Words on Wednesday: Ways of seeing science fiction, Aldiss and Le Guin

I read Brian Aldiss' Greybeard (1964) and Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven (1971) soon after each other towards the beginning of last year (2019) and their similarities and differences have been something that has continued to play on my mind long after I finished the two novels.

Ostensibly both novels have very little in common apart from both being part of the excellent SF Masterworks series, however, although plot, characters and style may differ there is a background theme as setting that places and inhabits both novels, it is the formation of their world's as 'gone astray'. I won't say dystopian quite yet, although one certainly could start as strong as this, but in both novels the world that the characters inhabit have fallen apart in some way and it is how the author's have their characters relate to this world and how the character's actions effect (or not) the world that is of interest to me. It's interest is in how the author's own perspective and belief's about human nature and social order soak into their fictional worlds. As always, I suppose, art is merely a reflection of the artist and a good artist tries their best to hide this, if they are even aware of this bleeding of their 'real world' opinions into the fictional creations.

You might think you're telling a story, but really you are telling us how you see the world.

Thus, what we have here are two different attempts at an abstraction from present concerns aka a speculative fiction, to call them sci-fi is to try and lessen or 'genre-place' the work into insignificance. To side-step into personal complaint again, I find that the comment "I like fiction, I just don't like fantasy/sci-fi, I like my stories real," is actually a case of mistaken identity. People are welcome to have certain likes and dislikes of 'style' in writing, but to call one fiction realer than the other is simply foolish. It is a category error, both fictions are fictional after all, but one is clothed in the veneer of realism and the other demands a certain use of imagination. Perhaps it is this demand that people dislike.

Anyway, returning to the point. It seems to me that the two different story-worlds (of Aldiss and Le Guin) are defined by their personal politics (as we all often are). These perspectives shape their reaction to their worlds and their intuitive understanding of how (they believe) human beings function and act (and why). To categorise Aldiss as 'right-wing' and Le Guin as 'left-wing' is simplistic, but still manages to shine a light of these differing approaches even if, personally, this distinction would be more difficult. Indeed, individual statements (or artistic endeavours) can be called left or right (politically) in that they can be isolated from context to give a definite answer, but taken within an individual's own personal history and belief system this basic categorising is dangerously simplistic and typically only used to label and distance.

Aldiss: In Greybeard the world and the character's are all literally in decline. No children have been born for years and the world's inhabitants are all creeping towards senility and decrepitude. The focus is on the violent and insular world that has risen up now that the world is 'without purpose'. The exacting reasons for society collapsing (worldwide one assumes, although the focus is purely on England) is not really detailed, it is instead taken as a given that these very male power structures would immediately come to pass. That culture is forever walking along this tightrope of potential aggression and that it's only the distraction of raising children and having a 'purpose' that keeps most men (except the level-headed protagonist) from starting militias and trying to take over small towns in the Midlands to rule as a tin-pot Caesar.

The protaganist represents (in some respect) the reader, he is an intelligent assured man whose plans have nonetheless always seemingly failed due to the idiocy of the masses. Whether meant or not, there is a significant description of people along the lines of class, with our lead characters (Greybeard and wife) being middle-class and having had relatively cosmopolitan lives, whereas their counterparts in the story are working-class and therefore seemingly more likely to give in to their aminalistic impulses. Despite that there is also a negative portrayal of academia as weak and easily overthrown by the aggression of thugs.

Throughout the story all the efforts of Greybeard are shown to essentially come to nothing, the characters end up simply floating along and when the story seems to be just petering out they happen to meet the reality behind the 'folk myth' and discover that there are indeed children in the world and that they've been living wild in the woods.

Le Guin: The setting of The Lathe of Heaven starts in a dehumanised future. However, although this novel is also about the self-destructive capacities of humanity it's focus is more internal and psychological. Our main character, George Orr, has the power to alter reality based upon his dreams. His court-assigned psychiatrist Dr Haber, discovers this and attempts to harness George by way of his 'Augmentor'. The road to hell is clearly paved with good intentions.

Rather than wallow in the misery of our failings, as it could, Le Guin's novel instead sets us many difficult and ultimately unanswered (and potentially unanswerable) questions about agency and control. Although I apparently have less to say directly about this novel it think that this is because the story's message is more ambiguous.

