A Cure for Gravity

I saw Joe Jackson and his band perform twice, the first in 1979 in a huge concert when his popularity was in rapid ascent, the second in a  small venue some years later when it had precipitously declined.  I've admired his music for years, though I haven't kept up with his recent work of the past few decades. A Cure for Gravity, published in 1999, is a kind of musical coming of age story. It's well written, and engaging, but it basically only covers Jackson's musical life until he was 25 and had just issued Look Sharp in 1979. I really wish it would have continued at least through his albums of the 1980s.  As it stands, one gets a rather selective view of his life. He writes a bit about his ambiguous sexuality, but only tells of his girlfriends and wife. No hint of his coming out via the double album Night and Day, and how his sexuality (and other aspects of his life) affected his music. I'm glad to have read it, especially for Jackson's views on the early London punk scene and his considered reflections on finding his own place as an artist and musician. 

Bearing with Greg Bear

Earlier in his career, noted science fiction writer Greg Bear published some fantasy novels and short stories.  Six short stories were collected in Bear's Fantasies (1992); they were all later included in The Collected Stories of Greg Bear (2002).  Bear's Fantasies was reissued as Sleepside: The Collected Fantasies of Greg Bear (2004). The six stories are minor but entertaining pieces.  Somehow most of them don't really work as short stories, and in my somewhat limited reading of Bear he seems to have difficulties with shorter works. His famous story "Blood Music" was first a short story in 1983, and was expanded to a brilliant first half of a novel Blood Music (1985), with the second half of the novel being a rather disappointing sequel to the first half. But the idea of Blood Music is brilliant. Too bad there is nothing so engaging in his fantasy short stories. 

The Herald of Crap

I've heard very good things about The Killer Angels (1974) by Michael Shaara, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1975.  I'd also heard good things about his science fiction novel The Herald (1981), and it just happened to be the first book of Shaara's I picked up to read.  I wish I could say I enjoyed it, but I didn't.  It's a techno-disaster in the Michael Crichton genre, but even worse than Crichton.  The characters are stock, and have no development, and even worse the writing style is clumsy and choppy, with very short paragraphs and lots of trite dialogue. Basically, like many of Crichton's books, it is just a fleshed out screenplay for a B-grade film that wouldn't be worth watching. Here the improbably named Nick Tesla lands his small plane at at airport in the southeast, only to discover the town all dead save for himself and some strays who, like him, are apparently immune to the radiation that he learns the town has been subjected to.  Add some military men, and evil scientists, and you get a predictable, dull result.  Shaara re-wrote the ending and retitled the book The Noah Conspiracy when it was reissued in 1994. But I can't find it in me to care about any supposed revision.  Nothing could make this a worthwhile read. I'm not for book burning, but if this one ended up in a fire I wouldn't try to save it. 

Three Annual Macabres

For the years 1997 through 2005, Jack Adrian published an annual volume of older, mostly never-before-reprinted, macabre stories with Ash-Tree Press, making a total of nine volumes. The first three, which I'll cover here, were smaller in terms of contents than the other six. 

The volume for 1997 contains only four stories, all by women writers, plus an Introduction and notes by the series editor.  Though small, it makes for a good volume.  The stories by Patricia Wentworth ("A Wedding Day") and Carola Oman ("The Visitor") are routine, but well-done.  The one by Mollie Panter-Downes ("The House of the Laburnums") is slight but well-written, with some very acute descriptions. The standout in the volume is the story "The Swaying Vision" by Jessie Douglas Kerruish, which is the investigation of a haunting along the lines of William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki stories. 

The volume for 1998 has six stories by men writers, plus Adrian's informed introduction and notes. All of the men writers made their names in writing fields other than the supernatural. The stories by W. Somerset Maugham ("Told in the Inn at Algeciras") and Hilaire Belloc ("The Unpleasant Room") are the most commonplace.  Belloc's story is a time-slip one, telling of a nights pent in an old residence that rotted decades previously.  E.C. Bentley's story ("Exactly As It Happened") tells of a man staying a night in a haunted house.  John Buchan's "Ho! The Merry Masons" tells of a curiously haunted room, in whose bed sleepers die of suffocation; it is a kind of follow-up to Buchan's Runagates Club stories.  The best stories in this volume are those by Ford Madox Ford ("The Medium's End"), in which a fraudulent medium actually manifests the six-fingered hand of Anne Boleyn; and by Arthur Ransome ("Post-Mortem"), in which two men attend a seance and find that the voluminous spirit-writing relates to an autopsy that one of the men had performed years before, from the victim's point of view.

