Category / Books

by Jonathan M

Don’t Let Pop Culture Tell You Who You Are

Frequent visitors to this blog will by now have realised that both the form and frequency of my posting is subject to a good deal of fluctuation. Sometimes I crank out sizeable pieces on a regular basis, sometimes I provide only links and other times I post links to short reviews and publish larger essays. The reason for these variations is that my motivations sometimes change and when my motivations change, so to does the nature of my output.  These changes in motivation were particularly obvious when, earlier this year, I ceased to write very much at all.

At the time, I found this sudden lack of motivation rather distressing as I have always been able to re-motivate myself by shaking things up and writing about different things in different ways. In fact, this lack of motivation was so traumatic that I soon came to believe that my time as a critic might have come to an end. Needless to say, this did not actually happen but the reasons for this creative impasse strike me as interesting enough to warrant a proper post, if only for the sake of other people who may be experiencing similar motivational problems.

The problem was that I was going through the process of selling my childhood home and moving to an entirely new town. On a purely practical level, this made sitting down to write rather difficult. On a psychological level, this made it almost impossible to think about anything that was not directly related to the move. Unclear as to why I was finding it so difficult to sit down and write, I managed to convince myself that my motivation for writing has been completely destroyed by the realisation that there was really no point in sharing my views with anyone about anything. The reason I reached this particular creative impasse was that I encountered a number of works that encouraged me to think of myself purely as an introverted outsider and introverted outsiders tend not to be all that interested in sharing their opinions with other people. This is a post about the dangers of labelling oneself and then coming to believe that those labels exhaust your entire identity.

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by Jonathan M

Why You Want to Fuck Christopher Hitchens – Celebrity, Consumerism and the Search for Online Identity

 

I’d like to open with a kind of history. This history takes many forms and surfaces in many different places with the names of the actors sometimes replaced. Occasionally, the role of the nation-state is assumed by religion and at other times it is the gods of classical antiquity who take the lead. Regardless of which iteration of this history you have heard, its narrative will be familiar to you for it is a narrative of loss.

Once upon a time, people lived in tribes. These tribes were small social entities made up of a number of different family groups that pooled their resources. Members of tribes lived together, worked together and died together and this permanent state of communion with others made their lives meaningful. Of course, human nature being what it is, tribes could not peacefully co-exist and the tribes soon began conquering each other until their dominion extended over millions of people and thousands of miles of territory. Because these abstract tribal groupings were a lot harder to manage than a couple of families that had been living and working together for generations, tribal elders began reinventing themselves as governments who began to rule over abstract political entities known as kingdoms and principalities then as nations and states. Of course, nation states were never anything more than a way of referring to the territory under the control of one particular government but they stuck around for long enough that people began to forget their tribal loyalties and began to see their nationality as a fundamental fact about themselves, a fact no different to their sex, their gender, their sexuality or their race, a fact that took the form of a noun.

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by Jonathan M

Calvinball Mythology: The Inevitable Follow-up Post

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece about Ridley Scott’s Prometheus that allowed me to voice some ideas about the role of escapist media in contemporary spiritual life.  Evidently this post struck a chord with a good deal of people as I have been receiving a lot of traffic from people kind enough to link to me. While I cannot address all of the points raised by people, I can address a few of the comments that caught my eye.  Thank you all for your attention and I am delighted that you enjoyed the read!

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by Jonathan M

There is no such thing as a Reliable Narrator

A recent issue of the London Review of Books contained a fascinating review of Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, sequel to her Man Booker Prize-winning novel Wolf Hall. One of the questions addressed in Colin Burrow’s review (which can be read here if you’re a subscriber) is that of whether Mantel is overly charitable in her depiction of Thomas Cromwell as a man with thoroughly modern sensibilities:

The crude question ‘Does this mean that he could have felt as much and as finely as he does in this book?’ still needs to be asked. The novel’s present-tense mode of narrative, focalised through a single principal character, has an intrinsic problem. It would be almost impossible to write this kind of fiction and make the central character a brute, since so much depends upon what he or she notices and feels, on sensitivity. If a fiction represents the sensorium of one character’s feelings, then an inert or insensitive sensorium would probably generate inert fiction.

