to be self-evident.  'Og is Og.  Thog is not Og.'  Once you're past that, you can start exploring your environment.  'Rock is hard.  Stick is long.  Other rock is hard.  First rock harder than other rock, break other rock, make other rock sharp.  Sharp rock good at cutting things.'  You could watch someone demonstrate these things, remember them, show other people.  But the spread of ideas was limited.  You had to be right up close, able to watch.  If it was dark, you couldn't trade ideas at all.  There was something else important that needed to exist.

Language.

The earliest languages made ideas mobile.  No longer did ideas have to remain as what could be physically shown, but instead they could be transmitted, by voice, to more people at once.  And from there, more complex thought, more complex ideas could be crafted.  It was possible to explain that 'Scary stripey death cat' had to be approached differently than 'Big stompy nosey thing' without needing either of those things present.  Even without words as we might understand them, the symbols can be deciphered.

With language and the ability for more complex ideas, more complex questions started to arise.  Why does the hot sky glowy thing move?  Where does it go when it disappears below the horizon, before it reappears on the other side?  What is the cold sky glowy thing that changes shape and doesn't keep the same time?

Why does it get hot some times of year and cold others?

Where did all of this come from, anyways?

Before we had the tools to examine the world, the systems of thought to allow us to find the explanations, there were stories.

Enki brought water to the land of Dilmun, allowing plants to flourish and life to take hold.

The sun is pushed across the sky by the dung-beetle god, Khepri.

The seasons change because Demeter is sad that her daughter has to spend time away from her in the underworld.

When we seek answers, in the absence of available explanations, we shape ideas into myths, pantheons, gods.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

When we seek entertainment, stories can provide that, too.  When we have a shared basis of stories, we can form a culture.

When we have a culture, we can do great things.  Vast constructions, shaping the land to our needs, if our culture values such things.  Writing develops, perhaps first as a tool for commerce, but then as a way to record our stories and lessons, so they can be transported from place to place, without the writer having to travel with them.  And in this way, they can survive even beyond the death of an entire culture.

The ideas, then, can outlive their creators, can spread using minds as incubators and vectors, can shape even those minds, as they pass through them.

Writing also introduces a complication, however.  An idea, once written down, is largely immutable.  This copy of Descartes' Principia Philosophiæ may be differently translated, but the contents will still be the same as any other copy.  It's only when those ideas come in contact with other ideas, within the seedbed of a thinking individual, that new ideas, syntheses, can be formed.  And those are then written down, passed on, built upon further, and the cycle continues.

Ideas themselves promote this.  The idea for language came from the need to communicate ideas.  The idea for written language came from the need to communicate ideas over longer distances.  The idea for printing came from the need to communicate ideas to more people, more efficiently.  The idea for telecommunications came from the need to communicate ideas across longer distances, faster.

The idea for the Internet came from the need to communicate more ideas across potentially global distances as close to instantly as possible.

With the internet, though, the medium is no longer immutable.  Ideas can be expressed that change themselves over time, that reshape themselves based on new data.  Wikipedia lurches forward, an up-to-the-minute encyclopedia written by a million authors, changing to become more accurate and better-researched through this wide distribution.

When we combine so many ideas in an effectively limitless space and give them the ability to shape themselves, though, it raises an important question: how dense can ideas become, before they start to actually think?

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OK, so after all of that, where am I actually going with all this?  It's a long introduction, but it's the basic underpinnings of XX, by Rian Hughes.  This is... a doozy of a book.  992 pages in total, not even bothering to keep to the normal format of a book.  The inside of the dust jacket is made to look like a small shelf of books, which are then excerpted within the text (some real, some not), while the endpapers of the book feature a selection of covers from various printings of Ascension by F. Herschel Teague, a made-up 1960s sci-fi novel from a made-up author, but which is included in its entirety, in its 'serialized original printing,' within the text of XX.  The book's actual content begins literally as soon as you turn the endpaper, a stream of 1s and 0s, a binary data stream, taking form across a few pages before leading into exactly what those 1s and 0s represent, a brief discussion by a few British astronomers of just what they're supposed to do with this stream... because it's a very clear, and very obvious radio signal from deep space, clearly the work of intelligent beings.

That link, just there?  That page is directly referenced in the book, in this first set of pages.  Quoted directly.  That's not something Hughes made up, that's real.

It's only after this first chapter finishes that we get what would normally be expected in a book, the colophon and the title page.  This is followed by a brief poem about the origin and nature of ideas, then the novel proper.  The main character is Jack Fenwick, a probably-autistic (he himself considers this in-text) AI programmer at a small tech startup in London.  He's one of those folks who is very good at noticing patterns in the visual noise that surrounds us, perhaps to the point of obsession.  This tendency of his, to find patterns, means that when the astronomers at Jodrell Bank who picked up the "Signal from Space" need help figuring out a way to coax meaning out of it, they go to Jack, who (helpfully) set up some of the software their systems are running on.

