Book Review: Litany of the Long Sun: The First Half of The Book of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe's four volume The Book of the New Sun, an epic dying earth tale of the distant future, is one of the literary accomplishments of science fiction and fantasy. It's also an all-time favourite of mine although I've not read much of Gene Wolfe's work. I was impressed with The Fifth Head of Cerberus and Peace, but these did not have the same type of impact on my imagination as the above and maybe helps explain why I did not attempt any more Gene Wolfe novels until now. Like The Book of the New Sun , The Book of the Long Sun is a huge novel split into four volumes. The book I'm reviewing is an omnibus edition comprising the first two novels: Nightside the Long Sun and Lake of the Long Sun and attracted by the beautiful front cover illustration, obviously influenced by 19th Century Symbolism, I decided to commit myself once more to the author's brand of complex science fiction with an overlaying of fantasy.




There are similarities with Book of the New Sun but also differences. Both are about entropic worlds-here a generation starship called The Whorl, an artificial planet travelling through space, containing a medieval society scattered with left over technology, its origin and history forgotten. Litany of the Long Sun, though not having the vast canvas nor quite the singular invention of Wolfe's masterpiece, still offers the reader a detailed scientifically plausible, but unusual environment, especially appealing to science fiction fans. He uses the tropes of the genre-robots, gods who are not what they seem, even a light sabre-in a story that combines a large dose of adventure, complex political intrigue, and spiritual speculation.


The central character, Patera Silk, like Severian in Book of the New Sun, a member of a tightly knit group of professionals-the priesthood of a pagan religion (almost the mirror opposite of Severian's guild of torturers), becomes unwittingly embroiled with power politics and espionage, uncovering the realities of the Whorl and his beloved gods. The people who populate Litany of the Long Sun are varied, exotic but real to life and although the plot is dense with complexities it keeps you reading as it slowly reveals what's under the surface.


Of course I have two more novels to go (contained in the Epiphany of the Long Sun omnibus) before the story ends, but it's shaping up to be, if not as exceptionally imaginative as Book of the New Sun, an engrossing read, full of surprises and vivid images.


I will continue to read Gene Wolfe's prolific output in the years to come.


For those who would like to delve further into the world of Gene Wolfe have a look at Ultan's Library-a resource for the study of Gene Wolfe.

DVD from my Collection: Spirited Away, A Film by Hayao Miyazaki

In my humble opinion the greatest fantasy film of all time, even comparable in its imagination and originality to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. What makes Spirited Away a masterpiece of the genre is the richly detailed animation, immersing the viewer in a strange, beautiful but sometimes unsettling world, almost reaching the artistic heights of Surrealism. The film is packed with a cavalcade of gods and monsters who's weirdness is probably partly due to western audiences unfamiliarity with Japanese mythology, but still manages to make most fantasy cinema look like drab Dungeons and Dragon's rip-offs.




There are so many great scenes in Spirited Away. Two of my favourites are Chihiro's (the main character's) descent into the depths of the immense bathhouse of the gods looking for employment and her eventual meeting with the arachnoid Kamajii, the grumpy but kindly master of the boiler room-the sequence has a Steampunk feel. The other is the train journey near the end of the film across a wide expanse of a flooded plain, that comes very close to surrealist art. The mood conjured is a dreamy watery melancholia.




If you love fantasy and animation and you have not seen Spirited Away, then buy or rent the DVD ASAP. You will not be disappointed!

Other Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli DVD's in my collection:

Castle in the Sky

Kiki's Delivery Service

Princess Mononoke

DVD from my Collection: Romance, A Film by Catherine Breillat

Cinema and film culture is another interest of mine coming just behind imaginative fiction (novels and short stories.) So I suppose it's about time I started writing about films on Underground Man. Each time I view a DVD in my collection or purchase a new one I will write a mini-review. The bulk of my DVD viewing comes from online rental (Lovefilm), I watch two (just released or back catalogue) rental films a week, and I go to the cinema at least once a month, but I will not review these except if I buy the DVD later.

To get an idea of what type of cinema I like please take a look at my Blog profile or my top ten films released or re-issued in 2008.