To my mind, this is pretty much spot on. While I have not read Bring Up the Bodies, I have read Wolfe Hall and Mantel’s depiction of Tudor England is so fragrant and atmospheric that it simply could not have been filtered through the mind of a character who saw the world purely in terms of fights, political conquests or scientific problems in need of a solution. In order for Mantel to portray Tudor England as a place full of colour and contrast, she needed a central character who would be alive to those elements of his world. Had Cromwell been a brute, then he would have attended to brutish things and our impression of the Tudor England would have been immeasurably more brutish as a result.

This got me thinking… people often talk about characters in very instrumental terms, portraying them either as psychological riddles in need of decoding or as means of capturing the reader’s empathy and using that connection to immerse them in the world of the novel.  Indeed, people often talk about the possibility of novels having ‘unreliable narrators’ in the sense that some fact about the narrator might shed some doubt on his or her version of the facts and thereby encourage readers to infer some previously hidden truth about the events described in the novel. The problem with the concept of the ‘unreliable narrator’ is that it assumes that there can be a ‘reliable’ narrator but I do not see how this could possibly be.

When each of us walk into a room, our attentions are drawn to different things dependent upon our perceptual capacity, our life experience, our personality, our interests and our mood. Two people can walk into exactly the same room and their minds will turn to very different matters: One will notice a social rival and begin speculating about how they can confront and humiliate them while another will begin to internally enthuse about the style of dress and the quality of the food. In this case both narrators are, strictly speaking, unreliable as the picture they give of a particular situation is incomplete and slanted… but how else are we to perceive the world except through our eyes, our experiences and our personalities?

A little while ago, I wrote about Jo Walton’s Hugo Award-nominated novel Among Others (2011) and commented on how cold and emotionally detached the world of that novel felt to me. Given that, much like Wolf Hall, Among Others focuses upon the life and experiences of one particular character, I inferred that much of the coldness of the world came from the fact that the book’s narrator was some kind of psychopath:

The work whose tone and setting most closely match that of Among Others is Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985) as Mor is not only isolated and alienated but also intensely calculating in her relationships with other people. There are scenes where Mor discusses purchasing buns for other girls on the understanding that this will get them to buy her buns in return that echo with the same sociopathic lack of humanity as the scenes in which Ender ponders murdering or brutalising a bully in order to set an example.

Among Others and Ender’s Game are perfect examples of the kind of book that Burrow speculates must exist: They are emotionally inert because their central characters are themselves emotionally inert. The same can be said of Steve McQueen’s second film Shame (2011), which is cold, austere and minimalistic because its central character lives a life that is just as uncluttered as his elegantly-designed Manhattan apartment.

The ‘take home’ point from all of this is that characters are not solely defined by the things they think or the things they do, they are also defined by the things they pay attention to. Any novel that uses first-person narration or clings closely to a third-person viewpoint character must necessarily be read as that character’s subjective impression of the world they inhabit. While all of us share the same physical world, we live our lives in subjective universes built to suit our preferences. The art of great writing lies not just in making a character or a world that seems realistic, but in exploring the way in which the world makes the character and the character makes their own world.

by Jonathan M

A Paragraph from Peter Straub’s Ghost Story

Last night I picked up my copy of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (1979) and just started reading. Within a couple of pages, I pulled up short, unable to get past the astonishing beauty and craft of this paragraph:

So for hours they drove south through the songs and rhythms of country music, the stations weakening and changing, the disk jockeys swapping names and accents, the sponsors succeeding each other in a revolving list of insurance companies, toothpaste, soap, Dr Pepper and Pepsi Cola, acne preparations, funeral parlors, petroleum jelly, bargain wristwatches, aluminum sidings, dandruff shampoos: but the music remained the same, a vast and self-conscious story, a sort of seamless repetitious epic in which women married truckers and no-good gamblers but stood by them until they got a divorce and the men sat in bars plotting seductions and how to get back home, and they came together hot as two-dollar pistols and parted in disgust and worried about the babies. Sometimes the car wouldn’t start, sometimes the TV was busted; sometimes the bars closed down and threw you out onto the street, your pockets turned inside out. There was nothing that was not banal, there was no phrase that was not a cliché, but the child sat there satisfied and passive, dozing off to Willie Nelson and waking up to Loretta Lynn, and the man just drove, distracted by this endless soap opera of America’s bottom dogs.

