Zoo in the head

Monday morning Penguin: When life gives you lemons...

First Penguin edition, 1963.

From the back cover:

Anything could happen on a frontier planet, and Pyrrus was a shining example. Every form of non-human life, flora and fauna, mutation upon mutation, had combined with the impossible weather, the earthquakes, and the volcanoes to become a deadly weapon ... for the extermination of man. The Pyrran settlers had developed superhuman strength and reactions and had imported the most modern aids to warfare, but the odds were too heavy against them. Jason dinAlt, interplanetary gambler, had allowed and even helped himself to get sucked into the fray without realizing that to relax your guard for a split second was one split second too many. Appalled by the conditions, he fought a single-handed war, not only with the planet but against its murder-minded people, to stop the carnage and bring peace to the war-torn outpost. To say it was hard would be a galactic understatement.

What Jason discovers is that the planet's life-forms have all evolved psi powers: their hostility and aggression only reflect the feelings of the humans they meet.

Penguin: The running tap, the flushing toilet

Picked up in Oxfam, Dalston, for 99p: first Penguin edition, 1966, cover design by Richard Bailey. Foxed, but otherwise a nice copy.

Somebody, I don't remember who, complained that in real life people go to the lavatory far more than they have sex, while in fiction the ratios are reversed. Of course, if you get too worked up about keeping novels faithful to life you end up perpetrating the kind of daft, life-devouring experiments that B. S. Johnson went in for, and we all know what happened to him (full details in Jonathan Coe's biography of Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, which is excellent). But think of poor Martin Luther, hurling inkpots at the devil and nailing theses on church doors in his agonies of constipation (or so it's said); contrast happy Dean Martin, who in retirement rhapsodised about an existence measured out in dumps: "Another massive bowel movement. Beautiful. This is my life." It's nice when somebody does take the trouble to acknowledge the importance of the lavatorial.

Enderby, the poet protagonist of four novels by Anthony Burgess, stands in relation to his muse rather as Robert Graves stood in relation to the White Goddess, though in point of fact Enderby prefers to sit, courting Poesy while enthroned in the bathroom ("Why does he choose this meagre chamber? Poetry ... is appropriate to it; the poet is time's cleanser and cathartizer"). On a train to London he locks himself in and scribbles a song to the Blessed Virgin on panel after panel of bog-roll. And so the book is liberally punctuated with the noise of Enderby's catharsis: Chapter One opens with the word "Pfffrrrummmp", and also contains "Perrrrrp", "Querpkprrmp", "Bopperlop" and "Porripipoop" ("The horns of Elfland"); and that's just in his sleep. Afflatus and flatulence are never far apart: a fit of composition produces "Pfffrumpfff", "Prrfrrr", "Brrrbfrrr", and a conclusive "Brrrp".

This is comedy, but serious comedy: the book's theme is the collision of the intellectual and material worlds. So while I like this cover, and it is relevant, I wish it had been more ambitious. The graffiti is inappropriate and unimaginative ("Kilroy was here", fer chrissake). Nothing, either, to indicate that Enderby is a poet - and, as fictional poets go, quite an accomplished one; Burgess made up a number of verses on his behalf, displaying a kind of plain-spoken visionary quality that calls to mind bits of Graves and Yeats and Auden. Some of the lines are quite striking, or memorable anyway: the refrain "The running tap casts a static shadow" I can easily imagine finding in some mid-century anthology of promising young poets destined for oblivion.

Not that oblivion is to be Enderby's end. In the opening chapter he is visited by a party from the future, a teacher and pupils come to gaze on the poet as he sleeps: in time to come, we learn, there is to be a Harvard edition of his work; he will be spoken of in the same breath as Shakespeare, his digestive troubles thought of with Johnson's scrofula or Keats's consumption. The students are encouraged to draw lessons in philosophy from the contrast between the squalor of his surroundings (and his person) and the wealth of his spirit. (So Inside Mr. Enderby is an example of disguised science-fiction - SF that most readers don't even register is SF: cf. Cold Comfort Farm).

For comparison, here's the old Twentieth-Century Classics cover for The Complete Enderby, all four novels in one volume:

 

This doesn't push the envelope either, and the design is less satisfying; but the loo is more appropriately domestic, and the open lid speaks of abysses and zeroes - a hint that, given the choice, it might be comforting to be full of shit rather than empty of everything.

Nobby Clarkes

The winner of this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award for science-fiction was announced last night: China Miéville, for The City & The City. He is the first person to win the Clarke three times, having won in 2001 for Perdido Street Station and in 2005 for Iron Council.