Romance was one of those films released when the British Board of Film Classification had relaxed its rules in the late 90's, allowing scenes of real sex to appear in 18 certificate films. But unlike the revelling in nihilism and violence (see the nasty Baise-Moi) these films seemed to consist of, Romance although not a light hearted romp is chiefly about hanky-panky. Following a basic strand in much erotica-a sexually ravenous female protagonist, her needs frustrated by a cold husband or partner, goes on a sexual odyssey to find fulfilment-Catherine Breillat brings in a heavy chunk of feminism, alongside the explicit sex. The main character portrayed by the very attractive Caroline Ducey, picks up a stranger in a bar (played by Rocco Siffredi, a real life porn actor), for casual sex; offers herself for money to another but is raped in the process and engages in heavy bondage sessions with an older man. She finds a small amount of satisfaction in the affair with Siffredi, finding far more in the kinky games with the older libertine; but only with childbirth and autonomy from men (but not hatred of men) does she find herself.

Romance has an unreal artful quality like a depiction of a sexual fantasy or dream. The most lurid sequence (out of many lurid sequences) is Ducey's fantasy of working in a brothel where her body is divided by a wall, offering the punters her legs and sex organs only, as the rest of her body is not visible. This is not a gritty, realist portrayal of relations between the sexes, but rather what goes on inside the protagonist's mind when she thinks about sex. One of the few films directed by a woman, Catherine Breillat's feminism makes a refreshing antidote to the male dominated world of erotica, but also it's important to add to the dour puritans going under the label 'feminist' in the UK.

Other erotic films in my DVD collection:

In the Realm of the Senses

The Beast

Immoral Tales

Sex and Lucia

Book Review: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizohrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

I like an intellectual challenge but this one almost defeated me-a book consisting of a headache inducing melange of (anti) psychoanalytical jargon and post-modernist abstraction. After hacking through the dense thickets of language for nearly four weeks and only reaching the four hundred page mark, I decided to commit a cardinal sin of the serious reader and skip read to the end. I should have known what I was getting into but the succinct preface by Michel Foucault summarising the book as "a manual or guide to everyday life" and listing the attributes of non-fascist living had me intrigued. To summarise what Anti-Oedipus is all about would take up too much time and I'm not sure I'm up to the task anyway-for those who are interested read the Wiki entry. But it's also a book that prioritises desire and imagination, bringing these literally material and productive forces into the heart of radical left-wing ideas and politics.

My Favourite Writer J.G. Ballard Dies.

On Sunday 19th April J.G. Ballard died. I have read Ballard since my teens and he has become my favourite author. I have now completely immersed myself into his imaginative landscape, an imaginative landscape not of the far future or the distant past but the here and now. He has taught me that mystery, strangeness, even beauty and transcendence can be found in the geography of London’s utterly banal and alienated outer suburbs-a world of business parks, shopping centres and motorways. Rather then escaping to elsewhere, to a galaxy far, far away, Ballard brought science fiction down to earth without abandoning its visionary potential.

His style is not bleak realism that rubs your nose in despair, but enhanced hyper-realism closer to lucid dreaming or trance states. His protagonists populating his fictions seek transformation or psychological fulfilment not through extraversion-a sane and gregarious hero figure conquering his enemies and getting the girl-but by going inward, deep into the inner space of their minds, embracing obsession near to the threshold of madness. (and some times stepping over that threshold into genuine insanity.) The imagination is brought into the foreground, the source of personal liberation, highly appealing to my introverted and “stay at home’ personality.

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-story car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels…

But here we come to another important facet of J.G. Ballard; his critique of late-capitalism. Ballard’s fictions are ambivalent: on the one hand he reached out to the deviant and most alienated side of our society, the revitalising effects of violence or extreme sexuality, the leeching away of emotion to allow the imagination full reign-the death of affect. But on the other hand he understood the dangers residing in our modern day dystopias, high rises, gated communities and shopping malls, sapped of all human agency and community. J.G. Ballard was not left wing as such and leaves us with no social solution for our predicament. It’s difficult at times to reconcile my leftist hunger for class struggle and collectivism, albeit of the autonomist persuasion, with what seems on the service a middle-class individualist outlook. But his novels and stories depicted nightmares of capitalism, ruthlessly dissecting the psychopathology of corporatism and consumerism-offering a psychological or artistic solution not a political one. Anyway like all great artists he went beyond mere ideology, a subversive act in itself.

I suppose another factor in my love of J.G. Ballard was he lived very nearby. He was not a distant literary figure living the high life, but was almost a neighbour. It was only a few years ago I found out his address by looking in the local phone book (yes, there it was in the local phone book!) I would never intrude on his privacy but I did take a walk from Walton where I live to Shepperton to view his house. And it’s as ordinary as everyone says it is. It would be really great if a J.G. Ballard fan bought the house and turned it into a sort of Ballard museum by keeping it exactly as it is.

