Come to this blog freely, go
safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring.
Regularly, I place tree-based data-storage
devices on tree-based data-storage devices. Paper books on wooden shelves.
Books come in and must be stored somewhere.
I know,
yes, I know. Books come in and books don’t go out, and there’s always a
Bookpocalypse looming. New books must be read. Yet…
Old books can be read again.
And
so…I turned, once more, to Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula. What is a classic? Stoker’s tale is certainly that, but
what’s the definition? We might as well go with Alan Bennett’s remark: a book everyone is assumed to have read and
often thinks they have.
Have I read this classic work or…did I only
watch the move/TV adaptation? In watching an adaptation, would I be shocked and
surprised, on reading the book, to discover that diabolical liberties had been taken?
Classics I’ve read. Time for a very brief list
in no particular order. Strong Poison.
Tom Sawyer. Jane Eyre. Treasure Island.
Wuthering Heights. Dracula. Frankenstein.
Adaptations, flattened to fit a two-hour
movie-slot, are always going to be patchy. Better to go for lengthier TV
adaptations, in which fewer diabolical liberties are taken. If you have a
dedicated reading-space, and coffee, then stick with the originals if you can’t
bear to see a much-loved classic knifed from all directions.
Curl up with a good book, and pretend the awful
motion-picture does not exist. (Round up the usual suspects. You know the
drill.)
Dracula
opens with a lawyer, Jonathan Harker, travelling to Count Dracula’s quaint home
to assist in legal matters when it comes to moving house. Spoiler. Oh, and the
Count is a vampire.
When we leave the castle behind, things
don’t look too good for the abandoned lawyer. London is Dracula’s target, and
Stoker fills the text with characters. Fictional London, aye, and Fictional
Whitby, are both fair teeming with characters.
Dracula’s thirst for blood is matched by the
workman’s thirst for alcohol, judging by the many friendly bribes that aid the
vampire hunters in their investigations.
In the opening of this tale, at the castle,
in the severe vampiric wilderness, there are precious few characters. Indeed,
it is Harker’s realisation that the Count’s home is empty of servants that
raises more and more suspicion in his fevered mind.
Harker is left to the lack of mercy of
Dracula’s three undead minions. Few other characters visit the castle. Over in
the pub-filled stamping-ground of humanity, Stoker throws characters our way
thick and fast.
Here lies the problem of dealing with
adaptations of the tale. Many characters are many characters too many. In the book,
there’s space for these choir-like assemblies of voices and their different
methods of conveying story. Hardly anything truly happens directly in Dracula…
We are given a collection of notes. Letters.
Diaries. Newspaper articles. Stoker warns us of the existence of many receipts
and bills of lading and railway timetables, but he doesn’t bog us down in
those.
The novel is written, pencilled in, penned,
typed up, noted in shorthand, and gathered at the edges by means of newspaper
stories. Characters frantically chronicle that morning’s events while on the
afternoon train to the next vampire hunter meeting, which, itself, will be
noted in print much later.
Only with Doctor Seward and his phonograph
in action do we occasionally stumble upon an event that is happening while his
recording device is in motion.
That brings me to his patient: R.M. Renfield.
Our lost lawyer friend, Mr Harker, arranged Dracula’s purchase of a property
right next to Doctor Seward’s very Victorian asylum. Dracula’s new temporary
abode isn’t spooky enough by itself. His new lair needs Edward Gorey levels of lunacy on neighbouring soil.
It isn’t long before Dracula is at the asylum
window, having late-night chats with Mr Renfield. They share an interest in
blood. There’s a much-used method running through adaptations, to save screen-time,
of condensing characters into one role…
For some reason, it is fated to Renfield,
across adaptations, to merge with the character of Jonathan Harker. Renfield/Harker
is often the first condensed casualty in a Dracula
adaptation. It seems that writers are hell-bent on turning the patient into the
lawyer.
The lawyer is mobile. Renfield, however, is
an inmate who engages in brief bursts of movement when he escapes the confines
of his cell. It’s a shame that he’s the first of many elements to go, as…
He’s vital to the plot.
In
movies, Renfield can come across as a minor character. In the book, though,
he’s significant. For a novel named Dracula,
we find Dracula himself conspicuous by his absence. Stoker wisely has Dracula
conspiring offstage for much of the action.
Various unrelated newspaper accounts track
Dracula’s bursts of activity across the map of London. When he appears in
person, he takes the centre of the stage.
