The Call of the Cormorant by Donald S. Murray (2022)

 This is a book which is in some senses local to me. Shetland, where I live, is mentioned a few times, and the author lives here. It's also set, in its earlier sections, in Faroe, which is not too far away, and similar in a range of ways. I don't know the author, but could come across him at any time, given the small population here. Which brings up a standard difficulty when one has criticisms and lives in a relatively unpopulous community. Due to proximity, should one just shut up, and look to "propriety"? Or conversely see this journal for what it is, and speak? That's preferable to my thinking, but I know I need to be meticulous - and would like to think I am that habitually, anyway. Choice made...and hopefully not regretted. The subject matter of this book is a chap called Karl Einarsson, an Icelander/Faroe Islander, most of the meat of whose life was lived in the first half of the twentieth century. The book is a novelisation of his life, and has as a subtitle An Unreliable Biography: the author is at pains to point out in notes that it's a work of imagination, not only through choice, but also because of a paucity of available facts. Looking at what information there is, and reading between its lines, Einarsson emerges as highly evasive and highly eccentric. He harboured all sorts of ideas and identities: St Kilda was the only remnant of Atlantis, which had its own language (which he presumably invented); he, despite never having been there, was its self-styled "Count"; he also adopted the title Emperor Cormorant XII of Atlantis; was known under several other pseudonyms, including academic ones; having moved to Germany before the Second World War, he broadcast for the Nazis to his old homelands; after the war, he befriended Nobel winner Halldor Laxness, by whom some of his ideas and exploits were recorded. All this points to someone with significant pathology, very unlikely to be pinned down, except wholly in these terms. And that leads to a first criticism - the character here is, in his youth, a fairly average boy, who is mysteriously seen as a bit of a blowhard by some of those around him, but never really shown to us to be. Almost as though the oddness perhaps couldn't be depicted? It would certainly be a tall order for a writer; one would need virtuoso skills to do it convincingly, and perhaps Murray shied away instinctively. But it would have been there, in reality, and isn't here. Which makes the work of imagination which is this life quite a bit less convincing. An essential element is missing. When this Karl goes on to Denmark as he gets older, leaving the restrictions of Faroe behind, we get the slight shifting of axis so that some of the real character's later excesses can begin to be explored. But because of its earlier absence, his oddness is not compassed even in this section. He's made instead into more of a manipulative and evasive conman, though how that change comes about from the earlier ordinary boy is not overtly covered. It just happens to happen. Karl the boy here and Karl the man here don't really relate to each other. Two unreliable biographies. Proof of this pudding comes when the real Karl's written works are mentioned. Their nature does not match his as depicted here, like a fundamental disjunct. Other sections of the book come from Karl's sister Christianna, and tell a parallel story which stays in Faroe, detailing her falling in love with a shipwrecked Hebridean sailor, eventual marriage to a local, frustrations and dissatisfactions, unrequited love for another, and horror when she hears Karl's voice on the radio from Germany. These are far more anchored somehow, and it's a fastening we need, I think. We would no doubt have needed this strand even if the depiction of Karl had been a unified and convincing one, it would have formed something for that craziness to push against. There is, unfortunately, another criticism here: Christianna's voice is largely the same as Karl's. They have the same method and manner of investigating their inner workings and revealing their concerns. So, a little flat and underimagined to some extent. There is a last concern with this book, and it lies in the nuts and bolts of the writing. Firstly, Murray has the tendency for malapropism in similes: when the "constant" praise of his work by colleagues, necessarily episodic, is "rattling away like the drum downstairs", when someone with snow-white hair shifts their head, and "looks for all the world like a flurry of sleet or a blizzard", when the smells of a Copenhagen neighbourhood are "as regular and persistent as waves that crashed against the coastline of my home island", and many another example, one's confidence in the author flags a little. Secondly, there are enough typos and missing minor edits here (repeats of the same word within one or maybe two clauses, for example) to underline the need for these skills at publishing houses. The publisher of this is quite tiny. But there is also a proofreader mentioned in the acknowledgements - hmmmm. So, a plentifully fascinating subject, not well reached; it still has colour and interest, which go some way towards compensation.

