The donkey-boys were having their evening meal

Michael Pearce is a mystery writer, specialising in stories located in colourful places and filled with exotic characters.

Growing up himself in North Africa, he has been most successful with his Mamur Zapt series, the Mamur Zapt being a peculiar position in the 1920s British administration over occupied Egypt, referred to as a political officer and essentially head of the secret police.

Pearce makes one Captain Owen his Mamur Zapt, and his novels are an unusual blend of mystery and police procedural, as the Mamur Zapt investigates a crime or occurence which has political dimensions and the possibility of destabilising the uneasy political situation of 1920s Cairo.

It’s a great idea for a series, Pearce has written sixteen of them to date, the last coming out in 2008, I’ve now read three. The first two, The Night of the Dog and The Return of the Carpet, were both excellent. Highly evocative in terms of time and place, interesting in their depiction of the political difficulties of a very different world as the Mamur Zapt deals with the Egyptian civilian police, disaffected French former colonial interests, local nationalists and religious groups. The third, The Donkey-Vous, unfortunately worked less well for me. Two out of three’s not bad, so I’ll likely give the fourth a try some time, but it will probably be quite some time before I do.

In The Donkey Vous, an elderly Frenchman with family links through marriage to the French president is kidnapped from the terrace at Shepheard’s Hotel, the most prestigious hotel in Cairo and therefore the best known terrace in Cairo. The kidnapping appears to be for money, but despite all the bystanders nobody saw it happen, and such a person taken from such a place cannot help but be political. The Mamur Zapt, reluctantly, is brought in to investigate the disappearance.

Essentially, this is then a locked room mystery. Ok, the locked room is a crowded terrace facing an exceptionally busy street in the heart of a major city, but the point remains the same, there’s no way that the crime in question could have occurred at such a location.

The problem with the novel, however, is a simple one. Outside the terrace is a stand of donkey-boys, boys who hire out their donkeys to tourists. The kidnapping could not have occurred without them witnessing it, Captain Owen after initial interviews is convinced that they are lying when they plead ignorance, so is Mahmoud, investigator for the Parquet, the Egyptian justice ministry and a friend of Captain Owen’s.

As the donkey-boys won’t talk, Captain Owen, Mahmoud and others spend the next couple of hundred pages making fairly fruitless investigations into a seemingly impossible crime before they find a way to get the donkey-boys to open up, along the way running into problems with rival bidders for public works contracts, army sensitivities to the potential involvement of sectarian groups, and political infighting and gamesmanship. The trouble is, all this depends on one assumption, that the head of the secret police and the Egyptian investigator, both operating in 1920s Cairo, wouldn’t simply have the boys rounded up and beaten until they told everything they knew. If they did do that, however, the novel would last about 30 pages.

Pearce is good at bringing 1920s Cairo to life, the book is filled with descriptive passages, indeed every other page comes with another rich and exotic description (possibly too many, a friend of mine abandoned the book around page 50, having overdosed on them). Here Captain Owen visits an influential member of Egyptian society:

Owen walked in past the two eunuchs, named according to custom after precious stones or flowers, across a crunching gravel courtyard where cats dozed in the shade of the palms and in through a heavy wooden outer door. When he came to the inner door which led directly into Samira’s apartment he stopped and called out “Ya Satir – O Discoverer” – (one of the ninety-nine names of God), the conventional warning to ladies that a man is coming and they must veil. He heard scrambling inside and as he opened the door saw a female slave disappearing up the stairs to “warn” the Princess. He realized he must be the first male guest to arrive.

Here we have a typical street scene from the novel, from in front of the Shepheard’s terrace:

The street was brimming. As well as the usual hawkers of stuffed crocodiles, live leopards, Nubian daggers, Abyssinian war-maces, Smyrna figs, strawberries, meshrebiya tables and photograph frames, Japanese fans and postage stamps, sandalwood workboxes and Persian embroideries, hippopotamus-hide whips and tarbooshes, and Sudanese beads made in Manchseter and the little scarabs and images of men and gods made for the Tombs of Pharoahs but just three thousand years too late; as well as the sellers of sweets and pastry and lemonade and tea who habitaully blocked up the thoroughfare; as well as the acrobats and tumblers, jugglers and performing ape managers; as well as the despairing arabeah-drivers and the theatrical donkey-boys and the long line of privileged vendors stretching the whole length of the terrace – a swarm of Albanians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Georgians, and Circassians had suddenly arrived in front of the hotel to show off their boots.
They were very proud of their boots and had come along, in traditional national dress with a few props such as guns, daggers and swords, to exhibit them to the tourists to be photographed.

Lavish description is of course much of the point, fans of historical mystery novels read them as much – perhaps more – for the sense of time and place as for the mystery itself. The ability to lose oneself in another country, another period, is much of the draw. Where it becomes problematic is where, as here, the plot is insufficiently robust so that one is left with little but the period flavour.

The novel also contains several scenes in which Owen tries to question locals, and ends up in a meandering and gently humorous conversation as his desire to be direct and the Arab custom of arriving at conclusions circuitously and with much discussion come at odds, in a form of mild culture clash. I would quote one, but by their nature they tend to be protracted, and can extend over several pages. They’re well enough written, though I did struggle slightly to tell any of the Arab characters (other than Mahmoud, the policeman) apart by their dialogue since they are all prone to much the same sorts of pleasantries and asides.

Pearce’s Cairo is a place filled with good natured people, good natured though perhaps slightly scheming Frenchmen, good natured but perhaps overly suspicious British soldiers, good natured but overly garrulous and emotional Egyptians, good natured but traditionally minded Greeks, a good natured but forgetful retired elderly Englishman who may have seen something and his good natured but excitable daughter. Everyone is basically a bit of a good egg, save one young army officer who comes across as a bit stupid and a bit bigoted, but even he does no real harm.

That’s fine, the word “cosy” is actually used for a certain subgenre of the mystery novel, but I did start to long for an elderly Flashman to show up and give them all a good kicking.

And that’s about it, I struggle to say a great deal more. Pearce knows his stuff, his 1920s Egypt is a convincingly real place, it’s just the people and their ubiquitous niceness that lets down ultimately both the realism and the plot. Fans of historical mysteries would likely enjoy the first two a great deal, I certainly did, but here the plot depends on the niceness, which brings it to the foreground and makes it evident how incredible it actually is.

On an unrelated note, Planet of Slums continues to be a good but slow read, I’ll be trying to break the back of it this weekend so I can stop feeling guilty about it’s unfinished status.

The Donkey-Vous

He wanted a sword long enough to slash the sky and tumble the dwellers in paradise from their beds

I’m not, as a rule, a fan of the fantasy genre. Indeed, shortly I’ll be blogging about a work, The Crystal Cave, that I started over a year ago and which I think I have to recognise I’m simply never going to get round to finishing. Like any genre though, it has its exceptions, its talents, Fritz Leiber being one of them. Unfortunately, Swords and Devilry, the first volume of his collected Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser stories, is not an example of Leiber at his best.

Taking a step backwards, in the 1930s and 1940s pulp fantasy tended towards tales now known as sword and sorcery. These were generally episodic adventures in which protagonists of doubtful morality lived large on a lightly sketched stage. Tolkien, with his massive epic, changed all that, and after him sword and sorcery went into decline, eventually being squeezed out of the marketplace of ideas by bland multi-volume pseudo-Tolkeinian works now often referred to as “fat fantasy”. Part of this was I think due to Tolkien’s success being so huge as to encourage legions of imitators, part in that the morality of fat fantasy is essentially Western and liberal and comforting while the morality of sword and sorcery drew heavily on intellectual currents of the 1930s such as existentialism with an emphasis on the human-created nature of gods and ethics and the individual having little responsibility or purpose beyond that they created for themselves.

In its day, a lot of sword and sorcery was produced, but by the 1970s it was a dying genre. Today it is largely extinct, though writers such as Richard Morgan are apparently trying to resurrect it. Most of what was written is now forgotten, but among those who are remembered is Fritz Leiber, the man who actually coined the term “sword and sorcery”. Fritz Leiber’s great creation was the city of Lankhmar, and the two rogues who inhabited it, Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser. Leiber wrote a number of stories through the 1940s featuring this pair, one a tall Northern warrior and the other a small semi-wizard and civilised swordsman from the warm south. Together they stole, loved, drank and faced death (on one occasion, if I recall correctly, literally and in person) in a series of adventures often only loosely linked in terms of chronology or indeed logic. At their best, Leiber’s stories had an immediacy and passion which makes them deservedly remembered, at their weakest they were sometimes trite with dubious sexual politics.

Which brings me to Swords and Devilry. Swords and Devilry is a collection of some of Leiber’s Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser tales, one of six volumes containing all such. The oddity, however, is that the volumes are in order of internal chronology, such as there is, not real world chronology. The result is that although it is for his tales written in the 1940s that Leiber is best remembered, the ones in this (the first) volume were in fact largely written in 1970, by which time Leiber’s talent was perhaps starting to wane and when the freshness of his initial creation was increasingly affected by his knowledge of the wider fantasy genre as it had developed over the years.

Swords and Devilry essentially consists of four linked novellas, the first two respectively are origins stories for each of Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser, before they came to Lankhmar, the latter two telling of how they became friends and of their first adventure together. The difficulty is that the charm of Leiber’s tales lay in the friendship between his two protagonists and the marvellous life he gave their city, it’s unfortunate then that for 120 pages of 192 the characters haven’t actually met or made it to Lankhmar yet. None of the tales which made these characters so loved appear in this volume, none of Leiber’s best writing does, and as such although I still enjoyed it I enjoyed it to a degree with memory’s eye, rather than perhaps the eye of a mature reader. I enjoyed it in expectation of what is to come in later volumes, less so for what is present in this one.

Niall at Torque Control has written an excellent piece on this volume, here (you need to scroll down the page a bit past some introductory remarks), he notes (correctly in my view) that the central theme of the volume is one of the lure of civilisation, in contrast to the simplicity of living with nature. At the start, Fahfrd is a tribesman among barbarians ruled by snow-witches (in some ways better than that sounds, in others much more sexist in the depiction of women generally, a problem throughout this volume), he dreams of escaping to the warmth of civilisation, and falls in love with a visiting dancer who both symbolises a wider world and promises to give him a path to it. In the next story (The Unholy Grail), the Grey Mouser is a hedge wizard’s apprentice, living in civilised lands but in the rural and more outlying parts of them. He falls foul of a local baron, leading to a conflict described by Niall at Torque Control as “incredibly generic”, an assessment I agree with. The Snow Women is at least sometimes funny, The Holy Grail isn’t even particularly consistent with the depiction of the Grey Mouser in other stories.

In the second pair of novellas, the characters have moved to civilisation’s heart, Lankhmar, a jaded metropolis which duly consumes such little innocence as our heroes possess. Possessed of streets named “Cash Street”, “Dim Lane”, “Cheap Street” and the like, it is “Lankhmar, City of sevenscore Thousand Smokes”, later described by one of the characters as follows:

Lying low between the Marsh, the Inner Sea, the River Hlal, and the flat southern grainfields watered by canals fed by the Hlal, Lankhmar with its innumerable smokes was the prey of fogs and sooty smogs. No wonder the citizens had adopted the black toga as their formal garb. Some averred the toga had originally been white or pale brown, but so swiftly soot-blackened, necessitating endless laundering, that a thrifty overlord had ratified and made official what nature or civilisation’s arts decreed.