Although ultimately there is also a sudden reversal at the end, albeit one that is optimistic is a true sense rather than the straightforward reversal at play in Greybeard.

To conclude, I probably shouldn't have left this so long before writing as I might have managed something more detailed and nuanced this time last year, but as both stories have still stayed with me it seemed worthwhile. Science Fiction really is just another fiction, it is a style, one wherein the author can engage in thought experiments more freely. A story of ideas rather than just about (imagined) human interactions and how that particular writer believes people will act (although it's that too).

Words on Wednesday: Prescient Poets

Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion,
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave and eats a bread it does not harvest.

Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.

Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,
yet submits in its awakening.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
save when it walks in a funeral,
boasts not except among its ruins,
and will rebel not save when its neck is laid
between the sword and the block.

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking

Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,
and farewells him with hooting,
only to welcome another with trumpeting again.

Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years
and whose strongmen are yet in the cradle.

Pity the nation divided into fragments,
each fragment deeming itself a nation.

Kahlil Gibran, The Garden of the Prophet

Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.

Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.

Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.

Pity the nation - oh, pity the peope who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.

My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, after Kahlil Gibran

Jane Frere

Words on Wednesday: Thali Katori

Thali Katori
An Anthology of Scottish and South Asian Poetry
Edited by Bashabi Fraser and Alan Riach
Luath Press, 2017
ISBN 9781912147090

I like a random poetry discovery as you may well know. Well, this one fell into my lap last week just as I most needed it. I've been struggling to read anything longer than a paragraph recently; exhaustion, child care, lack of motivation, other concerns, world weariness, etc.

So, this literary "feast of many flavours" was a much appreciated find. Here are just a wee sample.

Tessa Ransford (1938-2015)

The dhobi's dog

The dhobi's dog will return from riverbank in the sun
to the house, but not lie down; to and fro he'll trot
panting, semi-wild, hither and thither recalled,
never petted, fondled, either hot or cold.
Does he belong? To whom? Dhobi-ji send him home,
Bibi-ji won't give him room. Such is my lot.

Born and reared in India, comforted by ayah
on some cool verandah of lofty bungalow
with charpai and dgchi, decander and serahi,
enervated, dusty, the whining mosquito,
black ants and red, hug fans overhead:
when all was done and said, the British had to go.

In Scotland I froze: hands, feet, nose,
in thick uneasy clothes at dour boarding school:
a wind-resistant, dismal, stern, redoubtable,
grey-stone-wall life exemplified by rule;
embarrassed to embrace, weep, laugh, kiss:
was I of this race? from such a gene pool?

I lived in Pakistan, land of the Mussulman,
governed by the Koran. I learned Punjabi,
dressed in shalwar, travelled to Lahore,
joined in zabur, lived on dal-chapatti:
but didn't my passport say 'British, born Bombay'
however long my stay in Sialkot or Karachi?

I like the way I speak, the voice my thoughts make,
yet Scottish folk are quick to think me English.
I've lived here (sixty) years (Anderson forebears
and Glasgow Macalisters - that's buksheesh!)
Still my language finds no place, no ethnic dress or face:
I plead my special case and thus I finish.

Irfan Merchant

Address Tae Chicken Tikka Masala

Fair fa' the nations favourite dish
fulfilling everybody's wish,
great chieftain, O so very Scottish,
the spice o life;
ye came, and conquered the English,
tae cure thestrife.

Born in Glasgow's Shish Mahal
during Thatcher's iron rule,
your origins stretch to the Mughals
but when they tried
the chicken tikka, the locals
found it too dry.

The chef wad think tae open up
a can o' Campbell's tomato soup,
add chilli, colouring with pap-
-rika for zest;
and then O what a glorious sup,
simply the best.

As Scots we want the hottest thing
on the menu, a dish with zing:
haggis disnae mak us sing -
we're globalised;
it's the mince an tatties o Tony Singh
brings tears tae eyes.

Noo we export tae India
oor national dish, making it clear
that Scotland is a warld leader
in aa the airts;
fir chicken tikka masala
ye've won oor hairts.

Lord Ganesh, tae please the Scots
remember whit they want is lots
o sauce and spices, very hot,
but dinnae worry;
Ah've got the answer in ma pot -
gie then a curry.