Valis by Philip K. Dick (1981)

 After a good number of in-betweeny books, one way or another, it's great to have read a virtuoso performance. Re-instils one's faith in the medium, and, given its date (all the recent mediocrities have been recently published), tends to remind one of what seems a diminution in quality. I hope I've just been unlucky, but, more and more, feel there's something going on - and down. This is in Gollancz's SF Masterworks series, but to my mind is essentially a counterculture novel. There is a fictional scientific notion at the back of it, justifying in the loosest sense possible the epithet, but seen through a metaphysical lens in large part. It involves as main character Dick himself, so is approaching autobiography, fictionally transformed perhaps. Also this avatar is split: "Phil" is the author as neutral commentator, whereas "Horselover Fat" is the author as crazed drug-adventurer, traumatised one, and metaphysical explorer. The latter name is advertised as descending from some convolution of 'philip' as 'lover of horses' in Greek (?) and 'fat' from 'dick', the German for that. Of course, 'horse' is also heroin - no idea if Dick's appetites extended that far. These two emanations are part of a small group of friends with very distinct personalities: sarcastic Kevin and religious David are the centre, but two women also have prominent roles, both of whom have died, but who are seen in flashback. Gloria, a troubled, paranoiacally-minded drug-adventurer who ran a sideline in destroying the people around her; and Sherri, a long-time cancer-sufferer, who provides a counterpoint to the mind-expanded views around her in her stubborn Christianity. Dick essays a spiral of themes, as Horselover Fat, who melds into one with Phil at a critical point two-thirds in, deals with insights he gained through a crucial period of drug-taking in 1974, ramifications rattling through all his psychological issues. What makes this different is Dick's extraordinary weave-control as he manages all the threads. He takes the drug-inspired insights and has Fat discover that parts of them were actually true in real time, rather than addled wanderings of the mind. A process is gone through of 'proving' their veracity. Connections are made by interweaving established ancient classical and religious traditions with these experiences - and then further forms of 'proof' are sought, and indeed found. Fat's excitement and amazement at these revelations is strangely palpable, as is all the other mental stuff going on in his life, which is much more melancholic and mixed, and much more guilty. He develops a growing "complete theory" (appended at the end) about humanity's place in things, and modes of thinking, most of which we have no immediate awareness of, but would with the right tools. Without going into too much detail, the origin lies in the illusoriness of corporeal existence, its actual composition as streams of 'information', and the mostly pink beams of light, routed from somewhere in interstellar space which, I think, got the whole human thing going in the first place, and can provide mind-blowing perceptions if we can loosen the mind from its current temporal-substantial grip, and be receptive to them. But this novel also involves further interweavings between 'real' 70s cultural history and subcultures and the world that is created here, with rock bands, freakout films, and cultish tropes. There is a culmination with three charismatic-but-largely-secretive ex-rock star illuminati further north of San Francisco where most of the book takes place. I don't know what Dick would think of what occurred to me during this section, where the current point of fascination, a Giant Intelligence/Saviour Being in the person of a two year old girl who speaks like an adult sage, is investigated. I found it inescapable - Dick is portraying in this section, knowingly or not, in the reactions and paranoias of all the players, a Hubbard-like quality, an (intentional?) dissection of what goes to make a cult, particularly the mania for control, the feeling of special access, and the mistrustful worry. Perhaps what I'm really saying is that his intelligence would have made him, in the right circumstances, and with his special leanings, a disturbing cult leader. 

