Art Deco Pulp Fiction

The Demolished Man
by Alfred Bester

Another of those classics of science fiction (like this one) that I should have read when I was a teenager. This isn’t quite Golden Age SF but its author was a figure from that era, and The Demolished Man certainly reads as if it was published in the 1930s rather than in 1953. Also, though he doesn’t make it too obvious, Bester clearly imagines his future setting as an Art Deco world, a bit like Batman’s Gotham City. The few visual descriptions he spares us all point unmistakably in that direction.
    What else to say about this book, as briefly as I can? It’s a science-fiction policier set in a world in which a powerful minority of humans are telepaths. A big tycoon murders a business rival and a telepathic detective sets out on his trail. Being telepathic, he already knows whodunit, and why, and how, and when; his problem is to find evidence that will convince a non-telepathic prosecutor (a computer, as it happens). All this is thoroughly implausible, of course, but in science fiction that’s never been a deal-breaker. 

    An equally improbable pitch of hysteria is sustained all through the narrative, as if the book had been produced by a comic-book writer, or else an advertising man. And it was: Bester really did work in both those capacities between the height of the Golden Age and the publication of The Demolished Man. People don’t talk normally in this book: they shriek, scream, howl, roar and otherwise communicate in exclamation marks. They run, or ‘jet’, more often than they walk. They are constantly getting pounded and pummelled, yet bounce back into action with more resilience than Wile E. Coyote. And no matter how long they go without food, sleep or even rest, they never, ever get tired. But all this, too, is fine; most Golden Age SF was a bit like that in any case. 
    One aspect is even, at a stretch, justifiable. Bester has created a world in which many people are telepaths, so concealing one’s emotions out of politeness or self-interest is futile. In such a society, it does seem possible that people would take to speaking their minds without restraint. A world full of telepaths may well be a world in which everyone talks like a comic strip. But that doesn’t explain why they should act like one too.
    More dated even than the Golden Age narrative style is the psychology. As an adman (PR man to be precise), Bester was well up on the psychological theory of his day, which was largely Freudian or Behaviourist. The book is chock-full of Freudian ideas and jargon, all of which have since been superseded in psychological theory as well as in therapeutic practice. In consequence, the rationales for both the plot and the characters’ actions now come across as mere far-fetched twaddle.
    Enjoyable twaddle, though. Funny, too. And if you squint hard enough, you may even detect some of the literary quality a few highbrow readers (Carl Sagan, of all people, among them) have found in the work of Alfred Bester. I’m sorry to have to admit I am not one of these readers, though I still had fun reading The Demolished Man.

Behind the Veil

The Turkish Embassy Letters
by Mary Wortley

Mary Wortley, Lady Montagu, a beautiful, frankly spoken liberal feminist, would probably have fitted better into the late twentieth century than the early eighteenth, which was when she lived. 

     She wrote the Turkish Embassy Letters (1716–1718) in Istanbul and on the vast de facto European Grand Tour she was obliged to make with her husband en route to and from Turkey, where Lord Wortley served as George I’s ambassador to the Sublime Porte. In Istanbul she bore a daughter, became a pioneer of inoculation against smallpox, adopted local dress (including the veil) and made a study of Ottoman culture and upper-class customs, becoming the first Christian woman ever to gain social éntrée to a Turkish harem. 

     Her journeys in Europe carried her through Holland, Germany, Bohemia, Austria and war-ravaged Hungary, the last of which she traversed in the dead of winter before passing with her husband and their entourage into the Ottoman-occupied Balkans. Her return to England, three years later, was made by sea via the Dardanelles, the Troad and Tunis to Genoa, and thence by land through Italy and France. As an ambassador’s wife, she was introduced at court in every country they passed through. 

     Lady Mary’s letters are fascinating travelogues, each given over to matters she thinks suited to that particular friend or relation, yet of far more general interest to modern readers. They are informative (at times scholarly), full of mature perception and judgement, often sardonic yet always amusing and agreeable.  Interleaved with them in this edition are a few letters from one of her correspondents – none other than Alexander Pope. The poet and Lady Mary were at first friends (he admired her writing, among other things) and later enemies (after she laughingly refused his advances; the Victorian painter William Frith later painted the scene as he imagined it). I don’t know whether it was before her departure for Istanbul or after her return to London that Pope thus made a fool of himself, but her letters to him are friendly if mildly sarcastic, while his are importunate, though only for her attention and approval, and somewhat bitter.

     The volume in which I read this book also contained a number of Lady Mary’s poems. I only read a few of these. They were very accomplished from a technical and aesthetic point and display clearly the personality and values of the woman who wrote them. One or two, I thought, were very good. On the whole, though, I preferred the letters.