What do I mean by entire output, exactly?
I thought this over as I hunted around for books to photograph. Last month’s blog post called for a few book covers.
Stevenson is represented in the margins of every blog post. No need to
re-photograph Weir of Hermiston for
that.
When it came to Raymond Chandler and Robert
B. Parker, I was quite specific in seeking out tomes. My talk on Sir John
Mortimer’s creation of the world-weary barrister, Rumpole, centred on a
particular tale.
There’s a shelf of le Carré books, minus A Legacy of Spies. That particular file
must be located in another part of the registry. Can’t see it anywhere.
Well,
hunting for a belated prequel/sequel set me to thinking about an author’s
output.
What is it? Output.
Essentially, it’s a collection of works
written by a dead person. Chandler, Parker, Mortimer, and le Carré have death in
common. Okay, we all have that. But this is a matter of putting certain writers
into the past tense. Any new books by those writers will be gently compiled, or
otherwise completed – flat-out written by other writers.
Yes, in the case of a living author you can
say I’ve read ’em all. In this loose category,
output, we must include the living as
well as the dead. But do we include all of the books? The short stories?
Essays? Collected shopping lists? Magazine articles? Non-fiction work? Letters
to the editor of a prominent national newspaper?
Is there such a thing as a prominent
national newspaper? How papery is the digital version of a newspaper? And how
national? If it is digital, it is international. Beamed out into the ether,
why, it is galactic whether received by aliens or not.
We
noticed that you are alien, and using an ad-blocker.
But that is a diversion. I’ve read one
Robert B. Parker book: the book started by Raymond Chandler. I don’t feel like
tackling the rest of Parker’s stories. The Parker output is put out, and pouts.
I read le Carré’s revisitation book, A Legacy of Spies, to see how he filled
in some obvious plot blanks. Not holes. Just things we weren’t told originally.
And I read it while le Carré was alive. There are a few of his books still to
tackle.
Will I read them all? I may get around to
all of his espionage-themed books once I buy them. But I vividly recall shutting
down very quickly as a reader when trying to wade through The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. It’s le Carré’s affair novel, his divorce book, and it shows.
I didn’t get far into the story. It takes a
lot, a LOT, for a book to stop me in its tracks. I quickly gained the
impression that I was reading a do-nothing book in which nasty characters
collide with each other, only to flop around on the floor.
Pudding, fallen from the hands of someone who
wanted fish and chips. You could save the pudding, so that it doesn’t flop
around on the floor. But what is the point of that? You wanted fish and chips.
That’s why you crossed the street to try the chip shop’s wares.
Reputation. You put out two murder mysteries
starring a genteel civil servant named George Smiley. This Smiley character has
a surname I suspect le Carré scubaconsciously lifted from a Colonel in the
Special Operations Executive. Real and fictional Smiley types share an OBE.
George Smiley the civil servant. Not a spy,
or a spymaster. He’d hesitate to admit to a fellow intelligence officer that
he, too, is an intelligence officer. In several books, le Carré seems hell-bent
on describing Smiley as every character from The Wind in the Willows.
The reputation of the author is cemented
with that third book: The Spy Who Came in
from the Cold. That’s it. He’s an espionage writer. This continues with
book four. And book five. Then it is time, once more, to head to the chip shop
for fish and chips. Ah, here’s the pudding. That’s no good.
Now that le Carré is gone, I have the
opporchancity to read his entire output. Catch up on the last few novels he
wrote. I’m dodging that earlier one. The
Naïve and Sentimental Lover. With the best will in the world, I think that
one should remain unread. The author quickly returned to proper intrigue with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In doing so,
he went back to the reputation he cemented – and he painstakingly covered it in
gold leaf.
There is nothing proper about intrigue, and
you’ll still find nasty characters colliding with each other in his stories. So
I’ll buy the last few espionage tales I didn’t quite get around to. And I’ll
read them. Then I can say I’ve read all of his spy novels.
If
they are spy books. They are easy enough to describe as condition-of-England novels in which a vampiric English upper-class
cabal goes around selling out its more-dispensable people to shady notions of
ethics and morality that are neither ethical nor moral – merely shady and
notional under the thin blanket of being national.
Graham Greene writes about betrayal. Betrayal
as a theme runs through Greene’s work as clearly and consistently as the words Brighton Rock run through a stick of
Brighton Rock. Book after book, betrayal is Graham Greene’s thing. It is the
whole thing, cut in one piece, from a single sheet of literary cloth.
In le Carré’s case, he uses betrayal,
thematically, as a diffuse jumping-off point into examining a patchwork quilt of
hypocrisy, double-dealing, and the pettiness of grand aims backed by low ways
and means. Snobbery with violence. Cosh
and carry.