Big Fiction by Dan Sinykin (2023)

 This is subtitled How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. It's part of a series called Literature Now, published by Columbia University Press in New York, which is about literary culture in the late 20th / early 21st centuries. It occupies a space, though, between the academic and the general. There is relatively little footnoting and any theory in it is broadly scoped. Sinykin traces the advent and development of conglomeration in publishing, starting right back with Random House buying Knopf in 1960. Publishing back then was defined in terms of discerning owners and editors regulating taste and exposure through their own enthusiasms, with sales performance used only as an excuse for rejection, and "poorly-performing" favourites still maintained on lists. Then bottom lines and business started their takeover. Now, 60 years later, we have Penguin Random House as 50% of the market if not more, along with four others, and bottom lines insisted upon as not only a key element which it is taken for granted all will obey, but an authorial consideration too. Ditto social media. Basically it's the story of neoliberalism applied to the book world. The main gist, and main recommendation, is historical. He splendidly traces the central players in the saga, who was hired when, and for what reasons, who (editor and writer) had successes with books we all know and why, and how all this was interpreted at the time and subsequently. He is an academic, though, and so smidgins of it creep in from time to time, not altogether impressively. Early on there's one of those classic baggy mentions of how "sameness and difference" echo through these various themes. As well say that "light and darkness" pattern the temporal milieux of the fictions discussed. His thesis is that conglomeration caused not only the folks in publishing to think differently (bottom lines and business) but also authors' thinking being influenced, directly and by osmosis. On the whole I get this, but have a few nags: was it not there in the background always? Was it not simply supercharged by neoliberal dollars-concerns? I'm thinking of the trope of the writer who writes anything that sells, from pulps to Edgar Wallace. What proportion of anticipation was given to income in those cases, and what does it culturally represent? He also makes a case for the repurposing of genre as connected to conglomeration, even though this was set going long before. It's connected, but not a result, is my thinking. The result is the current strength of the thread, not its origin. It would be interesting to trace the joins between the world of publishing pictured very exclusively here and the broader progress of the neoliberal project, the even wider story. The word 'neoliberalization' is the only derivative which appears here, and not until page 210, so perhaps he's shying clear of political talk of that obvious kind, hoping to avoid a "leftie" tag? It's all there, but in other words. On the whole I'd say that the thesis is interesting, but not entirely convincing - bottom lines and business have always been round and about the publishing world, especially in larger houses. Perhaps a survey of publishing outside the United States would bring this into focus? But the current (last 50 years) concentration on it to the exclusion of much is definitely new, and yes, delusively seen as a democratisation. Ditto across all sorts of enterprise, cultural and otherwise. The history is fascinating, the book being worth it for that alone. 

Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles (2021)

 This is a poem, very broadly speaking. It's also, purportedly, a science-fiction novel. It's also two things in one, the original and its translation - the original being in Orcadian, the English translation, smaller, below. It's by someone who is non-binary. So it has quite a lot going on, which makes the next thing a little 'tremulous', perhaps: it won the Arthur C. Clarke award for its year. Did the judges see all the above and think a very simple "wow!" and hand it the prize? Because it is doing a lot, on the outside? For me, outsides have to match insides, which means this one really needed to be an amazing reading experience, and, of course, it wasn't. The danger would always be the oldun' of falling between stools, married with the niggle of tokenism. If this were just its Orcadian poem, it would be a slightly dull affair which comes quite a bit brighter in its last third. In the first two thirds there's a lot of musing and staring out of windows, and characters which don't deeply engage the reader, but hey, it's a poem, so the terms are different. Yes, but it's a narrative poem, so, again, we need to bring that characterisation/engagement dialectic back closer to the centre of expectation. Obviously, it's a poem by today's standards - there's no rhyme, and this is replaced by rhythm and a kind of spareness in the usual manner. I have lived in Shetland for a few years now, so my ear is becoming trained to Shaetlan and its rhythms and tonalities through daily exposure to native speakers. Orcadian is a tiny bit different, but not a lot, so reading the poem was not onerous, and I could always dip to the English below for explanation if something didn't twig. So, as a poem, middlingly OK. 'Attached' to that, the novel: by which, I think we're saying, the narrative part, which was the story of a group of characters aboard a space station, their current state of flux in terms of relationships, workish and attractional, and ambitions, realised majorly through their emotional resonances. In the last third a something occurs among the wrecks which the station houses which is associated with light, and becomes a fractal 'explosion'. In the blue light of the poem, and the musing characters, this is also two things at once - appropriate, and a bit vague. Novelistically, it would certainly be considered on the 'unresolved' side, most examples of which need to have a compensator-factor to be satisfying: magnificent writing, deep atmosphere, extraordinary rightness philosophically. I wouldn't say this achieves that. The original Orcadian, being Giles' natal language (I am assuming, anyway) has the quiet economic arrow of intention which makes it clear and resounding, the word-choice 'free'. But the English translation is another affair. There's a classic example on the first page: the Orcadian 'teddert' which would naturally translate as 'tethered' is rendered as 'ropemoormarried'. Examples then proliferate throughout the book. There could be a lot said about this - is it an attempt to make a political statement? "Orcadian's implications are so rich that we need to give all resonations"? If so, it frankly feels a bit needy. Or is it some sort of enthusiasm for the Joycean brought as a further plate to this feast? If so, the taste is "ick". Is it political in the sense of "we need to render the English such that it is a lesser experience so that the Orcadian is clear and masterful by contrast - LEARN ORCADIAN if you want to read this work well"? If so, hmmmmmm. Then why translate at all? At all events, I pity the person who feels uncomfortable with the Orcadian and is relegated to the English alone. This one, overall, is a typifying example of the danger of promising too much.