Bram Stoker, should you look him up, would
be remembered chiefly as a figure of the theatre had he not written Dracula. He kept one eye on adapting his
story to the stage, after all. (And his theatrical version predated the book’s
publication by the barest whisper of a vampiric sigh.)
So don’t be surprised by the Victorian
theatricality of a Victorian novel penned by a theatrical fellow. Stoker was
not just any theatre-lover, but assistant to noted actor Sir Henry Irving. Much
has been made of Dracula’s habits and their alignment with the temperament and
physicality of Sir Henry.
Adaptations sent me to the source, and I
found I much-preferred the source. Dracula
wasn’t the first vampire story, and it certainly wasn’t ever going to be the
last. Stoker threw an undead quote into the book by mentioning the poem Lenore, so we see vampiric roots from an
earlier time appearing in the novel itself.
And it is to poetry that we’d look, in
search of early vampire tales that were written down. Before that, as usual, to
stave off the mystery of the night, you’d be huddled around a campfire trying
to keep people entertained.
If that campsite happened to be the Villa
Deodati at Lake Geneva, and you knew Byron or Shelley, then the stories told
would chill the very marrow of your bones. From that rain-lashed place, two
classic works emerged.
We’ll call one Frankenstein. And, just like the later Dracula, this tale faces knives from all directions when being
adapted. For reasons of cheapness, a trip into the icy wastes at the novel’s
end is a trip too far for most movie budgets. That chill journey is often
replaced by a lab explosion.
The other spooky story from out of Lake
Geneva, scribbled by John Polidori, is titled The Vampyre. Today we’d call it highly literary revenge-porn
against Lord Byron. The Villa Deodati was the prototype of an internet forum
where a teenager could publish her grave-robbing fan-fic without fear of
cancellation.
A
forum like that always has an edgy character in there, floating on the periphery
while aiming barbed taunts at the centre, and that’s pretty much Polidori’s
role in the literary space.
Polidori gave us the aristocratic vampire
preying on young women. Lord Ruthven, the vampire, or vampyre, is based on a man who had little time for the undead – Byron,
though there’s a cottage industry out there trying to convince us of his own
vampirism. But this blog post is about Count Dracula and not Lord Byron, and I
fear we must move on before sunrise surprises us.
In short, it’s a good while after The Vampyre before we reach Dracula, by way of Varney the Vampire and other literary routes most quaint and
curious. For completeness, we should add alternative titles to the well-known
tales…
Frankenstein
is all about The Modern Prometheus. Varney’s
vampiric saga also travels under the guise of The Feast of Blood, and a last-minute change to Dracula deprives us of the story named The Un-Dead.
If we are to believe the notion that Lord
Byron was (and remains to this day) a real-life vampire, then we must go along
with the awkward literary notion that Byron wrote everything. He penned The
Vampyre, scribbled Frankenstein, created
Sherlock, and wrote up his exploits as Varney…
And
then “in retirement” Byron went on to write Dracula,
The Railway Children, 1984, The Phantom Menace, several episodes of
the TV soap EastEnders, and, in a
failed attempt at dispelling the mythology, this very blog post.
My point, in detouring through this
graveyard and that cobbled street, is to consider Dracula against the backdrop of a blood-red sky as we approach the
setting of the sun. There’s before Stoker’s novel and after…
Before, you certainly had the aristocratic
vampire in fiction. After, you had a legion of aristocratic vampires. You can
hardly move through fiction without encountering Count Orlok (Dracula, hiding
from copyright law), Countess Dracula, Count Yorga, or every edgy aristocratic
vampire character from the roleplaying game Vampire:
The Masquerade.
As to that last, I fervently avoided the
aristocratic cliché when playing the game. When you think of roleplaying games
and aristocratic vampires, you are led in the direction of Dungeons & Dragons and D&D’s
very own Dracula photocopy, Count Strahd von Zarovich, ruler of Barovia. (Curiously, Dungeons & Dragons emerged from the American Lake Geneva. Coincidence? Byron wrote the Monster Manual, obviously.)
Your mileage in subverting vampiric cliché
in your own fiction will vary – for the dead ride quickly – but, damn it, over
in the fantasy world of D&D, the Hammer Horror treatment comes across as
a bite refreshing…
Moving swiftly on…
I revisited Dracula. It is a dramatic telling of Johnny Foreigner invading
London. You can see the tabloid headlines today…
EASTERN EUROPEAN
CRIME LORD AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT CORRUPTS ENGLISH ROSE…AND MILKS OUR BENEFIT
SYSTEM. HE’S EXPLOITING THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE AND HAVING A LAUGH WHILE
ABOUT IT.