Elements of classic Leiber style can be seen in the above passage, a fondness for alliteration (of which more shortly), a wry commentary on the exigencies of civilised life, but here it is a touch flat, a touch obvious, too much reliant on exposition. In later, paradoxically earlier, stories Leiber uses all these elements with a surer and lighter touch and the result is descriptions no less detailed but quicker sketched and more amusingly written.

Sometimes Leiber deliberately writes to excess, here he indulges his tendency to alliterate but employs it to comic effect underlining the drunkneness of the characters:

But the Mouser and Fahfrd merely exclaimed in mild, muted amazement at the stars, muggily mused as to how much their improved visibility would increase the risk of their quest, and cautiously crossing the Street of the Thinkers, called Atheist Avenue by moralists, continued to Plague Court until it forked.

I rather like the Atheist Avenue joke there, the sheer excess of alliteration is I think quite intentional, but at the same time when I read it I was thrown bodily out of the story, the language so plainly sculpted for effect that it quite distracted me from the narrative.

Some elements do work well, the last few pages of the collection are the strongest part, reflecting I suspect that by then Leiber has finished setting up the characters to be as they were when first written in the 1930s, the backstory is complete and it shows in a sudden improvement in literary style and content. The pair’s intrusion into the villainous thieves’ guild disguised as beggars is suitably comic, with them convinced of the brilliance of their disguises and all others commenting behind them that the standards of beggars are clearly slipping. Later, the assault on the thieves’ guild is both exciting and horrific, particularly the fiery attack on the entryway and Fahfrd’s rage-fuelled killing of a child that mistakenly comes into his path (an action regretted afterwards, but its mere presence shows how morally questionable these characters are intended to be). All this comes very much at the end of the volume, however.

Along the way, an enchantment involving magically controlled fog is suitably chilling, as is an evil sorceror’s disturbing familiar, but too there are continual issues with the depiction of women as either scatter brained, controlling shrews or manipulative femme fatales. Leiber’s work is at its best when it focuses squarely on Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser, and their ongoing relationship with their city, each other and their curious patrons Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes – neither of whom make an appearance in this volume at all. Swords and Devilry suffers from the absence of these elements, and is at its best when they briefly come to the fore.

I’ve been very harsh in this blog entry, perhaps because the truth is I love Leiber’s work, and have since I first read it in adolescence. Stories such as The Bleak Shore, The Howling Tower, Bazaar of the Bizarre, The Cloud of Hate, Lean Times in Lankhmar (with its marvellous satire on religion) are all small marvels. Sadly, none of them are in this volume which I perhaps judge harder because of my fondness for Leiber’s better works.

Swords and Devilry appears as part of a compendium volume, along with the much better Swords against Death, and is currently out of print. Undeservedly so, despite my many critical remarks in this blog entry, bad Leiber is not a patch on good Leiber, but it remains better than much contemporary fantasy.

This made her look so charming that even a husband could hardly remain unmoved

There are few things less romantic than a French novel about love. A slight Misunderstanding, a novella written in 1833 by Prosper Mérimée, is no exception.

Mérimée was, in his period, a well known and regarded writer. A slight Misunderstanding comes with a back cover recommendation from Henry James and 1958 translator Douglas Parmée in the foreword notes that “a distinguished committee of well-known French authors and critics, in choosing the twelve best novels of the nineteenth century, included in them La Double Méprise.” Parmée goes on to describe it as a masterpiece, high praise then.

For me, masterpiece goes too far, however despite that I enjoyed Misunderstanding and I can certainly see why James might have been a fan.

In Douglas Parmée’s translation, which despite being now over 50 years old was I thought clear, crisp and still fresh, Misunderstanding comes in at a brisk 115 pages. Within them, we meet Mme Julie de Chaverny, trapped in a loveless marriage with her husband of six years, Chaverny. Julie is a pretty young woman, once high spirited and imaginative, her husband though of good family is a vulgar and unappreciative man. Julie is pursued by the dashing young Major de Châteaufort, who seeks to become her lover. Matters transform, however, when her old friend M. Darcy (yes, Darcy) returns from Constantinople awakening old affections and bringing with him a new exoticism that the men of Paris struggle to compete with.

Parmée refers to the plot as banal, which is fair. There is no story so traditional in French literature as that of the bored wife, the boorish husband, the uncaring lover. The plot here is utterly predictable, sufficiently so that I would not consider it a spoiler if I were to repeat it in whole below (though I shan’t, as others may differ). The only unusual element is M. Darcy, a fourth player in the ancient love triangle, a rogue element in a story that otherwise was likely told by one French caveman to the other.

Why then, if so predictable, is it worth reading? Not the characterisation, none of the characters are deeply drawn, all are shallow, interchangeable even (though of that, more shortly), Mme. de Chaverny is not a particularly sympathetic heroine, there is little to choose between the merits of Major Châteaufort and M. Darcy, what is left then is the prose.

And the prose, generally, is excellent. Mérimée has a sharp observational eye and a dry turn of wit. For the first half or so of the novella, I could barely turn a page without a sly witticism, so softly uttered that one could blink and miss it. Descriptions are acerbic, unmerciful, yet affectionate too. Language is used with great precision, not a word wasted. Here we meet Major Châteaufort and his faithful friend Major Perrin for the first time:

Major Perrin was sitting at a little table, busily reading. His well-brushed coat, his cap, and above all, his posture, stiff as a ramrod, proclaimed him to be an old soldier. Everything in his room was spotless, but extremely simple. An inkwell and two quills already cut were on the table beside a pile of writing paper, not one sheet of which had been used for at least a year. If Major Perrin didn’t write, he at least made up for it by reading a great deal. At the moment, he was reading Montesquieu’s Persian Letters whilst smoking his meerschaum pipe and these two occupations had so engrossed him that at first he did not notice the entrance of Major de Châteaufort. He was a young officer from his own regiment, with a charming face, extremely likeable, somewhat conceited, a protogé of the Minister for War; in a word, the opposite of Major Perrin in almost every respect. Yet, quite unaccountably, they were great friends and saw each other every day.

The description of the room is light yet exact, the comment about the unused pages dry but not unkind. What will not be apparent, from the passage above alone, is that the description of Major de Châteaufort is surprisingly similar to that of Chaverny in his youth when first he won his wife.

Later, we come to a description of M. Darcy, when a younger man:

In the old days, Darcy had been a person of no consequence whatsoever in Mme. de Lussan’s set, because it was known – certainly every mother knew – that his lack of money would never permit him to think of marrying any of their daughters. And as far as the daughters were concerned, there was nothing about him to turn their pretty young heads. In other respects, he had the reputation of being a gentleman. Being something of a misanthrope as well as having rather a caustic tongue, he enjoyed making fun of the absurdities and pretensions of the other young men, whenever he found himself the only man in a group of girls. When he was seen whispering to some girl, their mamas were not alarmed, because their daughters used to laugh out loud and mothers with daughters who had nice teeth even used to say that M. Darcy was an extremely pleasant young man.

What impresses me here, apart from the vicious wit of “mothers with daughters who had good teeth” approving when Darcy made those daughters laugh out loud, is the density of social description. We have rules regarding marriage, but rules too regarding affairs for it is clear if a daughter is laughing openly that nothing untoward is occuring. Mérimée is nothing if not precise in his language.

As noted above, Major de Châteaufort is little more than a young Chaverny, Darcy too though is cut from similar cloth. He is wittier, less dashing, but armed with the power of his exoticism fresh from his return from the East he is irresistible. Chaverny wooed his wife in part with the promise of construction of a special carriage for her, Darcy seduces her in his own carriage, an irony that all Paris society (and therefore Mérimée’s original readership) would well appreciate. Indeed, for a short work, it is full of irony, from the differing accounts of Darcy’s heroic rescue of a Turkish woman during his stay in the East and his later reflection on the incident which sheds a different light on it again, to the core simliarity of every male character in Julie de Chaverny’s life. Julie de Chaverny loathes her husband, is attracted but only shallowly by Major de Châteaufort, is washed away by Darcy, but they are all really the same man – slightly differing manifestations of the same cool Aristocratic wit and disengagement. Here, the difference between a husband and a lover is not one of character, but merely of complacency. De Châteaufort and Darcy are still trying, Chaverny no longer needs to.

The curiosity of A Slight Misunderstanding, is that as I write about it, it grows in my mind. The beauty of the novella as a form is it gives space to explore an idea, but its brevity gives space too to allow it to echo beyond the page, unfolding still in the mind once finished. Misunderstanding is a work characterised by a plot that even in the early days of 1833 would have suprised noone, its criticism of French society is mild, none in it are likeable but there is none of the anger of Laclos. Still, its cool manner, clarity and pared-back style remain after the book is finished, and having read it I already find myself wanting to read it again.

I read A Slight Misunderstanding in the excellent Oneworld Classics edition, an imprint new to me but one I shall look out for again as physically the book was printed on good quality paper, with generous but not excessive use of spacing and margins which helped make it an easy read. It comes with an attractive cover image of a rumpled bed which managed to be both restrained yet apt. Oneworld Classics are I hope proud of the job they did producing it, and I’m grateful to them for bringing it to my attention.

A Slight Misunderstanding

Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already

The Valley of Bones is volume seven of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. It continues the overall seasonal theme of the series, here heading into autumn, and into war.

As the novel opens, it is 1940 and Nick Jenkins (the series’ narrator) finds himself attached as a junior officer to a Welsh infantry regiment on exercises, but which has no immediate prospect of a combat posting. This is not then a novel of war in the conventional sense, indeed it is no spoiler to say that in this novel Nick does not go to war at all, rather here we see with Nick the tedium and daily grind of army life, its absurdities, its necessities, the boredom and the loneliness of men forced into each others’ company and away from the company of those they love.

For most of this novel Nick is apart from his family and friends, the characters we have grown used to are absent. Instead, we meet new faces, people with whom Nick shares the officers’ mess and the men under them. As ever, these are well realised and credible, Captain Gwatkin with his ambitions to be a great soldier, held back however by his caution and his over-romanticisation of military life; Bithel who is hopelessly ill-suited to the job, but who lied to the recruiters about family connections and past glories in order to gain a place; Kedward, solid and capable, efficient but without (perhaps efficient because without) the eccentricities of Gwatkin or Bithel.

Among the enlisted men too there are well crafted individuals, Gittins, the extraordinarily parsimonious manager of the Company Store (”where he guarded every item as if it were his own personal property acquired only after long toil and self-denial. Nothing was more difficult than to extort from him even the most insignificant replacement of kit.”); Corporal Gwylt, the company womaniser; verbose (but competent and reliable) Company Sergeant-Major Cadwallader, there are many others each well realised even where their parts in the narrative are small.

The quality of the characterisation is key here, this is a novel in which little happens in one sense, most of it is spent in the company of men who have little meaningful to do, the pleasure in large part is observing them with each other, the social nuances implicit in men being thrown together despite often having nothing particular in common.

