Girl, 2000

She

H. Rider Haggard

A lowbrow classic, She is a book for schoolboys of all ages from twelve to... well, two thousand, I suppose. I can’t imagine any woman of any age ever wanting to read it, but despite this apparent handicap, Rider Haggard’s famous adventure story is one of the most popular novels ever written, with over 100 million copies sold. It’s a specimen – perhaps the specimen – of what used to be called a Rattling Good Yarn, and oozing, too, with that all-important Sex Interest, which Haggard ladles on in part-sublimated Pre-Raphaelite dollops (you know the kind of thing – the Blessed Damozel leaning bosomily over the Bar of Heaven, Waterhouse’s Lamia with one tit frankly out, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth). It must have caused unnumbered nocturnal emissions, voluntary and involuntary, in the public-school dormitories of its day.

    Indeed, the formula has been more than good enough to keep us reading for well over a century, for though Haggard’s titillatory efforts seem merely funny today, the central character herself has an erotic power that cannot be denied. Jung held that Ayesha, the eponymous She, was one of the purest depictions of the anima in literature: a woman as near immortal as dammit and so appallingly beautiful that a single glimpse of her face is enough to enslave you and destroy your sanity, yet whose favour is also the key to untold wisdom, riches and power if only you can win it. 

    Everyone knows the story, or at least the outline of it. Since its first serialization in the Graphic, an English popular magazine of the era, it has appeared in multitudinous guises from feature film to comic strip to BBC radio drama, and inspired countless imitations (Indiana Jones is a descendant). To tell the truth, though, I didn’t find Ayesha nearly as eldritch or as archetypal as advertised; in fact I found myself liking her better and better as the story went on. She’s a girl of sturdy and loyal character, even if she doesn’t think twice about torturing deserving cases in her catacombs or giving love-rivals the kind of drop-dead look that actually works. 

    I wish I’d read She when I could have appreciated it properly – before, that is, age, experience and the countless other books I’ve read spoilt the innocent pleasure I might have taken in it at, say, age fourteen. I still enjoyed it well enough, though I had to skip through a few over-amped passages of description here and there, and put up with the fictional narrator’s half-baked amateur philosophizing. There’s a surprising amount of purple in Rider Haggard’s passages, some of it arguably fatal to the tension or excitement he is trying to build up; much of this occurs around the middle of the book and looks suspiciously like padding. Perhaps the author was simply trying to meet his contracted word-count-per-episode for the Graphic.

    Apart from a short but evocative nautical episode near the beginning, the writing only really comes to life after Ayesha enters the story – halfway through the book, in the middle of a lot of cod-philosophy about people growing more cynical as they get older, and suchlike. The later chapters, in which she transforms from villainess to heroine, are by far the best of the book, full of genuinely exciting scenes and images.
    She is the kind of novel that excites the contempt of intellectuals, and the long-outworn familiarity of its tropes – a product, lest we forget, of its own vast success – obviously works against it as far as the present-day reader is concerned, but it remains a pretty good read for all that. Ayesha may not truly have been immortal in the flesh, but as a literary creation – and a manifestation of the collective unconscious – she will never die. 

Intermittently Fascinating

The Book of Imaginary Beings

by Jorge Luis Borges 

A literary bestiary. The Classical monsters, from Kronos to the satyrs, are well represented. So are the cobbled-together cacozens of the Middle Ages, part this, part that and part the other: plausible as heraldic images, impossible to picture as living, breathing beasts. But Borges, in this short book, also brings us a haul of imaginary creatures from China, Latin America, the Malay Archipelago and just about everywhere else. Now and then we find among the specimens something genuinely exotic, like the Simurgh of Sufi fable or the Celestial Stag believed in by Chinese miners. Other beasts here were first imagined by famous modern authors: Kafka and C.S. Lewis each features more than once, and Kafka’s Oradrek is by far the most lovable monster in the book. Going in the other direction, readers of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun will discover in this bestiary a Talos and a Baldanders – though on reading the entries for these beings, they are likely to find themselves more mystified than ever.

Although the subject-matter of the book harmonizes perfectly with Borges’s oeuvre, The Book of Imaginary Beings is too heavily in debt to its sources to give us much of the pure, the veritable elixir. Only two of the beings featured in it appear to me at all Borgesian. The Á Bao A Qu, an allegedly Malay monster (it sounds Chinese to me) could, in its aspect, character and setting, have sprung fully formed from the brow of the master, while The Sow in Shackles, who terrifies Argentinean peasants by tightrope-running along the telegraph-wires at night, rattling her eponymous chains, partakes of the Latin American magical realism of which Borges was a forerunner. She could have been imagined by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but she wasn’t. Yet for me, the most hauntingly Borgesian piece here is the one describing the fauna of mirrors, which speaks fascinatingly but obliquely about that mysteriously visible but strangely inaccessible world.

