Yatterings

Remembering the World – Jonathan Lethem’s Amnesia Moon

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Iain

Jonathan Lethem’s Amnesia Moon is a novel which plays with the reader. It is a tapestry of genres in a series of dreams and journeys. Lethem enjoys his ecstasy of influences, in this case from Searchers to Philip K Dick or perhaps even John Crowley. Its moving across genres encourages it to rethink the post-Apocalyptic world as a post-lapsarian one.

When Chaos decides to leave Hartford, a small mid-American town, to find the truth behind the Disaster that has occurred. His friend, Edge, informs him that he is looking for a “whole new paradigm” (p 28) when he leaves with Melinda, the seal girl who is covered in fur. The world unfolds like a sideshow, a typical American myth, as Chaos moves into another, the road trip. The world promises a variety of narratives and stories that need to be discovered. Rather than colliding with each other, they co-exist in a fragile state of making a whole. Lethem looks for different ways of exploring the world, with the idea of the horse replaced by the car and or walking between the worlds. The wild frontier of the Western is replaced by the idea of the open road.

In a sense the apocalypse provides Lethem with the perfect post-lapsarian world. After paradise has disappeared, Kellogg has the chance to discover and remake the world. As he and Melinda move across in America in search of something that he cannot quite comprehend. He sees new tribes like the McDonaldonians, who make burgers but have to make a certain amount each time, regardless of the demand. The aliens could equally be seen as the tribes of small town America, like Sherrill’s M, all equally strange and wonderful, as if the world can be anew. Perhaps it can, as it is remade by the author. The cowboy’s trip on the horses, the open road and science fiction all come back to seeing the world in a different light and moving away from a comfort zone.

As he is constantly reminded, Chaos cannot remember anything outside of some dreams. As he moves through the word he comes across a computer which insists on calling him Everett. As he travels, he dreams which affect him, he does think that “the dreams seem designed, either by the computer or some part of his sleeping self, to nudge him towards speculations about his life before” (p 69). Since they affect everybody, the dreams are a way if him re-working the world and fashioning it into something different. It reminds me of Wednesday’s dreams in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, the dreamscape shattering ones which alert him to the potential futures. His dreams force him to leave the safety of the community.

When he reaches San Francisco, the spiritual home of hippies, Chaos is told that the world had come to an end and that he is living in his own dream which is also a construct. The revelation echoes the end of John Crowley’s Engine Summer, though he moves forward and decides to continue living the dream. Rather than being afraid, he takes the world and decides to make it his own. Escaping the confines of one genre gives Amnesia Moon a sense of forgetting itself and finding itself, which perhaps is the point of the post-lapsarian world. He sees the maker in the sun, visible only by squinting, but merely moves on rather than being scared of him, taking the promise of free will to its full.

Earlier post on Jonathan Lethem.

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Notes on reading Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Iain

Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) is a book about escape, or trying to escape. Like Jonathan Lethem, Chabon’s work enjoys its influences and finds an joy in its escape from genre and creating its own illusion.

Josef Kavalier is a trainee escapologist in 1930s Prague, who is helped to escape after the German invasion. Bernard Kornblum, a retired escapologist, helps the elders of Prague to spirit the Golem out of the city, rather than seeing it being perverted by the invaders.

Arriving in the US, he stays with his cousin, Sam Clayman. Discovering that both can draw and have a love of superhero comics, they decide to rewrite them with all their failings. Exploring the weaknesses of the form, they come up with the idea of the Escapist superhero comic which becomes wildly successful. In response to Anapol, his publisher’s, question, “[m]y new Superman is a Golem”(p 86), Kavalier responds “this Superman is…may be … only an American Golem”(p 86). Seeing the world from a different perspective, one which is aware of the coming danger, he maps his own view onto it. Rather than assimilating into the comics world, he uses fiction to assimilate it into his own perspective. He does lose himself in the new fantasy though begins his own one person war.