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris (2022)

 This is my first Sedaris. It's quite hard, on the whole, to be reading such a thing in the same period of time as one is working through The Letters of Katherine Mansfield! The contrast is educative, and yet expected. Sedaris' style is essentially an emanation of the "21st century" ethos in literature (though he got going a tiny bit earlier). It is chatty and genial. Lite. Like the stuff you would expect from a friend over a restaurant table, but can see wouldn't translate into print well, if by 'well' one meant impressively, and if by 'impressively' one meant not only having impact, but also being genuinely, deeply comic, which is I think the aim. He has a walloping reputation for humour, and maybe this really hits when he is seen on stage, but this book is just......fairly superficial in the main. At least that would have been my whole summary if I'd only read to page 162. But with the piece 'Fresh Caught Haddock' and a couple after there is a lean into more gravitas. I don't know whether this is a deliberate move: 'allow the reader to become used to being a little mollified and glazed, then hit them with some slightly harder stuff'? The 'slightly' is key there, too. While entering this new territory and speaking of his father's end, his sister's suicide, we are also still treated to material about his teeth and a turd on the floor in a deserted airport, which would be quietly interesting when discussed orally (haha) with a friend, but are a little thin-on in text. I guess the question which then arises is 'what is "suitable material"?' And I guess it's this, if you are thrilled and pleased by that kind of thing. I suppose I'm one of those who want more. Picking other books off the shelves at the time of reading, and feeling the wateriness here by contrast. I don't feel illuminated. I wonder if he'll become another of those humorists who have quite a big catalogue (a la Patrick Campbell, or a good number of mid-20th century magaziney Americans) who are very popular in their times, but who go completely out of print once their era is over? It's a trope which resonates.

Around the World in 80 Books by David Damrosch (2021)

 This feels very much like the literary critical equivalent of a coffee table book. Such books have interesting things in them, but the weight is with the illustrations; the text is often blandly secondary. This one has a few illustrations, yes, in quiet black and white, but it definitely is a little "lite" textually, which makes it somewhat unsatisfying. It is a 'journey' around the world, as the title suggests, looking at the literatures of various cultures exemplified in some of their major works. It is written by a professor of comparative literature who has, I presume, put on his populist hat to undertake the project. It's genial, I guess, not piercing or revelatory. Damrosch has the tendency of making personal asides about members of his family or his own personal history - meaning that we have a book which has a small element of memoir alongside its main informative strand. That frankly sits a little uncomfortably. One other thing to mention is the occasional tendency to the glib: summarising sentences for each section which are a bit pat, or referencing about significance which is anodyne and unchallenging. All of that said, it's yet another in the "OK" list, a bit uninspiring, but all right, I suppose.

