John Wyndham, Chocky, 1968

There’s still some uncertainty over Chocky’s original publication date: Penguin claims it was first a novel in 1968 but John Clute points to an earlier appearance in Good Housekeeping in 1963 – it certainly exhibits a domesticated gentility suitable for such a magazine. This Penguin Modern Classics edition comes with an introduction by Brian Aldiss that maybe goes into a bit too much detail, as if readers of this particular edition will almost certainly have read it before. It’s an undemanding and straightforward read that ultimately reveals the identity of that extra voice in young Matthew’s head, with perhaps only a fleeting mention of the troubling matter of schizophrenia and no mention at all of Multiple Personality Disorder which, given Matthew’s Harley Street treatment, would at least have been considered more than the outdated diagnosis of ‘possession’. This seems to indicate that the science has been excised as much as possible, making it one for the list of recommendations of science fiction for people who don’t read science fiction.  PY

MORE ON JOHN WYNDHAM : JOHN WYNDHAM ARCHIVE   |  WIKIPEDIA

John Christopher, The Death of Grass, 1956

The lesser-known of the two great ‘floral apocalypses’ of the period, the other being John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids to which this bears little resemblance. The Death of Grass is actually a far better read, and there’s certainly a greater similarity to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in the way it shows civilisation as little more than a fragile set of agreements, easily ignored when the chips are down as the world’s diseased food chain collapses and Britain descends into anarchy. This is deliberately a very adult book that gives little consideration to half-formed attitudes – the perspectives of the coterie of children who also head north with John Custance are more or less ignored as a deadly adult type of playground power-play is put centre stage instead. There are a couple of well-drawn characters in the cynical Roger Buckley and particularly the enigmatic Henry Pirrie, whose individual influence throughout the novel is consistent and believable. The Death of Grass had been out of print so long that a 2007 Bookfinder survey named it as one of the top ten out-of-print British books; another out-of-print book it recalls – in believable environmental themes at least – is John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, although John Christopher/Sam Youd’s conception of a highly contagious and adaptable form of stem rust seems to be coming ever-closer to reality. A timely and overdue reprint, and a scary read indeed.  PY

MORE ON JOHN CHRISTOPHER / SAM YOUD : PENGUIN CLASSICS PROFILE   |  WIKIPEDIA

Thomas M. Disch, The Prisoner, 1969

This new Penguin edition of Disch’s novelisation – the one that, in his lifetime, he resented every reprint of – is timed to coincide with the recent miniseries remake. Disch contracted to write this for a small fee while particularly short of cash, even before he caught a few episodes of it on US television, and he felt no particular affinity to the series but went on to create his own kind of embellishment on what he had seen with little regard as to how his novel might match the series’ end result. It certainly diverges from it in any number of ways, but that’s possibly explained by the (very likely grafted on) notion that this was meant as a sequel: Number 6 has been recaptured, and he goes through the motions once more with similar tenacity but with a very different set of results. I didn’t see this as a sequel at all, but I like the notion that The Prisoner’s deliberately inexplicable nature can give rise to different interpretations and outcomes from its themes. Given the circumstances of its conception this isn’t considered a great Disch novel – understandably so, although I still found it to be elegant throughout, particularly the eloquent cat-and-mouse dialogue between Number 6 and Number 2 which felt exactly as it should, and which gives an indication of why Disch was probably right to be offered this gig: he made a more mentally stimulating job of it than, say, Philip K. Dick possibly would have, despite some multiple-identity and dystopian overtones that would now be considered Dickian. Certainly one for the completists of either Disch or The Prisoner, but in many ways actually better than might be expected.  PY

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Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!, 1966

A word about Ondrea Barbe’s great photograph that appears on the cover of this recent Penguin Modern Classics edition: it’s the perfect accompaniment to the alliterative nature of both Harrison’s name and the book’s title, and at the same time reflects the oppressive heat and claustrophobia contained in the book itself. Make Room! Make Room! occupies the other end of Harrison’s spectrum in relation to his satire and humour: a murder in an overcrowded and riot-prone New York in 1999 forms the backdrop to some good characterisation and a serious overpopulation message. What you get are characters to care about, a decent police-procedural plot and a strong dose of feminism; what you don’t get is the grafted-on horror aspect of the movie adaptation Soylent Green. This sits comfortably alongside some eco-conscious literature of the 1960s, published just a few years after the environmental preachiness of Silent Spring and at a time when overpopulation was not the major global concern it is today. Also, interestingly, it appeared seven years before Roe vs. Wade, and puts up a strong defence of the need for access to birth control which some at the time specifically wished to remove. Still a very good book indeed that always deserves to remain in print.  PY