Of note, I once stepped onto Ellis Island
and straight into the viewing of a play on illegal immigrant Bela Lugosi’s
acceptance into America. On his side, he wasn’t an actual vampire. And, today,
if a vampire like Lord Byron came out of “retirement” and promised to use his
vast and secret fortune to fund his own happy meals from out of a blood bank,
would we use vampire as a term of
abuse?
We’re human. Of course we would. (I have to
say we’re human. This camouflages the fact that the blog post was written by
Lord Byron, and is fresh to print from his holiday hideaway retirement cottage in Transylvania. Cottage. Castle. The terms are
interchangeable.)
There’s so much lore around the creation of Dracula, and of Frankenstein before it, that the best thing to do is ignore all the
psychobabble and delve straight into the words. Visit these books. Revisit
these books. Judge for yourselves.
I like Dracula
for the framing of the story. Readers are invited to piece together the narrative
as the clues come in. It’s a Victorian detective piece, and you are forgiven if
you end up wondering where Sherlock Holmes is in all this.
Stoker’s novel is out of copyright, and the Dracula/Holmes crossover is not the
original idea it once was. There’s a well-worn path from Baker Street to Castle
Dracula, now. I have at least one comic book adaptation on the shelves, around
here, somewhere.
From time to time, I revisit works. Some
books are worth reading again, even though unread books glare at me as I pass
them by to remove the stake from Stoker’s novel one more time. In literary
terms, Dracula is bound to outlive
all of us. The book is still in print to this day, and has taken on an Un-Life
all of its own. It’s better for a classic to be an Un-Dead book than an unread one.
Sunday, 2 January 2022
BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA…AGAIN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.
Sunday, 4 April 2021
ON READING AN AUTHOR’S ENTIRE OUTPUT: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.
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.
Saturday, 6 March 2021
READING A BOOK THAT CAN’T POSSIBLY LIVE UP TO EXPECTATION: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.
Blast from the past.
…standing in the shadow of the Stevenson
house, I hadn’t read Weir of Hermiston. The book has an
awesome reputation. From the man who gave us Treasure Island, came this
– his greatest novel. He dropped dead after writing chapter nine.
How can that be his greatest book? It’s unfinished. Hell,
with nine chapters – it’s barely started. I refused to read it until recently.
When I did, I had to agree with the view that it was his most accomplished
work. I was saddened that he didn’t live to write the best jail-break scene in
literature. All in the name of character, and in the service of the story.
Have I altered my view? Here
is a book. It is the author’s finest work. An unfinished tale. There are enough
notes from posterity to indicate how the book would’ve gone. How can such a non-book
be the greatest effort from the author’s output?
No, I haven’t altered my view. That is still
his finest tale.
I began thinking about other stories.
No. I am always thinking about stories.
Science fiction stories, for example. Stories in which crowds of people go into
supermarkets to purchase food. Well, tales like that seem like science fiction,
now, but one day those ideas will shift from fiction to fact.
Robert B. Parker took a fragment of a
Raymond Chandler story and bolted his own tale onto proceedings. The original
proceedings were rather slim. If you are presented with the first few chapters
of a mystery story, how much of the mystery is bolted on to the scene-setting?
Chandler reached every writer’s ultimate
deadline and died. He left behind a few pages of a story that’s out there under
his label, with a big old Robert B.
Parker rubber stamp across it. Poodle
Springs was never going to be a proper Raymond Chandler detective story
featuring Philip Marlowe.
It couldn’t possibly live up to the expectation. I’d never heard of Robert B. Parker, so I’d never read Robert B. Parker. Could he approach that world of Chandler’s with anything like a decent level of similarity?
*
I don’t mean a photocopy of Chandler’s
style. Or a smudged photocopy of Chandler’s world-view. If you are looking for
the continuation of a series based on a deceased author’s scribbled/typewritten
notes, I think you are looking for an impressionist watercolour painting. At
best. Yes, at very best. Not a digital scan.
A crisp photocopy of a writer’s work comes
across as dry and airless in tone. Use better toner. But who is Philip Marlowe,
and where does he begin and end? There are many false starts and finishes to
the character.
Chandler created his detective with one eye
on Arthurian literature. You don’t have to look far to see that. One of the
books is called The Lady in the Lake,
after all. Marlowe started off as characters in short stories. Detectives with
different names.