Shampa Ray

Red Moss

Are you land or water?
You welcome me,
spongy wetland, burnt red
rain-fed mosses stacked
discreetly under heather.
I've gone this way before,

looked out at lochs,
Grand Canyon, a mile deep,
gardens that no longer hang
but are hung into the earth.
I have seen you, cast
my thought-hook elsewhere.

But today it is your
peaty reticence, the silence
of your insects, the lure
of no purchase, that wants me.
Your open-heart surgery landscape
will unravel me enough.

I want your compressed
witness, your tidy files, the human
and inhuman in your dark seams.
What was and is, together,
not reduced like the curlew's cry
but deep as Bible layers.

You do it with such flair,
skip over the ten thousand years.
You are the story I would walk on,
slip through as fish or toad,
come clean to fill your sky
full of bright sentences.

Bashabi and Alan

Words on Wednesday: Norman MacCaig 'The White Bird' 1973

The White Bird
Norman MacCaig
Phoenix Living Poets
Chatto and Windus with The Hogarth Press
London
1973
ISBN 0 7011 1918 7


BOOKWORM

I open the second volume
of a rose
and find it says, word for word,
the same as the first one.

The waves of the sea
annoy me, they bore me;
why aren’t they divided
in paragraphs?

I look at the night
and make nothing of it –
those black pages
with no print.

But I love the gothic script
of pinetrees and
on the pond the light’s
fancy italics.

And the cherry tree’s petals –
they make
a sweet lyric, I appreciate
their dying fall.

But it’s strange, girl, how I come back
from the library of everything
to stare and stare at
the closed book of you.

When will you open to me
and show me the meaning of all
the hard words
in the lexicon of love?


ODD MAN OUT

So green's my colour, though my country is
Gray stone, gray water.
(I hate a man who calls a country his.)

I watch red minds absolved from bodies go
In my gray weather,
Will-o'-the-wisping, fading as they glow.

Or bodies hulking hugely through the air
Mindlessly wander,
Shagging with browns and blues the grayness there.

Sometimes the bold sun, happening to pass by,
Blushes, just pinker,
The stone, the water and the drowning sky.

What's that to a man whose helpless knowledge is
Green is his colour?
(I hate a man who calls a colour his.)

So, like a bird that, perking up his song,
Denies it's winter,
I say green, green, green, green: and get along.


IN A MIST

The mountains fold and move.
I'm not quite lost. The thing that troubles me
Is that the easiest way out
Is not the one that's easiest to see.

I know just where you are.
But how to get there when lochs change their place
And the familiar track
Squirms like an adder into the heather bushes?

I curse my sense: and speak
Into the mist: Stay where you are, please stay -
I've got my compass yet.
It'll get me to you, if not by the easiest way,

*

I'll save the longest and best from this collection 'Inward Bound' for another day/year.

Words on Wednesday: Norman MacCaig 'Rings on a Tree' 1968

I recently 'discovered' poet Norman MacCaig in typically circuitous fashion. I was recommended Andrew Greig's excellent memoir/homage/meditation 'At the Loch of the Green Corrie' (2010) which I would also recommend to you dear reader.

In these pages I read about the author's connection to this spindly spiky Edinburgh schoolmaster, poet and sometime fisherman, Norman MacCaig, who was one of the explosive set of Scottish poets from the middle to later half of the last century, a group that included such legendary figures as; Edwin Morgan, Sorley MacLean, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Iain Crichton Smith, George MacKay Brown, Hugh MacDiarmid, and others, some of whom I'll be writing about at a later date.

Knowing that my local public library and employer has a reasonable collection of 20th Century Scottish poetry I investigated the reserve and choose this collection to start with based purely on the name, Rings on a Tree (1968). Here are a few from that collection.

Rings on a Tree
Norman MacCaig
The Phoenix Living Poets
Chatto and Windus with the Hogarth Press
London
1968
SBN 7012 0304 8

Starlings

Can you keep it so,
cool tree, making a blue cage
for an obstreperous population? -
for a congregation of mediaeval scholars
quarrelling in several languages? -
for busybodies marketing
in the bazaar of green leaves? -
for clockwork fossils that can't be still even
when the Spring runs down?
No tree, no blue cage can contain
that restlessness.  They whirr off
and sow themselves in a scattered handful
on the grass - and are
bustling monks
tilling their green precincts.