Their history comes into play when they feature Hitler on the cover before the US entered the War and have to change it. Joe becomes increasingly frustrated and rails against those with Nazi sympathies in the city, picking a fight in the offices of the Aryan American League; an action which will come back to haunt him. In his spare time, he goes back to his magical background at barmitzvahs and social occasions. Meeting Rosa Saks, he is asks if his brother can be rescued from Nazi Europe though the ship that he comes across on is sunk with all hands lost. The grief sends him into a spiral of revenge wishes.

When the US does enter the war, Joe is sent to a radio listening station in Greenland where he fulfils his ambition to kill a German. Enacting his revenge does not help him, rather it sends him into himself with the guilt. Instead of finding release, he becomes hopelessly lost in himself and comes back to New York to finally kill the Escapist off. He pretends to his son, whom he sees as his nephew, that he is going to kill the character.

He begins to come to the answer the comment that Kornblum posed in Prague: “Never worry about what you are escaping from … Reserve your anxieties about what you are escaping to”(p 37). What he realises, after he begins recovering from his breakdown, is not that the world needs escaping from but that this is “genuine magic of art”(p 575). Comics, or other great art, is not about replacing the world in any sense but in getting away from it and its brokenness for some time. It creates its own illusion by creating something worthwhile to escape to, even if it is only a temporary release. The audience becomes implicit in the illusion though, creating its own magic act where the audience is aware that they are being fooled but are largely happy to go along with it.

He takes the Golem myth and transforms it into something different, retelling an old tale. When Joe returns the Golem, rather than being whole, it has returned to the dust it came from. No longer needed, it must be remade if needs require. Mixing Jewish mythology with a successful and complete alternate history of the America before it joined the war and a history of comics and their move from superheros to horror comics. He weaves in the supposed moral outrage of the conservatives which led to the comic code and the publication of Seduction of the Innocent in the 1950s. By accepting the alternate history as real, Chabon explores the ways that genres can mix and to reveal something about the characters and the changing world. It is more successful than Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America which ultimately fails to believe in itself or its world, despite dealing with similar material.

Through all of this, he ignores his cousin’s attempt to come out as gay. When Joe goes to war, Sam falls in love with the star of the radio version. To prevent humiliation for Rosa, Joe’s lover, when she becomes pregnant, he marries her. Eventually Joe realises that he has to rebuild his life and to accept that he needs to grow up himself and accept that the world has moved on.

Exploring the notion of escape, Chabon creates an illusion which is sustained and involves the reader in wanting the escapes to succeed. Drawing in his influences and history allows the novel to escape from the confines of one genre, one way of seeing the world. He challenges the notion of the fantastic as a way of merely escaping but being something worthwhile in escaping towards and to being part of art, rather than separate.

A night to remember – musing on Where the Wild Things Are

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Iain

The remixing of the film, through adaptation, shows how the fantastic can be found in realist culture, living cheek by jowl. The novelisation and the film turned toward placing the fantastic firmly within the framework of the mundane. This does change the tenor of the book slightly from being potentially being a celebration of play to partially being a bildungsroman; from dream to epic. It is tempting to say that the fantastic celebrates the darker side of the Enlightened, “civilised” world but the latter adaptations feel a bit heavier but the island becomes a safety valve, a suitably sidelined part of the world like the original fairy tales, to express a truth.

In interview with Alex Billington, Spike Jonze described his motivation for directing the 2009 film of Where the Wild Things Are:
“Well, it’s a book that I always loved since I was a kid and it was something I was really hesitant to adapt. Maurice had asked me about it and I was very excited and, because it’s something I’ve loved for so long, but also apprehensive for the same reason … It’s like adapting a poem – this very, sort of, impressionistic, evocative poem… And there is a narrative there but it’s a very slight narrative, it’s more the feelings that are really strong”. (http://www.firstshowing.net/2009/interview-where-the-wild-things-are-director-spike-jonze/, Alex Billington, accessed 5 January 2012)
Both Jonze and Dave Eggers show a love for the original but manage to develop it and give it their own take. Although not necessarily known for art created in the fantastic mode, they do appreciate that it has a role as manage to steer away from trying to explain the island.

