The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe (1972)

 I can't remember the last time I finished a book, and then started reading it again immediately. This broke that hiatus. I enjoy being challenged intellectually, when I feel there's something to be 'found out'. When the 'challenge' is simply inexplicability, I find it not only uninteresting, but not a challenge - it feels lazy, and the excuses made for it ("a real representation of the unknowability and illogicality of life") bring on a feeling of false "depth". This is not only in the former category, but is impressively so. It is composed of three related novellas. The first, the title novella, takes place on Sainte Anne, one of twin planets, the other called Sainte Croix. The main character is a boy, who is growing up with his brother in his father's house, in a town by a river estuary near the sea called Port-Mimizon. It's a slightly down-at-heel almost pioneer place, quite warm and semi-tropical, but his father's house is much more well-heeled, and the equivalent of a brothel; the "girls" are always round about, in working times and otherwise. This is perhaps the first sign of Wolfe designing a slightly different morality for these worlds, where this aspect is not particularly remarked upon. Nor are other differences in this world that feels a lot like our own: the boys' tutor is a robotic one, but very humanoid in some of its reactions and modes, by name Mr Million. Slaves are traded at a market in the town. The matter-of-factness of the presentation of this gives an insight into the world-creation which is being essayed here. Key moments in this period of the boy's life are pictured - his discovery of his aunt in a distant room of the house, his diagnosis of some of the hitherto unexplainable aspects of Mr Million's teaching. This is also the time that his father first begins to take an interest in him and his brother; they are probably just pre-puberty. His father has more interest in him than his brother - he is singled out to undergo sessions downstairs in his father's study/laboratory. He is drugged and analysed, going through very long (all night long) occasions which almost amount to interrogations. They exhaust him, destabilise him, slabs of time become a blank, but they also bring some fresh points clear: he is not strictly his father's son. He and his brother are genetic replicants, made by his father, of himself. His father is another example of this, made by the man whose face is still represented on Mr Million's headscreen. His aunt is similar, and so on. The revelations come strongly - his father trades/traded in children, there are many clones all around the planet, and scientific experimentation has become allied to exploitation. As he gets older, he begins tentative explorations into female friendship with a local girl, met at the park, by the name of Phaedria. It is with her and his brother that a plan is hatched, on the basis of a rumoured "secret horde" that his father keeps hidden. Once they realise the extent of his father's disinterest in them personally, and he particularly is weighed down with all the drugging and harsh experimentation, he can virtually fulfil a generational repetition and kill his father, carrying on with his supposed extensive resources. At this point we are informed that the plot is being retold by the boy, now man, following a period in prison for this crime. Late in the piece, before the murder is done, the house receives a visit from an anthropologist from Earth via Sainte Croix, Dr Marsch, who has been directed to their address as an old one for a famous theorist, Dr Veil, who developed a hypothesis regarding the aboriginal people of Sainte Anne. This was that they were not wiped out, as previously thought, by the first wave of French colonisation, but instead had such shape-shifting, merging capacities that they replaced the invaders with themselves in the colonialists' skins. First not knowing what the visitor is on about, it is quickly revealed that Dr Veil is in fact the boy's aunt, when Marsch is led to her to ask if she can shed any light. The novella ends with the "boy" now in charge of the denuded, peeling, tired house and wondering if he can continue it in some way. The second novella is called 'A Story' by John V. Marsch, and purports to be a representation of what the anthropologist from the first novella at some unknown point wrote when his imagination was fired from all he discovered about the aboriginal inhabitants of Sainte Anne, known in his anthro-speak as the Annese. It concerns tribal people conducting their lives in the wilds of the planet before colonisation. The light of this world is not sunlight, everything takes place under a different register, a much deeper, bluer one. There is a story of twin brothers, born out in the landscape (there are no houses, just temporary camps), one of whom stays with his mother, the other is drowned when being washed in a nearby river by his grandmother. As a point of crux, it is revealed much later that this brother was not drowned, and was saved from the river, but the two have grown up completely apart and come to very different allegiances in life through the environments in which they were succoured. The landscape is variable, a mereish waterworld low down, a very green midbelt, and stony mountainous areas. A river is dominant through all, and the