Crossing the Border

I sit with my back to the engine, watching
the landscape pouring away out of my eyes.
I think I know where I'm going and have
some choice in the matter.
I think, too, that this was a country
of bog-trotters, moss-troopers,
fired ricks and roof-trees in the black night — glinting
on tossed horns and red blades.
I think of lives
bubbling into the harsh grass.
What difference now?
I sit with my back to the future, watching
time pouring away into the past. I sit, being helplessly
lugged backwards
through the Debatable Lands of history, listening
to the execrations, the scattered cries, the
falling of roof-trees
in the lamentable dark.

Balances

Because I see the world poisoned
by cant and brutal self-seeking,
must I be silent about
the useless waterlily, the dunnock's nest
in the hedgeback?

Because I am fifty-six years old
must I love, if I love at all,
only ideas -- not people, but only
the idea of people?

Because there is work to do, to steady
a world jarred off balance,
must a man meet only a fellow-worker
and never a man?

There are more meanings than those
in text books of economics
and a part of the worst slum
is the moon rising over it
and eyes weeping and
mouths laughing.

Words on Wednesday: American Gods by Neil Gaiman

The belief in the power of belief

Disclaimer. Many people find critical analysis too close to flat out contempt. That is, they see any critical attempt as a destructively negative activity. This is only occasionally correct of me and not at all my motivation for writing this piece about Gaiman’s work today. Indeed, in my description of flaws in this novel, I am not suggesting possible corrections for the author (as an academic’s critique of another’s argumentation might include) but merely emphasising a difference in opinion. I think that ‘American Gods’ is an excellent novel, but as it’s made by a human, it’s never going to be perfect. This is a good thing. That it has made me, and others, think about; certain themes, the author’s usage of particular phrasing, or metaphor, the ideas, and the author’s (possible) social commentary, is the benefit of a worthwhile literary creation. That is, I have enjoyed the story but that is not all that it has done for me. It is, therefore, not “just entertainment.” Although if someone wishes to enjoy a work, any work, at this surface level only then that is entirely their choice.

The version of the novel I read was the “author’s preferred text,” which includes the edited inclusion of various story elements that were previously cut for brevity’s sake from the original text. How much of a difference this makes, I can’t really say, but perhaps in the future I’ll read the original shorter text (this version was around 630 pages).

Although I’ll do my best to avoid describing the plot specifically, there are several ideas that are especially central to the story that I’d like to discuss. I’ll keep these separated in a second section, which if you intend to read the novel or watch the forthcoming television series without knowing about them I’d suggest avoiding. However, I’d guessed at all of the main elements of the story, thanks to the blurb and my own personal reading history by page 25. So, I’d suggest it might not be that big of a deal as I still found it rewarding and surprising, but some people are quite antsy about spoilers…

1. As general a discussion as I can manage without describing the story itself…

What makes ‘American Gods’ good is not just the characters, not the plot, not the allusions to particular mythologies or real people and places (although all of these have to be good both individually and collectively to make the darn thing readable in the first place, but technical competence isn’t the mark of a really good writer), but that it is an attempt to bring all of this together to describe something conceptually intriguing. Something that warrants further thought.

An Englishman wrote an American novel. This is not an objective truth but a personal fact. Gaiman’s America is his America, perhaps it speaks truly to some and rings false to others. 

Like every good fantasy novel ‘American Gods’ is an attempt to create a new mythology, as Tolkien once said of his ‘Lord of the Rings’. Albeit that this a myth based on our pop cultural memory of gods, myths and an idea of a land we think we know. Why ‘American Gods’ works so well, is because it’s not claiming to fix a description of America, rather it is a mythic US of A that exists in imagination, thoughts, and dreams rather than the measurable ground or fact-checkable historic events. Your country, like your myths, like you yourself, is this amalgam fantasy. It is yours and yours alone, you can share parts with others, with your ‘countrymen and women’ (assuming they agree) but its basis will always be your heart.

"The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason." - Pascal.