The volume for 1999 again contains six stories, all by men, and they center around ideas of time, particularly on time-slips.  Sadly this was (for me, anyway) the least interesting of the three volumes under discussion here. Two of the tales, Tom Gallon's "The House That Was Lost" and Neil Gow's "Tight and Loose", are based on murders. Eric Ambrose's "The Man Who Was Tomorrow" concerns a man who finds himself back in time, visiting his arrogant younger self, and this encounter irrevocably alters the future.  W.J. Makin's "Newsreel" is a short and predictable tale, while Donald Shoubridge's "Time-Piece" imagines a murder committed in the past by a man's kindly hostess.  The best tale is the final one, "Last Act First" by Laurence Meynell, in which a man, having time-slipped forward twenty years, tries to warn a woman about her future. 

Despite my occasional dissatisfaction, all three volumes are worth reading if you like this sort of stuff.  I look forward to the further volumes in the series. 

Summerlong

I can't recall how long ago it was when I first heard Peter S. Beagle had a new novel entitled Summerlong coming out.  It was certainly before 2005, and probably around 2003. Already scammed once by the crook Connor Cochran (for lots of details, see: http://fansagainstfraud.com/ ), I certainly did not order it whenever Conlan Press announced it (and never published it).  So now it's finally coming out in September from Tachyon Press as a trade paperback original.  I got an advance reader copy.

Anticipating something for thirteen years may raise one's expectations, but I tried not to let that affect me. And of course I won't use that incredibly stupid expression that it was "worth the wait", even if it were relevant. (How many people who wanted to read this book died in the decade-plus since it was first announced? Rarely is anything "worth the wait" for any reason.)

I'm afraid that Summerlong is not top shelf Beagle, but Beagle-lite. It's well written, and moderately engaging. I'm pleased at last to have read it, but it's pacing is so leisurely that the central idea might have worked better as a novella.  Basically, it's the story of an unmarried couple, Abe, a 65-ish retired history professor working on a book of medieval history, and his flight attendant partner, Joanna, who is about ten years younger than Abe. They have been together for more than two decades, though they live apart, Joanna in Seattle and Abe on a small island in the Puget Sound.  Joanna has a daughter Lily from a previous relationship, though Lily was raised by her and Abe.  Into this mellowing account of growing old comes a young beautiful waitress, who calls herself Lioness Lazos, who is mysterious and enchanting, inspiring unusual trust and adoration in whomever she encounters. Clearly there is something magical about her, and also about the strange people who come looking for her, after she has taken refuge in Abe's garage. These people seem to be acting out some part of the old myths.

The first half of the book is better than the second half, when the relationship between Abe and Joanna deteriorates after Abe is caught sleeping with Lioness on impulse, and as a result Joanna deliberately sleeps with the man looking for Lioness.  The resultant turmoil, as illogical as it is emotional, leaves a frustrating end which seems false to the characters as they had been so carefully developed previously. The result is disappointing but still mostly enjoyable. 

Here Comes a Tripod!

Somehow or other, I missed reading John Christopher's Tripods series when I was younger.  There are four volumes, the initial trilogy, The White Mountains (1967), The City of Gold and Lead (1968) and The Pool of Fire (1969), followed a decade later by a prequel, When the Tripods Came (1988). I've now read only the first book, The White Mountains, and though I enjoyed it, I'm not inclined to read any more. Basically, it's a tale of the post-apocalypse, where aliens have taken over and rule the populace by "capping" them as the children reach puberty---literally by placing metal caps on their heads, which diminish the curiosity of the person capped. The White Mountains is a tale of some boys who rebel, and run away to escape being capped. The scope is rather narrow, and the ending is abrupt and not very satisfying, clearly setting the reader up for the inevitable sequel.  My problem with the book is that the whole post-apocalypse scene has been done so many times already, and done better, since this book came out in 1967.  Perhaps back then it felt fresh and new, but from fifty years later it seems simplistic and contrived. 

Good Grief!

A few years after the death of C.S.Lewis, Owen Barfield, one of Lewis's long-time and closest friends, tried  to describe the change that went over his friend in the 1930s.  Barfield noted that Lewis had adopted some kind of posture, that Lewis had ceased to write in the mode of "I say this" but rather in the mode of "This is the sort of thing a man might say."  This observation has long perplexed me, as in my reading Lewis (predominately his fiction and literary essays, not the apologetics) I've never really noticed this before. But I have now, in the reading of A Grief Observed, which (supposedly) contains the notes from four of C.S. Lewis's notebooks written right after the death of his wife in 1960.  (The book was published under a pseudonym in 1961.)  Though there are passages of apparent actual grief in this book, there are also a lot of passages that feel like Lewis is posturing, that the exercise basically is Lewis setting up straw men arguments about the absences or cruelty of God in order to wriggle around them later. This makes the whole book (which fortunately is short) an essay in what Lewis calls "rhetorical chicanery."  I cannot imagine anyone finding anything of worth in these rantings unless one comes to them already as a Christian seeking confirmation of one's pre-existing superstitions.  This edition has an additional essay on Lewis by Chad Walsh, which is far superior (but with occasional lapses) to Lewis's own writing in this slim book.