Often it’s very funny, the interactions between officers and men, Nick hearing the men late at night in the company store – listening to Lord Haw-Haw and discussing the consequences of Germany winning the war (”If Hitler wins the war, I tell you lad, We’ll go down the mines for sixpence a day.”), or how terrible it would be to be required to go up in an aircraft, which reminds one of them of a story:

‘You make me think of Dai and Shoni when they went up in a balloon.’
‘And what was that, I wonder.’
‘They took two women with them.’
‘Did they, then?’
‘When the balloon was in the sky, the air began to leak something terrible out of it, it did, and Dai was frightened, so frightened Dai was, and Dai said to Shoni, Look you, Shoni, this balloon is not safe at all, and the air is leaking out of it terrible, we shall have to jump for it, and Shoni said to Dai, But, Dai, what about the women? and Dai said, Oh, fook the women, and Shoni said, But have we time?’

Powell himself served as a second lieutenant in a Welsh regiment, where he was much older than the average officer and where as a writer his background was quite different to the others, who were mostly Welsh bank managers. In Valley, Nick has the same experience, indeed the events in Valley and the events in Powell’s own life almost directly correlate: the regiment’s duties, its posting to Ireland, the weeding out of weaker officers, the relocation of the regiment to a crumbling manor house, all this happened to Powell and all of it happens to Nick too. It’s hardly surprising I was so impressed by how real it all felt, it’s based very closely it seems on Powell’s own experience of army life. So closely, that to read of his time in the army would actually spoil the few plot developments in the novel.

The book also captures well the strange mix of the vitally important and the utterly absurd that Nick finds in the army. A general’s inspection becomes a bizarre interrogation of the men as to their like or dislike of porridge for breakfast, a cup of tea becomes more important than almost anything on Earth, almost:

In the army sleep is prized more than anything else; beyond food, beyond even tea.

And yet, while exercises go comically wrong, while some of those present should clearly never be allowed near a loaded weapon, underlying it all is a terrible seriousness. Britain is at war, some of these men will go into combat, some will not return. Where an exercise goes wrong it’s funny in part, Gwatkin’s obsession with getting every detail perfect meaning that he misses his overall objective, but the point of the exercise is ultimately to keep men alive when their time for fighting comes. It is funny, but it is also really nothing of the sort.

As the book continues, death creeps in at the edges. One man dies in what may be suicide, may be murder by Irish separatists, may be just an accident in the dark with a rifle that probably shouldn’t even have been loaded. Nobody really knows, the man is still dead. Duty continues, the war becomes a little more real.

Nick goes on leave, spending time with his heavily pregnant wife, with family and friends. Here Powell takes a moment to fill in more of his larger canvass, updating us as to the progress of other characters, some with wartime are flowering, aspects of their character previously unrealised coming to the fore. Also, Powell shows the social change conflict brings, grand houses being adapted for use by troops. War is an opportunity for some, a leveller for others.

If I were to criticise, I could note that this is the most male of the novels so far, women are largely offscreen, the army is a world of men and their interactions with women are highly restricted, mostly involving encounters with girls near their camps. There is, as always with Powell, a sense that the women do have inner lives – we gain further insight into Nick’s old lover, Jean Templer – but by and large women are absent from this particular narrative and mens’ relations with them reduced to their simplest:

‘Not feeling much like going on the square tomorrow, are you?’ said Stevens. ‘Still, it was the hell of a good weekend’s leave. I had one of the local girls under a hedge.’

It’s difficult to see, however, how the novel’s masculine flavour could be avoided given it is a story of army life from the perspective of one man in one regiment. The absence of women and the effect on men of their absence is part of what the novel talks about, and as such it’s difficult to address that while still having well rounded female characters present.

Slowly, the war comes closer. Some men earlier detached from the regiment to active duty are reported dead at the front, Nick hears of other deaths, some people he knew in peacetime. The war is starting to change his world more fundamentally than its immediate impact of relocating him and forcing him to live with strangers. As readers, we learn something of what life during wartime was like, the original readers I suspect would simply have been reminded of it.

Valley is a remarkable work, witty, well observed, with a tremendous grasp of period and a mounting sense of what is to come. Reading Powell is like diving into a pool of clear water, immensely refreshing, invigorating even and it quite washes away any feelings of ennui that reading lesser works occasionally brings on. I’m tremendously excited about starting the next in the sequence.

The Valley of Bones

The air is like champagne

Fraülein Else is a 1924 novella by Austro-Hungarian author Arthur Schnitzler, now perhaps most famous for writing the work that would eventually become Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut.

But let’s not hold that against him (actually, I think highly of Eyes Wide Shut, but popular opinion has I think moved against me on that one), Fraülein Else is a complex psychological novella written almost entirely in the form of the stream of consciousness of a young woman of respectable family staying with her aunt at a fashionable spa. In just over a hundred pages (and small pages at that) it manages to be as gripping as many thrillers, while having much to say about sexuality, the brutal realities underpinning polite society and loss of innocence (or worse, realisation that innocence was only ever a comfortable illusion).

I read the excellent F.H. Lyon translation of Fraülein Else, published by Pushkin Press. For those unfamiliar with them, Pushkin Press is a publisher of literary fiction with particular strengths in European literature (especially, from what I have seen, mitteleuropean literature). My wife, Emma, has read a number of works published by Pushkin Press and the general quality of their choices is very high. The books are published on a smaller than usual format, clearly printed on high quality paper, and although paperback with slightly stiffish card covers. Physically, they are very attractive, easy to hold and a pleasure to read. Even if ebooks do become the norm, there will I think always be a place for books as well produced as the Pushkin range.

Going back to Fraülein Else, the essence of the story is a simple one. Else is a young woman of good but not aristocratic Viennese family, her father is a lawyer and a successful one, she is on holiday with her aunt and attractive cousin at a spa when she receives a telegram from her mother, informing her that her father faces ruin and that only 30,000 gulden can save him. Her father has already approached all those who have lent him money in the past, all that is left therefore is for Else to approach family acquaintance Herr von Dorsday who is also on holiday at the spa and ask him for the money.

We soon learn that Else’s family is not as good as it appears, her father has embezzled trust funds and this is not his first brush with possible ruin, he has needed saving before. Else has holes in her stockings that she hopes will not be noticed and, although it is clear until now she has avoided thinking too much on the subject, the telegram leaves her unable to avoid the truth that her family is not so respectable after all.

Else approaches Herr von Dorsday. In return for the money he requires that she pay an improper price. For the course of an evening Else thinks on whether or not to pay that price, and on what her alternatives may be.

And that, in its most simplistic essence, is the book. It is the stream of consciousness of a young woman, forced by family exigency to consider matters she would prefer not to and exposed to the truth that even in polite society the good manners on show merely conceal the reality that everything still has its price. Else’s innocence is lost merely by the fact of the request from her mother to approach Herr von Dorsday, his request simply cements her understanding of the crude nature of the world she inhabits, a world that until then had seemed much prettier.

The drama of the novel comes from Else’s consideration of what to do, for much of it I was genuinely uncertain how events would play out and there is a real tension as one watches her thoughts flow to acquiescence, to rebellion, to escapist fantasy, to acquiescence again and so on. More powerful though is the character of Else herself, beautifully realised (as it must be, for the novel to work at all). Schnitzel shows Else’s initial innocence, its later resurgence as she dreams of ways out of her dilemma, he shows too her new understanding of her world – which seems always to have been present but heretofore unacknowledged, her despair and her savage hope. Schnitzel paints a subtle and wholly persuasive psychological portrait which made me empathise with Else and be fascinated by her situation.

Because it’s essentially an unbroken stream of consciousness (though far easier to read than that suggests), it’s difficult to pull out particularly representative quotes. I’ve tried, with the following two passages, to give some sense though of Else’s internal monologue and the style of the work. In this first excerpt she has received the telegram and is considering how to approach Herr von Dorsday:

I must turn on the light. It’s getting chilly. Shut the window. Blind down? No need. There’s no one standing on the mountain over there with a telescope. Worse luck … ‘I’ve just had a letter, Herr von Dorsday’ … Perhaps it’ll be better to do it after dinner. One is in a lighter mood then. Dorsday will be too … I might drink a glass of wine first. But I should certainly enjoy my dinner more if I finished the whole business first. Pudding à la merveille, fromage et fruits divers. But what if Herr von Dorsday should say no? Or if he’s downright impudent? Oh no; no one has ever been impudent to me. Well, Lieutenant Brandel was, but he didn’t mean any harm. I’ve got a bit thinner again. It suits me … The twilight stares in. It stares in like a ghost – like a hundred ghosts. Ghosts are rising out of my meadow. How far off is Vienna? How long have I been away? How alone I am! I haven’t a girl friend, nor a man friend. Where are they all? Whom shall I marry? Who would marry a swindler’s daughter? …

In this second excerpt, Else is returning to the hotel after thinking matters over for some time:

He’s waiting. Herr von Dorsday is waiting. No, I won’t see him. I can’t see him any more. I won’t see anyone any more. I won’t go back to the hotel, I won’t go home. I won’t go to Vienna, I won’t go to anybody, to anyone at all, not to Father, not to Mother, not to Rudi, not to Fred, not to Bertha, not to Aunt Irene! She’s the best of them, she’d understand everything. But I’ve nothing more to do with her or with anybody else. If I were a magician, I’d be in quite another part of the world. On some splendid ship in the Mediterranean, but not alone. With Paul, perhaps. Yes, I can imagine that quite easily. Or I’d live in a villa by the sea and we’d lie on the marble steps that run down into the water, and he’d hold me tight in his arms and bite my lips, as Alfred did at the piano two years ago, the impudent wretch. No, I’d lie alone on the marble steps by the sea and wait. And at last a man would come, or several men, and I’d choose one, and the others whom I’d rejected would throw themselves into the sea in despair. Or they’d have to be patient and wait til next day. Oh, what a delicious life it would be!

Part of what impresses me here, is how easily Schnitzel captures Else’s immaturity, her flights of childish fancy, but intercuts them with her dawning realisation of her actual situation. Schnitzel is also excellent in a number of passages in bringing out Else’s own burgeoning sexuality, suppressed by societal dictat but by virtue of this situation brought (only part unwillingly) to the forefront of her mind.

Other characters in the work are seen largely through Else’s eyes, the few times Else speaks to someone during the evening it is presented in italics and rarely are the words of the conversation on their own very revealing. Despite this, Schnitzler manages to capture Else’s aunt’s concern for propriety, Herr von Dorsday’s self-interest,self-regard and essential hypocricy, the tension between Cissy Mohr – possible lover to Else’s cousin Paul – and Else herself. We see only through Else’s eyes, and she does not appear a particularly unreliable narrator, but because suddenly she sees much so too do we and the work is full of small psychological truths.

An irony with Fraülein Else, compared to other works I have written about here, is in one sense I have relatively little to say about it. It is well written, shows great insight and is both an enjoyable and rewarding read. Pushkin Press have, once again, brought to English readers a novelist whose works might otherwise go ignored, and certainly without them I wouldn’t have read this particular work. The plot however is so simple, the essential dilemma faced by Else so easily grasped, the truth of her society so depressingly familiar, that it is hard to write at length about it. I am left then saying that this is a fine piece of Austro-Hungarian literature of a sort too little now recognised, and that I am extremely grateful to Pushkin Press for publishing this translation and giving me access to it.