When it came time to write full novels,
Chandler strip-mined his short stories and stitched them together into books.
Three books in, Chandler wrote a novel that didn’t depend on
previously-published tales.
So…
Detective Philip Marlowe had a few false
starts before he started. At the other end of the line, he had a few false
trails leading to the end. You are better off reading the novels before tackling
the short stories.
The books open with The Big Sleep and end with The
Long Good-Bye. We must gloss over Playback,
which came out after The Long Good-Bye.
Philip Marlowe rises fully-formed from the sea in The Big Sleep and he walks off into the sunset, or along Sunset, in
The Long Good-Bye. That’s all you
need to know.
Rather, it’s all we need concern ourselves
with. No short story talk, and nothing about the fiction after a very lengthy
farewell.
The
Big Sleep is a great opener for
Chandler’s detective, and The Long Good-Bye
is the ideal finish. Playback is from
an unfilmed script dating to a decade before, and sits – quite rightly – off to
the side when you are reading it.
Chandler’s first novel leads to more
stitching of short stories and further adventures for the weary detective
character of Marlowe in the second book. And The Long Good-Bye closes the series with its hyphenated title.
Chandler was a writer who hyphenated to-morrow,
and I suspect the title layout was at his snippy insistence.
After The
Long Good-Bye, does Playback live up to expectation? Not really. Playback is the diving board from which Poodle Springs springs. There’s even
less chance of Poodle Springs living
up to expectation, given that jumping-off point.
I read the springy book anyway.
Why? I
wanted to see where Raymond Chandler ended and where Robert B. Parker began.
But I am not writing this post to talk about Raymond Chandler. I am here to
rake over the idea of reading a book that can’t
possibly live up to expectation.
An author scribbles away. The author dies.
Another book is torn from the deceased scribe’s iron fingers. The death-grip
loosens, and a publishing company makes a little cash. Was that a crime? The
court of public opinion determines the verdict.
Suppose there’s another criminal act? The
author, in the library, with the fountain pen. What happens when an author
writes a story in a series and…that story couldn’t possibly live up to
expectation?
The reader has to read this book. It is part
of the series. That is the law. Expectation be damned.
Sir John Mortimer’s comedic/dramatic
creation of a lawyer in search of justice, Rumpole
of the Bailey, provides an example of reading a book that can’t possibly
live up to expectation. Everyone in Rumpole’s life is long-suffering.
Especially Rumpole himself.
He moves over the hallowed ground of the Old
Bailey, and attempts to gain a not guilty
verdict on behalf of an entire family of long-suffering villains. Insufferable
long-suffering judges settle like dust into long-suffering courts and put up
with Rumpole’s caustic long-suffered comments.
Rumpole never
enters a plea of guilty. (Well, that’s not strictly
true.) And Rumpole always appears for
the defence – never for the prosecution. (Well, that’s not strictly true, either.) As sure as night follows day, the Rumpole stories hand us many constants
in the Old Bailey Hack’s life.
He drinks cheap wine charitably referred to
as plonk. Uncharitably, in unveiled
references, the wine is akin to sewage. Rumpole quotes a lot. He bluffs, he
blusters, and he takes to court as others take to the stage.
Rumpole’s long-suffering wife Hilda is
referred to in long-suffered style as She
Who Must Be Obeyed, a descriptor only half-jokingly lifted from H. Rider Haggard.
Mortimer gives us Rumpole’s world and gives us that world repeatedly.
Familiarity breeds contempt of court, and there’s much fun in establishing the
familiar only to pull the rug from under it.
There’s one familiar item in Rumpole’s bag
of tricks that never went anywhere. This was the story of an early case, The Penge Bungalow Murders. Often
referenced and used as an in-joke, the Penge case offered little to go on
beyond the title.
Rumpole was a young legal beagle, and
concluded the case alone and without a leader. He won a spectacular success.
After many stories, and after the long-running television series ended, the
author went to the library with the fountain pen, intent on committing a crime.
The crime of giving us a book about The Penge Bungalow Murders. This is the
literary felony of potentially killing your own franchise. The disaster of
writing a prequel at odds with everything that followed on.
Scene. The time is now. Whenever now is. Rumpole raises the topic of The Penge Bungalow Murders one more
time. But this time, Rumpole tells the tale. It is the story of a young lawyer
who is thrown in at the deep end of a murder case when his boss drops out of
proceedings.