As it happens, The City & The City is the only one of the six shortlisted novels I have read: my Telegraph review can be found here. Short version: noir detective story set in the twin cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, which occupy the same physical space, overlapping, crosshatching, mingling. What separates them is law and custom: when you are in one city you simply do not notice what is happening in the other, though it is  right under your nose; you don't even smell the cooking from the house next door.

I thought the conceit was brilliant hyperrealism: this is how we live in a modern city - selectively ignoring everything outside our own social boundaries. Story and style were less successful:I was not bowled over as I had been by Iron Council. But I'd endorse the view implicit in the ACCA, that it's worth reading.

POSTSCRIPT: Important point - the Clarkes bash was a very pleasant affair. Free beer! Small salty pastry things! Thanks to Tom Hunter, Paul Billinger and everyone else involved.

Beware the stare

1961 reprint. In re A High Wind in Jamaica, I said I wasn't that interested in film tie-in covers, but it would be more accurate to say that I'm only interested in campy old ones. And who couldn't love this one, with the contrast between earnest, troubled George Sanders and the superhuman disdain of the children (so often I've seen that expression on the faces of my own offspring). Not that Sanders couldn't do superhuman disdain when the mood took him - his suicide note read: "Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck."

Off the shelf: The Oxford Companion to English Literature

More to the point, out of the stocking. Santa was pretty good about consulting my Amazon wishlist this year - not so great for our local independent bookshop but avoids that awkward moment when I tear off the wrapping, realise it's something I've already got, and fail to compose my face into a spontaneous expression of surprise and gratitude. And so my haul included the new edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, edited by Dinah Birch - will this, I wonder, be the last really chunky reference book I take possession of before all information migrates online forever?

It will be months, if not years, before I've got properly to grips with this edition, but I wanted to point out a couple of things:

1) The cover - it's a painting by David Kirk called The Gardener (2003-4), and it's got a Penguin. More precisely, it's got a Penguin with the vertical grid designed by Jan Tschichold and Erik Ellegard Frederiksen (we think of Penguin as a British design icon, but it was a very European operation). Phil Baines, in Penguin by Design, reckons the grid made its first appearance on a cover in 1952 (earlier on dustjackets); I don't recall seeing it on books printed before the mid-1950s, and it died out in the early 1960s. The title is, frustratingly, illegible, but the first word begins with an A, and the second with a T.

2) Science-fiction - loads of it, to the point where it feels slightly weird. So there are entries for authors like Michael Swanwick, Ian McDonald and Adam Roberts, whose work is virtually unknown to the non-SF-reading public and whose reputations are far from fixed; meanwhile, venerable, influential and good crime writers such as Donald Westlake and Reginald Hill don't make the cut. Nor does Julian Maclaren-Ross - a minor novelist, but the focus of considerable attention in recent years; nor does the poet Philip Gross (an omission that looks particularly daft now he's won the T. S. Eliot prize).

Can anybody explain?

Hugo prat?

Adam Roberts, SF critic and author, has stirred up a storm in a multidimensional quasi-intelligent teacup by telling SF fans they have terrible taste - specifically, they chose lousy shortlists for this year's Hugo Awards. (For my non-SF readers: the Hugos are the most prestigious awards in SF, and they are voted for by members of the public.)

The ripples have been felt as far afield as the Guardian books blog and Torque Control, where a few SF fans have been congratulating Roberts on his percipience, and rather more have been cursing him for a snotty, anal, ivory-towered twerp. Several people have suggested that his real problem is sour grapes at not being shortlisted himself (for Swiftly, his take on Gulliver's Travels and Micromégas).

I thought something similar after reading his notes on the Clarke Award shortlist back in April. But I think now that having a stake in that shortlist, as one of the judges, led me to overreact to his somewhat abrasive style (and what should a critic be if not abrasive?). At any rate, looking from the outside, most of what he says about the Hugos strikes me as objectively and obviously correct. Certainly his views on the merits and flaws of individual books - Little Brother (not Clarke shortlisted, to dismay of some) and Martin Martin's on the Other Side (Clarke shortlisted, to dismay of many) - are spot on.

But the problem is not with the fans, it's with the whole structure of the Hugo Awards. Superficially, making awards democratic sounds nice; in practice, it makes the awards a popularity contest, and we've already got one of those - it's called the bestseller list. So what's the point? Few people voting are likely to read more than a fraction of the eligible books; most will stick largely to writers and genres they already know and like; with a jury award, like the Clarke, the people voting are obliged to read a majority of the books, and to give consideration to books that, left to themselves, they would dismiss out of hand. God, what I would have given to be able to dismiss some of them out of hand.

