The Terror by Dan Simmons

In 1865, Sir John Franklin led two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, on a doomed expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage through the frozen seas North of Canada. While traces of the expedition have been found, none of the 100+ members of the crews apparently survived.

Apart from the foolishness of such an enterprise, the British Navy were (of course) ill-equipped for the frozen North, and the sophisticated white men were in the habit of sneering at the Inuit peoples who knew how to live on the ice. The ships were frozen in and never emerged from the ice. Although the ships’ stores supposedly consisted of rations for three years, the tinned food is thought to have been badly preserved, and the hopelessly impractical clothing would have been constantly cold and wet.

All of this is amplified in Simmons’ long novel, a fictional account of what happened to the ships out there on the ice.

While not well received in all quarters, I found this 900+ page paperback to be gripping and visceral, and though the outcome seemed a foregone conclusion there is a certain poetry to the ending which seems fitting and satisfying.

Simmons chooses several points of view to tell the story, jumping from ship’s captain to doctor, to junior officers, and back again. In some ways, the story is like a scaled-up version of “Ten Little Indians”: we know people are going to die, but we read on to learn just how it happened. The twist in Simmons’ tale is the monster on the ice, an enormous beast with preternatural powers and an uncanny ability to rise up out of the ice to dispatch people in bloody ways.

But the real horror – or terror – here is to do with the poorly equipped, incompetent, doomed sailors on their fruitless and pointless mission. The very idea that people habitually set out to sea with little understanding of proper nutrition or food preservation, of science and nature, in order to find a sea route which would – at best – be passable for a month or two each year is truly astonishing. Simmons is great at bringing home the horror:

The Holland tents were soaked and never dried. The sleeping bags they cracked open in the late evening and crawled into as darkness fell were soaked and frozen inside and out and never dried. When the mean awoke in the morning after a few stolen moments of fitful sleep … the inside of the inside of the circular and pyramid tents were lined with thirty pounds of hoarfrost that fell and dripped on the men’s heads…

Highly recommended.

Born Yesterday: the news as a novel by Gordon Burn

We’ve previously featured a review by contributor rashbre of Burn’s novel Alma Cogan. Burn ploughs a similar furrow with this one, a mixture of fact and factoid, fictional narrative techniques applied to the news of the day. Normal Mailer, in connection with his book on Marilyn Monroe called it faction.

I heard Burn discussing his book on the Simon Mayo programme on 5Live, though Mayo wasn’t present. It sounded interesting. The big news events of the past year, all woven together and narrated as one, as if the news was a novel. What’s not to like? This also reminds me of classic Don DeLillo, and books like Mao II and Libra: the narration of events, the eventhood of events, the nature of events, of news, the effect of narrative on events. This is right up my street: I wrote a PhD on just this topic.

Born Yesterday is brilliant: an astonishingly up-to-the-minute tour of our current obsessions, including the Madeleine McCann story, the attempted car-bombings in London last summer, the departure of Blair, the arrival of Brown. Even the Credit Crunch and Northern Rock get a mention. It’s all fresh in the mind, which is the point.

The novel begins with the puzzling and dislocating experience of seeing someone who was once so extraordinarily famous she was in/on the news almost every day for over a decade: Mrs Thatcher. I remember reading years ago about the poignant sight of Harold Wilson, reduced, shambling down the street in his Gannex coat with his pipe, tiny and anonymous, shrunken by the fact of his circumstances: gone, and actually forgotten. Will this happen to Blair? Politicians often try to feather their nests, provide a soft landing. The lecture tours, the books, the millions. Tony Blair took a job as a peace envoy instead. There’s a funny passage in Born Yesterday about Blair’s protection team, thinking they were in for a cushy retirement, guarding Blair on his rambles round the park; suddenly discovering they were going to have to brave car bombs and assassins in fucking Tel Aviv.

Mrs Thatcher, on the other hand, does have a habit of wandering round a park, pointing at things, petting dogs, the Harold Wilson of our times. What is it like, to see someone so famous without the media to mediate?

Everything is connected, nothing is connected. What are we supposed to think? Who tells us? Juxtaposition sometimes makes the news of the day seem portentous. Everything is connected, by the media: threads of electricity, lines of type, broadcast signals and static. Michel Serres pointed out that le parasite, the French word, had three meanings: noise on a signal, an organism, and a social pariah.

Newspapers mix news, commentary, speculation, feature stories, gossip, and criticism. Opinion disguised as fact, facts in short supply. Kate McCann, separated at birth from Heather Mills? Kate McCann: ice-maiden, doctor, milf, working class girl made good, media manipulator, photo opportunity, suspect. It all gets mixed together in your head and keeping it all separate is like trying to sort grains of sand.

