Bluebeard (#96)

Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut

What I said then: 

Vonnegut’s a huge favourite of mine, to the point that I’ve had to ration his books out so that I don’t find myself with fifty years left to live but no new Vonnegut to read.

What I say now:

Of course, there's always a chance that I'll be hit by a car tomorrow. And as I lie on the road my last thought will surely be: Consarn it, now I wish I'd read every last Kurt Vonnegut novel as soon as I fell in love with the guy.

But at least I'll have read Bluebeard.

After Drood I figured I'd treat myself to one of the 'sure things' that's still on my shelves, to perk me up a bit, and Bluebeard didn't disappoint. If you haven't read Vonnegut before, his tone of voice is difficult to describe: he's like the perfect uncle you wish you had, both wise-cracking and wise. Honestly, his writing is a mess of contradictions, managing to be simultaneously hilarious and tragic, serious and silly, and best of all, sane and insane at the same time. And for as long as you're reading a Vonnegut book, that feels like the only possible way to respond to this mad, beautiful, cruel world we live in. He's a magician.

Rabo Karabekian, an Armenian-American Abstract Expressionist painter, has a cameo in Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (his scene in that book is a favourite of mine), and is placed centre stage here. After the particular brand of paint he used for his art turns out to fall off the canvas after a while, he has become a laughing stock and is living out the last years of his life in relative seclusion. His comfortable decline is interrupted when a bossy know-it-all widow named Circe Berman shows up on his private beach and cajoles him into writing his autobiography. Bluebeard is that book, and it swings between Karabekian describing his ill-starred youth and relating the philosophical disagreements that arise between himself and Berman, who becomes his house-guest.

Spicing the book with occasional historical figures (Jackson Pollock figures prominently), Vonnegut gives us a potted history of the beginning of the Abstract Expressionist movement. However, it's the running commentary provided by the arguing Karabekian and Berman (she can't stand his collection of paintings, he can't satisfactorily explain them) which is the most fun. Their relationship --- snarky and adversarial, but still needy --- is a delight.

Sorry, this is a pretty crap review. I don't really know how to explain the appeal of Kurt Vonnegut to me. I've loved every one of his books that I've read. Reading the last third of Bluebeard on the train back from Wangaratta I laughed out loud on several occasions, and had to wipe tears from my eyes on several more. But for the life of me I can't dissect how he does it. Or maybe I don't want to dissect it.

So ... look. Go to a bookshop. Pick up a copy of Slaughterhouse Five. (That was the first book of his that I ever read, and it blew my mind apart. In a good way.) Stand in the store and read it until you come to the words "It ends like this: Poo-tee-weet?" In my edition, that's sixteen pages in. If, at that point, you haven't fallen head over heels for Kurt Vonnegut the way that I did (and still do), then I feel sorry for you. You won't know what you're missing.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Revolutionary Road by Kurt Vonnegut
books to go: 95

Drood (#97)

Drood by Dan Simmons

What I said then: 

A Victorian mystery which has Dickens and Wilkie Collins as its protagonists

What I say now:

It's possible that I did this book a major disservice by reading it immediately after I had read Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. Simmons' book is told in the first person, from Wilkie Collins' point of view, and the fact that I was juxtaposing real Wilkie Collins with fake Wilkie Collins made the fake version nigh-on unbearable. Every time Simmons got the voice wrong (which was often) it jolted me out of the story. Maybe with a bit more time and space in between them, all of Simmons' infelicities of style wouldn't have been so noticeable, or bothered me so much. As it is, his effort at literary ventriloquism struck me as a complete and utter failure.