And, given the setting, it is a murder case
with incredibly high stakes. The death penalty is still in place. What do we
know, as readers? Rumpole can’t start the story in charge of the legal brief.
But he must take over. And he is going to win. Where is the suspense, then? What
is the point of this tale, except, perhaps, to give us a view of Young Rumpole in action?
The added complication is that Rumpole meets
Hilda in this story. Yes, we know how that ends. He must marry She Who Must Be Obeyed. This isn’t
wildly speculative internet fiction or an alternative comic book universe,
after all.
Basic story building blocks are already
carved into the landscape of the past and do not have to be shunted in place.
Rather, they need merely be unveiled with a degree of ceremony. A degree of
certainty.
So why the hell write this? Why the hell
read it?
For the inevitable journey around familiar
landmarks. The hype around the case counts against it. This story cannot live
up to expectation. There is a sense of inevitability about the plotting. We
need a murder. And a victim. The suspect. A sense of injustice. High stakes.
And the wooing of Hilda. Or is it the wooing of Rumpole by Hilda? You decide.
Yes, this is a prequel. It is a very bad
place to start reading about Horace Rumpole. The effect, the joke, only works
after repeated exposure to mentions of the case in all the other stories. You
shouldn’t read The Long Good-Bye
first if you want to hear about Philip Marlowe, private
detective/knight-at-arms.
How heavily does continuity feature in a
story of this type? Long-delayed prequel. A book people frothed to read, yet
were afraid the writer would publish. Continuity in Mortimer’s stories wasn’t a
very strong point to begin with.
Characters are frozen in amber in the Rumpole tales. They are born, they live,
and they keep on going as the years pass by. With stories set now, now
is a very loose term. Rumpole’s date of birth is a matter for major miscalculation.
When did he buy his first legally-required white wig? Did he marry Hilda during
the Second World War or after? When did the murders occur in that bungalow in
Penge? Is Rumpole a vampire, given that he seems to be there in the same
offices and same courts, decade in, decade out?
There’s another character who qualifies for
this semi-eternal blurriness over the timeline, and that’s John le Carré’s Cold
War operator, George Smiley. We’ll return to him in short order.
Details flutter out of Mortimer’s legal
stories, giving glimpses of those murders in the bungalow and Rumpole’s
involvement in the trial. When Mortimer finally hands us a murder case Rumpole HAS TO SOLVE, and solve ALONE, can the story possibly live up to
the expectation?
Rumpole’s world itself is a world packed
with inconsistencies, told over many years, and would tax all but a godly
editor when trying to keep the timeline straight. It is no surprise that the
story about the Penge murders is also dogged by inconsistencies.
We gloss over that. It’s something we gloss
over when reading the regular stories about an eternal Old Bailey Hack.
Reading
a book that can’t possibly live up to expectation is a pursuit with very few
avenues of escape. Let’s wander the avenues.
The story can’t live up to expectation, can
it? So we agree that you know this, going in. You are reading just to confirm
this. In the case of Robert B. Parker, he was no Raymond Chandler and you knew
that. Parker’s friends continued his
stories after he died. The death-grip loosens, and a publishing company makes a
little cash.
Alternatively, down another avenue, the
story goes beyond expectation. Exceeding your wildest dreams, you praise the
story for not being internet fan-fiction. Fan-fic’s always bad, coming from the
original writer. We should not dwell on that point.
How was the story, then? Which avenue did
the author take?
I always hoped we’d see a tale about the
murders in that bungalow down in exotic Penge. (A hasty scan of the interwebs
tells me people are dedicated to the view that Penge is where planning
decisions go to die.)
Batting the continuity glitches aside, I
thought the story lived up to its impossible expectation and went a little
further. Above all else, it’s an atmospheric piece about a familiar character’s
younger days. It works on its own terms, and that’s all we need ask of a story.
My opinion that the book was great fun…is irrelevant, naturally.
We could ask the story for coffee and a
triple chocolate muffin, but that’s an expectation too far.
I once considered the Stevenson story a tale
too far for me. What was the point of reading nine chapters? I was surprised by
the enjoyment I gained from an unfinished story.
In the case of the Chandler piece, that’s
four chapters of Raymond Chandler and the rest is very clearly Robert B.
Parker. I’d looked at an unfinished tale by Stevenson and another one barely
even started by Chandler. Big differences there.