Sadly, many of the entities described – such as dragons, unicorns, or the Phoenix – are too familiar to be really interesting to us. The author does his best to find exotic traits and tall tales attributed to them in obscure and often dubious authorities, but this only partly ameliorates the tedium of over-familiarity.

I don’t know who would love this book. Bestiaries aren’t as unfashionable in our day and age as you might think; consider, for example, Monster Wiki and the character menus of RPGs. But film and video monsters come ready-made; the hard work of picturing imaginary creatures has already been done for us – and done breathtakingly well, by experts. This bestiary doesn’t have a single picture in it. 

Any work of this genre is ultimately a series of index entries lacking either plot, narrative or theme: an assortment, a farrago, a grab-bag filled with unfamiliar but not necessarily delightful treats. Most twenty-first century readers would be bored and mystified after a few pages. In the end, as with certain other works of Borges – ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, for instance, or ‘Funes the Memorious’ – the appeal seems to be mainly to hopeless bookworms and literary trainspotters, the kind of people who are fascinated by old books and long-dead writers. I am one of those people, but I am sorry to say that I found The Book of Imaginary Beings only intermittently fascinating.

Turn Down the Sound, Abate the Fury

How to Deal With Idiots (and 

Stop Being One Yourself)

by Maxime Rovère

trans. David Bellos

All writers struggle with the limitations of language. Philosophers have it particularly hard; the ideas they work with are complex and often counterintuitive, easily misinterpreted or misunderstood, and the effort to be as precise as possible often ends up making things worse. Many great philosophical tomes are – let’s face it – damn near impenetrable in places. Usually the most important places.

    Aware of this, philosophes down the ages have addressed the problem in various ways. Some try to divide their thoughts up into bite-sized chunks: Aristotle was perhaps the first of many to publish his lecture notes. Others have sought to distil their work into a set of handy aphorisms, while the more literarily inclined devise allegories or works of alleged fiction as vehicles for their ideas. Nietzsche famously succeeded with both these methods: see, respectively, The Anti-Christ and Thus Spake Zarathustra. More recently, Jostein Gaarder got excellent results with his philosophical novel Sophie’s World.

    Sometimes philosophers attempt to leaven the heavy dough of their cogitation by expressing themselves informally, adopting the terms of common parlance or whatever they imagine common parlance to be. Maxime Rovère does this in How to Deal With Idiots, which is presented and packaged as a popular self-help book, or rather a parody of one. Though he gamely maintains the conceit all the way to the end, his material inevitably overflows the mould he has created for it as philosophical disquisitions tend to do. By Chapter Four or so the game is well up (the chapters are very short, by the way, as is the book as a whole), and we’re starting to grapple with the gnarly ethics of personal interaction, which is what the book is really about. Rovère’s speciality (one of several, it seems; he’s also an expert on Spinoza and an accomplished translator) is something called ‘interactional philosophy’. In this book, at least, a better name for it might be ‘transactional ethics’. Most of us will recognize it as a type of moral philosophy.

    It is not a spoiler to reveal that the book never really teaches the reader how to deal with idiots; rather, Rovère hopes to teach us how to avoid ‘creating’ idiots, which he defines as events rather than persons, and how to minimize the unpleasant consequences when we fail, as we are bound to do more often than not. Some of the methods he suggests will be familiar to practitioners of Buddhism – not of Buddhist meditation, but of the attitudes and mental hygienics of Buddhism. The roots of his thought are not Buddhist, though; they are planted firmly in the history of Western philosophy and moral criticism, and a short bibliography appended to the book cites Kant, La Boetie and Nietzsche along with Sacher-Masoch and de Sade, as well as a number of modern philosophers whose names I don’t recognize and forebear to mention on that account.

    I found the book enjoyable and much easier to read than the general run of philosophical works, though that’s not saying much. I did not think it wholly persuasive. At times I found that I could reinterpret the author’s explanations or refute them entirely just by changing the context of his words from the one he obviously had in mind into another that would fit them equally well, but convey the opposite conclusion. I think this is one of the risks you run when you try to put complex thoughts into simple language.

    There was little in the book that I found entirely new, though it did make me reflect on my own attitudes and behaviour, which was clearly the author’s intention. Rovère’s advice would certainly make us all kinder, more understanding and accommodating people if we followed it, but the difficulty, as always, lies in practising what one has embraced as precept while coping with the stresses and strains of everyday life, and with the implicit understanding that the world itself can never really be made better. Idiots (as the penultimate chapter admits) always win in the end.

    An intellectually and sympathetically engaging read, then, though I do wonder whether the format the author has chosen puts his case as convincingly as it could be put. It’s a strange book this, neither flesh nor fowl, and although there’s nothing wrong with the taste I am doubtful of the nutritional value. 