Fraülein Else (also available directly from the publisher here). I note that John Self over at Asylum has written up a different Arthur Schnitzel here, which may also be of interest.

The coke sweat had been dutifully airbrushed from the mayor’s forehead; only a contaminated grin remained

A Firing Offence is the 1992 first novel of George Pelecanos, later to become (relatively) well known as a scriptwriter for The Wire. It forms the first of his three part Nick Stefanos series, a trio of novels dealing with the exploits of (apparently fairly autobiographical in terms of character) D.C. based private detective Nick Stefanos.

After finishing the Stefanos series, Pelecanos went on to write his “D.C. Quartet”, an apparently much more ambitious and accomplished series of novels. It is not, therefore, the Nick Stefanos novels for which Pelecanos is now best known, they rather represent him finding his voice as a writer. That said, while it’s fair to say A Firing Offense isn’t terribly ambitious in scope it is a solid and enjoyable work of crime fiction and having read it I do intend to read the other two in the Nick Stefanos series before moving on to the D.C. Quartet and his other works.

So, enough of what it’s not. What is it? A Firing Offense is the story of how Nick Stefanos, a bored Advertising Director for Nutty Nathan’s chain of consumer electronics stores, agrees to help find a missing employee – a 19 year old kid who Nick briefly knew and who reminded him of his own pre-corporate self. Along the way, in fine hardboiled tradition, Nick gets beaten up, beats someone up, gets in a firefight and generally asks a lot of questions of a lot of people, some of whom aren’t too happy about answering. In terms of structure, it’s very much in the Chandler/Hammett vein, Nick asks around, puts two and two together, and knows he’s on the right track because people beat him up for being on it.

Where A Firing Offense is unusual however, is in its pacing and in its portrayal of the world of work – in particular the worlds of crummy office jobs and of working a salesfloor. This is a 216 page novel, for about the first hundred of those pages Nick is pulling down his job at Nutty Nathan’s and his enquiries into the missing boy are very much a sideline, we therefore spend a great deal of time seeing what it’s like to be an advertising director. In order to free up time to look for the kid Nick goes to work out of a local branch outlet, and so we see what it’s like to work a sales floor. Almost half the book then is not so much Nick running after bad guys, as Nick drinking too much and putting in a mediocre performance at a mediocre job, while his friends and colleagues mostly do likewise.

Generally, fiction deals poorly with the world of work, I’m not sure why, perhaps few authors have experienced it and those who did hated it, after all had they loved it they wouldn’t have left to become authors. Here, however, we have overpromoted management, bored employees, people watching the clock until they can go home, the world of work in all its tedious drudgery. It’s a marvellous portrait, not least when Nick reaches the sales floor and we see the various ruses and scams the salesmen pull to ensure they get the plum customers (those looking for TVs or steroes rather than say radio alarms) and how they convince them not to buy the best TV for them but the ones with the highest commission for the salesman, then making some extra on top by selling unnecessary warranties and parts insurance.

Lloyd was still with his customer, an older woman who seemed to be edging away from him in fear. I walked over to McGinnes, who was scribbling seemingly unrelated letters and numbers onto the sales tags.
‘You remember the system?’ he asked, continuing his markings.
‘Refresh my memory.’
‘The first two letters in the row are meaningless. The next set of numbers is the commission amount, written backwards. The final letter is the spiff code [a sales bonus], if there is a spiff. A is five, B is ten, C is fifteen and so on. So, for example, the figure on this tag, XP5732B means twenty-three seventy-five commission with a ten dollar spiff. That way, you’re pitching the bait that doesn’t pay dick, you look right beside it on the next model, you see what you get if you make the step, in black and white. ‘ He stepped back to admire his handiwork.
‘Just in case one of these customers asks, so we keep our stories straight, what do we tell them the numbers mean?’
‘Inventory control codes, he said with a shrug.

Shortly before this little exchange, we spend over a page and a half watching McGinnes, the best salesman on the floor, convince an old man who’s come in to buy the advertised special offer to upgrade to a much more expensive set, in part on the basis that it has a high IS (internal spiff, the customer obviously having no idea what that means) and by such tricks as putting a lousy aerial on the set the customer had originally intended to buy – all paired with a folksy patter and an ability to come from whatever part of the US the customer hails from. It’s a marvellous sequence, fun to read and really brings to life the sleazy ambience of the Nutty Nathan’s salesfloor.

The salesmen themselves are from the Glengarry Glen Ross school of charm, swearing heavily, drinking extraordinary amounts (including during the working day) and in the case of McGinnes taking copious quantities of drugs as well. It’s a vision of a sort of retail hell, a working environment so unbearable that only by mocking their customers and deadening their senses can they make it through the day. Competition for commissions is high, with the hapless Lloyd kept on primarily to deal with the low value items nobody else wants to touch, it’s a profoundly ruthless environment and Nutty Nathans becomes a sort of microcosm of the wider city of DC, a place drowning in drink and narcotics in which nobody is really clean.

As noted above, Pelecanos spends around 100 pages of the book, almost half, on Nick’s life at work and the people he knows there. During this half, pacing is carefully gradual, with Nick starting to get deeper into his investigation, but the bulk of his activity still centring around his normal life. All this comes, however, with undertones of menace because on page 2 we are told how the story will end: “with the sudden blast and smoke of automatic weapons, and the low manic moan of those who were about to die.” That means, during this entire 100 pages of quotidiana we’re aware that by the end of the book people will have died in terrible violence, once we’re past the halfway mark we start to accelerate to that end, but it’s a measured acceleration and the drive from normal life to automatic weapon fire and painful death is always a controlled one (for the reader anyway, not so much for Nick).

Pelecanos then brings the world of work to life, and shows a real skill at pacing, where he also shows real skill is in his descriptions. Here we have Nick’s favourite lunch spot:

In the Good Times Lunch an industrial upright fan stood in the rear, blowing warm air towards the door. Malt liquor posters hung on the walls, showing busty, light-skinned women held by mustachioed black movie stars. Of the eight stools at the counter, three were occupied by graying men drinking beer from cans, and a fourth by a route salesman in a cheap suit.

And here we have Nick, getting changed to go to head office rather than the sales office:

I finished shaving and undid my tie, switching from an Italian print to a wine and olive rep. I changed my side buckle shoes to a relatively more conservative pair of black oxfords that had thin steel plates wrapped around the outside of the toes. I put on a thrift shop Harris Tweed, secured the apartment, and drove to work.

Note the relatively spare, hardboiled, prose style there.

Generally, Pelecanos brings early 1990s D.C. to life, the drugs, the racial tensions. There is a palpable sense of place through the whole novel, and given that to me a sense of place is key to writing good crime fiction, it’s an important element of the novel’s success.

Not everything, however, is quite so successful. The characters are incredibly hard drinking, Nick clearly has an alcohol problem, not yet fully developed but plainly there, that’s fine but so does almost everyone else and it’s fair to say that almost every character of note in the novel spends their time drunk, stoned or both. That may be a fair reflection of early 1990s D.C., but I wasn’t wholly persuaded. Worse though is that’s a symptom of a problem with Nick as a character. Generally, he is convincing, he is part of a Greek community that feels real (as it should, given Stefanos himself comes from such), he feels as if he has a life beyond the book, but he is also portrayed as being a bit cool and for me that didn’t wholly work.

Nick has great taste in music (I actually dug out my old Elvis Costello discs on finishing the book, apparently a common reaction to it), he can hold his own in rough clubs aimed at men ten years his junior, he is popular with women, the two times he gets in fights knowing that’s what’s about to happen he basically kicks ass, he is a fine shot too. Basically, he’s a bit badass.

Now, in part that’s all good hardboiled stuff. Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and the Continental Op can all handle themselves in a fight, Spade and Marlowe are both handsome fellows and well dressed. Pelecanos is writing a hardboiled crime novel. It’s just that Spade, Marlowe and the Continental Op were professional PIs, Nick is an advertising director slightly past his glory days. He’s cool, but he’s cool in a slightly sad way for a character the wrong side of 30.

In fairness, that slightly pathetic quality is in part intentional. Nick’s ex-wife left him because he wasn’t accepting adult responsibilities, an element made interestingly ambiguous given that it’s clear she’s accepted them herself but that in doing so she’s lost along the way an essential part of her own character. Pelecanos gives the impression that much of Nick’s motivation in looking for the missing kid is seeking his own youth which is slipping away from him. The trouble is, those elements of ambiguity, of whether accepting adult responsibilities is simply a form of surrender, are slightly undercut by Nick later on taking down a bad guy in brutally effective fashion. It’s also undercut slightly by Nick’s success with women. Put another way, Nick’s traits that come from his status as hardboiled hero sit slightly oddly with Nick’s traits which come from him being an ageing scenester who’s sold out and isn’t sure he got anything worthwhile in return.

Still, those criticisms aside, it’s a well written and well paced crime novel. It’s not more than that, but that’s nothing to be sniffed at, it’s an enjoyable read and Nick is ultimately an interesting character to travel some of America’s backways with. As I said at the outset, I intend to read the sequel, and I look forward eventually to reading George Pelecanos’s more ambitious works, the ones he wrote when he finally felt free not to follow a hardboiled template that at times seems to work against what he’s trying here to achieve.

A Firing Offense

Microgenres and new publishing models

The other night, I had to stay late in the office waiting for documents. Too tired to do meaningful work in the meantime, I followed a link I had recently come across to a novel published online by its author, a novel also available for purchase in the normal fashion.

Reading that novel has inspired me to talk a little about the publishing model that its author, David Wellington, is using. Along the way, I’ll need to dip into microgenres, before returning to wider publishing issues. I’m going to save my thoughts on the novel itself until the end of this piece, as I’m aware there will be readers who might be curious about the publishing model but who have no interest in a horror novel which for me was in any event unsuccessful. I’ll flag when I’m turning to the work itself, so those with no interest can know to duck out gracefully at that point.

Put simply, when David Wellington has a new work, he publishes it on a weekly or biweekly basis online, chapter by chapter. Each chapter comes with a comments section, allowing fans to directly comment and discuss the work with each other, and a sidebar asks those who read the whole work to buy his most recent novel in print form, and encouraging those who enjoy his works online to also buy copies of those also in print form.

The essence of the approach then is free access to the work, interactivity with fans (of which more shortly), and an honour system to encourage fans to buy that which they can obtain at any time for free. I have seen David Wellington’s novels on sale in London in mainstream bookshops, so while I cannot say how successful this model is for him, my impression is that it has worked.