With Mortimer, I was given the story oft-times
mentioned yet never seen. Finally, the author ran the Questing Beast to its
thorny lair. Here you had the original author completing a story and handing it
in. The expectation being that he wouldn’t mess it up.
He didn’t mess it up. There’s great
enjoyment in hearing of Rumpole’s significant case, and even greater fun in
then reading it.
At this point, I should return to le Carré.
With A Legacy of Spies, le Carré was
an author still alive, handing in his homework. Not a prequel. And not a
sequel. Awkwardly…both. A return to an earlier time, with a story that filled
in the blanks.
Expectation was high.
For reasons of the plot, I can’t really
discuss the plot.
Our tale starts with Call for the Dead. It continues later in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. I always wondered about a
character in the series. There was an obvious story gap with no obvious
explanation.
We move on through le Carré’s novels to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. There’s a
major bit of plotting here that sets you thinking about previous books in the
series. An obvious story gap with no obvious explanation.
Years later, the author turns in his
not-prequel, filling in those two obvious gaps with explanations that more or
less hold up. You’d think I’d be delighted to have two great puzzle pieces
handed to me by the original scribe…
I was two pieces shy of the whole jigsaw,
after all.
And yet…
The author’s one crime was to set the story now, whenever now is. George Smiley is a character who sipped, like Horace
Rumpole, from a minor immortality potion. Before A Legacy of Spies came out, you could point to assorted Smiley
stories and say, with confidence, that the dates didn’t quite match up.
Characters simply had their ages revised, for convenience.
This is the Batman Effect. Batman’s history extends back around a decade or so
when considering his many adventures. He stays eternally fit and is forever 29
years old unless stated otherwise. The character is deliberately an older caped
crusader in The Dark Knight Returns,
for example.
Inconsistencies in A Legacy of Spies are overlooked. The one thing that let it down
for me was the updated setting. If le Carré could’ve done anything to remove the
absurdity of an elderly character getting ready to mix it up in a raging
fistfight, he should have set the story in 1985 instead of the 2016-ish
territory we are saddled with.
No, not Smiley himself. Though Smiley appears
in the story, I can’t quite take in the notion that he’d still be living by his
wits and on his memory at the age of post-100. A Legacy of Spies was a prequel and a sequel rolled into one. And
it almost worked. But the millstone around its neck was the improbable age of
several characters in the early 2000s. Characters who belong, firmly
entrenched, in the late 1900s.
This is something Philip Marlowe suffers
from. We’d like to think of Marlowe stuck in the late 1930s, leading up to the
Second World War. Yet there he is, still walking those mean streets in the
early 1950s. Rumpole swerved retirement age every time he took up later cases.
I suspect he swerved retirement in more than a few of the earlier ones.
Stevenson’s story exceeded my expectation by
leaps and bounds.
Robert B. Parker’s book is the only Robert
B. Parker book on my shelves. I resisted the non-temptation to read his
unnecessary sequel to The Big Sleep.
Mortimer’s easy target, finally giving us
the big case, was no easy target after all, and more than lived up to the
expectation.
And le Carré almost came away with a classic,
explaining behind-the-scenes scenes that lay behind the scenes of other scenes.
To set the story in 1985 or 1989 would have guaranteed classic status. Almost
there, but not quite. Oh, I liked the jigsaw pieces le Carré finally handed out.
Begrudgingly, he gave us those.
Expectation is inevitable. Inevitably, set
expectation aside and just read the damned stories. See what you think,
yourself. If you go further than that, you go further by writing as well as
reading.
My copy of A Legacy of Spies has defected to the other side…of a bookshelf, somewhere in the Berlin area. I could engage in a spy hunt to photograph the suspect. Or just let an old Cold Warrior enjoy retirement…
Thursday, 28 June 2018
OVERLY-LITIGIOUS OLD GROPER HARLAN ELLISON IS DEAD: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.
Groping Connie Willis in full view of the world. Demon with a brass neck.
HERE'S A BLOG POST ABOUT THAT. I'll wait for you.
Disclosure.
I never read Ellison's fiction. Given his mistreatment of Connie Willis, I am unlikely to purchase his books. It's improbable that I'll return to Asimov's material, given Isaac's groping days at conventions.
In an attempt to avoid compiling a blog post that's just going to turn into a long and tiresome list of sci-fi gropers whose books I've never read/will never read again, I'll stick with this non-obituary format instead.
Ellison.
If he read my fiction, he kept quiet about it. (He never read my fiction. I have a doctor's note to prove it. Jekyll is the fellow's name. More on him, anon.)