Though short, at just over 200 pages, this book is dense, and full of long sentences which ramble and divert and leave you as confused as you’re supposed to be. How did we get here from there, by which route? The sentences begin in one place and leaves you in another. The paragraph starts with Blair and ends with the McCanns, or the terrorists, or the summer floods.

Excellent, highly recommended, but read it quick, while it’s all still fresh.

A Hidden Place by Robert Charles Wilson

This reprint of Wilson’s 1985 novel A Hidden Place is a nice edition with a cover that gives very little clue as to its contents. Having just complained about the skimpiness of Michael Connelly’s The Overlook (see previous review), I have to admit that this, at 224 pages, is even skimpier. If not exactly a novella, it’s not much longer.

That said, though, this is far less formulaic than The Overlook, and wears its genre clothes awkwardly. It’s a depression-era mix: Of Mice and Men meets The X Files.

Wilson’s prose is superb, and this strange little tale of small town America unfolds gently, so that you do in fact feel inclined to take your time not to rush through the 224 pages and instead savour every word.

Travis is taken in by his Aunt and Uncle in Haute Montagne (terrible name) after his mother dies. He’s not a happy kid, and his Aunt’s house is not a happy home. They already have a lodger: an astonishingly beautiful woman who definitely does not belong in this place. Travis takes up with a local waitress, a slow scandal unfolds, and the brutality of the Depression is never far away.

Meanwhile, a confused and apparently simple-minded hobo, Bone, rides the rails around America with two other displaced persons, who take advantage of his memorable looks and size), as well as his apparent ability to take punishment that would kill anyone else. Bone is definitely out of the same literary tradition as Steinbeck’s Lennie, and of course we wait to find out what Bone’s connection with the mysterious scandal of Haute Montagne is all about.

One of the few books I’ve enjoyed this summer: and I’ve yet to read a bad Robert Charles Wilson novel, so: recommended.

The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers

Another Powers entry in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series, The Drawing of the Dark takes us back to the Siege of Vienna in 1529, during which Suleiman the Magnificent’s over-extended forces were (just) defeated by an admixture of poorly supported conscripts and mercenaries.

This is another of Powers’ secret histories, one which seeks to explain just why Suleiman chose to attack Vienna so late in the season (October), and all the ill-fortune that beset the Ottoman army on their way to Vienna.

Brian Duffy, an Irish swordsman and mercenary, is recruited by the mysterious Aurelianus to act as bouncer in the ancient Herzwesten brewery and inn (former monastery) in Vienna. The beer at this brewery is renowned, but Duffy is still bewildered to find himself beset by obstacles, attempts on his life, and the kind of supernatural incidents that have dogged his life on his journey from Venice to Vienna to take up his post.

Inevitably, he finds himself embroiled in events beyond his ken, and in spite of his resistance, realises that he can be instrumental in preserving the West against the Ottoman onslaught. The message here is not that the East is necessarily evil and the West good, but that a certain balance exists in the universe, which is in danger of being overturned.

I love the idea that western civilisation is built upon the brewing of beer, and even that the true key to human progress is not the gift of fire but the gift of beer. This is the first Powers novel to really play into the Fisher King monomyth, the beginning of a long line of books in which he has explored elements of the myth from different angles (up to and including his recent novel Three Days to Never).

You could call this novel fantasy (does indeed feature swords and sorcery), or magic realism, or steampunk, or even counterfactual history: whatever it is, it’s a superb exploration of the nature of heroism and a superb sideways look at a slice of history.

The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers

Now available as part of the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series, Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates was originally published in 1983, Powers’ fourth novel, or (put another way) the second novel of the second phase of his career (Powers published two early books in 1976 and then came back with a completely different approach with The Drawing of the Dark in 1979 – see separate review to follow).

What The Anubis Gates and The Drawing of the Dark have in common with those earlier books is the hero, the sometimes hapless individual who finds himself caught up in extraordinary events and gets pretty much beaten up and torn to shreds before putting himself back together again. This same hero turns up in almost every Powers novel under various names, and Powers sets out to take him to pieces and inflict pain and humiliation such as will make you wince as you read. Smashed hands are not uncommon, as are blows to the head and mortal wounds.

The Anubis Gates is a time travel novel, in which the hero (a somewhat down-at-heel academic who is attempting to write a biography of an obscure 19th Century poet, William Ashbless) joins a group on a trip back in time to witness a Coleridge lecture. As you’d expect with Powers, this time travel has less to do with science than with a kind of internally logical magic, involving gypsies, beggars, ancient magicians, homunculi, and attempts to free Egyptian gods fom the underworld.