As he's just starting to dig in, though, the Signal gets leaked onto the internet.  This democratization of the attempts to find a way to sort through it results in a vast array of multimedia explorations that are examined in the book, from dropping the Signal into a generative graphics program and letting it draw patterns on its own, to making music from it (complete with actual LP available to download; there's a QR code in the book that leads there).  While all this is going on, though, Jack comes to the conclusion, based on looking at repeating fragments of the Signal's code, that it's not a message from aliens, but instead is the aliens, transmitted digitally.

With this idea in place, that the Signal is itself carrying alien minds in it, combined with the Signal being out on the Internet, where the idea farm is percolating away, he comes up with the idea for the Oxbow, a digital device a little like a one-way valve, where a mind in the Internet could slip in, and still see out, but be separated from the whole, able to see the I and the not I.  This is then hooked up to a 3D printer (for visual representation) and a text output engine (for communication), turned on, and he and his two coworkers, Nixon (the money and business sense) and Harriet (a master programmer), sit back to see what happens.  What they get is decidedly not what they expect, though, as instead of grabbing an alien, they get the Twentieth Century incarnate, the titular XX.

Shouty machine head (whose preferred appearance is as a dazzle-striped mechanical monstrosity seemingly inspired by the factory set design in Metropolis crossed with WWII battleships) is quickly joined by The 19th Count (a tall, thin Victorian gentleman in pure alabaster white, both clothing and skin, with absolutely no other coloration anywhere, whose speech comes in the style of vintage playbills) and Girl 21 (a manga-influenced goth girl who uses a constantly-changing flipshow of selfies and animated .gif images to show facial expression, who talks by tweeting with a smartphone), avatars of their respective centuries.  These three characters, only visible in their avatars through Augmented Reality glasses hooked to the Oxbow software, serve as secondary protagonists, allowing ideas to be bounced off of them as Jack, Harriet, and Nixon explore what lurks within the Signal in an attempt to discover what it actually is, how it works, and what its inner meaning is.

At the same time, a second plot dealing with Dana Normansson, an astronaut working at Daedalus Base on the far side of the Moon, is running, dealing with an object that flew in from outside the solar system at a significant fraction of the speed of light, pierced through Europa entirely, whipped around the sun, and promptly embedded itself in the Moon's surface.  Venturing out to investigate, she finds that what turns out to have been a ship has fired an escape pod, and a single alien has survived, though injured.  Her plotline, at least at first, deals with trying to work out how to communicate with a being who, while intelligent, shares few sensory inputs and no language with humans.

There's obviously several layers of narrative working on top of each other here, several plots that initially seem divergent-if-parallel, but eventually come together.  There's a few plot holes here and there, one of which bugged me upon noticing it about 20 pages later and one of which I didn't really realize until after finishing the book but then it kind of lingers like an unanswered question but which may be somewhat by design.  Most of the concepts at work are well-explained before they actually come up in the narrative, through the many "ephemera" that are included in the hefty page count, along with showing the effects of the Signal on culture as a whole.

Rian Hughes is a published author, but this was his first novel; his earlier works are all nonfiction on the topic of graphic design, and he himself is a graphic designer with a wide array of fonts, a portfolio full of book and album packaging, and a number of comic book title designs to his name.  This history shows very clearly; every page of XX is carefully designed, so that it looks as much like the source he's attempting to emulate on each page as possible.  He uses type as an artistic medium, stretching it to its absolute limits and using words to form images even while using that same text to tell the story.  The only places that tend to be difficult to read are when XX is talking; the typeface chosen for its normal speech takes a little extra work, though not usually for pages upon pages after its initial, 18-page soliloquy about itself, but it is given two other typefaces later that are also difficult.  But then, it would be rather difficult to talk to an anthropomorphized incarnation of the spirit of automation in any way that isn't 'loud and clanky'.

I came into this expecting something in the same vein as House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski's debut novel.  There, as here, an author with no previous fiction to their name dropped a massive experimental piece on the market, a tome that, for someone willing to put in the time and effort, is a very rewarding experience.  (Full disclosure, I have never actually gotten all the way through House of Leaves, to my shame.  In my defense, it is a very tough read.  Maybe I'll actually properly tackle it this year.)  This book isn't quite as unapproachable as Danielewski's, but definitely operates in the same space.  Where Danielewski's work was very much engaging with the 20th century media landscape and ability to spread ideas, XX is absolutely at home in the 21st century, titular character notwithstanding.  Wikipedia, Twitter, and even online meme culture make appearances, and while I perhaps felt that the primary narrative was a little rushed at the end, the author's stated desire to keep it under 1000 pages meant that had to happen, especially given the coda at the end, after the epilogue, where the whole piece is brought full-circle in an amazing bit of speculative science fiction that ties everything off in a downright brilliant manner.

Yes, there's an epilogue, then there's an additional 60 pages of story.

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