The closest I came to reading Ellison's fiction was inside the pages of The Rocketeer, by Dave Stevens. Harlan wrote a grumpy introduction, as required under Montana law. Much of his grumpiness stemmed from the loss of everything.
You know the drill...
Old Farts misbehaved and misremembered how things never used to be. Young pups don't know they are born and won't live to be old pups. The knowledge-base is gone...
Except.
We can all ask Doctor Google about that shit now. It is possible to locate this unfindable forgotten stuff that Ellison wanted to keep to himself. Well, 13% of it.
I was bemused to find Ellison haunting the internet. He railed against so much that he was paid royalties by train companies. True, he made me laugh out loud.
He came on the interwebs to inform us, in all seriousness, how to pronounce Jekyll.
Just like that.
And, just like that, not being Scottish, Hurling Elision mangled the name Jekyll. I seem to be having some difficulty pronouncing Harlan's monicker.
The author's name, Robert Louis Stevenson, was rattled out rather quickly by Harlan on this video clip. Therein lies another pronunciation problem.
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson. When written in full, and read out loud, there's less temptation to hurl elision at the audience. To omit Balfour is to allow Louis and Stevenson to merge, altering the sound of the author's name.
LouisStevenson.
We know from Stevenson's writing that his name is pronounced Lewis.
Jekyll is pronounced tae rhyme wi' meikle. You might write that as meekill, to give a better idea of what to say.
Onywey...
Much of my knowledge is pre-Google. With a writerly mind, I had to uncover random weirdness on my own by catching that late-night never-repeated TV show, listening to half a radio documentary, scribbling notes as I devoured data...
Dead magazines surfaced in out-of-the-way places. Books practically fell into my lap at a convenient time. (Thank you, Mary Shelley.)
This is how things were, in the used-to-be. The beforeness of now.
Ellison was the sort of guy who'd grump his way through a conversation expecting to be the only guy in the room old enough or old enough and in the right place at the right time to remember whatever the hell he decided to talk about.
Any young pup who knew a scrap of detail about the subject under discussion? That pup would be seized on as a space-time anomaly. How the hell do you know about that?! Feigned admiration from the old warhorse.
Derision followed, of course. Scorn for the 99% of the audience not lucky enough to have been around back in the day, deprived of the Old Fart status that allowed all this misremembering of how things never quite were.
I used to think about that sort of nonsense when dropping arcane references into my fiction. Because I had that pre-Google writerly mind. Same as Ellison. Not as dusty or Old Farty.
But we walked the same long fucking road back in the day when you couldn't point-and-fucking-click your way from A to a very distant B.
Here's a deleted scene from one of the Terminator movies.
The
Harlan Ellison fights back, and there's a legal settlement.
I'm struggling to maintain the thread, here. That's no bad thing. Onywey, Hurling Elision made me laugh at his ability to correct the world's view of...Doacturrr Jeekl.
We can hire Doctor Google to scan Harlan's world-view and see him speak about Old Fartery. I no longer concern myself with arcane references in my fiction, as e-books have the capacity to hand those references to you on a digital silver platter.
Words are linked to articles. The missing knowledge-base? We carved an electronic chainsaw through the all-encroaching jungle of time, and there's the once-lost analogue city awaiting the first digital tour-bus.
That stuff was digitised around us. As we grow older and grumpier, it's easier just to click from A to B.
I think Ellison was simply grumpy at having to be Ellison. That here, in our electronic wasteland, was some suspect short-cut for writers who wouldn't have to walk in his shoes.
Well I walked in similar boots, and I am here to tell the young pups in the audience...for fuck's sake point-and-click. You'll save the shoe-leather for when it is needed.
Even younger pups must search engine the shit out of point-and-click to discover what a mouse was.
There'll be a lot written about Ellison on his demise. Much praise. Some condemnation. I always knew the name, yet never sought out his work. The more I learned, the less-inclined I grew to chase down the guy's stories.
Being an imaginative writer, a prolific writer, an influential writer, does not excuse being a groper.
Ever. The end.
You can cure cancer and murder someone. Doesn't mean I have to like you for curing cancer.
So, yes, you'll unearth anecdotes about Ellison's championing of women. And you'll hear that he had a heart of gold under that gruff exterior...
Who was he? Good question. What will he be remembered for?
Groping Connie Willis in full view of the world. Demon with a brass neck.
If you missed it or skipped it, HERE'S A BLOG POST ABOUT THAT.