Maurice Sendak’s book, originally published in 1963, is an illustrated short story with very little text. Its images are the driving force of the book which has less than 100 words in it. Its most famous phrase is “Let the wild rumpus begin” which, along side the central image the crowned Max throwing his head back with outsize monsters. The sequels follow this sense of the wildness of the imagination of the little boy who has been sent to bed for being naughty by his mother. The rumpus comes across as the extension of the carnivalesque play in which has meant that he been sent to bed but the book has little real world focus.
In the film, when Max has run away to the island and discovers the monsters, puts in a show of strength to avoid being eaten. He claims that he is a king and re-invents the world that he currently feels bullied in, as one in which he has control. After the monsters start asking him about how he keeps the sadness away, he claims to have a “sadness shield” (27:09 minutes) and his response to being challenged is to raise his own expectations and deeds. It is a playground transformation from using the rumpus as something which is a continuation of play, into trying to fit into a society. Boisterousness turns into bravado which spirals as it has an undercurrent of real anger to it.
Having written the screenplay for the film, Dave Eggers wrote the novelisation. Originally he wanted to put in some of the ideas and scenes that were cut. In an interview with the New Yorker, Eggers comments that, “[f]rom the beginning, though, Maurice was clear that he didn’t want the movie or the book to be timid adaptations. He wanted us to feel free to push and pull the original story in new directions.”(http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/08/dave-eggers-on-wild-things.html, accessed on 5 January 2012) Allowing the book to be remixed and rethought allowed it to explore parts of the story which had previously been left and also to allow the new authors to explore new avenues rather than just remake the story.
As the story is moved around, it builds on the emotional story and changes the idea of the rumpus. Clearly it becomes part of the what Conjunctions journal called the Betwixt the Between (Issue 52) and the fantastic is used to explore the emotional turmoil that Max feels. On the edges, almost ghost-like, his family have to deal with his selfish disappearance and he finds his own place within the family. Much as Coraline does in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. The space given by the fantastic to the author to visually express the paradoxical nightmare of the monsters. Though clearly monstrous, the roundness given to them in the drawings suggests a cuddly, non-harmful creation. The monstrous is changed from being fearful to a slightly lesser something to be watchful of which has the potential to become nightmare outside of the real world. There is a subtle, but somewhat unexplored question, of the monstrous. Is Max the real monster here? Through his behaviour as he ends up scaring the monsters with his out of control actions and is isolated, finding himself in the same predicament from which he ran away. In his accidental quest to the island, he begins to grow up; something that he refuses to do through wearing his wolf suit.
The nature of the journey subtly changes between versions, from one sort of fantastic journey to another. In the original Sendak novel, the trip to the island ends up being Max’s dream as he falls asleep in disgrace, waking up to a forgiving meal. In that sense it echoes Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland when Alice wakes up and realises that she has dreamed the nonsensical world, giving it a sense of the carnival. For Jonze and Eggers, the journey is more like a quest where Max returns from the island in the boat, giving it more of a sense of the quest. The quest turns the island into a rite of passage rather than a temporary overturning of the world. As Max dons his crown, he begins to learn his place in the world and that he has responsibilities and well as a role. He is able to take the imagined role to an extreme before his return journey when he understands that accidents have consequences.
By changing the mode of the fantastic, from the joyous one off to the quest forward, the tone changes but both Jonze and Eggers respect the original. These are more slight uses of the fantastic than either Michael Chabon or Jonathan Lethem but it does nod towards the influence of works of the imagination to vividly break through the skin of the real and express the animal.

Earlier post on the Dave Eggers novelisation.

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Tapestry of histories – John R Fultz’s Seven Princes

Posted on January 7, 2012 by Iain

John R. Fultz‘s debut novel, Seven Princes: Books of the Shaper: Volume 1, is a slightly strange fantasy. It is a tapestry of fantasies, each thread of influence enhancing and possibly celebrating the others as they are woven together. The first in a series, this is a self-contained novel leading one to expect other books with the same characters that could possibly be read as stand-alone novels but which share a world.