MORE ON HARRY HARRISON : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Dambudzo Marechera, Black Sunlight, 1980

Marechera was the kind of off-beat Zimbabwean writer that did himself no favours, one who ended his life sleeping on Harare’s park benches refusing to talk to his family. He was either mad or blessed with, as some believed, a taint of genius, and his small output of work continues to attract attention with the reissue of his second novel in Penguin’s newly launched African Writers Series. A photojournalist whose name may or may not be Christian becomes connected to a violent rebel organisation that may or may not be called Black Sunlight, in a country that may or may not be Zimbabwe. What Marechera is doing in this odd and, yes, awkward book is explore anarchism as an intellectual position. Written when he was in his mid-twenties, the story bounces between Christian’s marriage to his blind wife Marie, to liaisons with several women (all of whom are necessarily spectacular in bed), to his work covering student riots and the shadowy world of Black Sunlight. There’s an interesting passage in which he meets a doppelgänger of himself and discusses violence, plus there are several sections in the latter parts of the book that indulge in philosophy-fuelled rants of the sixth-form variety (Marechera also studied at Oxford, before being kicked out). One surprise was that he name-checked John Wyndham and Clark Ashton Smith, although not in a particularly complimentary way. I didn’t particularly like this book at all; it’s vain, inconsistent and weakly plotted (if there is much of a plot at all), and gives the strong impression of a talented young writer who didn’t yet know how to say with clarity what he needed to say.  PY

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Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One, 1948

This was described by Anna Haycraft (better known as Alice Thomas Ellis) as ”One of the funniest and most significant books of the century”. The friction that drives it is the awkwardness of British cultural attitudes in post-war Los Angeles, set mostly in the Whispering Glades Memorial Park – a kind of Disneyland for the dead – and involving a young British poet who falls for a young American corpse beautician while he himself works secretly as a mortician at a pet cemetery. Waugh is funniest when he lets his characters’ veneer of civility slip to reveal something far more feral underneath, and I can almost sense how he filled in some laugh-free zones with just that kind of unexpected viciousness to keep the humour levels up. Some mocking characterisation and a few very memorable turns of phrase make this a wickedly funny book.  PY

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Italo Calvino, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, 1947

Throughout his career Calvino had a very ambivalent relationship with this, his first novel, and even when not quite disowning it he was more than happy to point out its various faults and explain just how and why they came about. Written when he was twenty-four after Calvino had lived through some of the kinds of events he describes, and despite clearly trying not to be this is still a very naïve coming-of-age novel. Set in a town on the Ligurian coast at the tail end of the Second World War that is overrun with both the Germans and the Blackshirt fascist paramilitary, a young cobbler’s apprentice hangs out with adults in the local bar, playing their dangerous adult games and, after stealing a German soldier’s pistol, later plays at being a partisan revolutionary. It really doesn’t go any further than this (apart from the awkwardly polemical ninth chapter that really does stick out like a sore thumb) having been specifically plotted and themed to tick all the boxes of the recently formed Italian ‘neo-realist’ school, its aim seemed to be more to preach to the converted (it sold very well on first publication) and nail Calvino’s communist-leaning politics to the mast, rather than tell a good story. Disappointing, but clearly the best place to start when understanding the transformations of Calvino’s later career.  PY

MORE ON ITALO CALVINO : WIKIPEDIA

William S. Burroughs, Junky, 1953

For the proper experience this is one of those books that ought to be read as a first edition, with its cheap cover illustration that was meant to inspire a degree of horror towards heroin use in those who picked it up. Starting life as one half of an Ace Original double paperback, with fifty years hindsight it’s easy to see how Junky took the road from cheap pulp fiction to cult novel, and while Burroughs didn’t intentionally romanticise heroin use, today, like heroin itself, this kind of book or film is now mainstream. Under the thin disguise of ‘William Lee’ Burroughs is unapologetically confessional, yet Junky probably wouldn’t have made publication at all if he didn’t also display the redemptive element of repeatedly trying to kick his heroin habit (and instead fall back on the lesser social evils of morphine, coke, alcohol and petty crime), first in New York, later in New Orleans then Mexico City. Junky isn’t an alienating experience because Burroughs does not take you on that journey; instead his alienation arrived here fully formed with the everyday world already rendered meaningless – including his wife (who he killed between drafts of this book) and, for the most part, the law – and in replacement his junk habit was promoted to the almost everyday activity of a natural bodily function like sex, a mere extension of himself stripped of its negative and antisocial connotations. Burroughs’s writing is for the most part deadpan and functional yet he occasionally indulges in wonderfully descriptive and concise analyses of what’s going on beneath the skin – not his own skin or his own experiences while under, but the skins of those exterior horrors, other people, and these passages were an early root from which were later to come the excesses of Naked Lunch. This is a relatively safe book now, but it’s lost none of its immediacy.  PY