[Ashbless is a conceit cooked up by Powers and his friend James Blaylock: a convincingly real obscure poet, contemporary of Coleridge and Byron, who leaves few clues behind as to the details of his life.]

Finding himself trapped in 1810, Powers’ hero Brendan Doyle adopts various personae in his attempts to survive, and (always lagging behind in his comprehension of events) even finds himself in a completely different body, thanks to the doings of a Ripper-like serial killer/werewolf called Dog Face Joe.

This is one of the early examples of the genre Powers termed Steampunk, and it carries his trademark: the retelling of actual events (such as the inexplicable appearance of someone claiming to be Byron in London at a time when Byron was known to be in Turkey) as a secret history, with the hidden details of magic and supernatural included.

Superb.

Three Days To Never – Tim Powers (Review Part 2)

There has to be a part 2 to this review, if only to allow my initial excitement about a new Tim Powers novel settle down. Part 1 is here. When you think about it, it’s a bit depressing: you wait five years, and then you read it in three days. And then what? The question is, can you re-read this book as many times, with as much satisfaction, as other works by Powers?

The great pleasure of his previous novel Declare, I’ve found, is that picking it up for the second time was just as rewarding. Because of its mix of actual historical figures and fiction, of recent history with fantasy, Declare gave you much to chew on. In fact, I found that further reading was required. I became so fascinated with the Cambridge spy ring that I went off on an espionage jag. I read a biography of Anthony Blunt; a fictionalised account of his life; several John Le Carrés; and many others. None of it, though, gets you even close to the brilliant weirdness of Powers.

Three Days to Never, whilst fascinating, is in many ways a little bit (whisper) formulaic. For example, one of the main protagonists is a kid on the cusp of puberty who is in considerable peril (a theme familiar from Expiration Date). Another is an ordinary man whose life is disrupted when he is caught up in extraordinary events (a classic narrative device that is present in almost every Powers novel). Then you have your opposing teams who are pursuing power (or “The Grail”) by supernatural means: your expert, government-sanctioned professionals, and your amateur disreputable Secret Society types. There’s even a familiar character in the slightly dishevelled, alcoholic, wounded older man. This wounded figure, of course, is straight out of Powers’ favourite trope: the Fisher King myth, which crops up again and again in his fiction. This is from The Wikipedia article on The Fisher King:

“Confusingly, many works have two wounded Grail Kings who live in the same castle, a father (or grandfather) and son. The more seriously wounded father stays in the castle, sustained by the Grail alone, while the more active son can meet with guests and go fishing.”

It’s worth bearing that little snippet in mind when reading this novel. Powers isn’t as explicit with his myths in this episode, but it’s fair to say that some familiarity with the Fisher King myth – with its holy grails, open wounds that never heal, spears of destiny, and severed heads that keep talking – will enhance your enjoyment of many of Powers’ novels, including this one. The joy of Powers is that he puts all this kind of stuff into recognisable historical and geographical settings. Three Days to Never is set in the Los Angeles of 1987, for example.

All these figures are familiar from other Powers works, then, and yet… there’s something else going on here, which is a bit of button-pushing and gentle ribbing aimed at some other, shall we say, more successful (in monetary terms) works of fiction. Because Powers does secret societies which are pursuing some grail-like object through history, he just throws in the odd reference to Carcassone and Mediaeval Pontiffs, the Grail itself, and alternate histories – because he can. Just a little dig at the Dan Brown crowd. But if you want precedent, Powers’ interest in the Grail and Fisher King myths go right back to one of his earliest novels, The Drawing of the Dark, and continues in more recent works like Last Call.

Then there’s the current celeb fashion for the Kabbalah: hence the presence in Three Days to Never of the Mossad, who are seeking a “little machine” discovered by Einstein and who carry amulets inscribed with hebrew characters.

All the stuff of fantasy fiction, or at least Powers’ take on fantasy, but the other thing about Three Days to Never is that you could make an argument for it being a Science Fiction book, just because of its interest in Einstein and his Special Theory. The central premise here is that Einstein discovered something (along with Relativity) that he found so frightening that he chose to cover it up. Since his death in 1955, various groups have been trying to piece together the fragments of his work to discover what it was. The “fantasy” conceit here is that Einstein’s work served to confirm some apparently bizarre statements in ancient Kabbalist texts.

The simple fact is, once you get really deeply into the post-Newtonian physical universe, and let your imagination run wild, what emerges could be science, or it could be fantasy.