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.

 

The Art of the Potboiler

Sanctuary
By William Faulkner

There is some exquisite writing in this book. Faulkner’s prose conjures a unique world, with its own vividly recognizable atmosphere and inhabitants. Sanctuary naturally partakes of that world, which the author renders with careful and often surprising attention to pertinent details.

Apart from the great beauty of the writing and the pleasure of revisiting the world it evokes – a pleasure of which this Faulkner reader has never tired – I found little entertainment in Sanctuary apart from a few episodes of broad comic relief: the funeral in the gambling-den, Clarence Snopes, the antics of an irrepressibly dipsomaniacal infant. The characters, even the hero manqué, are unsympathetic, often repellent and mostly far-fetched. The central figure (hardly a heroine) is in a state of wild hysteria in every scene save the last in which she appears. In our post-feminist world it has become depressingly clear that the great masculine colossi of the twentieth-century American novel knew almost nothing about women; their female characters are marionettes of cardboard and greasepaint glimpsed through a fog of drink, infatuation and resentment. In Temple Drake, this tendency may well have found its archetype: though terrible things happen to her, their telling stirs no sympathy in the modern reader, only boredom and incredulity. 

There are other women in the book besides Temple, but they are nearly all stock characters – the wronged but incurably faithful wife and mother, the tart (madam, actually) with a heart, the helpful but corruptible serving-maid, all of whom were well established in fiction long before this novel was written. Only two of the female characters ring true – the hero’s sister and her elderly, waspish aunt. But they are both middle-class characters, of a type whom Faulkner would have seen many examples. The others are all demimondaines, sensationalistically but unconvincingly rendered.

Faulkner wrote this book, we are told, as a ‘potboiler’ that might make him money. Apparently it did; Sanctuary is his best-selling novel. As a piece of genre fiction, however, it is a failure: by no means the sort of book you’d stay up at night reading because you absolutely have to know what happens next. On the contrary, there were times when I had to force myself back to it. But I did return, because in spite of all its manifest failings, Sanctuary is a work of art, a very beautiful one except in the places where it fails. But it couldn't be a work of art without those failures; if it had completely succeeded, it would have been No Orchids for Miss Blandish.

A Traitor’s Testament

The Kite Runner

by Khaled Hosseini

Garbage. The author writes poorly, has no psychological insight (apparent from the second sentence of the novel onwards), and displays the outlook and attitudes of his nation and class: quasi-mediaeval, that is to say, with a thin veneer of modernity pasted on and peeling right off again.
    His hero, Amir, is a treacherous coward, and the reader who retains an atom of sympathy for him beyond the climactic scene of Part I isn't thinking at all about what they read. This is a hero with no heroic qualities. Nor is he much of a protagonist, since he rarely does anything of his own volition; even his betrayals are the circumstantial products of his own cowardice. Life just carries him along, unresisting. And there is nothing Postmodern or experimental about any of this, in case you were wondering: that kind of writing is far above Hosseini’s pay grade. The Kite Runner is a book of pedestrian construction, frothing with cliches – no Pale Fire, I’m afraid.
    Worst of all, Hosseini plainly expects you to feel sorry for his repulsive creation. He seems to think this weepy, effeminate, backboneless sentimentalist, this selfish milksop pining desperately for the love of his father, is quite a likeable chap and hard done by besides. I suppose Amir’s sissiness is meant to be a contrast to the conventional Afghan machismo of his father Baba (which Amir aspires to but lacks both the courage and the dash to emulate). In fact, Amir’s character is redolent of nothing so much as repressed and curdled homosexuality, and makes you wonder whether the author is working through some identity issues of his own.
    Part Two of the book, set in the USA, is unspeakably awful: slipshod, boring and full of the kind of bad prose that people who attend ‘creative writing’ workshops generate so easily. Its main effect was to persuade this South Asian reader that Afghan society must be just as backward, and as grimly resistant to integration with the modern world (there are no non-Afghan characters to speak of in Amir’s America), as the Western imagination conceives. By the time I finished this part I was thoroughly sick of them all: Amir, his relations (he has no friends to speak of, having betrayed the only one he ever had back in Kabul) and even, unfairly, poor suffering Afghanistan itself. I certainly had no interest in finding out how they all fared in the end, and quit reading while Our Hero was still in Peshawar, Pakistan, en route back to Kabul in a self-flagellating attempt to ‘redeem himself’. According to the spoilers I read, this effort ends in another act of treachery committed by him. Well, at least that’s dramatically consistent.
    Awful, awful, awful, awful. I wish I hadn’t read it. It seemed to confirm my already dim view of South Asian elite culture and all the hardest things I’ve ever read or heard said about Afghanistan. I could have done without the endorsement.