sea is there, but distant. The animals of the landscape are not dissimilar to those of Earth, but with key differences, with some being good eating, others wildly dangerous. There are also a variety of more sentient beings - at least in the minds of the characters, where not only are there peoples from different sectors, but also beings which only appear at certain times, or beings which take on different looks depending on how they're being seen. Trees are sentient, and are deeply valued and respected, as key presences to be pleased and understood. The sky is full of meaningful constellations with 'native' names, who have influence upon events. The whole atmosphere is felt through a spiritual lens, and significances play out in those terms, both harsh and sweet. The other important element, which is related, is that of the psychic and dreaming: many decisions are made because of dreams or visions, dreams are recounted as reasoning, beings are seen differently and tellingly in dreams, merging of reality happens between visions and dreams. The culmination of the piece is in the meeting between the two brothers, the capture of the "surviving" one and his fellow travellers (a crew of humanesque aboriginals and "Shadow Children", wispy-visaged and -bodied, now here, now gone, sometimes harsh fighters, sometimes incomparably weak) by the "rescued" one in a pit near the sea and the river's mouth. Right at the end, after one brother has vanquished the other with the help of a Shadow Child, a strange streak shoots through the sky and something splashes down in the sea near the rivermouth. Beings are standing on the beach speaking an unheard-of language. Going to investigate, the Annese are nonplussed; we recognise the portentous arrival of the first visitors from Earth. The last novella is called V. R. T., and takes place in the main on the sister planet Sainte Croix. It involves a skeleton structure of an officer going through some muddled files in a dispatch box regarding a prisoner. There are various notebooks and journals, as well as loose pages, and a good number of tapes of free conversations and arrest interrogations. These elements are presented as the officer wanders through them, very broadly in some sort of chronological order, but swapping between different parts as his mood takes him. It quickly becomes clear from some of the tapes that Marsch has been detained when he arrived back on Sainte Croix after his time on Sainte Anne, and is suspected of something, possibly anti-government activity. But he is unsure what they are after, and why they don't believe him. His papers are about what happened once he left the house of the boy and his family in the first novella. He recounts being directed to a beggar and his son who claim to be Annese: Marsch is still at this point trying to work out his own theory about possible aboriginal survival. Trenchard and Victor, his son, design a boat journey in the nearby area to convince Marsch that they know what they're talking about, taking him to sacred sites and points of significance. He is convinced enough to set out upon a much longer journey into the interior with Victor (Trenchard is too decrepit to go to those lengths) in the hope of finding a cave in the riverbank in the mountains which may have survivors living in it, as well as possible relics of the 'lost civilisation'. The two of them encounter some of the animals mentioned in the second novella, and a couple of gruesome others, have all sorts of difficulties which are toughly overcome, often by Victor in terms of local understanding, and Marsch in terms of heft. As these documents proceed almost sequentially, there is the feeling of a loss of fulcrum, a gradual change coming over the mind of Marsch. And then a point is reached when he discloses that Victor got too near the edge of a precipice alongside the now deep-valleyed river, and fell to his death. Other documents relate the experiences of Marsch as a prisoner, in very deprived circumstances, and further utterly inhumane ones, attempting to communicate with other prisoners via tapping on pipes, trying to work out where he is, being taken for interrogations, and so on. There is a salutary eventuality about two thirds of the way through these papers, where the voice of the narrator, formerly Marsch, slips over into being that of Victor, and back and forth. A clear reference to Veil's Hypothesis in the sense that it's unclear how much of the prisoner is Marsch original, or, alternately, Victor-overtake. And who knows what the circumstances were. Based on prior evidence, there's no reason to believe that anything untoward occurred - Marsch's stories have not been deceptive. Presumably Victor's shape-shifting spirit had begun to meld itself with Marsch's either before his death (evidenced by the slight shift in angle in Marsch's account) or after it - this exactitude is left uninvestigated. As of course is so much in this piece - one of its major praises is the completeness of the worlds and their norms created, where what's left out is what might easily have been lost information, information never written down, things not considered important in those immediate circumstances. Add this phenomenal attention to detail to extraordinary complexity of vision and concepts, and one can begin to recognise the level of the achievement here. A swim in delicate, dislocating waters.