I will miss J.G. Ballard. I never knew him but his writing has lodged itself into my brain like no other writer. He has literally changed my mental map, no cliché. J.G. was never a believer in God or an afterlife but let’s hope like a "second Adam," he has found at last "the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun."

Book Review: Daemonomania by John Crowley

Daemonomania is a novel that needs to be read more then once. Its complexities and mysteries would give a literary critic plenty of scope for a PHD thesis. So to write a short review of the third book in John Crowley's Aegypt Cycle after reading the novel for the first time (and also taking into account that Daemonomania is part of a long interlaced story encompassing three other novels equally as complex) has its difficulties.



Daemonomania I found was slightly more fragmented then the previous novels. (Aegypt or The Solitudes and Love & Sleep) Not unstructured or jumbled just so many strands to take into account. Pierce Moffett's character takes on a darker hue, having the dominant role in a sadomasochistic relationship with girlfriend Rose and descending into depression when she turns to a cultish Christian organisation, The Powerhouse. Rosie (not to be confused with Rose) struggles with her daughter Sam's epilepsy, that's triggered by the scrying globe once belonging to the occultist John Dee, an historical character but also a character in the novels. Adding to her problems Rosie's ex-husband has joined The Powerhouse and demands custody of Sam... There is far more going on of course both at the domestic level and at the metaphysical-the previous age of the world transforming into the new: the overall theme of the Aegypt quartet.



It would be a bit of a stretch calling the books fantasy (certainly not genre fantasy) but Daemonomania does contain much that's fantastic and it's arching schema of Neo-Platonist and Gnostic cosmology firmly places it in the category of fabulation. The fantasy elements are primarily contained in the sequences set in the 16th Century revolving around the lives of John Dee and Giordano Bruno; in Daemonomania these sections have escaped from the pages of dead writer Fellowes Kraft's historical novels-the books within a book of Aegypt and Love & Sleep-and been intergrated into the main narrative. There's plenty of small-scale fantasy subtle interwoven into the lives of the 20th Century characters: Sam, Rosie's four year old daughter, has contact with the 16th Century via Dee's scrying ball, when her own toy ball bounces into John Dee's world, startling the old mage. There's also the strange sub-narrative of a battle running throughout history, between 'werewolves,' (on the side of good) and 'witches' at the gates of the land of the dead. One modern day character, Bobby, the feral mountain girl, (in Daemonomania, she's grown up) taken in by the 11 year old Pierce and his cousins in 'Love & Sleep,' is related to the 'werewolves,' although it seems she has more of the 'witch' inside. It's also interesting that most of the 20th Century protagonists are unaware of anything supernatural or fantastic, except for odd coincidences. (coincidences play a major role throughout the sequence of novels) Pierce never has his magical theories of history confirmed and only half believes them anyway.



By the end of this wonderful novel the world has shifted into a new age with the past age forgotten, remembered only in obscure fragments. The end of the world is not apocalyptic but experienced individually, at the unconscious level, with none of the fireworks of conventional fantasy.



The Aegypt Cycle is a dense, multifaceted and completely immersive read. I found myself almost a part of its construction as if I was a vital character looking down on its entirety from above; all down to John Crowley's skillful use of post-modern self-reference. It's no exaggeration to say Daemonomania, along with the other novels, is a work of literature. But you will not find the book in a British shop and in the US you would have to search through the Sci-Fi and Fantasy shelves before, if your lucky, finding a copy. It's been ignored by the literary establishment (except Harold Bloom), but it towers over most modern mainstream fiction. I look forward to the conclusion of the series in 'Endless Things.'


For a better and more in-depth review of Daemonomania and the Aegypt Cycle read Genre Trouble by James Hynes.

G20 Summit-The Summer of Rage Starts Here?

In a week's time London is hosting the G20 Summit of world leaders with the collapse of the world economy at the top of their agenda. Whatever the meagre outcome of the latest gathering of bourgeois politicians and their functionaries, don't expect it to offer any hope for our benighted planet and its peoples. The only hope lies with us, the 'multitude,' the 'proletariat', in all our diversity; our scream (of rage? fear? despondency?) produced by the new Depression, acting as a sharp spur to exit the years of consumer passivity and to join others in struggle, to get organised. A very loose coalition of the disaffected from trade unionists, through to climate change activists and anarchists are coalescing around the week starting Saturday 28th March to protest and vent their anger.