Sunday, 27 October 2013
COURTNEY LOVE, VAMPIRIC SPAM, AND INFLATED BLOG-TRAFFIC.
The list is configured to give size-based prominence to much-mentioned labels. Missy Biozarre, being Kacey Vanderkarr's writing buddy, is often mentioned in the same breath as Kacey - their blog labels are of similar size in the listing.
K. Woodward, having propelled me into blogging, is mentioned far more frequently than Alistair Cooke - who inspired the scattershot methodology behind my blogging.
Doug Chambers, a character from serialised blog fiction, makes his presence felt well-beyond his influence - in the story, his colleague Roy Falafel is the real star.
Staring at those labels, I wondered how organised they were. They weren't. I didn't take to labels immediately, when blogging. If I misremember rightly, they were called tags before the great Blogger™ interface revamp.
I added labels to blog posts on whim rather than by decree, and, with the listing gadget up, that non-policy showed. Well, here they are anyway. I write a post, adding labels for convenience, searchability, and as a sign-off to the blogging process.
Affixing labels tells me I'm done with a post. If I can find any labels to add. This is all by the wayside. Once I nailed up the gadget that listed labels, I looked short and soft, then long and hard, at what I'd created.
A few labelling errors and glitches crept in. I'd accidentally listed a load of poets as one entry. For some arcane reason, I'd allowed Courtney Love to lie atop Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson's grave in a combined label.
I struggled with the peeling of a digital sticker, sorely tempted to let Courtney be. Yes, I had a task separating those two. Peeling the joint label from Queen Courtney's side, I wasn't surprised to find celebrity skin underneath.
The author of The Body-Snatcher would laugh at today's world, I'm sure. Meanwhile, what I should have done...
Yes, there's a label on the blog for Craig Ferguson. I should have created a Courtney-Craig combination label. Accidentally-on-purpose.
In memory of that time Courtney fucked Craig at Carrie Fisher's house. This doesn't feature in Courtney's memoirs. Could you imagine that marriage? Courtney Ferguson. Or would that be Craig Love? (Craig Ferguson's porno label.)
For legal reasons, I should point out that Craig Ferguson didn't actually fuck Courtney Love - she turned him ten per cent gayer instead. I'm having trouble spelling greyer. Bing Hitler's lawyers, take note.
Okay. Time to hit the point of this fucking blog post. (Too late.)
I organised blog labels. Fixed glitches. Attended to duplication of effort. No big deal. Later, I was back inside my blog looking at stuff and, in the statistics, I noted an absurd rise in traffic.
Loads of people in America suddenly jumped to my blog. At 7.00 in the morning, going by the East Coast time-zone. Eh? So what were they reading?
Nothing. Hundreds of hits on the blog. No one accessing articles or dedicated pages. Well, okay, a few people were in - reading items on formatting. Where were the hundreds of visitors?
Evanished.
Check the source. Two offenders. One called vampirestat and another called adsensewatchdog. Googling these, I found they were spammer scammers.
You find the traffic in your statistics, and, wondering what the score is, you might be tempted to visit those sites. All sorts of malice may then occur, according to many sources on the internet.
How to ditch these ethereal visitors? Google Analytics has an admin page with filters allowing blocking of phantom statistics. Just follow the instructions. That's as far as Blogger is concerned. If you are using another blogging method, your platform will likely have a similar remedy. Root around.
Why did I start off discussing labels? The phantom-bots keep a lookout for alterations to blog posts. Because I went through my posts like a dose of salts, tidying labels, the posts were published afresh. That gave something for the vampiric spammers to latch onto.
I'm not obsessed by blogging statistics. Now and again, I'll check the traffic. I was annoyed when I saw this phantom surge. So wild a spray of visitors looked like a scam to me.
If you are new to blogging, don't become obsessed by statistics. Never click on links to referring sites when you snuffle around in the stats. Type the name of the site into Google, and search to see if scam warnings come up.
Checking my stats, I see one lone reader is in RIGHT NOW. He, she, or it, is reading up on the adventures of Doug Chambers. Episode sixteen. Doug is mentioned, but doesn't put in an appearance.
What will my Chinese reader make of that? I'd hope for a realisation that fifteen episodes precede the blog entry under perusal. Maybe the reader slyly read those episodes earlier. I've no way of knowing.
Though I do know this. I can block phantom visitors with the digital equivalent of bell, book, candle, and Holy Water™. My advice - do the same.