David Wellington’s approach is not of course unique. Recently, some bands have taken to putting albums free online, either for a limited period or indefinitely, counting on the free distribution to itself boost sales. Stephen King experimented with online serial publication, albeit for a fee, for one of his works. An experiment which in his case ended in failure. Other authors have tried placing example chapters online, so that potential readers can read a fair selection of the relevant novel, before making a buying decision. Writer Jeff Long, author of bestselling (I think, I could be wrong on that actually) novel The Descent took this approach, placing the first chapter of his novel at his website – a move which if nothing else shows he has confidence in his own story (and although I didn’t like the chapter and so didn’t buy the book, clearly plenty of folk disagree with me given its success). The, on its face fairly risible sounding, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies took a similar approach (god help me, I read the first chapter of that online too, from morbid curiosity. It is, if anything, worse than the title would suggest. Again, clearly many disagree with me).

Of the examples above, David Wellington is the only one I know of that has published his entire output online for free, Jeff Long and the PP&Z author are merely using online publishing as a method of giving tasters of normally published books, extended versions of the Amazon “see inside the book” concept. Wellington is much braver, much more experimental, the question arises then why does this technique work for him and could it work for others?

By now, it should be apparent what all my examples have in common, all are horror writers. I have no personal interest in the horror genre, save early examples such as Poe, Lovecraft and MR James. It doesn’t, as a genre, speak to me or interest me. I am, however, aware that in the 1990s it saw a fall in popularity that led to many bookshops discontinuing or reducing their horror sections, but in the last few years has seen a popular resurgence, helped in part by the emergence of the young adult supernatural romance genre.

Still, whatever fall or partial reprieve in popularity the horror genre may have suffered, I suspect it still significantly outsells most literary fiction, it’s possible then that though the two have little in common, there may be lessons capable of being learned.

David Wellington is not only a horror writer, he is also to be more precise a writer within a microgenre – zombie apocalypse fiction, which turns out to be a fairly vibrant subgenre – and which is as specific a niche genre as I can imagine. That niche quality, however, has certain advantages. I doubt that zombie fiction has a vast number of fans, but with the internet that doesn’t matter as however dispersed they may be it’s easy for them to find each other. Being a microgenre, it’s perhaps easier for an author to engage more directly with fans, to have a feel for their expectations and so produce works that will build a solid and reliable fan following. Further, lowering that barrier between author and fan, creating a sense of a relationship (a rather illusory sense, I suspect) must help with relying for income on an honour system. A fan who reads a work online, who feels they have a relationship with the author, that their comments are invited and valued, will I suspect then want to support that author by buying the print editions of their works.

Turning to the comments aspect of David Wellington’s publishing model, while reading his novel I dipped into three or four of the chapters’ comments sections. The comments were generally pretty content free, lot of “OMG! This so rocks!” and “Wow, great chapter” which while probably cheering for Mr Wellington didn’t add much to my life. More interestingly, it became apparent with Plague Zone that several fans were (rightly in my view) unhappy with the final section of the book and in particular the ending, Wellington let those comments stand, showing firstly a laudable fairness on his part with regard to his fans input, but also illustrating that he has received valuable direct feedback on what his fans liked and what they didn’t. On another note, Wellington conducted a competition, the winner of which was included in a chapter as a minor supporting character, so further drawing in fans and involving them in his work.

As best I can tell, Wellington didn’t actually change the course or content of his novel as a result of fan feedback. I don’t know if he writes it as he goes along in line with a predetermined story outline, or writes the whole thing and then releases it bit by bit (I suspect the former), but the fact of serialisation and fan comment doesn’t seem to cause him to change his direction. Equally, he doesn’t himself appear much in the comments section, leading to my own comment earlier that I suspect the relationship fans feel with him is largely illusory, the real relationship being still one of author and reader. This isn’t then a shared writing experiment, an interactive novel, rather it is simply a publishing model.

Could it work for other genres? Perhaps, the hyperniched nature of David Wellington’s work must I think be a factor in his success with this model, but much literary fiction is also read only by a very narrow readership base. Admittedly, literary fiction enthusiasts have the benefit that newspaper review sections take their interests seriously, a luxury Mr Wellington’s fans don’t enjoy, but for all that external support literary novels still aren’t that widely read – with some deserving writers getting only a few thousand readers.

Over on The Asylum, Linda Grant (who likely has more than just a few thousand readers) has appeared to discuss works, and both at The Asylum and The Mookse and the Gripes I have seen authors give interviews, discussing their works with John and Trevor, the bloggers at each of those sites. Would it be such a large step for an author to take control of the process themselves? To publish their work free online as well as in print, to discuss directly with their readers their thoughts, to engage with their readership as Mr Wellington has with his?

David Wellington uses fan loyalty, competitions, the ability to comment as a work develops and a self-created fan community to encourage his readership to actually buy print copies of his books. Were a literary author to do the same, I suspect they would in some ways find it actually easier, few readers of literary fiction ultimately will want to read such works on a computer screen, they’ll want a physical copy. I’d guess that many more zombie horror fans will be happy just with the online version.

David Wellington has demonstrated with his works an alternative publishing model, one that sits not in replacement of normal publishing, but alongside it supporting it. It’s an interesting experiment, one that appears to have worked for him and if for him I would have thought could also work for novelists such as say Indra Sinha (a very online-aware author), potentially allowing him to reach more readers than is presently the case.

That ends my thoughts on publishing models, I’m now going to talk about Plague Zone, the novel. Those of you who’ve stuck with me this far may want to bail at this point if a discussion of a specific zombie horror novel is outside your interests.

Right, I suspect I’m now writing for myself even more than usually. Still, here goes. Plague Zone is a work of zombie horror by David Wellington. It tells the tale of a librarian, Tim Kempfer who while embarking on an affair at an out of town librarians’ conference sees a news report of a zombie attack, a news report in which he recognised both the zombie and the victims – his wife and sitting in the unlocked car next to them his young son. Tim decides, through what fairly clearly is a form of guilt displacement, to get back to his home city of Seattle and have revenge on the zombie that killed his family. In other words, to find and kill one zombie in a whole city full of them.

The writing style is straightforward, it’s very much about telling the story without effect, recounting events. In my view, that’s appropriate, the genre wouldn’t support overly clever attempts at narrative technique, indeed given the inherent improbability of a zombie apocalypse a relatively flat writing style is perhaps an advantage. Some flaws emerge, twice Tim encounters zombies that were once women in print dresses, it’s clear what’s attempted there. A zombie that was once a woman in a print dress is a reminder of normality lost, that the monsters were once our friends and neighbours. Two such women though is a bit clumsy. Still, it’s the only such problem I noticed.

You don’t read this sort of novel though for the literary technique, and to analyse it on that basis wouldn’t really be fair. There is a strong tendency to tell rather than show, but that fits with the generally flatly descriptive approach taken:

He turned around, the fear threatening to paralyze him if he kept looking at the slowly creeping mass of droolers. He turned toward the entrance of Safeco Field, then to the street that ran past it. If he kept his calm, if he didn’t trip over something in the dark, he knew he could outrun the infected. He could put them behind him and after a few blocks of pursuit surely they would lose his scent and give up. He didn’t need to shoot every drooler he saw—that would be a waste of time and ammunition.

And:

Tim slammed the office door shut behind him, twisted the deadbolt. Backed up until his legs hit the desk behind him. He could hear the droolers coming up the stairs. They couldn’t climb fences but a simple staircase was still within the limit of their powers, it seemed. Before he’d even caught his breath they were pounding on the door. He could see one through the rectangle of glass set into the door, its face pale and patchy, broken with sores. It felt a film of black drool on the window as it pressed its mouth against the glass, its lips making an obscene seal there. He could see its blackened tongue lolling for him.

The writing then is workmanlike, efficient and adequate to its task (hm, damning a bit by faint praise there, but I do think a more nuanced writing style would actually be an error for this genre). The problems with the book don’t arise from that, particularly given Wellington’s many fans clearly enjoy his writing technique.

The book does however have three significant problems, characterisation, the fact that Tim is the sole hero (I’ll come to why that’s a problem shortly) and sheer (even given the book’s premise) implausibility.

Tim is not a terribly persuasive character, although badass librarian has a certain ring to it, he is basically a moving plot device and viewpoint character. At the opening of the novel, Tim is about to have an affair, we’re told he hasn’t had one before, there seems no reason for him to have one now, really my impression was that the only reason he was uncharacteristically about to have an affair was so as to give him something to feel guilty about, and so send him on his bizarre assassination mission after one zombie.

Other characters act equally without reason, a military commander who is easily the book’s best character effectively imprisons Tim for his own good, and is running a small and hyper-surveillanced militarised state consisting of a town full of survivors and refugees. That’s fine enough, but when Tim inevitably escapes the commander is so keen to recover him (his mission apparently being to protect everyone he finds alive) that he sends troops into a zombie-infested city and uses massive resources to recover one apparently suicidal man. It just didn’t persuade, there seemed no good in-character reason for him to go to such lengths. Other characters risk their lives for Tim, even offer to die for him, but precisely why is never terribly clear. The characters act as the plot demands, not as what little we see of their personalities would dictate, and it’s a fatal flaw.

Tim himself is not terribly sympathetic, in part because the zombies aren’t really literal zombies. They’re actually living victims of a disease that causes aggression and severe brain damage. Tim’s mission then is to kill an admittedly dangerous, but actually profoundly neurologically impaired disease victim. To Wellington’s credit, the distinct lack of heroism in this is intentional and several characters do query whether Tim is simply mad in pursuing his pointless, suicidal and ultimately cruel quest for vengeance.

That’s fine, characters in a survival horror context need not be sympathetic, but with Tim unsympathetic more weight is placed on other characters, and other than the military commander they can’t really carry it.

The book is also weighed down in places with tremendous implausibility, I’ve mentioned the military commander’s quest to recover Tim, a quest a deranged as Tim’s own. Much worse though is the ending, which I won’t go into here but which given the already established abilities of the zombies simply makes no sense, a point made by several in the comments following the last chapter. That said, the ending does involve a degree of psychological subtlety in Tim’s character that is welcome, though sadly which I cannot discuss without giving that ending.

Finally, there is the issue of Tim as sole survivor. Zombie horror is an example of what is known as survival horror, the horror comes from the possibility of sudden character death, from the frequent randomness and sheer unfairness of such death. Wellington tries to include that here, but with only one central character we know that Tim must at least reach the last chapter. That undermines any suspense, Tim will make it to Seattle, he will get past the obstacles trying to stop him, if he’s to die it won’t be until the end of the book – all that has to be true as Tim is the only viewpoint character and without him the novel stops.

It’s a big problem, without the possibility of random death, of bad luck or a single bad choice killing a loved character (not that I loved Tim, but that’ not quite the point), there’s no suspense and thus no horror. The choice of having a sole protagonist undercuts the genre, means we know pretty much what will happen in the book, and indeed I guessed the ending very early on and was right in pretty much all key particulars.

So, Plague Zone didn’t work for me, reading the comments it looks like David Wellington has written more successful novels, and since I wish him well in future I hope he continues to push his craft and extend his range – my strong impression was that here he wanted to write a more psychological study of one man under terrible pressure but didn’t wholly succeed. He is, however, an author with many fans and while I don’t think the zombie horror genre is the best place to explore psychological trauma, Stephen King moved from supernatural to psychological horror and I see no reason why with time David Wellington shouldn’t do the same, if that’s where his talent leads him.