Even more unfortunately, the story was annoying as hell. Charles Dickens, returning from a trip to France with his mistress (and ... the mother of his mistress?!), is involved in a horrific train crash. As he helps to pull people from the wreckage, he encounters a mysterious apparition: a disquieting man in a long black opera cape, with no nose and severed fingers, who has a lisping hiss of a voice and is named Drood. Drood, may or may not be an Egyptian hypnotist, a master criminal, a serial killer, or a figment of Dickens' and his protege Wilkie Collins' imaginations, or all of the above. Over the next five years, the last of Dickens' life, Drood haunts, beguiles and terrifies the famous author, and casts an even greater shadow over the grasping, peevish, Collins who narrates our tale.

Drood is 800 pages long, and is stuffed with incident, but it was all so haphazardly thrown together that I'd struggle to elongate that brief summary. Soooo much happened, but it was all soooo meaningless. Not once, but several times, there would come some extraordinary revelation that should have changed everything about the relationship between Dickens and Collins, only when next they met, everything would go on exactly as before. Sometimes no reason was given for this break from cause & effect storytelling, and sometimes Simmons fell back on the excuse of hypnotism (mesmerism, he calls it) to explain why events have no seeming consequence. I couldn't tell you which annoyed me more. There's even one moment, I shit you not, when an entire chapter is explained away with the old 'Then I woke up and it was all a dream' chestnut. Doesn't everybody in the world know that trope is dramatic death? Doesn't everybody know never to use it?

Collins --- jealous, drug-addicted, psychopathic, possibly mad and possibly hypnotised --- is an unreliable narrator, but his unreliability is never utilised for any purpose. The best unreliable narrator stories will still, at their close, offer satisfaction to the reader because they'll explain how, why, and in what way their narrator was concealing the truth. When Simmons closes Drood he leaves us still completely in the dark as to how much of the preceding 800 pages was madness, how much was hypnotism, how much was exaggeration and how much was true. At that point it's not clever, it's just frustrating.

My other beef was with Simmons' insistence on cramming in every damn bit of research he could find, regardless of whether it served his story or not. So much of this novel (not half of the total word count, maybe, but probably a third) consisted of tidbits about Dickens, or about Collins, or about the time they lived in, that simply had no need to be there. There'd be entire chapters in which the story would stop dead in its tracks while we were treated to a lovingly detailed description of what Dickens and Collins got up to in February of 1861. Okay, okay, I'm over-stating the case there ... but I'm overstating it by less than you might think.

All in all, this was a crushing disappointment. I've got Hyperion, another Dan Simmons novel on my shelf. It might be a very long while before I pull that one down and give it a go.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut
books to go: 96

'First and Last Thoughts' --- short story

'Sup everybody. Drood is continuing to be boring as hell. I just checked the dates and holy shit, in three days I'll have been reading it for a whole frickin' month. Ugh. I've got Thursday off, so if I really plow through the ending maybe I can beat the one-month deadline.

Anyways, given the relative silence recently I thought I'd throw up an old story from one of the writing groups I used to be a part of. I dropped out of them earlier this year because I was embarking on a big writing project which has taken up a heap of my time and energy. I'll have more details on that 'big writing project' reasonably soon. Hopefully. (Ooo, mysterious!)

So this particular story was for the --- how can I put this? --- vastly sillier of the two writing groups, and the theme was Trashy Vampire Fiction. It may or may not be the funniest thing I've ever written, but it's certainly the dopiest. But before we begin, here's a little something to get you in the mood:

Remember, if you think the story sucks, you can always scroll back up and gaze into R-Pattz's horrifyingly dead eyes. On that note, enjoy!

First and Last Thoughts

Doctor Isabelle Lee’s first thought was that the girl was terrified.  Her second thought was that the boy’s hairstyle was ridiculous.  It swept upwards in artfully asymmetrical swoops and swirls, like a disaster of post-modern architecture, or like a half-melted soft-serve cone from McDonalds.  Her third thought was that, despite the hair, he was smoking hot.

It was nearing four a.m., and nearing the end of her shift in the E.R.  It had been a relatively quiet evening: most of the drug-related gunshot wounds and stabbings had had the good grace to be D.O.A., and she’d even been able to snatch moments of sleep in between signing off on them and sending them down to the morgue.