None of this is to say that the outcome of a jury award will necessarily be better: there have been some terrible Clarke winners, as well as brilliant Hugo ones; I haven't bothered cross-referencing to see if both have happened in the same year. But the process is healthier and more likely to throw up something surprising and original - which, as Roberts says, is kind of the point of SF.

Judgment Day

The Arthur C. Clarke Award 2009 was announced of Wednesday: the winner was Ian R. MacLeod for Song of Time - report here. It was a tight decision, reached after a long, hard-argued but really quite amicable meeting. Paul Billinger, the non-voting chair of judges, warned us repeatedly that whatever book we chose we would be wrong.  He was unduly pessimistic: I haven't seen a negative reaction to the award. I suspect the reason is that even those who had reservations about the book, like Adam Roberts, were pleased to see the award go to a respected but little-known British novelist from a tiny publishing house, PS. So far, the book has only been published in a limited edition hardback; perhaps, like Christopher Priest's The Separation a year or two back, winning the Clarke will see it republished with a bit of a marketing push. And a nicer cover.

I'd love to write in more depth about the process of judging and what I thought about the shortlisted books, but I'm under a tongue-binding geas. Hey ho. I mentioned a few weeks ago an intention to say something about recurring themes in this year's submissions, and hope to get round to that soonish, round about the time nobody cares any more.

Judging the Clarkes was enjoyable, if only as an excuse to get wholly immersed in SF for the first time since my teens, but time-consuming; in theory, judges do a two-year stint, but I'm recusing myself for 2010 to earn a living. Maybe another year. Thanks to all my fellow judges, to Paul Billinger for unruffled calm, and to Farah Mendlesohn and Francis Spufford, who between them got me into this thing.

All must have prizes

The shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2009 has been published; Torque Control has published a useful round-up of reactions so far.

As one of the judges, I'm not permitted to discuss anything at all, really, under pain of having my tongue cut out and buried at low tide on the shores of the methane oceans of Titan or something. But I think it's all right for me to say that every one of the books I've seen identified as a notable omission was talked over at some length during the short-list meeting - nobody got short-changed.

What I may do in a day or two is blog at some length on one or two of the themes that emerged from the books we read.

The title of this post comes, as you will recognise, from Alice in Wonderland via one of the wackier dystopian satires of recent years.

Monday morning Penguins

 

It's mostly old Penguins that interest me, but this grabbed me when I saw it in a local bookshop.

It's one of a series of John Wyndham covers by Spencer Wilson, first published around 2000. Taken as a whole they're a bit too cartoony, as if Penguin was trying to re-brand Wyndham as a precursor of Douglas Coupland (cf. their peculiar habit back in the Sixties of using Quentin Blake's supremely amiable drawings for cynical old Evelyn Waugh), but they do make the books instantly recognisable. In this case, I admired the strong colours - which aren't quite right on this scan - and the fidelity to the story, about an 11-year-old boy, Matthew, whose imaginary friend turns out to be an alien inhabiting his head. The flash of light is a smart way of representing this visitation (and also allows for the potential religious interpretation), and you should be able to make out that the background is plastered with zeroes and ones - Chocky teaches Matthew to count in binary. Points to Wilson for having read the story properly.

The other reason I chose this one was the close parallel to last week's cover, John Updike's Pigeon Feathers, from 35 years earlier - again, a small drawing of a boy in a bottom corner, and a revelation arriving from above. You could even argue that the story "Pigeon Feathers" has some parallels with Chocky, both being about boys receiving a revelation of some sort; the big difference, leaving aside obvious questions of genre and psychological realism, is that whereas Chocky's departure restores Matthew's innocence, Updike's David loses his for good.

I can't recommend too highly Caustic Cover Critic's vast gallery of Wyndham covers.

Mutations, I

Over at Crooked Timber, John Holbo is understandably excited about having been given a copy of this book by his wife, clearly an understanding woman. I too am excited because, as I've already explained in the comments thread over there, this is one of the most important books in my life: in 1982, when I went for interview at Oxford, the trio of dons confronting me asked me what I had been reading lately. Rodent Mutation, I told them. A scientific treatise? they wondered (I was an arts candidate). Not exactly, I said: it's about giant radioactive beavers teleporting themselves around the country and smashing things with their tails (I had forgotten until Holbo mentioned it that they were also telepathic). Aha, they said, and we moved on. One of my teachers told me later that in the report sent to my school I was described as a "slightly strange" candidate; but I ended up going there, and it's where I met my wife and everything. Objectively, it is an appallingly silly and poorly written book; but I'm in no position to be objective.

Footnote: Bron Fane is one of the many pseudonyms of the Rev. Lionel Fanthorpe, the motorcycling vicar who used to present Fortean TV on Channel 4, and who was never as interesting or amusing as that description makes him sound.