Seven Princes is a rip-roaring adventure with plenty of action, heroics and a deeper history. Using a large cast, he creates an ensemble of characters who provide depth and vitality to a developing land which we are yet to fully discover. Fultz does provide a sense of a land which has forgotten its own history and is slowly recovering it and coming back together again. This forgetfulness provides many threads which might well be explored in future books but also gives the world far more potential. As it remembers, the reader discovers.

In part this book reads like a love story to the fantasies of Robert E Howard or the Zothique stories of Clark Ashton Smith with a seasoning of HP Lovecraft. In the main the book is an epic sword and sorcery novel which fully enjoys itself and is aware of the genre’s history. Fultz writes with a verve that is refreshing, but layers in a back story which gives the world some substance. The book’s pace though suggests that Mr Fultz is also familiar modern writers as he delivers what is a ripping yarn.

Rather than this series becoming a set of tales about the same cast continuing their adventures, there is a hint that the we will see some characters but Fultz is happy to kill some of the cast and to move on rather than keep the world cast in amber. Instead of sticking to one style, Fultz is canny enough to put in a range and changes the tone of the novel. His mixture of styles and attention to genre history gives this novel an edge as its shows somebody who loves the genre. He has taken the adage about reading widely to heart and provides much of this reading within the novel but with a lighter touch that one might imagine.

Whilst the novel make not break new ground in itself and its take on the genre, it is a full on read and one that I shall be recommending to friends who read epic fantasy.

Seven Princes: Books of the Shaper
John R Fultz, Orbit, £7.99

Update: There is an author blog post on the book on the Orbit site.

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Wings in the snow – Rebecca Guay’s A Flight of Angels

Posted on December 29, 2011 by Iain

I recently came across A Flight of Angels created by Rebecca Guay. It is a club story which explores and shows differing sides to the angelic host, quite apart from just being messengers. It seems to follow in the wake of comics which use the club story for their constructions, such as the recenlty ended House of Mysteries. John Clute, in Conjunctions 39, argues that the club story is perhaps the dominant form at the moment, the one which the fantastic has taken most closely to its heart and these comics have done something similar. Where the House of Mystery used it to explore the back stories of the various characters and to play with notion of form, this collection explores a single entity and its meaning.

An angel crashes into the forest and the goblins and natural supernatural creatures stay guard, debating what course of action to take. Meanwhile each takes turn to relate a story about the messenger. Guay has collated a wonderful group of writers, including Holly Black, Bill Willingham, Alisa Kwitney, Louise Hawes and Todd Mitchell to tell the story in different styles and modes.

Louise Hawes explores the idea of the angel as tempter, showing Eve a history of women from herself to the Virgin Queen with a warning that both herself and Adam forget. Knowledge and hope become the driving force to abandon a static Paradise which Eve may not ever grow.

Bill Willingham’s ‘A Story within a Story’ is an exploration of the angelic host as a civil service, permanently delaying the final show down thorugh production delays. Meanwhile an angel is sent to kill one who has gone slightly insane, subtly allowing the reader to question whether the angelic host can be entirley sane after so long, thogh they have a certain angelic amorality.

Alisa Kwitney brings the angels back into folkore as something to fear and be feared, yet they also allow the reader to see that life moves on. Rather than just being a harbinger of joy or death, the angel becomes something that allows for movement and motion forwards, almost industrially.

Yet, as Todd Mitchell shows in ‘The Guardian’, they cannot be involved in human affairs, an echo of the book of Genesis where they must be watchers. Straying is strongly forbidden but there might be some hidden guidance.

I did enjoy the collection and they way that it explores the ambivalent messengers whilst remaining within existing traditions. It also acts as a slight showcase for Guay’s art (I admit that she is a new artist to me) and I’ll be looking out for more in due course. Meanwhile the graphic novel is certainly one to look out for and read.