The thing that strikes about this paragraph is the way that it breaks down into three very different sentences. The first – which MS Word is currently underlining entirely in green – is not just a run-on sentence but a run-on sentence comprising little more than a list of things overheard on the radio. Aside from Straub’s eye for set dressing (The South belongs to Dr Pepper and Pepsi… not Coke), the astonishing thing about this sentence is that it in no way feels over-long or under-punctuated. It is easy to forget that punctuation exists in order to instruct the reader where to place emphasis and when to pause while reading ‘aloud in their head’. Straub strings his sentence together using a series of commas and a semi-colon that shifts the emphasis away from the adverts and towards the music. The sentence does not feel too long because Straub chooses his words with utmost care and precision. He chooses them for colour and he chooses them for cadence. He chooses them places them in the sentence in a very specific order so as to ensure that we can read the entire sentence without ever getting lost and without ever having to check the punctuation to make sense of what it is that we have just read. The words and concepts slip by us like the miles of a cross-country road trip. They fit together because we see them together, their association is almost accidental and yet strangely evocative in the same way that shopping trolleys and broken windows create an impression of poverty that has little to do with the bank balances of local residents. The semi-colon is a masterstroke as it changes the emphasis without jerking us out of the rhythm of the sentence. Once it was adverts that flowed by us, now it is song lyrics. They flow into one another and create a single impression almost by accident but seemingly by design.

If the semi-colon was impressive then the full stop is a stroke of genius. Again, we are confronted by a list of things but Straub cleverly inserts the second-person pronoun ‘You’ to suggest a growing bond between the music and the listened. What began as a way to keep the child quiet ends as a reflection on the listener’s life. YOU know what it’s like to be thrown out of a bar. YOU know what it’s like to have a busted TV and nothing to do. YOU know these things and so do the singers and songwriters. They speak to YOU, their words are no longer just a different type of noise to the adverts that started the paragraph. They got to YOU.

The third sentence finds the listener jerking himself out of a country music-filled reverie. The opening clause of the sentence is almost petulant: “There was nothing that was not banal, there was no phrase that was not a cliché” then comes the comma… then comes the BUT. This shit is awful, trite, clichéd nonsense but it lulled the child to sleep and it gave the miles a pleasing feel. Just enough of a pleasing feel to allow the driver to forget that the child on the back-seat has been abducted and that, sooner or later, he will have to be deal with her one way or another. That time will come… but not yet: “the man just drove, distracted by this endless soap opera of America’s bottom dogs.”

Even those last two words are brilliant: Bottom Dogs… Buh-dum Dah!

by Jonathan M

Zona (2012) By Geoff Dyer – Then, after about 15 minutes, you’re spit out into a ditch on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike!

Geoff Dyer is a man who knows the value of an unconventional job title. Rather than sauntering through life as a simple novelist, critic, travel writer, historian or essayist, Dyer has tried his hand at many different forms and somehow evaded becoming particularly associated with any of them. Geoff Dyer is not a novelist who writes criticism or a travel writer who produces novels, he is all of these things and yet none of them. Like a Renaissance princeling or Imperial Khan, his name is habitually appended with an ever-growing succession of baroque and idiosyncratic job titles ranging from the mundane (writer) and the old fashioned (intellectual) to the endearingly preposterous (intellectual gate-crasher). Frankly, if Dyer began describing himself as a servant of the Secret Fire and wielder of the Flame of Anor I doubt that anyone would be particularly surprised. Dyer evades encapsulation in the same way as Pynchon evades publicity… his elusiveness is central to his charm.