Where do you start, if you are going to read
the output? At the beginning. I’ll avoid the plotting here. A character puts in
an appearance in the first book, Call for
the Dead. We see several familiar characters return in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
I had a question about this.
Eventually we reach Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, start of a loose trilogy within the
overall Wagnerian cycle. Events in this book force up a point concerning The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I had
a question about that, too.
At a distance of many years, le Carré hands
us a prequelish sequelish revisitation of a book – A Legacy of Spies. He addresses plot-based questions from previous
works, and all is right with the cynicism in his world. If you are going to
start anywhere with the output, A Legacy
of Spies is absitively posolutely NOT the place to begin.
With certain authors, you can dive right in
and read the books in any old order. Not so with le Carré. His stories concerning
Smiley are in a set pattern. I’d go further. Even the non-Smiley stories should
be read in sequence. Tackle all the books in order of publication for a sense
of atmosphere, Smiley-based or not. (Omit one book entirely. There. I saved you
the bother.)
Order of publication? That’s trickier with
C.S. Lewis and the land of Narnia. After all this time, wars are still fought
on the plains of Narnia over the order in which to read the stories. My advice
on that score is to read them in the order that you found them in. I did.
Lewis wrote the prequel story, The Magician’s Nephew, close to the end
of the whole cycle – making it a prequel his initial audience couldn’t absorb
in any other way on first reading. I, too, read that book close to the end.
This was sheer coincidence, Jeeves. Never did me any harm. Lewis can be read
that way. The three volumes of The Lord
of the Rings can’t be.
Output. I’ve read Tolkien’s three tomes.
Never had an inclination to read The
Hobbit or that ill-advised Marillion
biography he churned out. I’d read Ian Fleming’s Bond books slightly out of sequence…
Those were ordered through a bookshop, and
the first to arrive was out of place. But I soon corrected that course. With
Adam Hall’s Quiller stories, I read
the first book first and the last book last – but everything else was a bit of
a jumble. I based my reading on whatever was on sale in charity shops, until
the last few missing tomes could only be located online.
Rumpole
I read in order. That doesn’t quite match the TV output. Usually, Sir John
Mortimer would sneak an extra little story into the books – one that wouldn’t
have made the running as a candidate for a one-hour TV slot.
So much for the collected books. As for
shopping lists, articles, and letters…
A billion years ago, le Carré arm-wrestled
Salman Rushdie into a froth when they exchanged different viewpoints across the
bows of a national newspaper. The area reserved for letters sat near the back
of the periodical, so, perhaps that should be the stern. And very stern they were, too.
I am in no great rush to read Rushdie. The
one-star reviews for The Satanic Verses
are all kinds of livid. This brings
up the point that I am wary of reviews in the sense that I may accidentally
discover how Anna Karenina ends. Fear
not. That was ruined for me by an introduction to a wildly different book that
warned of Tolstoy spoilers in the most half-arsed way possible.
No, I won’t tell you which one.
For some, the correct order of reading for
the tales about Narnia is…all of the books except for very near the end of The Last Battle. Wars are still fought
in Narnia’s far-flung reaches over whether or not Susan is still a friend of
Narnia, and what that all means at the very very very very last-gasp end of the
cycle.
What is the output? An author writes sixty
books in a series and everyone agrees book three was a let-down only redeemed
by the rapid fix of many mistakes in book fourteen. That was the master-plan
all along, right? Wrong. Everyone has off-days. Some writers have fuck-off days.
An author discovers success with a book,
and, gradually, the sap rises through the Writerly tree until there is a series
of books. A franchise. Eventually the author can’t cut it no more. People go to
read and re-read the work. That fabled output. But they stop short of the shaky
tome no one likes to mention.
Such a shame that there is only one movie
about The Matrix. What would a sequel
have looked like? Sadly, we’ll never know. As for Highlander, in cinematic terms…there
can be only one.
Who can forget the Rambo trilogy? First Blood,
Rambo, and Rambo: Last Blood.
That, inevitably, brings us to THE STAR
WARS. Let us draw a veil upon this scene. The film tie-in can throw up the
odd quirk…
If you want all of the output connected to a
story, can you, should you, pursue it? The movie CAPRICORN ONE, for example, has two novelisations – one for each
side of the Atlantic. Movie wheeling and movie dealing at its haziest.
Once you throw in movies and comic books,
you open Pandora’s Fridge and find
all the cool boxes. Tinker Tailor Soldier
Spy is available as the original book, the TV version with Bernard Hepton
in a supporting role, the radio version with Bernard Hepton as Smiley himself, a
second BBC radio production as part of an overall series about Smiley, the (condensed
and sterilised) movie version with Gary Oldman…I’m waiting for the opera, the
comic book, and the webisodes.