All her tiredness disappeared, however, as she gazed into the calm young man’s limpid green eyes.  She put his age at about sixteen, but his eyes seemed older somehow.  His skin was white, the pure white of a blank sheet of paper, as though there was no blood beneath the surface to stain it pink.  His lips, however, were brilliant red, and the contrast with his skin was dazzling.  They were like juicy fresh-picked strawberries perched atop a dollop of thick, luscious cream.

Isabelle became suddenly aware of her own skin, and began to feel hot underneath her scrubs.  For a brief moment, everything was forgotten—the hospital, the injured girl, her boyfriend Lorenzo waiting at home in their cramped apartment—everything was lost, except for him, and her.  Isabelle’s heart beat a tattoo against her ribs.

The boy smiled, a perfect dimple cleaving his hard, masculine chin.  ‘My girlfriend caught her tongue on something,’ he said.  ‘Could you take a look at it?’

His voice was unusually deep, and it shook through Isabelle like the bass in a nightclub.  It took her a moment to register what he’d actually said.

‘What?’  The world—the cruel grey world—came flooding back.  ‘Oh, yes, of course.  So, uhh, what seems to be the trouble?’

Turning to the girl, Isabelle again saw in an instant that something was scaring her out of her wits.

‘Mppffhhmm,’ she mumbled, refusing to open her mouth.  Isabelle pulled up a stool in front of her and laid her hand on the girl’s knee.

‘It’s okay.  You’re safe here.  What happened?’

In answer, the girl opened her mouth, revealing that her tongue had been shredded to ribbons.  She was a beautiful girl, Isabelle reflected.  Or, more accurately, she would be beautiful if her mascara hadn’t dripped to form black tear-streaks on her cheeks, and if her hair wasn’t in disarray, and if her clothes weren’t torn …

‘We were making out …’  The boy was stealthy; he had crept up behind Isabelle without a sound, and his deep voice purred into her ear.  Just hearing him say the words ‘making out’ in his Barry White-esque timbre made her lose herself.  A shiver ran down her spine and she shifted on her stool.  She grew damp, and not with sweat.

Staring blankly into the girl’s open mouth, at the half-cooked bolognese that was all that was left of her tongue, Isabelle surrendered to the boy’s lustrous voice.  She let out a whimper.

‘… and I grazed her tongue with my fangs …’

As he spoke, the boy hooked a finger underneath Isabelle’s pony-tail and draped it over one shoulder, exposing the back of her neck.  The faint whisper of his breath on her skin made her arch her back in delight.

‘… and I tasted her blood …’

He stroked Isabelle’s tight pink flesh.  His fingers were icy cold, like frozen sausages left to thaw in the kitchen sink of her burning skin.  She shuddered at his touch, closed her eyes and leaned back, biting her lip to keep from groaning out loud.

‘… and it tasted good.  Once a vampire tastes blood, his thirst is almost unquenchable, he can’t be stopped …’

Wait … fangs?  Vampire?  Huh?  Isabelle opened her eyes and the boy’s pale unearthly face was mere inches from hers.  His skin was smooth as marble, and just as cold.  But his eyes, despite their agelessness, were warm.  She was overwhelmed by his beauty, by the sheer perfection of his astonishing face—he was like a perfect meld of Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Zac Efron and all three Jonas Brothers.  She felt a monstrous heat growing inside her, a heat that Lorenzo had failed to make her feel in years.

‘… but I love my Lydia …’

The girl, her fear replaced by something close to joy, stroked the boy’s pale hand.

‘… so stop I did.  It almost killed me …’

He smiled.  Even the sight of his snow-white fangs couldn’t mar his angelic beauty.  Isabelle gasped and writhed in delight, intoxicated by his very presence.  The heat inside her was building to a crashing crescendo.

‘… and now I’m sooooo hungry,’ the boy crooned.