In a typically warm, insightful and engaging interview conducted by Colin Marshall, Dyer explains the reasoning behind his steadfast refusal to either commit to any particular form or abide by the rules of any of the forms he operates in.  Dyer’s end game is to create a body of work whose allure bears no relation to its actual subject matter. For example, you may have no interest in the life and work of D.H. Lawrence but this should not prevent you from being entertained by Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage (1997), a book about trying to write a book about D.H. Lawrence. Similarly, you might prefer the idea of burying your face in an ants nest to reading another novel about spiritually disaffected upper-middle class people but this should in no way prevent you from enjoying Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (2009).

With no apparent form or subject matter to call his own, the seat of Dyer’s charm is… well… Dyer himself. As Michael Silverblatt put it when he interviewed Dyer, there is something decidedly likeable about a man who travels the world only to obsess over finding the correct local iteration of his preferred breakfast. There is something instantly recognisable about a man who loves books and films but never the ones that he is supposed to be reading at any given moment. As in the works of J.G. Ballard, this persona may change slightly from book to book and from article to article but that voice and that character are present in everything that Dyer writes. Chances are that if you like the persona that Dyer presents in all of his writings then you will happily read anything that Dyer has to say as the true subject of Dyer’s books and articles is invariably himself.

Those immune to Dyer’s charms may well view Dyer’s methodology as supremely egocentric and dishonest. Indeed, how many people have purchased Out of Sheer Rage expecting an award-winning biography of Lawrence only to discover that the book is actually the amusing tale of a hapless writer who scoffs almond croissants goes on holiday and crashes his moped? These un-named and potentially fictitious critics may well be completely right about Dyer but they are also missing the point.

There are many reasons for deciding to read a particular book (plot, characterisation, social commentary, prose style) but one of the most compelling is that the process of reading someone else’s thoughts allows you to gain access to that person’s headspace for extended periods of time. To read a book is to experience something – a time, a place, a film, a relationship – through the eyes of an author and when that author has a set of sensibilities as distinct and engaging as those of Geoff Dyer then sharing that author’s headspace can become an end in itself. If the point of Dyer’s writing is to allow us to hear the world described by his voice then his latest work Zona (2012) is his most successful to date.

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by Jonathan M

BG47 – Hang All The Critics

Futurismic have just published my forty-seventh Blasphemous Geometries column entitled ‘Hang all the Critics: Towards Useful Video Game Writing’.

I originally wrote the column about ten days ago but last weekend I became aware of two significant blogospheric shit-storms that seem to provide an interesting context for the column.  The first shit-storm involves a bunch of people being upset by an article about yoga and the second shit-storm involves a bunch of people being upset by a review of an epic fantasy novel. Though ostensibly very different in their origins and subject matters, both shit-storms involve a community reacting very angrily to negative coverage from a perceived outsider. In the case of the ‘yoga community’, the outsider is the New York Times senior science writer William Broad and, in the case of the ‘epic fantasy community’, the outsider is the Strange Horizons reviewer and post-graduate student Liz Bourke.

The link between these blogstorms and my most recent video games column is that ‘Hang All the Critics’ is an attempt to confront the fact that the age of the critic has now passed. Criticism and its less well-heeled cousin reviewing rely upon the assumption that a person of reasonable insight and creative flair can consume a cultural product and issue an opinion or reaction to that will be of use to other people despite the fact that these other people might have very different tastes and interests.

It is no accident that the role of the critic has its roots in the cafe culture of the 17th Century as the coffee shops frequented by the likes of Samuel Johnson tended to be cramped places where all kinds of bourgeois intellectuals were forced to rub shoulders. One of the unfortunate side-effects of the Internet’s infinite potential for space is that people from a particular class and with a particular set of interests are no longer forced to rub shoulders with people with ever-so-slightly different sets of tastes. These days, if you are interested in steam locomotives but not other forms of train then you are in no way obliged to encounter the opinions of people who consider steam trains to be a quaint but outmoded form of technology. The more the Internet matures, the more interest groups fragment and the more interest groups fragment, the more isolated and tribal these communities become. There is no place for criticism in a world dominated by tribal conflicts and persecution complexes, this is why Liz Bourke and William Broad got it in the neck and this is why Rotten Tomatoes is filled with people reacting angrily to the idea that a film they haven’t seen might not be as good as they expect. The age of the critic is at an end and it is time to change the way we do business.