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (2021)

 What a mixture this novel is. And mainly a mixture of the strongly successful and mystifying failure. It's the story of Hans, an ageing East German writer and broadcaster, and Katharina, a young East German embarking on a career in set design. Their meeting and relationship occurs in the late 80s, so we also have a portrait of the end of the East German state. The story is ostensibly recounted via Katharina looking through boxes of old documents from the time, and has each document and what it brings up as a kind of starting point for a rumination. This structure is quite tenuous, where there's nothing obvious or specific about each piece she's examining, there are only the thoughts she has, which together add up to the story. One could be forgiven for forgetting that the boxes are being opened, or things looked at. What's great about the first part of the book is the limpid picture of that political climate seen through the lens of these two; nothing particularly didactic or overweighted, just a mood emerging through the exigencies of their lives. Despite their age difference, there's excitement in getting together. And probably some thrill in the subterfuge necessary, because Hans is married with a son a little younger than Katharina. I know very little about the author, but it has a feel of being autobiographic, or at least I wouldn't be surprised to find that she had many of these experiences in one way or another. So far so good. Then Katharina goes to Frankfurt-an-der-Oder to start a job in a theatre, and ends up having a night with one of the young men also working there. Hans finds this out, and it triggers all his insecurities. Even though they've been pretty relaxed in how they've related to each other up to this point, he goes full controlling-crazy, berating Katharina for her wickedness and betrayal, and harping on the lapse constantly. This is understandable in its initial explosion. But as time goes by, nothing ameliorates or develops. He just goes on saying the same things, punishing Katharina petulantly, neither of them engaging in order to get a discussion happening which gets them to a split or a reunion. This is what I would identify as the major failure of this book. The characters as set up initially don't fulfil their arc. Hans glooms into repetition, Katharina never gets angry, never reacts with any spike of resolving intention. And given that I'm surmising that Erpenbeck "is" Katharina, what does that say about her understanding of herself, depiction of herself? For the rest of the book, Katharina emerges as a blank jelly, "receiving" the impressions of Hans and others, and not doing anything decisive. She is harped at, and cries. She feels low. She brightens again when Hans seems a little less accusing. But the feelings engendered don't lead anywhere at all really, she's just waiting passively to see what happens to her next. Hans is sending cassette tapes of grievances (!), expecting her to reply with her justifications, and she does so willingly, always going with the systems he sets up, becoming tearful about it, and then going with it again next time. Presumably in coming to these justifications she must have felt something in terms of his criticisms being unfair, some element will have been wrongly put or place emphasis where it shouldn't have been, but if these thoughts have come up she hasn't followed them, just remained a repetitive "receiver". Something in this reminded me a little of The Portrait of a Lady, and its picture of lockedness. Somehow, though, James managed to flesh out the bitter, low-lit fight between Isabel and Gilbert. Here there is just abjectness and almost no dynamic. All this time, thankfully, the cool and pointed depiction of East Germany going through its death-throes continues, which is a saving effort. There are a couple of points in the second half where there is a dip into almost-experimentalism which is a bit odd, but not too troubling. I wonder if the autobiographic part of this which I am positing created its own block in Erpenbeck. Hans comes across as a whole character, and is ridiculously childish and crazingly melancholic alongside his cleverness, whereas Katharina is not ultimately believable. 

Cairn by Kathleen Jamie (2024)

 Yet another aspect of the current appetite for fragmentary memoir brought into focus. This one is a series of short glimpses which occurred surrounding the author's 60th birthday, looking back to prior life as well as forward to how the world might survive given current pressures, particularly those of a natural and climatic kind. Some are quietly touching, some a bit watery and thin. I haven't read Jamie before, so don't know how this compares to her other work. But what it says to me is that the feelings which occasioned these pieces were probably strong, and that were the reader with her, or able to inhabit her mind at the time, the impact would also be. Instead, the reader is reading this book, and attempting to inhabit her mind through its resources, and coming up with something that I would attest is probably lesser. It does resound, but very mildly on the whole. And it's very interesting that the longer the piece, the greater the impact - she's seemingly a writer who benefits from accumulation. Of course, one must come to the possibility of the conclusion that the written equivalent of an experience will always be lesser than the moment itself. So then it becomes a matter of what means are used to develop the written version towards impact, so as to represent something of its 'hit'. There are moments in the prose here which push that envelope, but a fair amount which don't. I'd be tempted to call this something of a missed opportunity - but it has mild charms.