As the two pin-pricks of his fangs sank into her neck, as her life drained away, as her orgasm sent great rolling waves of hot pleasure that wracked her body like a lifeboat in a storm, the last thing that Doctor Isabelle Lee ever thought was: it was worth it.

And then she died.

THE END

Story notes:

• In all honesty, this barely qualifies as a story. It's more like a Trashy Vampire Anecdote, or something. Even the wizard one, which is shorter, at least has a beginning, middle and end. This is too slight. It's just kind of a run of gags.
• A shout out to my good friend Kerls, whose series of Bad Fiction Friday Arvos over on his blog A Totally Irrelevant Title made me more willing to throw up something that's deeply terrible.
• I still giggle at the frozen sausages metaphor. I do wish that sentence was phrased a bit more elegantly though. Ah well, can't win 'em all. 
• I hope you laughed at least once. If you didn't, I'm not as good a writer as I think I am. 
• I genuinely have no idea what the Jonas Brothers look like.

Cheers, JC.

currently reading: Drood by Dan Simmons

books to go: 97

My favourites: Crash by J.G. Ballard

 

A long time ago I had a plan that I'd do a bunch of reviews of my all-time favourite books whenever I didn't have anything else to write about. Which is pretty much code for "whenever I'm really struggling to get through the book I'm reading." Which is what's happening now. For whatever reason, Drood just ain't really doing it for me, but more on that in another post or two. For now, let's talk Ballard.

Pretty much any time I read anything by J.G. Ballard, the main thing that strikes me is how unique his imagination is. If his novels and stories are any guide, he seems to think differently to every other member of the human race. I really believe that nobody else on earth would have been able to write the fictions that Ballard did ... and I find the experience of reading them thrilling, exhilerating, exhausting, and completely fucking mind-exploding. His Complete Short Stories, more than 1,000 pages long and covering more than forty years of writing, is like my own personal bible.

(His best known work, the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun, is by far the most 'normal' thing of his I've ever read, and stands out like a sore thumb within his body of work. Having read it for Year 11 English when I was at school, when I stumbled on Crash a few years later it actually took me a while to realise that they were written by the same guy.) 

Crash is narrated by a television producer named Ballard, and the book opens with a brief moment of violence as Ballard's car runs out of control and he spears into an oncoming sedan. Immobilised by crushed metal, Ballard is forced to look at the scene that confronts him, that he has caused. The other car carried two people: the male driver is dead, his body lying shattered on Ballard's own hood; the female passenger, Helen Rimington, is beautiful and barely injured. The frankness of her gaze as they wait, locked together, for rescue workers to cut them loose, reminds Ballard of the intimacy of sex. From that moment, sex, death and traffic collisions become linked in his mind.

Once in hospital, Ballard is discovered by Vaughan, a paranoid TV-scientist who is obsessed with the sexual possibilities of car accidents and is gathering together a group of crash survivors who feel the same. Together they fiercely explore their bizarre hope for an intersection of concrete, glass, steel, blood and semen. They plan accidents, then carry them out. They sneak into wrecker's yards to fuck in the twisted, mis-shapen seats of smashed cars. Ballard tracks down Helen Rimington and involves her in the group, opening up her scars and treating them like a vagina. Vaughan plans the perfect accident, in which he hopes to kill himself and Elizabeth Taylor (who's shooting a movie at a nearby studio).

Just in case my little summary hasn't given the game away, I'm gonna come out and say it: Crash is fucking fucked up. Essentially it's about the fusion of humanity and technology, which is a fairly common science-fiction trope (Ballard began as a pure sci-fi writer, before evolving into something much deeper, and stranger). The genius of Crash, though, is twofold: Ballard brings this idea out of the realm of the fantastical and sets it in the real world and, having done that, he makes it perfectly literal. The metaphor at work in Crash is infinitely more powerful than any of its sci-fi equivalents because it's so grounded in reality, yet at the same time so alien. Vaughan actually wants to mate with his car, to integrate the most perfect technology of his time into his own body. In the novel this involves being pierced by steering columns and leaking blood and semen onto dashboards; in the forty-odd years since Crash was published it has involved the invention of computers, walkmans, the internet and iPhones, and the subordination of our daily lives to increasingly elaborate technologies.