Is the author’s output limited to the books?
For simplicity, always. And for reasons of complexity, never. Of all the
authors I’ve read, how much of their output have I read? Can I point to a
writer and say I’ve read ’em all…
I’m forced to stop and think about
biographies with extracts from letters. But I’m not forced to stop too long.
There’s one place where you can pick up a copy of Emily Brontë’s second novel –
in the dream library of Neil Gaiman’s comic book series, The Sandman. Every story ever is there in the library, whether published
or not. Whether written in the author’s lifetime or not.
This is why Neil is such a furious
scribbler. He’s trying to keep as many of his own books off those dream shelves
as he can, by sending them out into the physical world instead.
I haven’t mentioned the impossible task of
reading all of an author’s books when that author goes by many different labels
– not a fraction of them known to the general public. For that way, madness
lies.
The simplest task is to read the book by the
author who only wrote one novel. Even so, what is the output? A few short
stories, besides. Scattered letters, collected by scholars. The fragment of a
second novel. A rough guide to the next one in a series.
Unpublished. Published. Destroyed. Saved.
Franz Kafka left his unpublished works in the hands of Max Brod, with the
instruction that these documents were to be destroyed on Kafka’s death. Brod
refused when the time came, and now we have Kafa’s “lost” output to stare at.
Yes. Output is hazy when it isn’t there at
all. I can reach out to my shelf and read of Jekyll and of Hyde, but I can’t
read the original version – not if we take Stevenson at his word that he threw
the manuscript into the fire. I, myself – quite rightly – shredded an entire
document, just to be shot of an appalling construction of a non-tale.
Not a file left. This was on a different
computer system, and would be hard to retrieve even if it still existed. So
what is an author’s output? Stories as-yet-unwritten? Adaptations. Fragments.
Ghostly volumes, sitting in Dream’s fanciful library?
Sir John Mortimer was tasked with stepping
in and “fixing” Ray Bradbury’s work on the script for Something Wicked This Way Comes. Unfathomable movie decision, but
there it is. Disney wanted a cute scary movie that wasn’t too cute and couldn’t
be too scary.
Does a movie adaptation by grand committee
destroy the original story? The original story is still there on the
bookshelves, after all. Turning to Ray Bradbury, we find in his work another
difficult area in trying to get at the output: transatlantic publishing.
It’s CAPRICORN
ONE all over again. That movie serves as The Martian Chronicles without – spoiler alert – actually going to
Mars. Spoiler spoiler alert – the
spoiler wasn’t much of a spoiler.
CAPRICORN
ONE spews up a great idea. What if the Mars landing is faked? Holes in the
plot? There are one or two hundred. The revelation that the movie spawned two
movie tie-ins, one by Ken Follett and the other by Ron Goulart, reminded me of
Ray Bradbury’s short story output. Ah, the output. Somewhere over the ocean, a
few stories fell into the mist-wreathed waters…
The
Illustrated Man is part of Ray’s output. I’ve read it. Seen the movie. I am
about to read the short stories again. For transatlantic reasons of the plot,
this book was and is published with different short stories in it – depending
where in the world you are.
I have a copy with yarn blah-de-blah missing and tale doodle-ee-doo
added. Yes, I’d characterise Ray as a writer of yarns and tales. Not
necessarily science fiction. Another
writer with transatlantic difficulties on the matter of output had a scathing
view of Science Fiction.
We return to Raymond Chandler for this one.
He had a go at the style, for laughs. “I cocked the timejector in secondary and
waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels.”
And so it goes.
Yes, I’ve read The Long Good-Bye. More than once. Chandler lost a little focus in
the writing of it, and accidentally changed the colour of a character’s hair
along the way. Editors on one side of the ocean caught this. They also excised
the miniature mystery over a very important suitcase.
But away from America, on this side of the
ocean, the suitcase mystery remains part of the book. It is a mystery that
isn’t followed. There’s no twist to it. Any clues inside the suitcase go
missing in the general plot. Chandler sets up part of a story and then abandons
it.
To this day, I still wonder what was in that
case. American readers don’t wonder at all.
The revolving door of stories featured in
different editions of The Illustrated
Man. A suitcase that may or may not appear in your copy of The Long Good-Bye. Are you prepared to
track down the comic book adaptation of the movie of the opera of the pizza of
the book?
Will you discover, many years later, that a
revised version of the sacred text was uncovered at an archaeological dig deep
in the forests of Pern? Are you keen on the Michelin
Restaurant Guide to the Inns and Taverns of Mordor…
What is the output? It is whatever you find
and in that inexact order. I’ve read ’em all, and then I’ve gone on to read
some more. Conclusion? Even I haven’t read all of my own work. Many of my
handwritten notes are illegible.
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