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Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 1969

— When a young man returns to his village in the Sudan after many years studying in Europe, he finds that among the familiar faces there is now a stranger – the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. As the two become friends, Mustafa tells the younger man the diturbing story of his own life in London after the First World War. Lionized by society and desired by women as an exotic novelty, Mustafa was driven to take brutal revenge on the decadent West and was, in turn, destroyed by it. Now the terrible legacy of his actions has come to haunt the small village at the bend of the Nile.

Despite the millions of translated copies in print over the last forty years (with barely a trickle of royalties for its author) and its frequent bannings around the world this has had very few widely available English editions, so in his introduction to this new Penguin paperback Salih tried to outline how it has become such an important book in the wider context of African literature (and, as it was written in Arabic, was also voted the most important Arabic novel of the twentieth century). In storytelling terms it is far more successful, and several degrees more complex, than either of those equally famous post-colonial novels Things Fall Apart or From a Crooked Rib: an unnamed narrator returns from England to his village in the Sudan, only to find a newcomer who has adopted the village as his own: Mustafa Sa’eed is a mystery from Khartoum, someone who gradually provides a very unflattering portrait of himself, centred around his own lurid experiences in England that are far more troubling, and necessarily secret, than anything anyone in the village may suspect. Tayeb Salih gives this story many interweaving layers as just about everyone submits to subconscious destructive forces that seem to spread forward and backwards, from person to person, throughout the novel. At the root of it all is the aftermath of British colonialism in Sudan, but that country doesn’t come out of this novel looking at all respectable either, which along with the explicit sexual content probably accounts for its periodic banning. Still a very engaging and challenging book while the echoes of Africa’s post-colonial experience are still being felt.  PY

MORE ON TAYEB SALIH :  WIKIPEDIA

Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957

— On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion.

The big deal about On the Road was mostly lost on me when I read it back in the 1970s, at a time when its prominent reputation meant it should have made much more of an impact. After a recent second reading and having since learned more about Kerouac I can understand what set him off on his road back and forth across the US but the excess of stimulants still leaves this reader non-plussed. Neal Cassady, incarnated here as Dean Moriarty and being both the heart and tao of the book and the whole Beat Generation, was the focus around whom the more observant Kerouac bracketed his own search in the character of Sal Paradise. There are some great passages and the last trip into Mexico feels like an encore to an already epic story, the whole of which is written in rather sentimental style compared to his later ‘stream of consciousness’ approach. I still think he was intellectually lazy in comparison to Burroughs or Ginsberg but On the Road – or more specifically Dean Moriarty himself – still takes you on a fast and thrill-seeking ride, the impetus of which is hard to shake off.  PY

MORE ON JACK KEROUAC :  BEAT MUSEUM  |  PENGUIN 'JACK KEROUAC' MINISITE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Ayn Rand, Anthem, 1938

Rand wrote this at the same time as she was working on The Fountainhead, so the two books share the theme of asserting individuality over collective living (the edition available today is her revised 1946 version). This is a very straightforward story but also a rather overworked parable, in which a future society populated by people who are numbered rather than named exists without the concept of ‘I’, instead only having ‘we’ with which to express themselves, and collectivism is enforced almost as a religion. The protagonist, Equality 7-2521, rather unbelievably gets to do everything all by his very resourceful self: stumble upon a lost source of ancient knowledge, make scientific discoveries singlehanded, suffer cruel punishment for his good fortune, escape from jail, win the most beautiful girl and discover the Unspeakable Word. And rather uniquely, because of Equality’s upbringing most of Anthem is told only using the first and third persons plural. Any atheist who has shaken off an earlier religion will, similarly, probably understand some of Rand’s antipathy to her roots, and her loathing for Russian collectivism informs the whole story. The influence of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is also there in the background, despite being thematically rather different. This is not a natural or free-flowing tale at all, it’s (necessarily) linguistically clumsy and way too earnest, but as a vision of a mind breaking free from imposed constraints it displays its own kind of self-conscious dystopian perfection.  PY