Operation ARES by Gene Wolfe (1970)

 ARES is an acronym: American Reunification Enactment Society. This is the 21st century, seen from the mores of the late 1960s. America, once great, has been through a tough time. It even had a colony on Mars. Then things began to unravel, and they "let the colony go". An influential section of the US populace decided to set the constitution aside, and installed a Pro Tem government, which, instead of being a bandaid solution, remained. The Pro Temmers are ones who speak of the poor, the humble, the people, but often seem more concerned with power. This power-seeking/concern engenders rebellion, with small groups of isolated opposition surviving, tucked away or operating in secret. Our lead man, John Castle, is one of the more effective of these. He has friends and associates of a similar make and networks by which he can communicate with them. He and the woman he loves, young Anna Trees (and her neversleeper brother Japhet) are living in White City, an inland smallish hub, typical of this new America, with rundown streets, frightening nocturnal 'wild animals' that will sniff out and kill any human beings they can, and "peaceguards" (sometimes cyborgs) who are employees of the new administration in place to scent rebellion and keep the new order. The "Martians" have been trying to communicate with their old country, in order to bolster the opposition, but the Pro Tems are blocking their transmissions. They have just started to land in remote areas and begin to foment an insurrection, which John and Anna are caught up in. The scene shifts into a forced walking journey to New York, where John and his fellows, who have been captured, witness a Martian landing and a decimating battle on both sides. Finally in New York, while he overtly is cooperating with the Pro Tem, secretly he is making connections with others of a similar persuasion. All this while, ARES has been a designation which has pretty well meant instant death, and John has wondered exactly who is involved. But he does identify with the movement, as he has heard it is. He is often accused of being a member, but can honestly say he isn't. (I'm guessing Wolfe intends the "Reunification" to mean two things at least: reunifying all Americans under a restored constitution, and reunifying the Martian Americans with those who abandoned them.) Through his new New York connections, John now discovers that ARES is a shadow, more a threat by the opposition; it has no members and does not "Enact" anything, other than causing distraction and befuddling of the airspace. But his reputation for effectiveness means that he is given the chance to make this shadowthing real. Anna has come in and out of focus all this time, with occasional meetings between the two as they both become major players in the resistance. The plot culminates with matter that has been brewing all through the novel: the Pro Temmers are supported by communist Russia (prescience gone astray there) and the legitimists by communist China (unlikely also). There are more and more battles across the country in what is emerging as a war proper. There are powerplays behind the scenes as to how much support either side can rely upon from these 'benefactors'. There is the somewhat figurehead-like presence of the last "real" President, Huggins, who has been an influential point of belief in some resistance quarters. In the end both sides sue for a cessation, and John, risen to the top, and the Pro Tem president bargain out a deal for the future, which includes restoration of the constitution and other concessions on the opposition side, and, on the other, a chance for the Pro Tem president to run for real after the "reunification", which is in most essentials a restoration, happens. He will have no opposition from those who formerly opposed him under the terms of the deal. It is a slightly downbeat and even copout-ish ending. Also, there are elements in this which could have done with far greater time allotted: why are the wild animals so frightening? Japhet's never sleeping is hinted at as only one type among many dysfunctions, but what engendered them? What does Wolfe mean, near the end, when he speaks in the bargaining period, from John's point of view, of the opposition requiring an end to welfare payments because they are "bribing people not to work"? The fact that he then immediately suggests the solution to this 'problem' being the enactment of what is in effect a Universal Basic Income seems a little unhinged and illogical without some sort of guaranteed work programme. But this novel also functions as a superior thriller in many respects, with a sheen of science fiction about it, and some almost noirish elements creeping in on grim city streets left desolate, and in secret meetings. It has an underfeel of potential originality which I'm looking forward to seeing in its prime, fully-developed form in subsequent works.