But is this the spark of the 'Summer of Rage' as predicted by our erstwhile Constabulary? Like the professional, salaried inhabitants of an upmarket Chelsea housing estate from J.G. Ballard's novel, 'Millennium People,' the middle classes, the police predict, will increasingly engage in confrontational protest as the recession hits; the G20 summit could be the catalyst. The scenario is far fetched (for the summer of 2009 anyway); more likely the police are hyping up the threat of violence to justify cracking down hard on protesters in the coming months.


So realistically what can we expect? The TUC organised 'Put People First' demo on the 28th should be large and diverse. Hopefully its atmosphere (but probably quite not its size) will be similar to the 2003 march against the invasion of Iraq. What I'd like to see are hundreds of ordinary working people of all races and creeds taking to the streets for the first time, people who have recently been made redundant or facing re-possession, expressing their anger at the government and the bankers, with home made banners and imaginative slogans. I would like to see residents whose homes or state of mind are threatened by a new third runway at Heathrow mixing with rank and file trade unionists and eco-activists. I would like to see the construction workers who recently went on strike against labour shipped in from abroad to undercut union agreements (but leave that divisive slogan at home, lads!) Here would be a clear sign that a large scale radical movement in the UK based on day to day resistance is at least possible.


And on the 1st of April more militant demonstrators will attempt to bring the City of London to a standstill (dubbed the G20 Meltdown) by converging on the Bank of England from all sides, with a climate camp directly in the heart of the City. What would I like to see happen here? Rather then a clear divide between full-time activists and those who work in the City-office workers, bank clerks, restaurant and retail staff, cleaners etc-a full integration or merging of protest, of those who self-consciously reject the system through counter-cultural lifestyle or direct action and those who are part of 'mainstream' society but oppressed by the relations of capital, facing redundancy, cuts in pay and working conditions. I would like to see workers joining the demonstrators in a non-violent but confrontational shut down of the Square Mile!


Regardless of tub thumbing rhetoric on the G20 Meltdown's website, realistically the likeliest scenario is the hemming in of protesters into confined spaces by ranks upon ranks of riot police; a very successful tactic of crowd control learnt through bitter experience of past demonstrations and actions. No doubt minor skirmishes will occur, with a McDonald's window smashed somewhere along the way, enough to get the odd right wing tabloid and liberal protester hot under the collar, but not exactly the Paris Commune.


What I would like to see less of are the usual travails and self-conforming stereotypes of the Left. Here is a handy list:



1: The paper sellers of the Trotskyite sects, pushing their outdated rigid nostrums and competing amongst themselves for the position of the vanguard party of the proletariat. We all know what horrors that ultimately lead to; rather then representing the workers, they have only succeeded in representing the interests of a hierarchical party-a new ruling class. Meanwhile the proletariat has fragmented and diversified to the point where a revolutionary party of the industrial working class has become meaningless anyway.



2: The anarcho-counter cultural absolutists, isolated from the daily realities of capitalist oppression (work, paying the bills) by either monetary privilege (our Julian is going through his anarchist phase; he'll get over it once he gets that post in daddy's company) or an idealistic and self-rightous willingness to accept poverty, putting up with a grotty student flat or squat; the necessary privations of an uncompromising antagonism with state and society. But the mind-set created by an antagonistic lifestyle can be as vanguardist as the Trots; a sneering stand offish attitude to those millions of people with jobs and mortgages; unthinkingly embracing direct action above and beyond organisation and in consequence glorifying useless gesture politics like breaking Starbuck windows or spray-painting war memorials-easily side tracked into the blind allies of primitivism and animal rights extremism.



3: The opposite but mirror image of 2 above; the leaders and careerists in the NGO's, trade unions and mainstream political parties. Straitjacketed by corporate management theories of efficiency and perceived media respectability, they shoehorn politics into a soul destroying electoral or legalist dead end, cutting off any development of struggle that could lead to structured but libertarian organisations. Keeping protest within the boundaries of ever more restrictive legality they stifle creativity; marching from A to B, writing letters to government ministers and legal campaigns through the courts may be necessary at times but a programme so limited will stagnate and eventually be recuperated as a adjunct of the system rather then a threat to it.



But enough negativity! Let's hope the protests and actions surrounding the G20 Summit will be a success, leading not just to a 'Summer of Rage,' but years of unrest directed against an increasingly failing capitalism and its counterpart and protector, the state. Not a lashing out in pointless acts of terroristic violence, which only reflects despair and resentment, but collective resistance; a movement that really can change the world.