Every work of creativity involves giving away something of the creator themselves. The clever ones hide this deep within elements of the work and never tell the truth about what it really meant to them. I’ll just say now that I don’t presume to read Gaiman’s mind or what it meant for him, but what I can say is that he really seems to like Norse mythology; the humour of it, the darkness, the pragmatism.

American Gods is an easy and enjoyable read. It is not challenging or dark, and yet it still has some conceptual depth. Especially worthwhile for a reader with an interest in mythology. Some aspects work better than others (in my opinion) but at 600+ pages this is to be expected, at the very least nothing is left unexplored. It’s important to point out the difference between unexplored and unexplained here, because one style would didactically tell you “what I meant here was” and the other gives you a hint and makes you think about what that might mean. Obviously, I think the second is the more interesting and Gaiman also trusts his readers to care enough to explore into things themselves, if they want to.

2. For those that have already read or are otherwise not concerned about spoilers or are sufficiently interested in further depth…

The central character ‘Shadow’ is both described in enough detail and abstractly enough that we are able to mould this hero into the reader’s own perspective. I think it would be dangerous to make such a prominently central character in such a large book too ‘fixed’. This is because the danger would be, what if the reader doesn’t like them or worse still, finds them boring? Shadow, thankfully, is therefore both mysterious and sympathetic enough to elicit our attention throughout the majority of the novel. Well, until the end, but by that point it hardly matters that our stoically dumb wise-man has become the all-aware superman hero. Mainly because we’re told he’ll soon forget it all anyway.

There are a vast array of secondary characters who are, for the most part, intriguing. Even their archetypal characterisation, which would otherwise make them seem flat, actually works given the context of the novel. They are mythic characters after all, although this creates a problem of who is a god and who is a normal person, as the method of description remains the same throughout. Perhaps this is the point, although I doubt the author meant it particularly. It becomes all the more confusing when a character (albeit a dream character, but this distinction in reality hardly matters for the novel) who we’d though might be an ancient god or belief, describes themselves simply as “the land.” Well, sure, that’s a belief people have. Is every belief manifest? Or just the ones with sufficient ‘weight’ behind them. That is, beliefs with some form of personal sacrifice, although this concept could be argued over too. At any rate, the problem becomes, at what point does this anthropomorphising of beliefs stop? The answer, perhaps cynically, is “whenever it is appropriate for the story,” because, yes, sadly it is just that, a story. Had we started to think that is was a technical manual? A guide book for existence? Probably this suggests that your/my imagination is over-active and that you should really stay away from cults.

Anyway, something that struck me as strangely absent was the lack of, shall we say, the more ‘famous’ religions. Perhaps the point was that monotheistic beliefs aren’t represented is this manner (in this world), because although Hinduism (not a ‘forgotten’ belief system with 750 million followers who are arguably pantheistic or monistic, depending where they/you stand) gets a tenuous mention with Kali making an appearance, but there is no mention of Jesus Christ or any of the saints or prophets of other religions (probably this is a sensible idea as this portrayal would annoy/anger/upset/outrage someone for sure). However, I’ve noticed that there is a Jesus Christ character is the television adaptation. Quite why and what role they will play is unknown (to me).

Also, as most people seem to believe in some form of externalised ‘evil’ in the world, represented as the devil, or in any other myriad of ways, it seems odd that this figure is not given the same anthropomorphic treatment. Possibly because this would make them the central antagonist and drive a rather different story than Gaiman had in mind.

I’ve read an interview with Gaiman that seems to suggest that the murder mystery ‘side quest’ story, was the originating idea for the novel that was then superseded by the ‘War of the Gods’ main story. It certainly reads like an add-on, indeed, it’s probably the bit that was edited out of the original. Still, it still fits with the rest of the world Americana mythology that he’s building and is reasonably interesting, just not that important really. It is also ‘solved’ or tied up in a particularly unremarkable fashion.

To conclude, I would certainly recommend ‘American Gods’ in the full “author’s preferred version” to any reader of contemporary fantasy and definitely to those with even a passing interest in mythology. Although there is some depth to the work that makes it more than merely passing entertainment it isn’t too conceptually dense, but it does reward a little extra thought. It’s certainly not a horror story or a science fiction, which are both awards that the novel won, probably due to an excellent literary agent...