Plague Zone

We blew it

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is a non-fiction work by Peter Biskind exploring the rise to dominance of a new generation of directors in late 1960s and 1970s Hollywood, and of their ultimate failure as a movement in the early 1980s. It is a story of the rise of auteur theory as an influence on American filmmaking, of how the producers and studios came for a time to be pushed on to the back foot as power transferred to a new generation of directors and how ultimately that power transferred right back again.

It is also, essentially, an industry book. As such, it has much in common with books about banking or books about say the internet boom, much of it is who said what to whom, who backed whom and who fell out with whom. It is not a book to go to for an investigation of directorial technique, why this shot was chosen over that shot. Rather it is a book to read for an investigation of how movies were made, how the directors, actors, writers, producers and studio people came together and somehow ended up with a movie at the end of it.

In places, it is fascinating, if like me however you have no real interest in Hollywood gossip, it is also at times rather frustrating. At its best, when examining the relationship between the director and director of photography on The Godfather and how both contributed to the final product, it is genuinely illuminating:

The tension between Coppola and Willis proved creative. Coppola relied on his WP to frame the shots. Coppola’s strengths were writing dialogue, storytelling and working with actors, not visual composition. Willis achieved a unique look – rich earth colors, buttery yellows and browns – that would go down in cinema history.

At its worst, such as when telling us how Altman used to buy $2 blow-jobs in his lunch hour, Eay Riders is merely prurient. Large sections of the book are essentially anecdotes detailing terrible people doing terrible things to each other, the characters here make those in an Ellroy novel loveable by comparison.

Biskind’s thesis is essentially that with the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s, studios found themselves increasingly out of touch with their audiences. Established directors were in many cases old men, studio heads very much so, in order to gain a position of authority and respect one had to put in the years, prove one’s worth, this was a system that had worked well historically but that responded poorly to a sudden mass shift in popular culture. New blood was desparately needed.

“Everything seemed different after Easy Rider. The executives were anxious, frightened because they didn’t have the answers any longer. You couldn’t imitate or mimic quite as easily, churn them out like eggs from a chicken. Every day there was a new person being fired. If you watched where the furniture truck stopped, in front of some producer’s building, or some executive’s office, you knew before he knew that he was dead. My inexperience, lack of contacts and relationships were not handicaps. Because of my youth, people asked, ‘well, what do you think?’” [Peter Guber, Columbia executive]

The result, was an unprecedented transfer of power to a new generation of directors, a “New Hollywood”. Directors such as Altman, Ashby, Bodganovich, Coppola, Friedkin, Dennis Hopper, George Lucas, Rob Rafelson, Scorsese and Spielberg as well as writers such as Schrader and Robert Towne (both of whom also directed, with differing results) came into the ascendant. The studios did not understand these directors, they did not understand their work and often mishandled releases and marketing, but they did understand sales and the new directors got audiences.

The New Hollywood directors were, in the main, heavily influenced by French new wave cinema, by auteur theory, by the concept of the director as artist. Their goals were, therefore, artistic rather than commercial ones (excepting Lucas and Spielberg, of whom more later). They produced idiosyncratic films driven by the director’s personal vision, rather than by a concept of what a particular demographic might respond to.

Biskind starts his history with Hopper’s Easy Rider, a landmark film which studio executives found incomprehensible, but which spoke to the new audiences of the counterculture and which as noted in the quote above changed the landscape. He explores a variety of key films, The Godfather, Apocalpyse Now, much of Warren Beatty’s work (due to his power in this period), Mean Streets, Jaws and so on. Biskind also explores the lives of the various characters involved in these films, Hopper’s descent into a drug fuelled nightmare of paranoia, violence and ultimate irrelevance for example.

As the New Hollywood directors gained power, producers lost it. The result was increasingly that personal visions became unstuck from financial control, films became bloated behemoths that required massive editing. On many occasions negatives would be taken away from a director by guile or force so the studio could actually cut a releasable film, on others they would be hidden by the director so he could stop the studio interfering with his vision. Costs increased, budgets were increasingly ignored, directors came to operate filmsets as personal fiefdoms with few having any ability to gainsay them.

As the 1970s progressed, the outcome was a move from landmark films with an essentially smaller focus like Bonnie & Clyde, the Exorcist or Mean Streets, towards vast epics such as The Godfather or Apocalypse Now, finally resulting in Heaven’s Gate and the destruction of United Artists.

Simultaneously, the 1970s saw the arrival of cocaine, which became an essential staple for many directors, Scorsese (one of the few individuals in the book not to come across as utterly loathsome) at one point being checked into hospital because he had somehow destroyed all the platelets in his bloodstream. Cocaine exacerbated the effects of power, leading to increasingly grandiose projects and the New Hollywood losing touch just as the old Hollywood had.

Biskind charts the relationships of the New Hollywood elite, both business and sexual. This is a masculine world and the women in it (save influential critic Pauline Kael) are largely interchangeable, actresses who sleep with directors and then cheat on them with other directors or with their leading men. Women are sexually available, drugs are omnipresent, most individuals will happily betray friends if it helps them get their movies made. A huge part of the book is essentially gossip, well researched gossip (Biskind is scrupulous in providing his sources, refusing to speculate and noting when accounts of an incident differ) but gossip for all that. Affairs, rows, backroom deals, betrayed friendships, all of the viler aspects of human life are here.

While the auteurs began to coke themselves out of their talent, Spielberg released Jaws, and on Biskind’s thesis changed cinema. Two years later, Lucas (who here comes across as essentially talentless, but with good actors and crew) released Star Wars. Between the two, the studios recognised that more money could be made from big budget special-effects driven crowd pleasers than could from cleverly lit deconstructionist dramas with unhappy endings. Essentially, for Biskind, Spielberg and Lucas kill the movies, making it plainly more profitable to make popcorn accompaniments than to create art:

Jaws changed the business forever, as the studios discovered the value of wide breaks – the number of theaters would rise to one thousand, two thousand, and more by the next decade – and massive TV advertising, both of which increased the costs of marketing and distribution, diminishing the importance of print reviews, making it virtually impossible for a film to build slowly, finding its audience by dint of mere quality. As costs mounted, the willingness to take risks diminished proportionately. Moreover, Jaws whet corporate appetites for big profits quickly, which is to say, studios wanted every film to be Jaws.

And:

Increasingly films resembled comic books, were even based on comic books, like the Superman and Batman films to follow. This phenomenon was later dubbed “high concept,” and has been variously defined, but the most scandalous explication of the term has always been attributed to Spielberg. “If a person can tell me the idea in twenty-five words or less, it’s going to make a pretty good movie. I like ideas, especially movie ideas, that you can hold in your hand.” As the studios became stronger, the power shifted from the directors back to the executives, who were beginning to emerge from the shadow of auteurs to become celebrities in their own right. Whereas a key piece by Kit Carson in Esquire in the early ’70s focussed on directors, a similarly influential piece by Tony Schwartz that appeared in New York in the early ’80s focussed on the front office at Paramount.

By the end of the decade, Friedkin is releasing mediocrities having lost all touch with his talent, Bogdanovich has disappeared up his own ego, Coppola has never recovered from Apocalypse Now, Scorsese is being openly laughed at for his lack of commerciality, Spielberg and Lucas are very rich indeed. The studio system reasserts itself, focus groups and films aimed at demographics are in, the New Hollywood that arrived with such noise and that during its short stay in power created some genuinely great films is over, in the words of Wyatt in Easy Rider, “we blew it”.

For Biskind, film after the 1970s is a lesser beast, directors serve studios that in turn are driven by market research and segmentation, producers are businessmen who treat film like any other commercial product. Film ceases to be an art form, and becomes a business. Where once a film which failed on release might be given space to grow, the opening weekend gross is all that matters (a fact that has changed somewhat with the importance today of DVD sales, but that is beyond the scope of a book about the 1970s written back in 1998). The revolution is over.

It would be wonderful if Lucas’s fantasy of multiplexes all over America playing independent features were a fact. But he has probably not been to a mall lately, where the reality is that six screens of the local multiplex will be showing The Lost World or a Lost World equivalent. Unfortunately, this story may not have a happy ending, and the last word could likely be that of Altman, who says, “you get tired painting your pictures and going down to the street corner and selling them for a dollar. You get the occasional Fargo, but you’ve still got to make them for nothing, and you get nothing back. It’s disastrous for the film industry, disastrous for film art. I have no optimism whatsoever.”

At its best, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls charts with some conviction how the film industry adapted to the counterculture and how some great films came to be made. It also charts how that changed, and how the profoundly commercial and often even anti-artistic film industry we have today came about. For those elements, I can certainly recommend it. For the gossip, well, it didn’t interest me but if you do have an interest in film-insider gossip it’s primo stuff and you won’t go away disappointed. Biskind takes it rather as read that 1970s film was better than 1980s film, and he rather skews his case by only really looking at the great films of the 1970s, for all that I think there is some truth in his thesis. I think there was great work done, I think the current system doesn’t prevent great work being done again but does mitigate against it. Biskind shows how we got where we are, and along the way shows quite how messy filmmaking really is, I don’t know if I shall read more by him but he has interesting things to say and casts genuine light on the filmmaking process in the wider sense.

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

The Englishman’s Boy, by Guy Vanderhaeghe

The Englishman’s Boy is a 1997 work by Canadian author Guy Vanderhaeghe, addressing issues relating to the settlement of the American and Canadian West and the myths it gave rise to. The novel follows two narrative strands: one in 1873, the other (narrated restrospectively in 1953) 50 years later in 1923 Hollywood. It is a novel of history, myth, and the role of both in shaping nations. Vanderhaeghe here deals in new territories, geographic and psychological, including the new territory of film, a medium with a profoundly democratic appeal and with an ability to create a new type of narrative – a new mythology.

The novel opens in my view fairly weakly, with two Indian horse thieves (one almost stereotypically wise compared to the white men he steals from) taking twenty horses from a group of sleeping men. The scene itself is well painted, Vanderhaeghe is a master at describing cold landscapes, the still of the night, but the patient Indian essentially horse-whispering while the oblivious Whites slept for me bordered on cliche.

Vanderhaeghe then surprised me, moving briefly into 1953 and then back to 1923, as follows:

I typed four names. Damon Ira Chance. Denis Fitzimmons. Rachel Gold. Shorty McAdoo. I sat and stared at their names for some minutes, then I typed a fifth, my own. Harry Vincent.
I did not know how to continue. It’s true that once I was a writer of a sort, but for thirty years I’ve written nothing longer than a grocery list, a letter. I went to the window. From there I could see the South Saskatchewan River, the frozen jigsaw pieces bumping sluggishly downstream, the cold, black water streaming between them. A month ago, when the ice still held, a stranger to this city would have had no idea which way the river ran. But now, the movement of the knotted ice, of the swirling debris, makes it plain.
So begin, I told myself.

History is calling it a day. Roman legionaries tramp the street accompanied by Joseph and Mary, while a hired nurse in uniform totes the Baby Jesus. Ladies-in-waiting from the court of the Virgin Queen trail the Holy Family, tits cinched flat under Elizabethan bodices sheer as the face of a cliff. A flock of parrot-plumed Aztecs are hard on their heels. Last of all, three frostbitten veterans of Valley Forge drag flintlocks on the asphalt roadway.