Needless to say, I am not the first person to notice the collapse of our culture’s public spaces. Indeed, many reviewers and critics have attempted to respond to the increasingly commercial and tribal nature of the public sphere either by retreating into the walled-garden of academia or by creating a tribal space of their own. While I can entirely understand this desire for retrenchment, I think that it is ultimately an act of cowardice:

As someone who has never once tried to review a game for a major site, I am not in the least bit opposed to the fracturing of public space in order to create environments in which inaccessible forms of writing are protected from the vagaries of commerce and popular tastes. A recent comment on one of my pieces described my style as “masturbatory” and I find myself absolutely powerless to disagree. There is something decidedly self-indulgent about sharing one’s opinions online — particularly when one makes little or no effort to reach out to the majority of people interested in a particular topic — and this kind of self-indulgence is not about subjecting games to serious intellectual scrutiny or ‘consolidating a continuous counterbalance’; is a cowardly retreat from the public sphere, driven by the recognition that my opinions are of use to nobody but myself. There is absolutely nothing brave or revolutionary about taking your ball and going home.

My problem with the critics of Bourke and Broad is not that they are wrong to feel the way they feel. Life in the 21st Century is frequently lonely and it is easy to begin thinking of one’s sub-culture as a kind of family that provides us with both an identity and a set of values. When you invest yourself that heavily in a particular sub-culture then it makes perfect sense that you should bristle when that elements of that sub-culture come under fire from outsiders. Even if you don’t like a particular novel or have your own concerns about the way that yoga is taught, it is one thing to hear those feelings from someone you trust and quite another to hear them from someone you don’t know. Ever bitched about a sibling to a member of your family? ever defended that same sibling when they came under fire from someone else? Some truths can only be spoken inside the family.

My problem with the critics of Bourke and Broad (or the people who complained about Uncharted 3 only getting 8 out of 10) is not that they are wrong, it is that they are being insular. As I said elsewhere, the most wonderful thing in the world is to have someone care enough to listen to you and tell you that you are completely full of shit. By wanting to protect epic fantasy from outsiders like Bourke, the defenders of epic fantasy (and those of yoga) are closing themselves off to a potential source of cultural renewal.

I would like to believe that there is a place for people like Bourke and Broad because I would like to believe that there is a place for cultural generalists and for people who take the ideas and values of one culture and carry them into those of another.  This blog is very much devoted to the idea that a single person can look at radically different forms and subject matters and say something of value about them. Unfortunately, while I would like to believe that there is a place for that form of cultural generalism, I think that the Internet is growing increasingly hostile to it. After all, why listen to random strangers when you can only listen to fellow academics, fantasy fans, yoga enthusiasts, republicans or furries? Why listen to anyone other than yourself?

by Jonathan M

The Book of Human Insects (1970) By Osamu Tezuka – The Horror of Limitless Potential and Unfettered Change

It is impossible to dangle one’s toes into the waters of Japanese sequential art without, sooner or later, encountering the name of Osamu Tezuka. Aside from being a hugely prolific and influential artist who inspired generations of authors, Tezuka was also one of the first Japanese comics artists to enjoy commercial success in the West with series including Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion. However, despite the child-friendliness of Tezuka’s greatest successes, many of his finest works are decidedly darker and a good deal more complex. An excellent example of this is Tezuka’s recently translated The Book of Human Insects. Set in 1970s Tokyo, the novel offers a darkly compelling portrait of a woman with a remarkable capacity for re-invention. Ostensibly a psychological thriller about a Mr Ripley-like femme fatale who feeds upon Japan’s predominantly male intelligentsia, The Book of Human Insects resonates most when read as a critique of post-War Japanese society.