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Not a number – Philip Palmer’s Hell Ship

Posted on December 29, 2011 by Iain

Philip Palmer’s Hell Ship is another fast paced pulp novel which turns into something quite exhilarating.What starts out as a space opera with pirates, aliens and lots of fighting becomes an exploration of the reaction to being the last being and also how to deal with the potential of freedom. In that sense it continues the argument developed in Version 43 where the version becomes more cognisant of his surroundings as he regenerates.

When Sharrock is captured by the Hell Ship as the last of his race, he meets Sai-ias and the slaves that have been collected for the Ka’un’s curiosity and thirst for violence. For the first part of the book, we are treated to a fast-paced bloodbath where we learn more about Sharrock, Sai-ias and Jak, a trader who becomes vengeful pursuer.

Whilst hearing their stories, we learn about the way that they are creating their own society in response to the Ka’un. The initial response is creating a hierarchical one with a slave class and leaders who come from the captured slaves. Palmer muses on the responses to captivity: resistance or joining the captors. Beginning with the polar opposites of Sharrock and Sai-ias, he moves from the extremes to exploring how positions change. Using the idea of resurrection, a slightly key point in Version 43, he allows a certain versioning of the person and alow for a certina exploration of positions though it does have the escape clause of the new version not always remembering the previous position.

We never get to the heart of the Ka’un mission of destruction cross the universe. There is sense of ennui, a sense that they are nihilistic alien teenagers, believing only in the destruction of all around them. The blackness of their ship almost reflects the Ka’un themselves and it is left to the reader to work out if they are the pirates mentioned on the cover blurb. The idea of a non-rational species traversing universes destroying them for a sense of unfathomable whimsy is one that gives this novel a sense of real terror. It is not the unimaginable vastness of space that is not terrifying but the idea that something might want to merely destroy it rather than understand it. Life is not the short brutish one that we might find on Neal Asher’s Polity but rather it is the individual waiting for an end at somebody else’s hands.

Perhaps Palmer takes us back to Gully, the individual railing against the intergalactic unfairness. He does write enjoyable pulp fiction which reminds us that even pulp can explore deeper threads rather than just being about excitement, danger and derring-do.

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Breaking bonds and coils – Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker

Posted on December 26, 2011 by Iain

Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker continues his exploration of post-scarcity economics which underpins part of The Windup Girl. Published as a young adult novel, this a rip roaring escapade which is exhilarating and frightening, and a subtle tale.

Nailer is growing older and beginning to get to the stage where he can no longer fit into the ship hulks to strip out the copper wiring for his bosses. He needs to find a way out or to move on. When a ‘swank’ clipper ship is wrecked off the coast, he has to find the oil and scrap precious metals to buy his way out and to fund his ‘retirement’.

On board, he finds the body of a swank who wakes up when her throat is about to be cut to make sure that she is dead. Life is short and brutal, and loyalty is scarcer than his oil. His own crew and family begin trying to kill him as he argues that Nita, the apparently dead girl, should live. As he does so he finds out that Nita’s own clan are engaging in their own in-fighting leading her to be chased and to questioning who is loyal to her.

Bacigalupi delivers a series of rip-roaring chases which force Nailer and Nita to realise that the worlds are closer than they think. Both are victims of their circumstances and, though the novel ends on an ambiguous note, they find ways of adapting and accepting that they are similar when social mores are stripped away.

It sets up a dialogue regarding how materials are being used and mined which begin in the Wind-Up Girl. Though it is not resolved, there is enough material in the book to make the reader consider the forgotten side of transport and consumerism. There is a forgotten class of people who recycle the waste side of capitalism and the means of moving goods from producer to consumer.

Bacigalupi explores an all to dystopian, familar world. There is enough in this which is extrapolated from this one but there is no definite feel good moment. Rather it comes as more of a 1984-style warning about the shape of the world as it is. There is no fix, rather a more subtle Orwellian tale. The world that he protrays is a broken one but it can change and motion towards a less monotone colour but only if vested interests allow.