MORE ON AYN RAND :  THE AYN RAND INSTITUTE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1981

Based on an event he remembers from his youth, Márquez adopted a journalistic yet personal style for this novel as a speculation on what led a possibly innocent man to be murdered in a South American form of honour killing, after a Colombian bride’s doomed wedding night. It would be easy to fall into line and call this a masterpiece the way everyone else does, but that’s to overlook that the structure of this novel can at times be difficult, particularly in the early few chapters where Márquez’s rhythm is not at all easy to establish. The fact that he removes the mystery from the murder in the first few pages is what makes this book exceptional because he can still keep the reader interested in events with the way he ranges back and forth along the story’s non-linear timeline, well beyond the killing itself. It’s one of those books short enough (and OK, important enough) that it deserves to be read by everyone, if only to witness the non-intrusive hints of magical realism that he adds, the multiple viewpoints that illustrate how the whole town failed that day, and his complex composition which drives the point home that the story’s dénouement is actually as important as the story itself. An intimidatingly masterful read.   PY


MORE ON GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ :  THE MODERN WORLD  |  NOBEL PRIZE BIOGRAPHY  |  WIKIPEDIA

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, 1962

The small but important differences between the original book and Stanley Kubrick's brutal film are not often commented on. This is still, thankfully, not yet a book to be noted for being a prediction, instead as a warning it seems to have functioned very well largely as a result of Kubrick’s truncated adaptation. But what was lost to Kubrick – he was unaware of the book’s final chapter because it was omitted from US editions – is a final sense of personal sympathy for the violent and unreliable teenage narrator, Alex. It’s actually what keeps the book alive and relevant because Burgess came down clearly on the side of his distinctly amoral anti-hero, despite having been driven to write A Clockwork Orange out of personal experience and loss from precisely the kind of violence he describes. It must have been difficult to write for that reason alone, though when set against the even greater amorality of a misguided government trying to deal effectively with youth crime it’s clear the book emerged out of Burgess asking himself some hard questions while still feeling a justifiable rage. Which makes the book a moral one, and far easier to experience than the film despite the complexities of Burgess’s invented language, Nadsat, which somehow also serves to veil the violence. Of which there’s plenty.  PY

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Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 1927

In 1714 a bridge in Peru collapses killing five people, a priest who witnesses the accident is compelled to ask why those five were chosen by God to die, and after looking into each of the victim’s lives he draws his conclusions. It’s a necessary book about the danger of trying to divine religious meaning from random events and why bad things happen to undeserving people, written in a slightly arcane historical style that doesn’t make for fluid reading but does instead capture the time and place very well indeed. This also served as inspiration for John Hersey’s excellent journalistic Hiroshima.  PY

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Georges Simenon, The Yellow Dog, 1931

Of the seventy-five 'Maigret' novels that Georges Simenon wrote between 1931 and 1972 this is the fourth. Commissaire Maigret is called away from Paris to solve the crime of an almost-fatal shooting in the French harbour of Concarneau, which leaves the town in a state of panic as further attempts at murder ensue. And there is also the mystery to solve of the strange yellow dog that has been seen everywhere – does it provide a link to the most likely suspect? The unfolding of the plot is classically straightforward for a mystery novel, never taking any great leaps of deduction on the part of Maigret, who here remains a very taciturn and insular character. This is what differentiates The Yellow Dog from all other Maigret stories in that the reader is given no clues as to what is going on in Maigret’s mind, something that defines just about every other Maigret story. The plot twists are sometimes predictable, but best of all is that both the story and Maigret himself are such believable creations. Very enjoyable.  PY

MORE ON GEORGES SIMENON : MAIGRET  |  WIKIPEDIA

Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, 1934

Schulz was said to be the most promising Polish Jewish writer between the two World Wars until he was shot dead for no apparent reason in 1942 by a German soldier on the streets of his home town Drogobych, and this collection contains all that survives of his work. These are very private stories that superficially radiate Kafka, and Schulz goes far into the private world of his family and the central figure of his lonely, mad father whose erratic and strange behaviour is an inevitable preoccupation. This is also what drive Schulz’s stories into more imaginative territory as he watches him repeatedly break the bonds of normality and escape into other, freer states of mental being (though rarely successfully), and the failures of his father in turn seems to drive Schulz back towards the kind of idyllic summer innocence found in the first story, ‘August’. It's sometimes as if the world is all too much for him, a sentiment that drives Schulz’s artistic purpose of ‘maturing into childhood’. Fantastic elements are also here aplenty in the stories ‘Cockroaches’, ‘The Comet’ and ‘Cinnamon Shops’, a few lines of which were a pivotal source of inspiration for China Miéville’s The City & The City. Encountering Schulz’s private world can be more difficult than you might expect, but it does provide some highly entertaining and angst-ridden food for thought if you let it get under your skin.  PY