The Bookseller's Tale by Martin Latham (2020)

 A bit of info: the author and I are roughly contemporaneous. He's a few years older than me, started working in a bookshop the year before me, and we've spent a good amount of our lives bookselling; he's made a career out of it, though he's not keen on that description, whereas I've strayed into repping and publishing. We've seen approximately the same things from not dissimilar vantage points. So, of course it's interesting to see any contrasts between us. This book is filled with interest, in the compendious sense. It's a wide-ranging look, ranged around where human beings encounter books - so, bookshops, libraries, of course, but also the streets. And how we relate to them once we've grabbed them and taken them home to be with us, or consult them in a library chair. And also some shots of history to tell us how they began and what other forms our more familiar modern examples grew out of, and the key industries and cultural leanings which gave them form. He has a fun way of drawing out psychological points concisely, figuring the book "thing" as a relationship. I'm guessing from some of his angles that he's thinking broadly in psychogeographic terms. My instinct here is to draw back and see what this achieves in this case. For me, it introduces on the one hand a pleasing warmth, a sense of exploring connections, on the other a kind of forced quality, where tropes are identified in a search for defining illustration which don't bear out in the cool quiet of ordinary observation. We have blanket statements about (I'm paraphrasing) "staircases inhabiting our dreams" when discussing interior architecture, or talk of customers stopping short on entering his bookshop, eulogising the atmosphere. Also quite a few examples of dreams he's had exactly echoing a point he's making! And his preoccupation with women kissing books is a worry. There's a definite romanticising going on here, but perhaps that's what partakers of psychogeography want? If they do, more power to their elbow, as long as it's identified as such. At the cooler end, this tendency is enriching and efflorescent, at the warmer it's approaching the selling of snake oil. I'd want more of a documented sense of his warping intention here, rather than a presentation of this information as cold hard fact. There are some fascinating excursions, though: apparently there are recent developments in the study of street literature, tiny ephemeral pamphlets sold by pedlars, which are uncovering the genre's true extent, believed to be game-changingly significant; there are similar developments in studying the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts, which I'm less convinced by, but open to. The form of this book is governed by it being a compendium, literally a magazine, in the military sense. And his very fluid style helps to cover over the "and then......and then......and then...."-ness of this. It flows between tendencies to the academic and Sunday Magazine-writing pretty successfully, though is best read in smaller chunks. As might be expected, I was very focused when it came to the last chapter on his own life as a bookseller, and throughout the book on his attitude toward the workings and significance of bookshops now. The aforementioned romanticising inspired concern; also I think I've worked out what's missing from my point of view, which is related. Reading this book as a book trade layperson, so to speak, one would get a pretty rosy image of a palace of dreams, chock full of delightful eccentricities of stock and staff, and a huge upthrust of inspiring waft to fertilise us. I can only consult my own feelings: I get a lovely sense of anticipation when entering even the most modest bookspace - there's a charity bookcase on the way out of my local supermarket at one end of the spectrum, there's Shetland's only "proper" secondhand bookshop in a glacial valley, opposite an old mill, where a noisy burn powers toward the voe below right by the windows, on the other. But that feeling is not overwhelming and crazily significant, it's the simple delight of the lucky dip. It's modestly enriching and then life goes on, other things are attended to, and I'm not theatrically concerned with any peculiarity of stock or staff. I do though have secondhand bookshop dreams, where I'm finding unparalleled rarities tucked away. And I do have new bookshop dreams still, despite having been away from the trade for 18 years, but they are blocked things, where I can't work a till, or keep going round and round trying to fix a problem in the typical circular way of dreams of that nature, so it's interesting to have it confirmed that I'm not the only one with these elements embedded! I worked at Waterstone's (as the author still does as manager of the Canterbury shop) for five or six years from the mid-nineties to just after the millennium. Now, perhaps Canterbury is an extraordinary branch, I've never been there, but certainly the two branches I worked in, and all the ones I visited as a rep, are incredibly neutral places, very much fulfilling the chain-shop mantra of samey dependability. Some of them are/were in lovely buildings, which lent some charm, but the corporatism certainly dulled that down. And certainly, to also give away the game from an insider perspective, the corporate "mind" dominated proceedings in a highly unromantic way behind the scenes. Perhaps we need to wait for his update-book on his experiences, after retiring from the work? I'm guessing he's had to edit himself for the purposes of continuing employment. Part Two could be intriguing.....  This is what I think is missing - this rosiness doesn't speak of some of the really bad stuff that goes on. I remember a "notable" manager of the Bath shop in my time had a truly woeful attitude to reps, and had infected all his staff with the same, though he and they weren't the only ones by a long chalk. I heard he went on to work at the head office - goodness knows what damage he did. And the snottiness which comes from being a major player and therefore abusing your "power" out into the trade, laying down the law to get what you want, despite the fact that it really negatively influences, for example, small publishers. And mismanagement and pettiness on other counts arising from chainism - whole "programmes" on removing posters from the wall of your goods-in and staffroom back area, presumably in answer to some sort of inane "tidy walls mean tidy mind" anal screwup. The absence of really any politics and the resultant imbalance of the portrait here is telling. There is a sanitised complacence in the trade still: it exists as a dominant bookseller and a few huge multinationals, with an "allowed" scattering of independents. It will be good to see that hegemony break up if the very current period of political veil-lifting is successful. I also hear that Waterstone's is now largely centrally-bought, with centrally-approved "OK" titles (largely multinational) only, with only tiny budgets for local purchases. I hope the booksellers are making the most of the few things they can still do these days in order to enjoy the work. The customers will hopefully provide a good amount of that. 