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Leaving the House of Mystery

Posted on November 13, 2011 by Iain

Matthew Sturges‘s run on House of Mystery has come to a sad end after 42 issues, although perhaps this was not an entire suprise. I have to say that at times the series has felt slightly loose but seems to have continued a running thread through this and Mike Carey and Peter Gross’s The Unwritten. (The Unwritten appears to be heading to some sort of conclusion as well.) I’ve largely enjoyed the ride with its use of the Club story, the story within the story, to expand its central theme.

In the final issue, sets of explorers come together in a jungle of confusion with each explorer identifying their own conclusion. The final one, and perhaps the most convincing, comes from the character who resembles Terry Pratchett. Perhaps this is intentional, I don’t know, but it is very apt since he is the one person who actually explores story. This section comes to me as a wry look at critical approaches to the comic, something that I am keenly aware of in this short post.

When professor Cornelius (a throw away reference to Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius?) goes travelling, his companion (Flora Bella) is turned into a vampire (a hint of Twilight?) but eventually comes to the Dreaming, where he meets Abel in the House of Secrets. (Another in point being that Steven Seagle who writes one of the short stories in the episode had a run for the House of Secrets during the 90s which I read whilst at university.) Abel replies that “No one s-stole the House of Mystery. The truth is .. it stole itself. It got tired of hearing my brother tell he same of scary stories. It wanted new stories and it got them is s-spades” (House of Mystery, #42, Dec 2011).

That gets the issue back to the crux of the series, the finding and telling of new stories. each issue has focussed around the construction of differing stores in pulp fashion. Some brought the Clockwork Storybook writers back under one roof but others brought indifferent writers. Perhaps it is slightly hit and miss but there was something for everyone. It was fun and had a serious exploration of stories in between the episodes.

Cain’s miraculous appearance at the end of the issue, when he points out of the frame, and says “and its yours” gets to another part of the matter. Stories need the reader to being them to life and to enter their world using their imagination. This is definitely a series to return to when The Unwritten comes to an end. Like The Unwritten, it is comes back to how stories come back and are re-interpreted as in the mighty Greek Street. Yet like them all, they are highly readable.

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A night at the circus – Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus

Posted on October 30, 2011 by Iain

The Night Circus sat on the table in Waterstone’s; its starkly designed cover shouting for attention.There is somethign rather strange and terrifying on the novel and it reminds me a little of Gordon Dahlquist’s The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters in its ambition. It is, though, easier to read in its different styling. Like the Dahlquist, this book is about magic though defining it so much more broadly.

Celia Bowen, who takes (though later discards) the nom-de-plume Miranda, is taken in by the magician known as Prospero the Enchanter. Morgenstern announces and uses the Tempest as a backdrop to her novel wherein she takes Shakespeare’s theme of art and artifice and mixes it with the fin-de-siécle. Prospero the Enchanter faes away, little noticed by his crowds until he is believed to be dead.

Meanwhile Chandresh LeFevre is dreaming up the Night Circus with an invited group fo dinner guests. The Circus is more than a three ring affair: it dazzles and maps itself to the visitor’s desires. On opening night, the Twins, Poppet and Widget, are born each with the power of sight in a different direction. Poppet can read the future whilst Widget understands the past. At the centre of the circus burns a cauldron of white fire, anchoring it and giving it a focus point. He, though, loses this focus gaining a convex view of the world and Marco, his assistant and unwilling pawn in the game, helps him to forget either throgh aiding his drinking or fashioning rooms around the house, redefining the space.

Meanwhile, Federick Thiessen falls in love with the circus, following it around and visiting it whenever he can. A clock maker by trade, he designs and gives his wares away so that he might visit it more often. In the process he forms the reveurs, a clique of fellow fanantics, after an article of his is published. His love affair spawns others though love in Morgenstern’s world is a deadly affair unless you know the rules and consequences.