It’s a toss up, then, whether this is SF proper, or “merely” fantasy. Like most Powers novels, it does send you scurrying to look up facts. For example, I’d forgotten that Charlie Chaplin’s body was stolen after his death. But Powers hadn’t, and it’s one of the many passing strange events that he uses to weave his fiction around. And then, if you think about it, the fact that Einstein turned up at the premiere of Chaplin’s City Lights could be seen as kinda weird.

The deeper you go, the stranger it gets.

As a narrative, Three Days to Never doesn’t work as well for me as Declare simply because of the old saw about showing and not telling. In Declare events take place over many years, and our protagonist finds himself caught up in them over and over again. Three Days to Never takes place over three days and the historical information (about Chaplin, Einstein, the Six Day War etc.) is narrated in the past tense. This has the effect of making the past events seem distant and less immediate than they are in Declare.

Which is not to say that Three Days to Never isn’t worth reading. It absolutely is. But if you were to read just one Tim Powers novel, it wouldn’t be this one. Still, start with one, and you’ll most likely be hooked into reading the rest.

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Note:

Some of the Powers novels kind of work in sequence, so (for example), Last Call, Expiration Date, and Earthquake Weather should be read in that order. And you should probably read The Drawing of the Dark before any of them.

Tutor to the Dragon Emperor by Raymond Lamont-Brown

Review by Simon Holy Hose

Spontaneity is a serious thing, and not without its guilty pleasures. It being the school holidays we took our kids to the local library so they might furnish themselves with reading material in order to avoid boredom. While there I spotted this book and couldn’t resist.

I first got interested in China and its later history after seeing Bernardo Bertolluci’s film The Last Emperor back in the late 80s. Since then I’ve read a number of related books. Tutor to the dragon emperor: The Life of Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston at the Court of the Last Emperor by Raymond Lamont-Brown caught my eye therefore so I borrowed it.

As you may or may not know, Reginald Johnston ended up via a series of extraordinary circumstances teaching the last emperor of China in the early part of the 20th century. Very shortly after Johnson’s appointment the emperor essentially became a prisoner in his own palace with no real power as various political factions struggled for control. Johnston went on to be a much trusted friend of the emperor and was therefore in a unique place to witness the court in its final moments.

The story of Pu Yi, the last emperor, is indeed rather poignant and is covered in several other books. None-the-less it forms a substantial part of the narrative of this book. I suppose that this is unavoidable really even though the book is a biography of Johnston.

It’s a short book. It took me two days to read it. And if you bear in mind that most of the book recounts what Pu Yi was doing, as well as a potted history of Great Britain’s interactions with China, it really does underline how little we actually know about Johnston.

I found this disappointing really, but maybe the lack of facts says a lot about Johnston. Like many people he went a long way to creating a myth about himself, and I suppose that would necessitate covering his own tracks to some extent.

So what do we know?

He came from a prospective middle-class Edinburgh family. He went to Oxford before entering the diplomatic service’s far east division to undertake what promised to be an inauspicious career.

After his father’s death, his mother came to be without income. Johnston was unsympathetic, claiming that she’d spent the money on drink.

While he was in China the struggling empire’s big cheeses decided that the emperor needed to understand Western ways and began to scout for a suitable tutor. Through diplomacy and Johnston’s great ability to learn oriental languages it came to pass that he got the gig.

He had about three serious relationships with women in his life, none of which materialised in marriage, although they all seem to have come close.

He seems to have been very close to the emperor, although Pu Yi would later deny this, probably for political reasons.

Johnston was much resented by the imperial court for his position. Indeed he was promoted to the highest rank in the Chinese court. Johnston seems to have been very proud of this fact.

When the politics of China finally changed in the second world war and the Japanese took control of Pu Yi’s destiny in order to further their own territorial interests, Johnston went back to England.

He seems to have been bitter that he was never made Governor of Hong Kong, and certainly by then the British government seems to have regarded him as very much a loose canon and not always reliable in acting foremost in Britain’s interests.

Back in Britain he taught oriental studies at the University of London for a short while, in which role he seems not to have excelled, and it is thought that his fame and contacts landed him the post over more suitable and better qualified candidates (who incidentally got the post after Johnston left).

Towards the end of his life Johnston bought a remote Scottish island and lived there with a female companion whom Johnston referred to as “wife in all but name”. On the island he flew the yellow flag of the puppet nation Manchuquo.

There! Now you know it all too. A short and relatively enjoyable read, but telling in what it doesn’t say rather than what it does. Probably only worthwhile if you’ve seen the film but read little else about the subject.