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett (2015)

 This one has crystallised something for me. On the one hand, it's quite an interesting attempt to get to the psychological nitty-gritty of a mind working across its life - the task of getting all that into words. On the other, there are lapses in that scheme. On the back cover, a quote (not the blurb) claims that this book is fiction. It certainly doesn't feel like it. It reads like deep-in psychological memoir. Maybe a few odd things have been fictionalised? If so, the main felt thrust is still definitely autobiographical. Bennett is clearly after a picture of the workings of her mind, in waves alternating between the heavily serious and the humorously light. In the serious parts she approaches profundity by expert digging into the spaces between thoughts and the quotidian increments by which they develop, and also reflect of course, the colours of moods. In the lighter parts she seems to have taken on some of the nuances of her Irish home, despite being a Wiltshirewoman. I kept being reminded of the voice of Aisling Bea in these sections, for some reason. They're quite dry, and not at all ostentatious. All of that effort is quietly rewarding, though it rarely reaches the level of poetry. There's a matter-of-fact tendency about it, which lends it the quality of a stare in the face from someone who's quirky. All of which is fine - you feel the seep of the personal surrounding you. But then there are the lapses. Given that everything is so based in psychology, I'm given to trying to find psychological explanations for these. So, why would someone writing like this for the majority of the time find themselves swinging into a dense little pocket of academese: "...the consolidated outcome which is typically produced when a protracted and half-hearted analytical process aggravates the superior auspices of an exasperated subconscious"? Is it an attempt to say "this thought is too difficult to face head-on, I have to hide"? I hope it's not "I'm a deep thinker you know". There are skitterings of this all through the book, and of course they irritate. Perhaps she simply wants us to know that she's sometimes irritating? A "true picture"? If that's the case, there are some other lapses which magnify that impression. These are the swings into freebasing modernism: "When passed betwixt and entered fully, pails were swung and notches considered [......] oh, all things considered and not one mentioned, since all names had turned in and handed back". Just words, and only words, really. They need to better affect each other. Which brings me on to the crystallisation mentioned at the start. We are in the midst at present of a welter of this kind of thing. The best way for me to describe it is to talk about it as a personal experience I think. Since everyone's a writer these days, that has imprimatur. It comes from that feeling you get when you have a friend who's a writer (heavy emphasis). They talk about their writing (ditto). That's not at all completely off-putting, sometimes quite interesting, and some of their insights are valuable. Going to visit them isn't awful to anticipate. You sit down with your cup of tea, near the fire, and get into it. Revelations are exchanged, streams of ideas are followed. But at some point the atmosphere starts to feel a bit leaden. The air is full of condensation. The aforementioned seep of the personal predominates. At the end of the session, they see you out, and you're exposed to the wuthering elements as you set out for home. You realise you've been ensouped in what I call Wet Air. The Wet Air impression is made of two things: the intensely personal project ("my writing") and of course the contrast with Dry Air. Here in the early 21st century we seem to have a deep predilection for staying in Wet Air, effectively our mania for memoir, and consistent hunger for trying to dig further into personal revelation in writing. It's the great project of the times. Whereas, for example, a piece from 1934, or 1888, is pretty well pure Dry Air. One doesn't feel mired in the reading. We seem to have made a temple of the self in writing nowadays. Writing is therapy, and about the writer. It's only incidentally for the reader. Perhaps it's a stage we have to go through. The advent of psychology culturally working its way - now, which is it? - into or out of our systems? It seems to have been going on since the first mutterings of modernism in the late 19th century; I'm wondering if this period is its last gasp, or, conversely, its final overcoming/domination of "the narrative", for the moment at least. But there's no denying that Wet Air, once you name it, becomes hugely recognisable. It's an interesting place to visit, always an experiment with some payoffs, but the lasting impression is of wondering how much further it can go, and when the mode will change up. And a complementary impression of what has been lost in all that Dry Air of former times. 