It becomes apparent that the circus is a god game, one where the pawns become aware of their predicament and try to change the rules to avoid the planned ending. It is somewhat tempered when the subjects begin to take on the games and to create their own rules. Perhaps they play it better than Prospero could have imagined and find a way of making it their own arena.

Celia and Marco’s love affair, initially benighted by Isobel’s infatuation with him, allows both of them to explore the memory palace that both create through their own illusions and strengths. They create a labyrinth orthagonal to the real world, much like Prospero has done, and removes themselves having found a new anchor to hold the circus together . I have not seem memory palaces like these since Mary Gentle’s Rats and Gargo

Bailey, the new anchor and Poppet’s love since childhood days, believe while heartely in the place and is able to take it on in the new century. When Celia and Marco remove themselves from the world in the final blaze of the while fire, he is the only one able to relight it as he understands the passion invested it by its denizens and fans. His trek to find the circus and to join it becomes something deeper which he can only understand as takes on the task at hand. In the end he is able to take the circus on somewhere else, magical but not magical. His own belief in the fantastic means that he is ther perfect person to take the story on into the twentieth century, as the timeframe of the novel is the 1890s, a time of experimentation and change.

This is wonderful novel which involves and draws the reader into its dream. Like Shakespeare’s Prospero, a form of magic is ended but it transmutes into something quite different and subtle. Initially the book struck me as something along the lines of Christopher Priest’s novels in its manipulation of the mundane, or perhaps Audrey Niffeneger’s The Night Library, but it goes beyond that and, I suspect, the initiated would find even more.

I look forward to donning my scarlet scarf for future visits.

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The most human creature – Chris Priestley’s Mister Creecher

Posted on October 22, 2011 by Iain

I’ve just finished Chris Priestley’s latest book, Mister Creecher amidst the surfeit of fine reading on my shelves. I picked up his for Tales of Terror book as a curiosity and duly fell in love with his take on darker side of the fantastic and his apparent love of the Gothic in all its styles.

Creecher is Frankenstein’s monster who has come to London and rescuses Billy from being attacked. In his hideousness, something that mercifully the author does not shy away from, the monster embodies the soul of the Enlightenment, as Mary Shelley began to argue in Frankenstein. His act of reading and caring for somebody who is equally seen as an outsider is apparently a hideous act to the capitalist society. Chris Priestley develops Shelley’s depiction of the monster as the most human person in the novel, whereas Victor Frankenstein is the real monster. Yet this act of self-recognition is ignored for the superficial aspects, his looks, which is something that Kenneth Branagh and Robert DeNiro tried to get to in the 1994 depiction.

After following Frankenstein and Clerval to Oxford via Windsor, the creature and Billy join Browning’s Circus of Freaks (including more nods to the fantastic including Bradbury,and Kafka) though Bradbury hints out that Billy is far more a monster than the creature. Following Frankenstein’s footsteps, the pair go to the Lake district where Billy assumes a different identity, trying to remake himself.

Getting to the heart of something that the Romantics certainly did, this taking on of disguises and layering of other people perhaps comes to a head when he claims that lines from Keats’s Endymion are his own but ignores the subtle warning given to him that it cannot last. Perhaps Priestley also gets to heart of assuming change, that is must be something from within rather than just affected. Affectations lead to monstrosities, perhaps like his Uncle Montague and the ghost children. Hounded out of Keswick, he and the Creecher go separate ways with their very own stories (a nicely segued set of stories there as well).

The book is a lovestory to Nineteenth century literature and its decided lack of boundaries of genre or place. The type face, shortness of chapters, separation into books and the embedded poetry are so like Gothic novels that Priestley is obviously familiar with and this book is a call or readers to take on Charles Dickens or Mary Shelley; something that I whole heartedly concur with. Equally it goes against the cult of childhood innocence though, that children can go through horror and remain unaffected. Billy’s life is one that takes on the sheen of being a romantic novel and that it will not affect them; something that the monster gets to in his own way.

In the end, the reader should ask: who is the real monster?

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