This is bravura stuff. We have the cast introduced, the five central characters who will drive the 1923 narrative. We have the imagery of the cold, the ice, we know that whatever happens in 1923 it will not end well for Harry, his amibitions of becoming a screenwriter (rather than a mere title-card writer) will end with him no longer being a writer at all. So too we have myth and history, the extras leaving the lot, a mishmash of dreams of what was. Many of the novel’s key themes are right there, in those two short paragraphs.

Vincent is called before studio boss Chance, an unprecedented interview given Chance’s reclusivity and Vincent’s junior status. We learn that Chance wants to make a new sort of film, to create a new American myth, and that to do so he wants access to the memories of an aged extra who was there in the Old West and who lived the truth Chance wants on celluloid. Chance sends Vincent to track down that old extra, Shorty McAdoo, but McAdoo’s experiences ended in tragedy and horror and he has no wish to revist those times or see his memories turned into fiction.

On the way to all this, however, Vanderhaeghe mixes his undoubted talent for description with several pages of blatant infodumping. It is explained who Fatty Arbuckle was and what happened to him, so showing the fickle nature of fame in early Hollywood. There is more than than two consecutive pages describing the life and work of the hugely influential director DW Griffith, a section which opens with the to me mystifying remark that “I don’t suspect the name [Griffith] means much to anyone now, except the most avid film buffs.” Vanderhaeghe simply spends too long lecturing the reader here for my tastes, after the first 30 pages or so this thankfully ceases and Vanderhaeghe instead trusts his own considerable talents to communicate the period to us, organically, within the writing.

The 1923 chapters alternate with the 1873 chapters, which tell the tale of the eponymous Englishman’s Boy – a young man who has found service in the pay of an English big game hunter and who on that man’s death joins a party of men tracking the Indian horse thieves. The expedition heads North, over the border into Canada and into lands to which no law extends, the “Whoop-Up Country” as it was apparently known, populaced by Indians, traders, outlaws and half-breeds. From the interviews with McAdoo in 1923, and from the nature of the men on the expedition, we know that like the career of Harry Vincent this will not end well.

Unusually, both storylines are equally interesting and entertaining. Vincent’s search for McAdoo, their strained interviews, Chance’s dream of being the next (but greater) Griffith and of uniting America through the medium of film, this is fascinating stuff. So too is the expedition the Englishman’s boy joins, led by the vicious Hardwick and with its own cast of colourful yet credible hard men of the Old West. The expedition travels through harsh conditions and landscape, fording rivers, dealing with natives and its own internal tensions. Vanderhaeghe conjures up the vast and empty landscape, the small band crossing it, with real skill.

Part of what Vanderhaeghe is bringing out of course, with these two doomed enterprises (and of course we know that no great Western movie did create a new American myth), is the youth of America. The 1873 expedition, alone in all that emptiness, is just fifty years before the bustling new Hollywood of 1923 in which the rules of a new art are being created on an almost daily basis. 1953, when the novel is ostensibly written, is itself within the lifetime of a man who met and talked with a member of that expedition. The timeframes are brief, the transformation of America huge, it is a country with a past so recent it is almost yesterday.

For Damon Ira Chance, this lack of history is a challenge, a call to arms. America is too young, too new, to be a real nation. It lacks myth. It lacks a voice of its own. In cinema, the aptly named Chance sees an opportunity to change that. Here Chance speaks to Vincent of his first time seeing a movie, and his sudden understanding of the power of this new medium:

When I left that nickelodeon, I took something important away with me. The knowledge that the new century was going to be a century governed by images, that the spirit of the age would express itself in an endless train of images, one following upon the other with the speed of the steam locomotive that was the darling of the last century and symbolised all its aspirations.

America is not the only nation without yet a true identity of its own. Canada too is in question. It’s history equally short, it’s voice equally unfound and cinema is America’s answer, not Canada’s. Here Vincent explains to his best friend, Jewish head writer Rachel Gold, why he is working for Chance and why he believes in his project of the Great American Film:

‘… Immigrants can’t read English. Whitman is for the elite. But everybody goes to the movies. It’s the movies that have the chance of making everybody – the immigrant, the backwoods Kentuckian, the New York cab driver, maybe even the Ivy League Professor – all feel the same thing, feel what it means to be an American. The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are all very well, but constitutions make states, they don’t make a people.’
“And you’re a Canadian Harry. So why is a Canadian so concerned about teaching Americans how to be American?’
‘Because I chose this place. And I’m not the only one in Hollywood. America’s Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, was born in Toronto; Louis B. Mayer came from Saint John, New Brunswick; Mack Sennett was raised in Quebec. Canada isn’t a country at all, it’s simply geography. There’s no emotion there, not the kind that Chance is talking about. There are no Whitmans, no Twains, no Cranes. Half the English Canadians wish they were really English, and the other half wish they were Americans….’

In both countries, the frontier has been conquered, but the countries built on it remain unfinished. Vincent is sucked into Chance’s vision, wants to be part of it. He looks to Chance, his larger and more colourful acquaintance, as a man who can lend purpose to his own lack of direction. Chance sees Vincent as a fellow spirit, offers him the chance to write the new movie’s script, takes him into his confidence.

Both stories progress in many ways as one would expect, I will not go into plot here but it is hardly a spoiler to say that Vincent discovers that Chance may not be wholly rational, that his vision of America may not ultimately be one that Vincent will want to be part of, that the truth learnt from McAdoo may not be what Chance wishes it to be. Similarly, the expedition of which the Englishman’s boy is part is not one that is likely to return successfully with the guilty punished and the innocent spared. History at the end it is simply what happens, myth what we tell ourselves about it afterwards.

The Englishman’s Boy is not a flawless novel. The early infodumps, the depictions of Indians in the few scenes where they have their own narrative voice (one scene even implies an ability to see the future in dreams, though thankfully it does not make the truth of such a gift the only possible interpretation), the curious conceit that throughout the entire 1873 expedition nobody ever seems to think to ask the Englishman’s boy’s name and so he is referred to by that rather clumsy title for the entire novel, all this is problematic.

All the above problems are though but a small part of the novel. Vanderhaeghe’s feel for the collision of truth and dreams, for the bloody consequences of conviction, for the reality of a literally lawless country, all this is well captured. When violence erupts, it is convincing. Vanderhaeghe brings early Hollywood, it’s madness and vision and sheer sense of possibility, to life.

Above all, Vanderhaeghe displays a genuine gift for description. The detail of his internal locations is reminiscent of that in much 19th Century literature, sufficient to create an almost cinematic image. Where he truly shines though is with landscape, wilderness, which he brings impressively to life:

… they walked their horses on under an impassive sky dappled with handfuls of torn white cloud flying before the wind like cottonwood fluff. Men and horses blinking in and out of the eye of the sun, cloud shadows overtaking and ecompassing them and racing on, patches of darkness sailing over the billowing grass like blue boats running before a storm. Anetelope and mule-tail, prairie chickens and jack-rabbits, coyotes and fox and grouse started out of the sage, flashed across the emptiness at their approach.

The Englishman’s Boy is just over 400 pages long. In that length it packs a story of Hollywood hubris, an ill-fated expedition into the badlands of 19th Century Canada, an Indian massacre and a meditation on the nature of myth as a way of interpreting the messy past. It is, the problems mentioned above aside, extremely well written and is worth reading for the evocation of place and time alone. Vanderhaeghe was recommended to me by Kevin of www.kevinfromcanada.wordpress.com, and it is a recommendation I appreciate. I shall be ordering The Last Crossing, another of Vanderhaeghe’s thoughtful westerns, and look forward to reading it in due course.

The Englishman’s Boy

A Dunsanian Diptych

By way of follow-up to my post on Lord Dunsany’s Book of Wonder here, I have included  below two stories taken from that work.  Both I consider to be fine pieces which effectively demonstrate Dunsany’s style.  The second is perhaps my personal favourite from this collection. 

The Hoard of the Gibbelins

The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man. Their evil tower is joined to Terra Cognita, to the lands we know, by a bridge. Their hoard is beyond reason; avarice has no use for it; they have a separate cellar for emeralds and a separate cellar for sapphires; they have filled a hole with gold and dig it up when they need it. And the only use that is known for their ridiculous wealth is to attract to their larder a continual supply of food. In times of famine they have even been known to scatter rubies abroad, a little trail of them to some city of Man, and sure enough their larders would soon be full again.

Their tower stands on the other side of that river known to Homer—ho rhoos okeanoio, as he called it—which surrounds the world. And where the river is narrow and fordable the tower was built by the Gibbelins’ gluttonous sires, for they liked to see burglars rowing easily to their steps. Some nourishment that common soil has not the huge trees drained there with their colossal roots from both banks of the river.

There the Gibbelins lived and discreditably fed.

Alderic, Knight of the Order of the City and the Assault, hereditary Guardian of the King’s Peace of Mind, a man not unremembered among makers of myth, pondered so long upon the Gibbelins’ hoard that by now he deemed it his. Alas that I should say of so perilous a venture, undertaken at dead of night by a valourous man, that its motive was sheer avarice! Yet upon avarice only the Gibbelins relied to keep their larders full, and once in every hundred years sent spies into the cities of men to see how avarice did, and always the spies returned again to the tower saying that all was well.

It may be thought that, as the years went on and men came by fearful ends on that tower’s wall, fewer and fewer would come to the Gibbelins’ table: but the Gibbelins found otherwise.

Not in the folly and frivolity of his youth did Alderic come to the tower, but he studied carefully for several years the manner in which burglars met their doom when they went in search of the treasure that he considered his. In every case they had entered by the door.

He consulted those who gave advice on this quest; he noted every detail and cheerfully paid their fees, and determined to do nothing that they advised, for what were their clients now? No more than examples of the savoury art, and mere half- forgotten memories of a meal; and many, perhaps, no longer even that.

These were the requisites for the quest that these men used to advise: a horse, a boat, mail armour, and at least three men-at-arms. Some said, “Blow the horn at the tower door”; others said, “Do not touch it.”

Alderic thus decided: he would take no horse down to the river’s edge, he would not row along it in a boat, and he would go alone and by way of the Forest Unpassable.

How pass, you may say, the unpassable? This was his plan: there was a dragon he knew of who if peasants’ prayers are heeded deserved to die, not alone because of the number of maidens he cruelly slew, but because he was bad for the crops; he ravaged the very land and was the bane of a dukedom.

Now Alderic determined to go up against him. So he took horse and spear and pricked till he met the dragon, and the dragon came out against him breathing bitter smoke. And to him Alderic shouted, “Hath foul dragon ever slain true knight?” And well the dragon knew that this had never been, and he hung his head and was silent, for he was glutted with blood. “Then,” said the knight, “if thou would’st ever taste maiden’s blood again thou shalt be my trusty steed, and if not, by this spear there shall befall thee all that the troubadours tell of the dooms of thy breed.”

And the dragon did not open his ravening mouth, nor rush upon the knight, breathing out fire; for well he knew the fate of those that did these things, but he consented to the terms imposed, and swore to the knight to become his trusty steed.