MORE ON BRUNO SCHULZ : THE ART OF BRUNO SCHULZ  |  SCHULZIAN  |  WIKIPEDIA

Nuruddin Farah, From a Crooked Rib, 1970

Post-colonial Africa saw many political commentators and writers urging a return to traditional African values that were suppressed by European colonialism, but the Somalian emigré Farah was not one of them: instead in his debut novel he set out to expose the mysoginy and hypocrisy of the Somalian cultural attitudes towards women: they are nothing more than property, and do we really want a return to this? Beneath the simplicity of the story this is a spare and angry book, convincingly told from the viewpoint of a young and powerless Somali nomad, married off to an old man and desperate to escape her life of poverty, oppression and servitude in a patriarchal culture. The book says plenty about the everyday frustrations of Somali women but Farah doesn’t always put his points across with crystal clarity: too many passages seem unnecessarily lengthened and he exhibits a tendency towards repetition. Even so, this is quietly memorable despite its occasional weaknesses.  PY

MORE ON NURUDDIN FARAH : WIKIPEDIA

Patrick Süskind, The Pigeon, 1987

Fear and self-loathing in Paris. Jonathan Nöel is a non-person, a man who has preferred decades of complete anonymity to the messy business of actually living, but his unimaginative and ultra-organised world is thrown into complete turmoil by the random appearance of a pigeon on his apartment doorstep. Kafkaesque, certainly, looking closely at how near we can live to the stuff of our nightmares with only the horror of our own suppressed rage to stop us from going over the edge, but for me The Pigeon is a greater success in that, despite its present day setting, it has all the feel of a novel fifty years older than it actually is. Recommended.   PY

Brian Aldiss, ed., A Science Fiction Omnibus, 2007

The best from Aldiss’s three patchy-but-famous Penguin Science Fiction anthologies from the early 1960s, plus ten or so new selections from the intervening years. Aldiss was the right man for the job then to further popularise SF, and this time around his editorial point again seems to fall in favour of diversity with slightly less regard for conventionality. There are a few that read less well today, as I’m sure Aldiss is aware; it’s interesting and strange how perception of a story can change while the words themselves never do. Not all the stories here are now worth the effort involved, but of those that are it was particularly good to read again James Blish’s ‘Common Time’, Ward Moore’s ‘Lot’, William Tenn’s ‘The Liberation of Earth’, and John Steinbeck’s ‘The Short-Short Story of Mankind’, a Cold War story worth keeping in print despite its scant relevance to science fiction. Best pick: Ted Chiang’s sublime and perfectly structured ‘Story of Your Life’, an SF tale with few equals from any era, because there is simply no other story here that comes close in either concept or execution.  PY

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949

It’s getting harder to believe there was once a time when Nineteen Eighty-Four was just a useful piece of socialist political science fiction, a somewhat far-fetched thought experiment though clearly a proverbial canary in the coal mine to the British political intelligentsia. Instead the intervening years have seen us brought considerably closer to too many aspects of Eric Blair’s vision, particularly with respect to surveillance in the UK and the conduct of political hypocrisies on a global scale. As a warning Nineteen Eighty-Four continues to serve the Western world very well indeed, and one wishes Russian and Chinese literature could have come up with equally potent fables of their own that would have had a similarly enlightening effect on their own populations and a restraining effect on their leaders: the intervening sixty years since it was written have often resonated with sentences and passages from this book that could be read as historical fact in parts of the world – the excesses of Russian and Chinese communism particularly, the former which Orwell feared English Socialism had a real danger of resembling – or echoes of the world’s present nervous condition, in which realities are habitually fabricated for entire populations in a way that would horrify our ancestors. Necessarily (and thankfully) extreme, it has inevitably become one of the defining books of the twentieth century, and with the invention of Newspeak has also made a useful and indelible stamp on the English language and conceptual thought everywhere. Doubleplusgood.  PY