When thinking about this book it's hard not to picture that guy on the tram chatting into the glowing blue headset-phone-thingy and freak out a bit about how on the money Ballard was all along. I mean, fuck, I'm blogging right now.

The writing in Crash is deliberately quite cold and mechanical, Ballard describing acts of savage sexual violence with repetitive language more suited to a technical manual. I know a number of people who find it nigh-on unreadable. (It actually has a hell of a lot in common with another of my favourite books, American Psycho --- the same collision of sex and violence, and a similar bludgeoning repetitive style. What does it say about me that I love them both? Probably nothing good ...)

If you're able to lock into its tone and read it on its own terms, I believe Crash has as much to tell you about humankind in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as any piece of art I've ever come across. I honestly can't think of any higher praise than that --- it's a remarkable book.

Cheers, JC.

currently reading: Drood by Dan Simmons

books to go: 97

The Moonstone (#98)

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins


What I said then:

A classic Victorian novel ... but I hate Victorian novels. Most of them, anyway.

What I say now:

Yikes, I actually finished this nearly a week ago, but with the packing/moving/unpacking/"hey-where-did-I-put-that-really-important-thingy?" madness that's been going on in my life, I haven't had a chance to sit down and yarn about it. (I live in Port Melbourne now, in a rather lovely Edwardian terrace house, and my books have made the journey safely. I was tempted to 'lose' one or two of the things I'm most dreading having to read --- *cough* D.H. Lawrence *cough* --- but it would've felt too much like cheating.)

So: The Moonstone. No less an authority than T.S. Eliot described it as 'the first, the longest, and the best of all English detective novels' ... though, is a modernist poet really an authority on thrillers? In brief, a dying scoundrel bequeathes his niece, Miss Rachel Verinder, a ransacked Indian jewel on her eighteenth birthday, which goes missing that very night. Among the suspects are her two suitors, a reformed thief now working in the house as a servant, and three mysterious Indians who turned up in the town just as the stone did.

Collins tells the story in a succession of first-person narratives as several different people describe their relation to the jewel and the hunt for it, and the shifting points-of-view are probably the greatest strength of the book. Each narrator has a distinctive voice, which Collins nails, but even more than that, each has a distinctive take on the crime, on life, and on the other people involved. Facts us readers thought we could rely on are subsequently thrown into doubt, and the initial portrayals of certain characters are shown to be wildly inaccurate. The way Collins uses his multiple narrators to toy with our perceptions is brilliant sleight-of-hand, and has been much copied since (I'm sure it was done before Collins, too ... if you're better read than me and know by whom, leave me a note in the comments).

The case of the lost jewel is intriguing, but Collins goes one better by successfully linking the search for the truth about the theft with the search for the truth about Miss Verinder's love-life. The book ends up being as much about her attempts to find happiness as it is about any ginormous diamond, and is all the better for it. While being utterly central to the plot, she is not one of our narrators, so her actions --- both to do with the lost diamond and her two suitors --- are left unexplained until the last moments of the novel.

If there's one weakness, it's the ending. In order to fit everything together, Collins resorts to a device which, to a modern reader, comes across as slightly fantastical. After the rigorous realism of the first three quarters of the book, it felt like a let-down to me, and even a bit of a cheat. Which, seeings as this is a mystery novel, should probably kind of ruin it. I had so much fun up to that point though (the first narrator, a cantankerous old servant who's obsessed with Robinson Crusoe, is hilarious), that I'm willing to forgive.

Cheers, JC.

about to read: Drood by Dan Simmons (which is narrated by none other than a fictionalised Wilkie Collins. Coincidence? I think not!)

books to go: 97