It was on a saddle upon this dragon’s back that Alderic afterwards sailed above the unpassable forest, even above the tops of those measureless trees, children of wonder. But first he pondered that subtle plan of his which was more profound than merely to avoid all that had been done before; and he commanded a blacksmith, and the blacksmith made him a pickaxe.

Now there was great rejoicing at the rumour of Alderic’s quest, for all folk knew that he was a cautious man, and they deemed that he would succeed and enrich the world, and they rubbed their hands in the cities at the thought of largesse; and there was joy amoung all men in Alderic’s country, except perchance among the lenders of money, who feared they would soon be paid. And there was rejoicing also because men hoped that when the Gibbelins were robbed of their hoard, they would shatter their high-built bridge and break the golden chains that bound them to the world, and drift back, they and their tower, to the moon, from which they had come and to which they rightly belonged. There was little love for the Gibbelins, though all men envied their hoard.

So they all cheered, that day when he mounted his dragon, as though he was already a conqueror, and what pleased them more than the good that they hoped he would do to the world was that he scattered gold as he rode away; for he would not need it, he said, if he found the Gibbelins’ hoard, and he would not need it more if he smoked on the Gibbelins’ table.

When they heard that he had rejected the advice of those that gave it, some said that the knight was mad, and others said he was greater than those what gave the advice, but none appreciated the worth of his plan.

He reasoned thus: for centuries men had been well advised and had gone by the cleverest way, while the Gibbelins came to expect them to come by boat and to look for them at the door whenever their larder was empty, even as a man looketh for a snipe in a marsh; but how, said Alderic, if a snipe should sit in the top of a tree, and would men find him there? Assuredly never! So Alderic decided to swim the river and not to go by the door, but to pick his way into the tower through the stone. Moreover, it was in his mind to work below the level of the ocean, the river (as Homer knew) that girdles the world, so that as soon as he made a hole in the wall the water should pour in, confounding the Gibbelins, and flooding the cellars, rumoured to be twenty feet in depth, and therein he would dive for emeralds as a diver dives for pearls.

And on the day that I tell of he galloped away from his home scattering largesse of gold, as I have said, and passed through many kingdoms, the dragon snapping at maidens as he went, but being unable to eat them because of the bit in his mouth, and earning no gentler reward than a spurthrust where he was softest. And so they came to the swart arboreal precipice of the unpassable forest. The dragon rose at it with a rattle of wings. Many a farmer near the edge of the worlds saw him up there where yet the twilight lingered, a faint, black, wavering line; and mistaking him for a row of geese going inland from the ocean, went into their houses cheerily rubbing their hands and saying that winter was coming, and that we should soon have snow. Soon even there the twilight faded away, and when they descended at the edge of the world it was night and the moon was shining. Ocean, the ancient river, narrow and shallow there, flowed by and made no murmur. Whether the Gibbelins banqueted or whether they watched by the door, they also made no murmur. And Alderic dismounted and took his armour off, and saying one prayer to his lady, swam with his pickaxe. He did not part from his sword, for fear that he meet with a Gibbelin. Landed the other side, he began to work at once, and all went well with him. Nothing put out its head from any window, and all were lighted so that nothing within could see him in the dark. The blows of his pickaxe were dulled in the deep walls. All night he worked, no sound came to molest him, and at dawn the last rock swerved and tumbled inwards, and the river poured in after. Then Alderic took a stone, and went to the bottom step, and hurled the stone at the door; he heard the echoes roll into the tower, then he ran back and dived through the hole in the wall.

He was in the emerald-cellar. There was no light in the lofty vault above him, but, diving through twenty feet of water, he felt the floor all rough with emeralds, and open coffers full of them. By a faint ray of the moon he saw that the water was green with them, and easily filling a satchel, he rose again to the surface; and there were the Gibbelins waist-deep in the water, with torches in their hands! And, without saying a word, or even smiling, they neatly hanged him on the outer wall—and the tale is one of those that have not a happy ending.

Chu-Bu and Sheemish

It was the custom on Tuesdays in the temple of Chu-bu for the priests to enter at evening and chant, “There is none but Chu-bu.”

And all the people rejoiced and cried out, “There is none but Chu-bu.” And honey was offered to Chu-bu, and maize and fat. Thus was he magnified.

Chu-bu was an idol of some antiquity, as may be seen from the colour of the wood. He had been carved out of mahogany, and after he was carved he had been polished. Then they had set him up on the diorite pedestal with the brazier in front of it for burning spices and the flat gold plates for fat. Thus they worshipped Chu-bu.

He must have been there for over a hundred years when one day the priests came in with another idol into the temple of Chu-bu and set it up on a pedestal near Chu-bu’s and sang, “There is also Sheemish.”

And all the people rejoiced and cried out, “There is also Sheemish.”

Sheemish was palpably a modern idol, and although the wood was stained with a dark-red dye, you could see that he had only just been carved. And honey was offered to Sheemish as well as Chu-bu, and also maize and fat.

The fury of Chu-bu knew no time-limit: he was furious all that night, and next day he was furious still. The situation called for immediate miracles. To devastate the city with a pestilence and kill all his priests was scarcely within his power, therefore he wisely concentrated such divine powers as he had in commanding a little earthquake. “Thus,” thought Chu-bu, “will I reassert myself as the only god, and men shall spit upon Sheemish.”

Chu-bu willed it and willed it and still no earthquake came, when suddenly he was aware that the hated Sheemish was daring to attempt a miracle too. He ceased to busy himself about the earthquake and listened, or shall I say felt, for what Sheemish was thinking; for gods are aware of what passes in the mind by a sense that is other than any of our five. Sheemish was trying to make an earthquake too.

The new god’s motive was probably to assert himself. I doubt if Chu-bu understood or cared for his motive; it was sufficient for an idol already aflame with jealosy that his detestable rival was on the verge of a miracle. All the power of Chu-bu veered round at once and set dead against an earthquake, even a little one. It was thus in the temple of Chu-bu for some time, and then no earthquake came.

To be a god and to fail to achieve a miracle is a despairing sensation; it is as though among men one should determine upon a hearty sneeze and as though no sneeze should come; it is as though one should try to swim in heavy boots or remember a name that is utterly forgotten: all these pains were Sheemish’s.

And upon Tuesday the priests came in, and the people, and they did worship Chu-bu and offered fat to him, saying, “O Chu- bu who made everything,” and then the priests sang, “There is also Sheemish”; and Chu-bu was put to shame and spake not for three days.

Now there were holy birds in the temple of Chu-bu, and when the third day was come and the night thereof, it was as it were revealed to the mind of Chu-bu, that there was dirt upon the head of Sheemish.

And Chu-bu spake unto Sheemish as speak the gods, moving no lips nor yet disturbing the silence, saying, “There is dirt upon thy head, O Sheemish.” All night long he muttered again and again, “there is dirt upon Sheemish’s head.” And when it was dawn and voices were heard far off, Chu-bu became exultant with Earth’s awakening things, and cried out till the sun was high, “Dirt, dirt, dirt, upon the head of Sheemish,” and at noon he said, “So Sheemish would be a god.” Thus was Sheemish confounded.

And with Tuesday one came and washed his head with rose- water, and he was worshipped again when they sang “There is also Sheemish.” And yet was Chu-bu content, for he said, “The head of Sheemish has been defiled,” and again, “His head was defiled, it is enough.” And one evening lo! there was dirt on the head of Chu-bu also, and the thing was perceived of Sheemish.

It is not with the gods as it is with men. We are angry one with another and turn from our anger again, but the wrath of the gods is enduring. Chu-bu remembered and Sheemish did not forget. They spake as we do not speak, in silence yet heard of each other, nor were their thoughts as our thoughts. We should not judge them merely by human standards. All night long they spake and all night said these words only: “Dirty Chu-bu,” “Dirty Sheemish.” “Dirty Chu-bu,” “Dirty Sheemish,” all night long. Their wrath had not tired at dawn, and neither had wearied of his accusation. And gradually Chu-bu came to realize that he was nothing more than the equal of Sheemish. All gods are jealous, but this equality with the upstart Sheemish, a thing of painted wood a hundred years newer than Chu-bu, and this worship given to Sheemish in Chu-bu’s own temple, were particularly bitter. Chu-bu was jealous even for a god; and when Tuesday came again, the third day of Sheemish’s worship, Chu-bu could bear it no longer. He felt that his anger must be revealed at all costs, and he returned with all the vehemence of his will to achieving a little earthquake. The worshippers had just gone from his temple when Chu-bu settled his will to attain this miracle. Now and then his meditations were disturbed by that now familiar dictum, “Dirty Chu-bu,” but Chu- bu willed ferociously, not even stopping to say what he longed to say and had already said nine hundred times, and presently even these interruptions ceased.

They ceased because Sheemish had returned to a project that he had never definitely abandoned, the desire to assert himself and exalt himself over Chu-bu by performing a miracle, and the district being volcanic he had chosen a little earthquake as the miracle most easily accomplished by a small god.

Now an earthquake that is commanded by two gods has double the chance of fulfilment than when it is willed by one, and an incalculably greater chance than when two gods are pulling different ways; as, to take the case of older and greater gods, when the sun and the moon pull in the same direction we have the biggest tides.

Chu-bu knew nothing of the theory of tides, and was too much occupied with his miracle to notice what Sheemish was doing. And suddenly the miracle was an accomplished thing.

It was a very local earthquake, for there are other gods than Chu-bu or even Sheemish, and it was only a little one as the gods had willed, but it loosened some monoliths in a colonnade that supported one side of the temple and the whole of one wall fell in, and the low huts of the people of that city were shaken a little and some of their doors were jammed so that they would not open; it was enough, and for a moment it seemed that it was all; neither Chu-bu nor Sheemish commanded there should be more, but they had set in motion an old law older than Chu-bu, the law of gravity that that colonnade had held back for a hundred years, and the temple of Chu-bu quivered and then stood still, swayed once and was overthrown, on the heads of Chu-bu and Sheemish.

No one rebuilt it, for nobody dared to near such terrible gods. Some said that Chu-bu wrought the miracle, but some said Sheemish, and thereof schism was born. The weakly amiable, alarmed by the bitterness of rival sects, sought compromise and said that both had wrought it, but no one guessed the truth that the thing was done in rivalry.

And a saying arose, and both sects held this belief in common, that whoso toucheth Chu-bu shall die or whoso looketh upon Sheemish.

That is how Chu-bu came into my possession when I travelled once beyond the hills of Ting. I found him in the fallen temple of Chu-bu with his hands and toes sticking up out of the rubbish, lying upon his back, and in that attitude just as I found him I keep him to this day on my mantlepiece, as he is less liable to be upset that way. Sheemish was broken, so I left him where he was.

And there is something so helpless about Chu-bu with his fat hands stuck up in the air that sometimes I am moved out of compassion to bow down to him and pray, saying, “O Chu-bu, thou that made everything, help thy servant.”

Chu-bu cannot do much, though once I am sure that at a game of bridge he sent me the ace of trumps after I had not held a card worth having for the whole of the evening. And chance alone could have done as much as that for me. But I do not tell this to Chu-bu.