Notes from an Island by Tove Jansson (1996)

 This book comes readymade with good wishes for me, being a reader of some of the Moomins series when young. This is my first exposure to the author as the writer of anything more. The straightforward relation one can make is with regard to "magic" I guess. There's a kind of connectedness to the rawness of child emotions, or folk emotions, in those childhood books which gives them their own colour, an unusual and delicate one. And this is somewhat the same, but muted. The question I would ask is whether the muting is from me, or from Jansson's intentions. Is she writing differently because this is the story of her real life? Finding a tiny rocky island with her partner, going through a wildly uplifting period with the help of bluff and eccentric locals to build a cabin on it, experiencing the sea and the wind across their blissful summer quietness and the storminess nearer to winter, finding near the end that they have to leave as they begin to find the physicality needed to cope a stretch. Or am I less susceptible? I know some little elements of these feelings as the resident of an archipelago, and having spent a good amount of downtime in wildish places, and having a love of islands which keeps their terms in my imagination. So I do get to some extent the groundfeel which is immanent in how she scribes it. It's probably both: this delicate but frank colouring is another tangent of the part of her which brought forth the Moomins. But also I am registering that there is a difference - her imagination is engaged in a very different way. It has the taste and colour of an unknown fruit from a place far away from your usual territory - not mouth-twisting and sour, or unbearably sweet, or blastingly weird, but instead a savour you haven't quite ever tasted before. Mild, strange, unpinpointable as yet, but you could get used to it.

Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti (1991)

 Well, I'm a convert. This was published five years after his first collection. He seems to have settled into a more uniform mode in this one. The tone is one of American small and middle-sized towns, and of night. Some are lonelier and darker, some marked with the colours of downtown and carnival. The Lovecraftian part of him records a lot of this like an anthropologist of the less often touched parts of the secret soul. It also has the weightiness of that kind of prose, a formality. Then his Poe side takes up the heavy skein and thwacks it alive with something like poetry. It's a very involving mixture, though, like Lovecraft and Poe, it definitely survives better in small amounts. The image-making is shot through with shadows, and a weird kind of "bright murk". This is I'm guessing influenced by the artworks of horror during the period in which he grew up, or the design ethos of movies of that period - scarecrows under moonlight and so on. But his originality comes in, it seems to me, in a willingness to take that trope and extend it intellectually - we are led into refinements of mood and psychology which plumb a further sea little sailed upon. And it's this effort which marks him out for me - there are very few writers I've read from recent times who have the chutzpah to do this, to even want to do this. It's redolent of the intellectual appetite of writers of longer ago, who are my main fare - a crazily comforting thing to find that someone still "respects" that space - has the wish to go there. One other thing: I wonder if David Lynch was a fan. There's something about the "burnt people" in the last (2017) series of Twin Peaks, existing as blackened shadows buzzed alive with sporadic blasts of electricity in what appears an abandoned 50s small-town service station, emanating evil, which is very Ligotti, somehow.