 

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by Jonathan M

BG45 – Demon’s Souls and the Meaning and Import of Virtual Death

Futurismic have my forty-fifth Blasphemous Geometries column about From Software’s Demon’s Souls and its place in the history of video game attitudes towards death.

Following on from some of my thoughts on Deus Ex: Human Revolutions, the column argues that rather than trying to downplay virtual death by re-packaging it as with Assassin’s Creed and Prince of Persia‘s talk of death-as-flawed-memory, video game designers ought to follow From Software in embracing the cataclysmic number of deaths that feature in their games. Indeed, what makes Demon’s Souls such a fascinating game is its relentless downbeat tone and its recognition of the fact that characters will die and players will give up in disgust. Clearly, if Demon’s Souls had been a film, it would have been directed by Ingmar Bergman. The column also draws the reader’s attention to Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon, a book all about the psychological impact of experiencing a futile death over and over again…

Nowhere is the need for unpleasantness greater than in video gaming’s attitude to death.  What was once a means of rationing the time people spent hogging a particular arcade machine has now ossified into a set of linguistic tics that are now completely disconnected from both their real-world and in-game significances. Video games ask us to die over and over again but rather than acknowledging this fact, many game designers seek to minimise the impact of these sacrifices by explaining them away as lapses in memory. By trivialising death, game designers have not only cheapened the lives of our characters, they have also deprived themselves of one of the most powerful thematic motifs in all of art and literature.

Games like Demon’s Souls recognise that they are dealing in death and this recognition is genuinely disconcerting. Like death itself, Demon’s Souls is utterly indifferent to both our presence in the game and our attempts at engaging with it. Demon’s Souls is a game of misery tempered by frustration, and its unapologetic recognition of this fact is what makes it both different and great. While I appreciate Walker’s point, I cannot help but feel that he is looking at the problem in entirely the wrong way: Let us not repackage death, but rather celebrate it as the core of the video game experience.

Having spent a good deal of time playing carefully-packaged AAA-rated titles for this column, one of the continuing joys of Demon’s Souls remains its complete indifference to my presence.  Forty hours in and I’m still not completely clear on how many basic aspects of the game actually work. One of the game’s major mechanics involves shifting between different forms and you begin to pick up magical items helping with that transition a long time before you actually realise what it means. Similarly, it took me about 20 hours to realise that the game had a magic system. In a video game culture full of shallow joys and craven player-pandering, there is something truly wonderful in From Software’s complete indifference to whether or not we ever get the hang of the game.

by Jonathan M

Ooku: The Inner Chambers – Volume 6

Gestalt Mash have my review of the sixth volume of Fumi Yoshinaga’s Eisner and Tiptree award-winning manga series Ooku: The Inner Chambers.

My review features something of a reassessment of the series as I realise that, rather than looking it as a Feminist thought-experiment about an alternate feudal Japan in which the male population has been reduced by 75%, the series is best seen as a historical epic.  The term ‘historial epic’ is somewhat misleading in that it tends to summon images of fat fantasy novels with intricate plots that unravel over hundreds of years.  While Ooku’s plot may cover a number of generations, the plot is very much anchored to the waxing and waning of historical forces.  There is no grand narrative at work here, just the ceaseless change of an aging ruling class and how the decisions they make change the country:

By stepping back from the lives of the individual characters and focusing instead upon the historical themes that emerge from the passage of the generations, we can see that Yoshinaga is suggesting that history is above all a product of human passions. Yoshinaga’s characters are the twisted and broken products of a twisted and broken society and while their exalted positions allow them the power to shape and reshape society as they wish, there is the growing sense that Yoshinaga’s characters repeat the mistakes of the past because they simply cannot help it.  In Yoshinaga’s history, change happens more by chance than by design.

Needless to say, I am still very much enjoying this particular series and I hope that Viz Media continue to show their commitment to the series by publishing volume 7.

My previous posts on the series can be found at the following locations though I have also collected them under a single heading in this site’s menu bar: