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The literary Bond revisited: Octopussy and The Living Daylights

 

© Jonathan Cape

 

I once read a comment made by esteemed poet Philip Larkin about James Bond’s unsuitability for a short-fiction format: “I am not surprised that Fleming preferred to write novels.  James Bond, unlike Sherlock Holmes, does not fit snugly into the short story length: there is something grandiose and intercontinental about his adventures that require elbow room and such examples of the form as we have tend to be eccentric and muted.”

 

As a boy, I would have agreed.  I read most of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books back then and the one I was least enamoured with was For Your Eyes Only.  Actually, FYEO (as I’ll refer to it) wasn’t a novel but a collection of short stories featuring Bond.  In one of them, Quantum of Solace – which had nothing to do with the 22nd official Bond movie, made with Daniel Craig in 2008 – all 007 did was sit and listen to somebody else narrate a story about a different set of characters.

 

For me at the age of 11, a good Bond story needed a super-villain with an imposing HQ, and a nefarious scheme involving espionage and / or criminality, and a love interest, and various action scenes where said super-villain tried, unsuccessfully, to bump Bond off.  And of course, with Ian Fleming, there’d also be a wealth of background detail culled from Fleming’s experiences as a globetrotting journalist, naval intelligence officer and bon viveur and from his research – research was something he was scrupulous about.  Cramming all these things into a short story was not viable, I thought.  Thus, the truncated slices of Bondery that appeared in FYEO just seemed weird to me.

 

They seem much less weird to me today – especially since, after reading FYEO, I saw such opulent but ramshackle Bond films as The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979).  Their plots were so disjointed, thanks to the filmmakers’ wish to squeeze in as many different, exotic locations and spectacular action set-pieces as possible, that they often felt like a series of short, barely-connected stories rather than a single, coherent, movie-length one.

 

Anyway, Larkin wasn’t talking about FYEO but about Fleming’s other collection of James Bond short stories, Octopussy and The Living Daylights, which was published in 1966, two years after Fleming’s death.  This book constitutes Bond’s final appearance in print, as penned by his creator.  It originally consisted of just the two stories mentioned in the title, although subsequent editions beefed it up with the addition of two more, The Property of a Lady and 007 in New York.  Nonetheless, it remains a slim volume.  Even with four stories, it comes to a mere 123 pages.

 

Since then, of course, Octopussy and The Living Daylights have lent their titles to Bond movies, in 1982 and 1987 respectively.  A film has yet to be made called The Property of a Lady and to be honest I think Adele or Billie Eilish would have difficulty wrapping their vocal chords around the title in a Bond-movie theme song.  (“The proper-TEE… of a lad-EE…!”  No, can’t imagine it.)  Obviously, 007 in New York wouldn’t cut it as a movie title at all.  Mind you, there was a TV movie made in 1976 called Sherlock Holmes in New York starring, heaven help us, Roger Moore as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s deerstalker-wearing detective, so anything is possible.

 

© Eon Productions

 

Octopussy and The Living Daylights was one of the few Fleming-Bond books I hadn’t read in my boyhood, so when I encountered a copy of it in a bookstore a while ago thought I’d give it a shot.  How would I get on with it?  Four decades after I’d read FYEO, would I find the short-story James Bond more palatable?

 

The opening story, Octopussy, is the longest one in the collection but it has Bond only as a secondary character.  The story concerns a Major Dexter Smythe, described acidly by Fleming as “the remains of a once brave and resourceful officer and of a handsome man…”  Now “he was fifty-four, slightly bald and his belly sagged in the Jantzen trunks.  And he had had two coronary thromboses…  But, in his well-chosen clothes, his varicose veins out of sight and his stomach flattened by a discreet support belt behind an immaculate cummerbund, he was still a fine figure of a man at a cocktail party or dinner on the North Shore…”

 

The North Shore mentioned in that excerpt is the north coast of Jamaica.  During the post-war years Smythe and his wife, now deceased, established themselves there after escaping from hard-pressed, austerity-era Britain: “They were a popular couple and Major Smythe’s war record earned them the entrée to Government House society, after which their life was one endless round of parties, with tennis for Mary and golf (with the Henry Cotton irons!) for Major Smythe.  In the evenings there was bridge for her and the high poker game for him.  Yes, it was paradise all right, while, in their homeland, people munched their spam, fiddled in the black market, cursed the government and suffered the worst winter weather for thirty years.”

 

Yet this easy, comfortable life in Jamaica didn’t fall into Smythe’s lap.  Gradually, Fleming enlightens us on how Smythe was able to afford it.  In a back story that has echoes of B. Traven’s 1927 novel and John Huston’s 1948 movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, we learn that in the Austrian Alps at the end of World War II, he stumbled across something immensely valuable that he hoarded for himself.  To do this, however, he also had to commit murder.  Octopussy describes what happens when Smythe’s ‘ancient sin’ finally catches up with him.  The bearer of the bad news – that the authorities have found out what he did back in the war and intend to arrest him – is a ‘tall man’ in a ‘dark-blue tropical suit’ with ‘watchful, serious blue-grey eyes’.  It’s Bond.  But Bond isn’t just carrying out a professional errand.  Eventually we discover that he has a personal stake in bringing Smythe to justice.

 

Once you accept that the story is about Smythe rather than Bond, it proceeds agreeably.  The plump and comical Smythe, who paddles about the reef in front of his villa and rather pathetically talks to the fish that swim there – plus an unfriendly, tentacled mollusc whom he’s christened ‘Octopussy’ – gradually loses our sympathy as Fleming peels back the layers and we discover the cruel, and unnecessary, deed he committed to enrich himself decades earlier.  Bond is hardly a paradigm of virtue but, equipped with a conscience and a rough-and-ready code of ethics, he’s the antithesis of what’s represented by Smythe.  The scene where the flaccid and weak-willed Smythe confesses his crime to Bond is admirably low-key, but Fleming infuses it with a cold, sadistic tension.

 

The Property of a Lady, on the other hand, is a conventional Bond adventure in miniature.  It has 007 turn the auctioning at Sotheby’s of an artwork designed by Carl Faberge – according to the catalogue, “(a) sphere carved from an extraordinarily large piece of Siberian emerald matrix weighing approximately one thousand three hundred carats” – into a trap to catch the KGB’s director of operations in London.  Also involved is a female Russian double-agent working in the British Secret Service, whom the service is aware of and uses to feed fake information back to Moscow.  To be honest, the plot didn’t make sense to me.  I didn’t see how Bond, by snaring London’s top KGB man at Sotheby’s, could avoid alerting Moscow to the fact that British intelligence had cottoned onto the double agent’s existence and were using her for their own ends.

 

Still, the story is readable and the scenes set in Sotheby’s allow Fleming to show off his knowledge, acquired through research or personal experience, of the world’s most famous broker in fine art.  When Bond expresses surprise that the auctioneer doesn’t bang his gavel three times and declare, “Going, going, gone,” an expert informs him, “You may still find that operating in the Shires or in Ireland, but it hasn’t been the fashion at London sales rooms since I’ve been attending them.”

 

Elements from both Octopussy-the-short-story and The Property of a Lady turn up in Octopussy-the-1982-film, which starred Roger Moore.  In the film, the title character is not an octopus but a beautiful and mysterious woman played by Maud Adams, whose father, it transpires, once received a visit from visit by Bond similar to the visit that Major Smythe received in the original story.  The film also features a proper octopus, and there’s some business too about a Faberge egg being auctioned off at Sotheby’s.  However, if you’ve seen Octopussy-the-movie and don’t remember these things, that’s hardly surprising because it’s a mad mishmash of things – involving nuclear warheads, circuses, exiled Afghan princes, feuding Russian generals, knife-throwing identical twins, hot-air balloons, snake charmers, gorilla suits, everything bar the proverbial kitchen sink.  It’s one of the very worst Bond movies in my opinion.

 

Meanwhile, Hannes Oberhauser, the character murdered by Major Smythe in Octopussy-the-story, plays a small but important role in the backstory of Spectre (2015), the fourth Bond with Daniel Craig in the title role.  He’s mentioned in a plot twist that bears upon Bond’s relationship with his old nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz).  That twist was much derided by the critics, though as a fan of the books I was pleased that Oberhauser got name-checked in a Bond movie at last.

 

© Eon Productions

 

The third story in the book, The Living Daylights, sees Bond assigned a mission in Berlin.  He has to kill a Soviet sniper whom the KGB have lined up to shoot a defecting scientist while he flees from the east to the west of the city – the story is set shortly before the creation of the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie.  Bond has a crisis of conscience when he discovers that the enemy sniper is a woman, an attractive blonde whom he’s seen posing as a member of an orchestra that’s performing over on the Communist-Bloc side of town.  This story is incorporated, more or less intact, into the early part of the 1987 movie The Living Daylights, which was the first one to star Timothy Dalton as Bond.  In the film, however, the action is moved to Bratislava, the defector is a KGB officer and his defection is planned to take place during an orchestral performance in a concert hall.

 

Although the rest of the plot of The Living Daylights-the-film is rather convoluted and unsatisfactory, and there are a few daft moments seemingly left over from the previous movies in the series, it felt like a breath of fresh air to me at the time. It was an attempt at a slightly more sensible Bond film and had an actor in the lead role trying to depict Bond as the moody, occasionally conscience-stricken character that Fleming had originally written.  And having a big chunk of Fleming’s story in it at the start definitely helped.

 

The final story, 007 in New York, is a trifle – Bond is sent into the Big Apple to warn a former Secret Service member that the man she’s cohabiting with is actually a Soviet agent, though he spends most of the story’s eight pages planning the shopping, eating, drinking, clubbing and wenching that he’s going to do while he’s there.  This allows Fleming to show off his knowledge of the city – “Hoffritz on Madison Avenue for one of their heavy, toothed Gillette-type razors, so much better than Gillette’s own product, Tripler’s for some of those French golf socks made by Izod, Scribner’s because it was the last great bookshop in New York and because there was a salesman there with a good nose for thrillers, and then to Abercrombie’s to look over the new gadgets…  And then what about the best meal in New York – oyster stew with cream, crackers and Miller High Life at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central?  No, he didn’t want to sit up at a bar…  Yes.  That was it!  The Edwardian Room at the Plaza.  A corner table.”

 

Fleming was known to have a predilection for sadomasochism, so it’s telling that 007 in New York also sees Bond considering a visit to a bar he’d heard about that “was the rendezvous for sadists and masochists of both sexes.  The uniform was black leather jackets and leather gloves.  If you were a sadist, you wore the gloves under the left shoulder strap.  For the masochists it was the right.”  Bond has an old flame in New York whom he intends to meet up with and enjoy some nightlife with, including the S-&-M-themed nightlife, and it’s here that a tiny sliver of 007 in New York makes it into the movies too.  The old flame’s name is Solange, which is the name of the character played by Caterina Murino in Casino Royale, which saw Daniel Craig’s debut as Bond, in 2006.

 

007 in New York is tied up with a gentle, though unexpected, twist that’s worthy of Somerset Maugham – a writer whom Fleming was a big admirer of.  And that, unfortunately is it.  Fleming had passed away prior to this collection’s publication and no further Bond material was to be published under his name.  Thus, Octopussy and The Living Daylights marked the end of James Bond as a literary phenomenon…

 

For all of two years, until 1968, when Kingsley Amis published Colonel Sun.

 

© Eon Productions

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A mish-mash from Mish

 

© Penguin Books

 

Anyone familiar with my wokey, lefty, liberal politics might be surprised to hear that I’m an admirer of the Japanese author Yukio Mishima.  Indeed, I’d probably include his Sea of Fertility tetralogy – or at least, its first two entries, Spring Snow and Runaway Horses (both 1969) – among my top two-dozen novels of all time.

 

Yes, that’s Yukio Mishima, the ultra-right-wing Japanese nationalist who rejected democracy, formed his own militia, and in 1970 attempted to take over a military base in Tokyo while calling on the members of Japan’s Self-Defence Force to stage a coup and restore the Japanese Emperor to his former glory. And who, when it became clear that the attempted coup was a flop, committed seppuku, i.e., ritually disembowelled himself.

 

When I lived in Japan in the 1990s, I remember Japanese acquaintances who leaned leftwards in their politics wincing in horror when I said I liked Mishima’s books. One guy who was in his forties, and had been a ‘New Left’ student in the late 1960s, told me he’d been terrified when he first heard the news that Mishima was attempting a coup d’état.  For a moment, he genuinely feared that Japan was going to end up under the heel of a right-wing, militaristic, Emperor-worshipping regime like the one that’d dominated the country in the 1930s and led it to disaster in the 1940s.

 

And I seem to remember reading an interview with the Japanese composer and occasional actor Ryuichi Sakamoto – now, alas, the late Ryuichi Sakamoto – in which he stated bluntly that he’d hated Mishima and was glad when he heard that he’d done himself in.  This was despite Sakamoto supposedly basing his performance in the 1983 movie Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence on the author, and despite him titling the music he composed for the film Forbidden Colours, after Mishima’s 1951 novel of the same name.

 

I won’t deny that I find Mishima’s extreme politics as objectionable and doolally as the next person.  (At least, the next sane person.  In 1990s Japan, there were plenty of Uyoku dantai around, i.e., fascistic dingbats who prowled the streets in flag-emblazoned black vans, ranting and blasting patriotic music out of loudspeakers and generally making tits of themselves, and no doubt they thought Mishima’s ideas were wonderful.)  But I can forgive him for his politics because I find his writing exquisite.  That’s with a couple of exceptions.  Forbidden Colours, a book I just could never get my head around, is one.

 

© Penguin Books

 

A friend and former colleague called Eiji Suenaga told me back then about the afore-mentioned Sea of Fertility novels and gave me some interesting advice about how to read them.  Don’t, he said, try to read them until you’ve reached middle-age.  Only at that stage in your life can you grasp their full significance and really appreciate them.  Thus, I didn’t read them until I was in my forties.  As I said, the first two in the series absolutely blew me away.  However, the third novel, 1970’s The Temple of Dawn, gets rather bogged down with its copious musings on Buddhism, while the fourth and final one, the same year’s Decay of the Angel, feels slightly rushed and sketchy in comparison to its predecessors.  Though to be fair to Mishima, he had rather a lot on his mind by then.  It’s said that he penned Angel’s final lines on the morning of his suicide.  (You can’t accuse Mishima of being a writer who talked the talk but didn’t walk the walk.  I mean, he polished off his last novel in between attempting to overthrow his country’s government and ritually gutting himself…  I couldn’t imagine Martin Amis doing that.)

 

One thing that makes Mishima an acquired taste is his bleak intensity.  You don’t read his work if you’re looking for some laughs.  Thus, in Confessions of a Mask (1949), you get a coming-of-age novel, an obviously autobiographical one, involving suppressed homosexuality and graphic, at times violent and macabre, sexual fantasies.  In The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963), you get a sect of young boys who quietly go Lord of the Flies, convince themselves they don’t have to abide by the rules of common morality, and start mutilating kittens – with the implication that soon they’ll be doing similar things to human beings.  In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956), you get a mentally-ill Buddhist acolyte setting fire to the titular temple, the Kinkaku-ji, in Kyoto – an act of arson that’d actually befallen that temple in real life in 1950.

 

Admittedly, Mishima’s 1954 novel The Sound of Waves is a nice, happy love story.  During my Japan days, I noticed how popular it was among certain Westerners living there.  I suspect they liked Waves because it allowed them to boast they’d read a book by one of their host-country’s most important 20th-century novelists – but it spared them having to grapple with that novelist’s normal, angsty, messed-up stuff.  However, Mishima himself didn’t rate Waves highly. He once brutally dismissed it as ‘that great joke on the public’.

 

Well, I recently read Mishima’s 1968 novel Life for Sale and I now wonder if I should revise my ideas about him and the sort of literature he specialised in.  It’s unlike anything I’ve read by him before.  Unashamedly pulpy in content, wildly episodic in nature, quite outrageous in its plot-twists, the book often feels like Mishima wrote it with his tongue so far into his cheek that it’s a surprise the cheek didn’t burst.  At times, it seems a million miles away from the gloom and seriousness of his other work.  That’s ‘at times’, though.  There are moments when the sombre, highbrow Mishima of old does resurface… But never for long.

 

It kicks off in the conventional Mishima style I’m familiar with.  Page one has the hero, Hanio, attempting to commit suicide.  He consumes “a large amount of sedative in the last overground train that evening.  To be precise, he gulped it down at a drinking fountain in the station before boarding the train.  And no sooner had he stretched out on the empty seats than everything went blank.”  Mishima-esque too is the fact that Hanio is driven to this attempt on his own life by nothing of great significance: “Suicide was not something he had put much thought into.  He considered it likely that his sudden urge to die arose that evening while he was reading the newspaper… he could only conclude that he had attempted to end It all on a complete whim.”

 

Hanio survives, however.  With a rather more nihilistic mindset than before, he abandons his nine-to-five job and puts an advert in a newspaper: “Life for Sale.  Use me as you wish.  I am a twenty-seven-year-old male.  Discretion guaranteed.  Will cause no bother at all.”  And that’s when the fun starts.  The advert’s first reply comes from an embittered old man with a much younger and voluptuous wife.  The wife is currently cuckolding him with a mobster.  The old man hires Hanio – who now considers his life both meaningless and expendable – to seduce his wife and make sure that her mobster boyfriend finds them both ‘at it’: “When he claps eyes on you, you’re sure to be killed, and she’ll probably be dead meat too.”  Hanio does as he’s told, but things don’t go according to plan.  Someone gets killed, but not him.

 

He then proceeds to his next case.  A librarian, “an utterly nondescript middle-aged woman… more like an elderly spinster, perhaps someone who taught English literature at a girls’ college of higher education,” involves him in a plot with some criminals, a rare book about Japanese beetles that’s housed in her library, and a particular type of beetle that supposedly can be ground down and made into a deadly poison.  Hanio, with zero interest in remaining alive, is asked to act as a guinea pig for the newly-manufactured poison.  He agrees, but again the unexpected happens, and again he survives while someone else gets killed.  Meanwhile, in both episodes so far, mention is made of a mysterious, secret crime syndicate called the ACS, the ‘Asia Confidential Service’.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Ken Domon

 

Things become yet more outlandish.  Hanio is hired next by a schoolboy who wants him to look after his mother: “She’s ill, but she’ll recover right away with care from you.”  What makes this life-threatening is the fact that the boy’s mother is a vampire.  Hanio soon finds himself living with the pair, having his blood gradually and gently siphoned away by the vampirical mum, but he’s languidly happy as his death seems to draw near: “he truly enjoyed lounging around at home, basking in the family atmosphere.”  This is the most baroque part of the book, but it actually works well.  (Thinking about it, I’m not surprised that Mishima and vampires – at least, those of the brooding, aristocratic sort – are a good match.)

 

The next episode – following another death, again not Hanio’s – is less effective.  He becomes embroiled in an espionage saga involving two foreign powers, ‘Country A’ and ‘Country B’, a stolen necklace, an all-important cipher key, and several dead secret agents.  It all feels a bit tired, despite Mishima throwing into the plot some mysterious carrots as a whacky extra ingredient.  The ‘Country A’ and ‘Country B’ stuff reminds me of old 1960s TV shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-68), where the villains were often foreigners, but ones acting on behalf of ‘unnamed hostile powers’, to avoid the show offending anybody.

 

After that, Hanio ends up living in a new, lavish apartment – his ‘Life for Sale’ business has earned him a fair amount of yen by this point – which he rents off a rich, drug-addled hippy-chick called Reiko.  (Reiko’s dotty old mum explains to him that her daughter takes “that drug beginning with L…”)  This enables Mishima, through the character of Hanio, to express his opinion of hippies, which as you might expect is not high.  “They were seekers after ‘meaninglessness’, all right, but he could not imagine them having the guts to confront the real thing when it inevitably came calling.”  Hanio gets romantically involved with the unhinged Reiko who, for all her wild talk, has a worryingly conventional vision of what married life with him will be like: “Daddy comes home every day at six-fifteen, so I have to start cooking.  When everything’s bubbling away nicely, I’ll hurry up and put on my make-up in time for when Daddy turns up…”

 

Hanio eventually flees from Reiko.  In the book’s closing pages, becoming increasingly paranoid, he believes that it’s not just her who’s pursuing him.  He might also have the ACS – the Asia Confidential Service mentioned by characters in the novel’s earlier sections – chasing him too.

 

Thus, Life for Sale is a mish-mash of crime, spy, horror, romance and comedy themes, leavened with a little of Mishima’s characteristic angst.  If not every episode is successful, that’s not a great problem – a few pages later, another episode arrives, which the reader may enjoy better.  Meanwhile, it suggests the books by Mishima that have long been available in translated form may have given English-language readers a blinkered view of him, i.e., that he was a humourless, cerebral misery-guts who specialised in Literature with a capital ‘L’.  But Life for Sale, whose English-language translation didn’t appear until 2019, gives a rather different impression, that he was less of a literary snob, enjoyed genre fiction and had a playful side.

 

And I hear that last year saw the first English translation of another Mishima novel, a 1962 one called Beautiful Star.  Its translator was Stephen Dodd, who also rendered Life for Sale into English.  Beautiful Star sees Mishima having a go at science fiction.  It’s about “a Japanese family who wake up one day convinced that they are each aliens from a different planet inhabiting human bodies.”

 

Mishima and aliens?  I can’t wait to read that one.

 

© Penguin Books

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More sinister sides of Singapore

 

© Epigram Books

 

A couple of months ago on this blog, I reviewed an anthology of horror stories set in modern-day Singapore called, appropriately, The New Singapore Horror Collection, written by local author S.J. Huang.  Now I’ve just finished reading a collection called Fright 1, containing 11 more scary stories set in the southeast Asian city-state, which my partner was kind enough to buy for me as a Christmas present.

 

Unlike The New Singapore Horror Collection, each story in Fright 1 is penned by a different person.  These 11 writers were the top-ranking entrants in a short-fiction competition held last year.  As the book’s introduction explains, Fright 1 “showcases the winners and finalists of the 2022 Storytel Epigram Horror Prize, and celebrates all subsets of the horror genre, told with a Singaporean twist.”

 

The first thing that struck me about Fright 1 was the preponderance of female writers – eight out of 11.  This might be a surprise to the many people who’ve traditionally associated the horror genre with male writers, although anyone familiar with the work of Angela Carter, Shirley Jackson, May Sinclair, Daphne du Maurier, Anne Rice, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the criminally underrated Dorothy K. Haynes, to say nothing of Mary Shelley, would argue otherwise.  Thus, the collection was doubly interesting for me.  Not only did its stories have a setting, Singapore, that I’m not very familiar with, but many of its themes were ones that impact on women – arranged marriages, pregnancy, sexting and, generally, being wronged by duplicitous men.  These being horror stories, such themes are refracted through a lens that sends them into the realm of the supernatural and macabre.

 

Fright 1 gets off to a solid start with Meihan Boey’s The General’s Wife, which is set in past times and is about an unremarkable young woman (‘with crooked shoulders and a pockmarked face’) whose family are desperate to get her married off to someone, anyone, so that they no longer have to be responsible for her.  When a mysterious, older, wealthy man known as the ‘General’, living on one of Singapore’s little satellite islands, requests her hand in marriage for no obvious reason, they don’t ask questions.  She’s hurriedly packed off to the island.  What follows is a tale of skulduggery involving deceit and sorcery, with suggestions of Bluebeard and even Jane Eyre (1847), impressively told and grippingly paced.  My only criticism is that I found the ending slightly rushed, although it contains a satisfying hint that the story’s narrator is no longer the shrinking violet she used to be.

 

Also set in historical Singapore is Dew M. Chaiyanara’s Under the Banana Tree, which is about a kampung – the Malaysian term for village – that’s terrorised by a pontianak when it takes up residence by the tree of the title and starts making “agonised wails that pierced the night and made all the villagers rush to slam their windows shut, bolt their doors and hold each other tight.”  According to Wikipedia, a pontianak is a supernatural creature found in Singaporean, Malaysian and Indonesian folklore that “usually takes the form of a pregnant woman who is unable to give birth to a child.  Alternatively, it is often described as a vampiric, vengeful female spirit.”  A woman in the village – evidently the only person there with a spine – resolves to go and tell the ponianak to, basically, shut up.  To her surprise, she finds herself developing a bond with the creature.  She also learns that they have more in common that she could ever have imagined.

 

Meanwhile, a non-folkloric and very modern supernatural being is devised for Kelly Leow’s story Breakwater.  This posits the idea that people subjected to extreme humiliation on social media, so that their lives are ruined, they end up living in shame and they vanish from their former social circles, actually, to a certain extent, ‘die’.  Not enough to leave behind a ghost, as many people believe happens when you physically die, but enough to create a semi-ghost, a ‘shade’.  Breakwater features a serial online-abuser being trailed, unbeknownst to him, by the shades of his former victims – one of which partly narrates the story.  I liked Breakwater a lot, not only because its central conceit feels genuinely new, but also because it’s set in Singapore’s East Coast Park.  The park is at the back of my residence and is an evocative place at night, one where, as Leow observes, “Cargo ships form a ghostly city out on the horizon, lights glittering in rows like the windows of apartments.”

 

Among the male writers represented, Teo Kai Xiang’s Untitled Train Story uses another well-known part of Singapore as its setting, the city’s MRT system.  Workers digging out a new MRT line discover a mysterious tunnel that seems to have existed a long time before trains began running underground.  It’s apparently man-made, its walls are covered in strange symbols, and it’s formed out of some ‘sleek and almost metallic black substance’.  I began the story wondering if it would turn into a Singaporean variant on H.P. Lovecraft’s seminal story Pickman’s Model (1927), which helped establish the trope, now common in the horror genre, of fleshing-eating, ghoul-like creatures living in secrecy under the streets of a modern-day city – see, for example, the movies Death Line (1973) and C.H.U.D. (1984).  Later, however, it becomes clear that Xiang’s story has more in common with a different strand of Lovecraft’s work – his tales of cosmic horror.  There’s something at the end of the tunnel that isn’t just deadly.  It also has the power to do disturbing things to the minds of those who encounter it and manage to survive.

 

For my money, however, the collection’s best tale is Dave Chua’s Hantu Hijau, which in Malay means ‘green ghost’.  It’s narrated by a young girl who becomes obsessed with a ghost, a female one, that’s said to haunt her Singaporean public housing estate: “Some doubted her existence; merely a hyper-localised myth to get children to return early and in bed before eleven, but I knew she had always been here, biding her time.”  The story is atmospheric and also manages the important trick of making the reader both frightened of its ghost and sympathetic towards it.  At the same time, Chua makes it believable by lacing the supernatural plot with descriptions of the block and its assorted inhabitants (“Despite the decrepit state of some of the storeys, the residents were full of kindness and humanity”) and with accounts of the girl’s mum – a hard-pressed single mother whose desperate attempts to make money and keep them afloat gradually become shady and even criminal.  With its blend of the ghostly, the grittily realistic and an urban myth that might not be so mythical, Hantu Hijau reminded me slightly of the Clive Barker story The Forbidden (1986), which later became the basis for the Candyman movies.

 

Not quite everything in the collection was to my tastes.  I felt a few stories had rather too much happening for them to be properly frightening.  Also, a couple of times, the social issues being explored were used for ‘body-horror’ moments that had me thinking of films like David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) or Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989) – good, grotesquely-surreal fun, yes, but too far-fetched for the build-up that’d preceded them.  Maybe it’s just me.  I feel that to be truly scary, a story has to be at least partway believable.  But if it contains too many incidents, or too much over-the-top gloop, it becomes less believable and hence less scary.  Overall, though, I was impressed by Fright 1  and I strongly recommend it.

 

For the record, the 2022 Storytel Epigram Horror Prize judges ranked Dew M. Chaiyanara’s Under the Banana Tree as the third-best entry, Dave Chua’s Hantu Hijau as the runner-up, and Kelly Leow’s Breakwater as the winner.  The collection can be purchased here, as can an audiobook version of it.

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Norm!

 

From wikipedia.org / © Gerald Lucas

 

I’m aware that some of the writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers whose work I admire were total arseholes in their personal lives.  Possessing ‘artistic genius’, or just having an ‘artistic temperament’, was for them an excuse to commit all manner of heinous sins.  Yet all I can do, I feel, is separate the art from the inadequate and disappointing personality that created it – and focus on and enjoy the former.  As the writer Poppy Z. Brite (who sometimes goes by the name of Billy Martin) wrote recently about the author V.S. Naipaul: “Past a point, you can’t help what you love.  Naipaul is my own problematic favourite, a sexist, racist, often unkind man, but I love his writing and he fascinates me as a person.”

 

To some extent, that sums up my feelings about that famous post-war American man of letters Norman Mailer, who would have been 100 years old today if he’d still been on the go.  To say Mailer was problematic as a person is an understatement.  From all the accounts the guy was a belligerent, egotistical, self-promoting, homophobic and misogynistic dickwad who lamented about ‘the womanisation of America’ and was preoccupied with the sort of toxic masculinity that, in the 21st century and as embodied by the likes of Putin and Trump, seems capable of threatening the continued existence of humanity.

 

Most notoriously, in 1960, he stuck a knife into his second wife, Adele Morales, enraged when she told him he wasn’t as good a writer as Dostoyevsky.  Morales survived and divorced him two years later.  For that reason, my partner never refers to Norman Mailer as ‘Norman Mailer’, but as ‘Stabby’.

 

Among other things on Mailer’s charge-sheet, in 1981 he was instrumental in securing parole for murderer, bank robber and forger Jack Abbott.  Abbott was also a writer, which for Mailer apparently righted all his other wrongs.  Six weeks after his parole, Abbott stabbed to death a waiter following an argument about whether or not he could use a café’s toilet.

 

And yet…  I’ve always enjoyed Mailer’s books when I’ve come across them, to greater or lesser degrees.  This is despite – or if I’m in the right mood, because of – the rampant egotism of their author often finding its way onto their pages.

 

© Rhinehart & Company

 

Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) is to my mind one of the great novels written about World War II.  Mailer wrote about it from experience, as he’d been posted to the Philippines with the 112th Cavalry.  It made an impact on me with its pessimism, which isn’t just about human nature when it’s put under hideous pressure in a theatre of war.  The pessimism also concerns the current, and likely future, condition of the USA, which is symbolised by the platoon at the centre of the plot.  They represent an assortment of different ethnic and regional groups that make up American society – Jewish, Italian, Irish, Mexican, Southern – and they generally don’t like or trust each other.  In charge of them are a psychotic sergeant, an educated and liberal-minded lieutenant and, at the top of the chain of command, a fascistic general who believes the war against Japan is soon going to morph into a war against the Soviet Union.  The enlightened lieutenant offers the novel its one sliver of hope, but that hope is abruptly snuffed out in a plot-twist some way before the end.

 

However, even if you find the political allegory in The Naked and the Dead clunky, there’s no denying that it conveys the numbing physical exhaustion of warfare – especially a war fought in a jungle on a tropical Pacific island.  If George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) gets across the idea that more than anything else war will leave you bored witless, The Naked and the Dead persuades you that it’ll leave you utterly knackered too.

 

One unfortunate feature of the novel, and something that modern-day readers will no doubt find hilarious, is that Mailer had to pepper his prose with the word ‘fug’, an invented substitute for the F-word.  Warned by his publishers that the dialogue of his soldier-characters couldn’t be too realistic, even though in a real combat zone hard-pressed soldiers would be spewing the F-word endlessly,  Mailer ended up having them say things like ‘Fug you!’ and ‘Fugging hell!’  It must have stuck in Mailer’s craw – and Mailer had a big craw for things to get stuck in – when, later, he was introduced to the celebrated writer and wit Dorothy Parker and she exclaimed, “So you’re the young man who can’t spell f*ck!”

 

A decade after its publication, The Naked and the Dead was turned into a movie. It’s a prime example of Hollywood taking something with an uncompromising message and watering it down to make it more palatable to mainstream cinema audiences – and losing what made the original effective in the process.  Not only does the lieutenant (Cliff Robertson) survive at the end but, if I remember correctly, he gets to make an inspirational speech about the value of everyone pulling together.  However, Mailer was already aware of the rottenness of Hollywood and in 1955 had written a novel on the topic, The Deer Park.  This was the era when the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities was at its most powerful and the notorious Hollywood Blacklist was ending filmmakers’ careers, events that are referred to in his book.

 

© G.P. Putnam’s Sons

 

I don’t remember much about the plot or characters of The Deer Park, but I recall the vividness of its setting, Desert D’Or, a desert town that’s become a fashionable resort and refuge for Hollywood bigwigs.  Its existence as a pocket of lavish make-believe amid the desert’s harshness is matched by the artificiality of its inhabitants, who are an immoral, scheming, backstabbing, bullying lot.  Wikipedia informs me that the novel’s title “refers to the Parc-aux-Serfs (‘Deer Park’), a resort Louis XV of France kept stocked with young women for his personal pleasure”, which seems appropriate.

 

Unsurprisingly, when the 1960s began to swing with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, and the Vietnam War, Mailer took to the decade like a duck to water.  At a young and impressionable age – 17 years old – I read Mailer’s Armies of the Night, in which he recounts how he marched on the Pentagon in October 1967 and told the US government to stop the war in Vietnam.  To be honest, Mailer did have a bit of help here.  About 100,000 people marched with him, including Allen Ginsburg, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who tried to use concentrated, psychic hippie-power to levitate the Pentagon building and ‘exorcise the evil within’.

 

© Penguin Books

 

A ’fictionalised work of non-fiction’, Armies of the Night was the first such book I’d encountered and it took me a while to get used to its central conceit, wherein Mailer describes what happened at the march not as some omnipotent narrator, or in the first person, but in the third person, so that he becomes a character in the action itself.  Yes, it’s a memorable device but, inevitably with Mailer, it’s self-aggrandising too.  At one point, possibly inspired by Armies of the Night, I wrote entries in my journal for a few months in the third person.  Years later, when I re-read what I’d written, my main thought was: “What a big-headed wanker I must have been back then.”

 

Mailer was in the first person for the next book by him I’ve read, also a work of non-fiction, 1975’s The Fight.  This is about the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, the famous boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman (who, to a younger generation, is primarily known as the inventor of the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine).  With Ali at his peak, and Foreman at his meanest and most lethal, this was, for boxing fans, an epic event.  It was also a grotesque one, because one of the 20th century’s most opulently corrupt dictators, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, hosted the fight in his country.  Sparing no expense, Mobutu also flew in some of the world’s greatest musicians, like James Brown and B.B. King, for a musical gala to accompany it.  And it was no surprise that the world’s biggest literary ego, Mailer, rocked in too to write a book about it.

 

While I prefer the 1996 documentary When We were Kings (to which Mailer contributes) as the definite account of the Rumble in the Jungle, I think The Fight is pretty good.  Mind you, with so much going on in Zaire at the time, Mailer could hardly fail to write an entertaining book about it all.  And it does provide a fascinating insight into the mind of the man who called himself the greatest…  The book mentions Muhammad Ali a few times as well.

 

Random House USA Inc

 

Having read one Mailer book from the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s, it’s fitting that the last of his works I’ve encountered is from the 1980s, 1984’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance.  Mailer didn’t take the writing of this novel terribly seriously.  It was something he dashed off in two months, to fulfil a contract, and is very obviously a pastiche / piss-take of the crime-thriller noir genre, vaguely in the tradition of Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler.  Its plot twists all over the place before, unconvincingly, the hero’s dad – a no-nonsense hard man, but with a heart of gold, no doubt representing Mailer’s own image of himself – pops up out of nowhere to sort everything out.

 

I thought it was basically rubbish, then, but it was enjoyable rubbish.  Maybe I liked it because, as with Tough Guys Don’t Dance’s hero Tim Madden, I was going through a hard-drinking phase at the time, waking up occasionally with a raging hangover but no firm idea of what I’d ended up doing the previous night.  Thus, I could relate to what Madden goes through in the book.  Though unlike Madden, I never woke up to find (1) an inexplicable tattoo on my body that hadn’t been there before, and (2) an inexplicable severed head in my possession that hadn’t been there before, either – the events that set the story in motion.

 

One thing that’s genuinely good about Tough Guys Don’t Dance is its setting, which is Provincetown in Cape Cod, Massachusetts – in real life Mailer had a house there, in Commercial Street.  He nicely captures the eeriness of the place when the summer weather has receded and the tourist season has ended, when ‘one chill morose November sky went into another’ and, seemingly, the town’s ‘true number of inhabitants must be thirty men and women, all hiding’.

 

© Penguin Random House

 

Three years later, Mailer got the chance to turn Tough Guys Don’t Dance into a movie, which he directed, and co-scripted with the distinguished screenwriter Robert Towne, and with Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios as one of the production companies.  Sounds good, yes?  Well, no.  The producers were Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus of the notorious Cannon Group, whose previous meisterwerks included Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984), Bolero (1984), Invasion USA (1985), Cobra (1986) and Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987).  And despite the talent involved, Tough Guys Don’t Dance definitely bears the Cannon imprint most strongly in terms of quality.  It’s a delirious slice of so-bad-it’s-good campness.

 

Thus, you get a party sequence, which appears to be Mailer’s idea of what a decadent 1980s shindig would be like – yuppies with feather-cut hairdos cavorting like arthritic elephants to some god-awful 1980s soft-rock music while nose-hoovering cocaine off the tabletops and brazenly opening the front door stark-naked because they think it’s their ‘boyfriend’.  (No, it’s actually the local police chief, played by Wings Hauser, come to ask them to turn the noise down.)  Still, I’m told that Mailer filmed much of the movie at his own house in Provincetown, so maybe he did hold parties like this.  Then there’s the scene where Madden (Ryan O’Neal) finds out about his wife’s infidelity and reacts with a jaw-dropping display of bad acting – “Oh man!   Oh God!  Oh man!  Oh God!” – which, over the years, has become so infamous it’s now an Internet meme.

 

To be fair to O’Neal, almost everyone in the film is having a bad-acting day.  This ranges from the way-over-the-top ‘southern’ accents sported by Debra Sandlund and John Bedford Lloyd – “Madden, take it in the mouth or you’ll die.  Will you take my pride and joy into your mouth?” – to the stilted awkwardness of just about everyone else (Hauser, Isabella Rossellini, Frances Fisher) as they try to get their tongues, and their minds, around Mailer’s dialogue, which is largely fixated on performing the sex-deed with adequate levels of manliness.  At one point Rossellini tells O’Neal that she and her husband, Hauser, “make out five times a night.  That’s why I call him Mr Five.”  Though this is contradicted when Rossellini and Hauser have an argument.  “I made you come 16 times – in a night.”  “And none of them was any good!”

 

On the plus side, Lawrence Tierney gives a solid performance as Madden’s dad.  I’ve read somewhere that after seeing him in this, a young Quentin Tarantino decided to hire him for Reservoir Dogs (1993).  Also, Mailer adds some supernatural elements that I don’t recall being in the book, and ramps up the general weirdness, so that the film becomes an oddly prescient mixture: a superficially sleepy little town, dark secrets, murder, drugs, violence, corruption, the uncanny, the strange…  There’s even a creepy forest where O’Neal has hidden his marijuana stash.  Yes, three years before the real event, did Mailer accidentally create the prototype for David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017)?

 

© Zoetrope Studios / Golan-Globus

 

Like Captain Ahab and his whale, Mailer spent his literary life pursuing that elusive beast, the writing of the Great American Novel.  Though the critical consensus is that he never managed it, he did produce some very big books along the way, like Ancient Evenings (1983) and Harlot’s Ghost (1992), neither of which I’ve read – and with them weighing in at 709 and 1168 pages respectively, I doubt if I ever will read them.  Nonetheless, I suspect I’ll find myself perusing Mailer’s other, more digestible books in future, because basically I enjoy his stuff.  My partner may not approve, but there are still works by old ‘Stabby’ that I’d like to have a stab at.

 

And the only possible reaction to that distasteful pun is: “Oh man!  Oh God!  Oh man!  Oh God!”

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The literary Bond revisited: Moonraker

 

© Penguin Books

 

As a ten or eleven-year-old kid I read a lot of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.  Indeed, I read most of them before I ever saw any of the films.  However, it was only a few years ago, after Penguin Books brought out new editions of the novels, using the same covers that’d graced them in the 1950s and early 1960s and having contemporary writers like Val McDermid write introductions to them, that I got round to reading the novels I hadn’t come across in my boyhood – Moonraker (1955), The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) and Octopussy and the Living Daylights (1966).   I also reread a few of the novels I’d read at a young age which, for one reason or other, had gone over my head or not left much of an impression – I still vividly remembered Live and Let Die (1954) or You Only Live Twice (1964) from those far-off days, but almost nothing of Diamonds are Forever (1956) or The Man with the Golden Gun (1965).

 

And in the case of From Russia With Love (1957)…  Well, as a kid, I started reading it, but unfortunately at the time I was staying at my grandmother’s house in rural Northern Ireland.  My grandmother noticed I had my nose stuck in a book, insisted on reading the blurb on its back cover and confiscated it from me, saying she didn’t think it was suitable reading matter for someone my age.  To rub salt into the wound, she then started reading it herself.  “I’m really enjoying it,” she told me a few days later.

 

Anyway, here is the first in a series of posts in which I describe my reactions to the Fleming / Bond novels I’ve read or re-read in the 21st century.  Starting with Moonraker.

 

It’s difficult to approach Moonraker the novel without having your brain fogged by memories of Moonraker the 1979 movie, which for good or bad – well, bad, actually – was a milestone in the James Bond cinematic franchise.  The Bond movies had become increasingly absurd over the years and by 1979 both the filmmakers and cinema audiences were firmly aware of their silliness. But with Moonraker, those filmmakers – Cubby Broccoli and his team – seemed to abandon all restraint.  It was as if they decided, “The audiences know that we know the movies are silly…  And we know that they know…  So, let’s have a ball!”  The result was that Moonraker, which has James Bond (Roger Moore) blasting off in a space shuttle and taking on an orbiting space station full of villains, also blasted off into whole new realms of galaxy-sized daftness.

 

Apart from the far-fetched science-fictional plot (which might have had something to do with the success of a certain movie called Star Wars two years earlier), the stupidity includes the hulking, steel-toothed villain Jaws (Richard Keil), who’s not only invulnerable to mishaps such as falling out a plane and hitting the ground without a parachute or having a cable-car crash down on top of him, but who’s also given a cringe-inducing, comedic love interest.  But even the business with Jaws pales into insignificance compared to the sequence where Bond escapes from some baddies in Venice using a gondola that transforms into a speedboat and then into a hovercraft, whose appearance in St Mark’s Square causes a pigeon – yes, a pigeon – to do a double-take.  I remember the movie critic John Brosnan writing that at that moment he concluded “the Bond series had gone about as far down the tube it could possibly go without reaching China.”

 

© Eon Films

 

But… Trying to erase all thoughts of the movie, I started reading the book from 24 years earlier.  Unlike the film version, whose plot ricochets between the USA, Italy, South America and outer space, the novel’s action takes place entirely in England, where immensely rich industrialist, stockbroker and rocket-designer Sir Hugo Drax has built a base, with a launch site, on the south coast.  From this he intends to test-fly a new missile called the Moonraker, potentially a valuable new means of defence against the Soviet Union.  Bond first crosses paths with Drax at Blades, an exclusive and opulent London gentleman’s club, where he discovers he’s been cheating at cards.  This suggests he’s less saintly than the adoring British media has made him out to be.  Later, Bond is sent to investigate the death of a security officer at Drax’s base, where he finds further, and much more serious, evidence that Drax is a bad ’un.  In fact, Drax is an embittered former Nazi, now employed by the USSR, who plans to fit a nuclear warhead into the Moonraker and send it ploughing into downtown London during its test flight.

 

During his mission, Bond joins forces with a policewoman called Gala Brand, who’s working undercover at the base.  After Drax’s goons make a couple of unsuccessful attempts to eliminate them, they manage to thwart the scheme by sending the Moonraker off course.  Rather than striking London, it niftily lands on top of a submarine transporting Drax and his minions back to the Soviet Union.  The novel ends on a rather un-Bondian note, however.  Gala Brand reveals to 007 that she already has a fiancé and isn’t about to swoon into his arms.  So, instead, Moonraker’s final line is: “He touched her for the last time and they turned away from each other and walked off into their different lives.”

 

In Moonraker the film, Gala Brand is replaced by an American heroine called Holly Goodhead, played by Lois Chiles.  (Goodhead… Get it?  Good… head…?)  In fact, according to jamesbond.fandom.com, poor Gala is “the only lead female character of the Fleming canon not to have appeared as a character in a James Bond film”, which is puzzling given the quip-friendly nature of her name.  I could just imagine Roger Moore hoisting a crinkly eyebrow at her and intoning, “Well, this is going to be a Gala affair…” or “I know where I’d like to Brand you…”

 

© Eon Films

 

Reading Moonraker, what struck my 21st century self was the shadow that World War II casts over the plot.  It has a heavy bearing on the characters – not just on the villainous ex-Nazi Drax, who draws on German V2 technology for his missile project and intends to destroy London as revenge for his country’s defeat in 1945, but on minor ones like the lift operator in the secret-service headquarters who lost an arm during the conflict.  And of course, there are references to how Bond served in the war himself and has scars on his back to prove it.  I didn’t notice this so much when I read other Bond novels in the 1970s probably because, then, the war didn’t seem so far back in time.  I knew middle-aged people who had vivid memories of it.  And it was still being enacted on television in countless documentaries, comedies and dramas like The World At War (1973-74), Dad’s Army (1968-77), It Ain’t Half Hot Mum (1974-81), Secret Army (1977-79) and Colditz (1972-74), and the stories in practically every boys’ comic on sale in the newsagents at the time – Victor, Battle, Warlord – dealt with nothing else.  Indeed, there were probably some kids my age who believed we were still fighting the Germans.

 

And no doubt the war, or more specifically the war’s aftermath, played a part in the Bond novels’ huge success in the 1950s.  Those six years of conflict had broken Britain’s economy and Fleming’s readers inhabited a drab, grey world of rationing and austerity.  I recall a remark J.G. Ballard made in his memoir Miracles of Life (2008), about leaving Shanghai and arriving in Britain for the first time in 1946.  Taking his first steps on the soil of his home country, Ballard wondered why the British claimed to have won the war.  From the worn-out faces and rundown landscapes around him, it very much looked like they’d lost it.  Another pertinent quote is one made by Keith Richards, who said that growing up in early 1950s Britain was like living in black and white.  Only when rock ‘n’ roll arrived from America did life suddenly switch to being in colour.

 

But reading Moonraker, I also realised how far Bond is removed from the dreary reality of post-war Britain.  Fleming portrays him as a shameless consumer, one with a seemingly inexhaustible shopping budget.  He wears the most expensive labels, smokes the costliest cigars, drinks the finest wines and spirits, helps himself to the fanciest foods.  Accordingly, Bond’s first encounter with Drax in Moonraker is in the club Blades, whose service, food-and-drink and furnishings were things that most of Fleming’s 1950s readers could only dream about.  Though Fleming was accused of marketing watered-down pornography in his books, it surely wasn’t pornography of a sexual or violent nature that titillated his readers so much at the time.  It was consumer porn, intended to give a perverse, if futile, thrill to underfed and down-at-heels readers who were still carrying ration books.

 

Mind you, the fact that Moonraker’s plot is confined to 1950s England didn’t go down well with those readers who’d started reading the Bond books – Moonraker was the third in the series – for the pleasure of being transported in their imaginations to exotic locales, which in real life they lacked the financial means to visit themselves.  My trusty copy of Henry Chancellor’s guide to the novels, James Bond: The Man and his World (2005) tells me that “Fleming received a number of letters from disappointed readers complaining that Kent, even on the most glorious English summer’s day, did not compare with the tropical heat of the Caribbean.  ‘We want taking out of ourselves,’ declared one old couple, who read Bond novels to each other aloud, ‘not sitting on the beach in Dover.’”  Fleming took note of the complaints.  None of his later novels restricted Bond to English soil.

 

© Hammer Films

 

I have to say that nowadays Fleming’s descriptions of Drax’s base and its technology sound decidedly low-fi.  The references to ‘gyros’, ‘radio homing beacons’, ‘ventilation tunnels’ and, indeed, ‘rockets’ had me thinking of some old black-and-white British sci-fi movie.  They particularly made me think of the Hammer film Quatermass 2 (1957), which features both rockets and a big secret base where the villains – aliens – hang out.  For their depiction of the base, the filmmakers used the sprawling and suitably eerie oil refinery at Thurrock in Essex for location shooting, and I imagined Bond and Gala battling Drax and his minions against a similar backdrop.

 

On the other hand, one element of Moonraker’s plot that feels more relevant than ever is its notion that a super-rich tycoon could become so enthused about, and involved in, developing futuristic rocket technology.  I can think of one billionaire… no, two billionaires… no, three billionaires in 2023 whose fascination with space-going vehicles is like that of little boys with toy train-sets.

 

Finally, even as a ten or eleven-year-old, one thing I did pick up from Fleming’s novels was a sense of Bond’s melancholia – a melancholia that wasn’t hinted at in the movies until the tenures of Timothy Dalton and, later, Daniel Craig in the lead role.  You get this in Moonraker at the very beginning, with Bond calculating how many more missions he has to go on before he can retire from the secret service and what the odds are for surviving that number of missions.  Retirement for Bond, I was shocked to discover, comes at the age of 45.  Yikes, I thought.  If I’d been an agent in Fleming’s version of MI6, I’d be way beyond pensionable age now.

 

So, readers of post-war Britain, forget the thrills and spills, and forget the fine living and exotic locations, and forget the fancy cars and beautiful women.  Even Commander Bond has reasons to gripe about his lot.

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Not the best book from an 18-year-old Shelley

 

© Heperus Books

 

The genesis of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) is well-known.  It was written by Mary Shelley in 1816 while she and her husband, Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, were staying at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva as guests of Percy’s fellow Romantic poet Lord Byron.  Mary was 18 years old at the time and Frankenstein sprang out of a resolution by the group to each write a ‘ghost story’.  This was largely because the wet and dreary weather that summer prevented them from doing much outdoors.  Mary duly concocted Frankenstein, which of course is one of the seminal novels of the horror genre.  Also, while it certainly wasn’t the world’s first horror story, there’s a good case to be made that it was the first work of science fiction. Victor Frankenstein, after all, assembles his creature out of pieces of dead bodies and brings it to life using technology, not magic.

 

Actually, a joke I’ve seen on social media runs along these lines: Mary Shelley went off and invented science fiction so that she didn’t have to endure listening to Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley talking shite all summer.

 

I think Frankenstein is an amazing book, though a logically flawed one.  The creature is totally inarticulate when he comes into the world, but soon picks up the ‘lingo’ by spying on a room where a foreign woman is receiving language lessons and secretly learning alongside her.  Before long he’s able to read and understand a copy of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and spends five whole chapters talking non-stop at his understandably flummoxed creator.  As someone who’s spent a good bit of his career teaching the English language to people, that’s a result I could only dream of.

 

Later, Victor Frankenstein retreats to a remote island in the Orkneys where he manages to find the body parts for, and assemble, a female mate for the creature without being noticed by the island’s inhabitants. He then ends up adrift in a boat that takes just one night to float all the way from the Orkneys to the coast of Ireland, and there the creature frames him for the murder of his best friend, Henry Clerval, whose body is discovered on the same coastline.  We last heard tell of Clerval in the central Scottish city of Perth, so how did the creature get his body to Ireland and know where to dump it?  After being freed, Frankenstein is collected by his elderly father, who makes a journey from Geneva to Ireland even though earlier we’d been told he was too infirm to travel between Geneva and Ingolstadt in Bavaria.

 

Yes, the fact that Mary Shelley was only 18 at the time does show through occasionally in Frankenstein’s plotting.  You get the impression she’s impatient to get on with the story, and move from one event to the next, and like any impulsive teenager isn’t too bothered about the logistics of how exactly she manages this.

 

But hey…  I’ve recently read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s short novel Zastrozzi (1811), which he had published at the age of 18 (though he wrote it a year earlier).  I have to say that compared with the scribblings of her teenaged husband, the teenaged Mary Shelley that’s suggested by Frankenstein is a model of good sense, decorum, level-headedness and maturity.

 

I’ve nothing against a good gothic potboiler and Zastrozzi begins in good-gothic-potboiler fashion. The mysterious but obviously villainous Zastrozzi of the title, and his two henchmen Bernardo and Ugo, abduct the book’s hero, Verezzi, from an inn near Munich and drive him off in a coach – or ‘chariot’ as the young Shelley insists on calling it.  They transport him while he’s asleep and the implication is that he’s been drugged, though this isn’t made clear – you’re left wondering of Verezzi is just an abnormally heavy sleeper.

 

Verezzi wakes up to find the three rogues imprisoning him inside a cavern – “Verezzi beheld the interior of this cavern as a place where he was never again about to emerge – as his grave.” – and Zastrozzi gets to inform him: “Resistance is futile.”  Yes, that’s the catchphrase of the Borg, from Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94).  Subsequently, a violent thunder-and-lightning storm tears asunder the rock above the cavern and exposes it to the elements.  This doesn’t provide Verezzi with an opportunity to escape, as you might expect, but leaves him with a ‘burning fever’ and ‘delirious with a despairing illness’.  Verezzi is going to suffer a lot of despairing illnesses during this book.

 

Deciding it’d be a mistake to keep the ailing Verezzi in the cavern, Zastrozzi, Bernardo and Ugo convey him instead to a cottage ‘on an immense heath, lonely, desolate, and remote from other human habitation.’  Verezzi recovers and, this time, does manage to escape, though with his three persecutors giving chase.  He makes it to the Bavarian city of Passau, where he meets and is offered refuge by an old woman called Claudine, who’d suffered the death of her son just the previous week.  The work done by her son had provided Claudine with a little income and she’s quick to invite Verezzi to take the son’s place in return for board and lodgings in her humble cottage,

 

From British Literature Wiki

 

While Verezzi finds a temporary hiding place with Claudine, Zastrozzi, Bernardo and Ugo, still hunting him, become lost in a forest.  In a baffling plot-twist, they stumble across ‘a large and magnificent building whose battlements rose above the lofty trees’, seemingly by accident.  This, it transpires, is the suitably gothic abode of Matilda, the noblewoman who’s masterminded the scheme to abduct and imprison Verezzi.  Matilda, you see, is madly in love with Verezzi, but Verezzi is unfortunately madly in love with, and betrothed to, someone else – a lady called Julia, who’s currently resident in Italy.  Matilda will consider committing any crime to thwart the relationship between Verezzi and Julia.

 

Meanwhile, it’s hinted, and in the book’s final pages confirmed, that Zastrozzi is not simply Matilda’s loyal minion.  He has his own reasons for wanting Verezzi to suffer.

 

And here, the plot seems to stop – or disappear up its own arse – for a long time.  Verezzi crosses paths with Matilda, whom he likes if doesn’t actually love, and about whose nefarious scheme he knows nothing.  She persuades him to leave Claudine’s cottage and stay at her chateau in the forest for a while.  There he falls critically ill, again – Matilda telling him a malicious lie about Julia being dead has something to do with it.  And the book’s most interesting character, Zastrozzi himself, fades into the background, leaving the reader to wade through pages of melodramatic blather where Verezzi and Matilda indulge in many ‘ecstasies of melancholia’, ‘floods of tears’, ‘gentle sighs’ and, yes, ‘heaving’ of ‘bosoms’.  There’s also much wandering done in the local forest, with the word ‘cataract’ cropping up as frequently as the word ‘chariot’ does elsewhere.  Now that he believes Julia to be deceased, will Verezzi get over his grief, succumb to temptation, and do the business with that duplicitous minx Matilda?  Honestly, I couldn’t have cared less.

 

At least things pick up later.  The action relocates to Venice, Zastrozzi becomes prominent again, and the book’s two most annoying characters are unexpectedly killed off 20 pages before the end.  Matilda and Zastrozzi end up on trial for their lives, in front of a horde of torture-loving Inquisitors.  Matilda  crumbles and finds religion: “God of mercy!  God of heaven… my sins are many and horrible, but I repent.”  However, the atheistic and – surprise! – Byronic Zastrozzi is made of tougher stuff and goes to his doom unrepentantly and defiantly.

 

I’d be more generous towards the book – which was, after all, the work of a 17-year-old – if the plot was less flabby.  It needed to centre less on the tormented, wimpy and seriously illness-prone Verezzi and more on Zastrozzi, who has some dynamism and agency.  Indeed, the book’s most memorable scene has Matilda out in the forest, sitting on a granite boulder, while a fearsome storm rages around her.  Zastrozzi is suddenly revealed to her by a flash of lightning: “His gigantic figure was again involved in pitchy darkness as the momentary lightning receded.  A peal of crashing thunder again madly rattled over the zenith, and a scintillating flash announced Zastrozzi’s approach, as he stood before Matilda.”  It’s uncannily reminiscent of the scene in Frankenstein where Victor encounters his creation during a tempest in the Alps.  Mind you, it’s a shame that Zastrozzi’s most notable feature here – his gigantic stature – isn’t actually mentioned by the author, or remarked on by the other characters, when he appears in the novel’s early pages.  This gives the impression that somewhere along the way he had a sudden and impressive growth-spurt.

 

The foreword to my edition of Zastrozzi was penned by Germaine Greer, who’s unexpectedly indulgent of Shelley’s excesses.  She views the helpless, fever-stricken Verezzi, at the mercy of the conniving, dominating but not undesirable Matilda, as symbolic of the fixation the very young Shelley had for his mother: “…Shelley’s mother, who was more in sympathy with him than his father, was from all accounts a very beautiful woman…  As the youngest of five children, Shelley’s infant passion for his mother probably went largely unrequited; his best chance of getting her to himself was when he was in the throes of one of his childhood illnesses which were, like Verezzi’s, ‘of a nervous or spasmodic nature’.”

 

However, while I struggled through Zastrozzi’s purpler patches, I found myself less in sympathy with Germaine Greer and more in sympathy with Rowan Atkinson’s Edmund Blackadder, who in the 1987 TV series Blackadder the Third said witheringly of the Romantic poets: “…there’s nothing intellectual about wandering around Italy in a big shirt, trying to get laid.”

 

© BBC

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A peripheral vision

 

© Penguin Books

 

For someone who’d normally describe himself as a ‘voracious’ reader, I’ve read a shockingly small number of books in 2022.  I’d like to think this was due to the stress and disruption I’ve suffered this year while moving from Sri Lanka (which had been my home for the previous eight years) to Singapore. However, back in January 2022, I contracted Covid-19.  Although it was a very mild dose, and seemed to have minimal effects on me, I’ve worried since then that it impacted on my powers of concentration, made me less able to process information, and slowed down the mental faculties I use when reading.

 

This worried me particularly a few weeks ago when I started reading The Peripheral, the 2014 novel by cyberpunk maestro William Gibson – which, coincidentally, has lately been made into a TV series starring Chloë Grace Moretz.  During The Peripheral’s first 100 pages or so, I struggled to follow what was going on, found everything bewildering and came close to giving up on it.  Was Covid-19 brain-fog stopping me from getting to grips with the book?

 

In fact, beforehand, I could have just read the blurb on The Peripheral’s back cover, where the book’s central gimmick that caused me so much initial confusion is plainly explained.  But I didn’t read it, wanting to avoid ‘spoilers’.

 

All of William Gibson’s fiction – of which I’ve read two-thirds of the Sprawl trilogy (1984-1988), all of the Bridge trilogy (1993-1999) and two-thirds of the Blue Ant trilogy (2003-2010) – is disorientating at first.  Gibson is not one for exposition.  He drops you straight into the action, which invariably unfurls in some near-future scenario with characters peppering their speech with unfamiliar techno-talk, jargon and cultural references.  All of which your reading-brain simply has to get acclimatised to.  So, I knew what to expect, but with The Peripheral I was alarmed at how long the process of acclimatisation took.  For a large, early section of it, I felt I was sinking.

 

But finally, after the 100-page-mark, I began to swim.  That’s when the book became really enjoyable, as enjoyable as anything else that Gibson’s done.  And before I proceed any further, I should warn you that there’ll be spoilers here too.

 

Once you grasp the novel’s basic premise, following it becomes much easier.  For events aren’t happening in one future scenario but in two. There’s a setting not too far into the future, featuring a rural American town where life isn’t much different from that in 2022 – just a bit cruddier.  The environment has been even more degraded, it sounds like warfare has become more high-tech but no less brutal, there are possibly even more chain stores and fast-food joints, and much of the local economy seems based on drug production.  Meanwhile, the characters make extensive use of 3-D printing and drone technology, and we hear of a recent fad where kids played with cute little Transformers-like robots that had iPads instead of heads.

 

In this setting, the novel’s heroine, Flynne, fills in for her brother Burton for a few days while he’s out of town. Burton, a former soldier, gets paid for playing a role in a strange new virtual reality / video game – presumably testing it out – by an ask-no-questions company that’s supposedly based in South America.  Flynne takes over his role in the game and, while playing, witnesses a murder in a cityscape that looks weirdly similar to London but at the same time isn’t London.

 

This strange version of London provides the book’s other setting.  It’s a real place, only seven decades further into the future.  The murder that Flynne believed she witnessed in a game has happened in reality, and a publicist called Wilf Netherton and his wealthy pal Lev Zubov, scion of a family of London-based Russian oligarchs, are informally investigating the disappearance of the person Flynne saw killed.  Lev has been using a form of time travel – well, time-travelling communication via a mysterious ‘server’ created in China – to hire people in the past to carry out operations for him.  Those hirelings believe they’re working in computer simulations in their own time.  It becomes obvious they need to get in closer contact with Flynne, who’s the only witness to what happened.  However, whoever engineered the murder has access to the server too and is soon hiring assassins in Flynne’s time to take out her and her brother.

 

Gibson explores the book’s two-different-futures-in-communication gimmick to the full.  The protagonists living in the further-away future have full knowledge of the earlier one, including its economy.  Thus, using the server and their knowledge, they can manipulate that economy to finance interventions in it.  While Wilf and Lev tamper with the world around Flynne and Burton, making them exponentially richer, able to create their own corporation and pay for their own protection, the villains of further-future London intervene too – not only staging assassination attempts, but also recruiting to their cause the unsavoury corrupt politician / drug manufacturer who controls Flynne and Burton’s hometown, and sending against them a cult of demented Christian fanatics (whom Gibson has evidently modelled on the real-life, loathsome Westboro Baptist Church).

 

Things step up a further gear when Wilf and Lev manage to send back in time some advanced technology, via a 3-D printing company run by Flynne and Burton’s friends.  This allows Flynne, Burton and others to transfer their minds to the future London, where they’re embedded inside ‘peripherals’ – artificial, semi-cyborg bodies that can be humans, animals or homunculi – which the people of the era hire out and inhabit for special occasions in the way that people of past eras hired out and wore fancy dress.  And Wilf amusingly gets to make a trip in the other direction, where he’s psychically installed inside one of the iPad-robot toys of Flynne’s time.

 

One thing that I’ve noticed about Gibson is the importance he attaches to communities.  This was especially noticeable in his Bridge trilogy, where he had San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge taken over by a band of outsiders, misfits and radicals and turned into a township where they live their lives according to their non-corporate, eco-friendly ideals; or a ‘cardboard city’ of homeless people at a major Japanese railway station that’s actually a refuge for computer hackers, otaku and general ‘cyber-gypsies’.  In The Peripheral, much is made of the rundown, hard-pressed and exploited community that’s home to Flynne, Burton and their family and friends – many of those friends being military veterans like Burton.  They don’t have it easy, but they stand by one another, even when threatened by murderous thugs employed by dark forces from the future.  This includes looking out for an ex-soldier called Conner, who’s returned from the battlefield both mentally and (severely) physically damaged.  Indeed, one highlight is when Conner’s mind get transferred to future London and, to his joy, he finds himself inhabiting a full-bodied peripheral.  A full body is something he hasn’t had for a long time.

 

Meanwhile, Gibson’s description of London in that further-off future is ripe with satire.  Russian oligarchs are so established there they’ve practically become the aristocracy, while advanced technology has allowed areas of it to be turned into tourist-orientated recreations of the Victorian past – as if parts of London aren’t that way now.  He also gently takes the piss with the character of Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer, a police detective investigating the murder who seems to know more about what’s happening than she lets on.  Lowbeer embodies every imperturbable, raffish crime-fighter in a long tradition of non-realistic British crime stories.  I wondered at first if Lowbeer was conceived as a female version of John Steed from the TV show The Avengers (1961-69), but recently on social media I saw Gibson state that he’d imagined her as ‘Tilda Swinton channelling Quentin Crisp.’

 

Faults?  Well, occasionally, Gibson’s description of the action – the full-on action scenes, with danger and violence – can be frustratingly sparse, to the point where you have to reread his descriptions a couple of times to figure out what’s just happened.  He’s a writer who’s interested in fast-moving narratives but not so much in action itself.  Also, while the peripherals are a logical plot-component, the concept of them seems slightly old-hat after James Cameron made extensive use of the same concept five years earlier in his movie Avatar (2009).  Not that that’s Gibson fault, of course.

 

And connoisseurs of time-travel stories might find it a cop-out that Wilf and Lev can interfere in their past as much as they like without suffering any effects in their present.  This is because, Gibson explains, the moment they start interfering they create a ‘stub’ – an alternative timeline where the reality containing Flynne, Burton and the others begins to branch off from the established, ‘official’ timeline, developing in its own way towards its own, unknown future.  The idea makes sense, but some may miss the complexity of a traditional time-travel story where interference in the past has unexpected and unwelcome consequences in the interferers’ present.  See Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder for the classic example.

 

The Peripheral is very entertaining, then, but there’s a grimness at its heart that’s rather like finding a dollop of ultra-sour cream within an ice-cream sundae.  The grimness is something called the Jackpot.  This isn’t a single cataclysmic event but a protracted series of smaller ones – “droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves” – that represent humanity reaping what it sowed with its onslaught against the natural environment.  The Jackpot occurs between the novel’s two time-settings and accounts for something Flynne notices when, in peripheral form, she arrives in future London.  There seem to be very few people around.

 

Late on in The Peripheral there are suggestions that, as their timeline diverges from the established one, Flynne, Burton and her friends, empowered by future technology and investment, can do something to avert or at least alleviate the Jackpot and create a better future for themselves.  Meanwhile, away from the pages of Gibson’s novel and looking at the dismal, real-life events of the early 21st century, I fear we’ll be hitting our own Jackpot all too soon.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Gonzo Bonzo

Posted on

The sinister side of Singapore

 

© Marshall Cavendish

 

Here’s a review of another book that’d make an appropriate Halloween present tomorrow…

 

A while ago on this blog, I wrote, “When you’re in a new culture, a good way to get insight into that culture is to read a selection of traditional ghost and horror stories from the place.  Finding out what makes people scared and finding out how they like to scare others give you some appreciation of their psychology.”

 

Thus, after I arrived in Singapore earlier this year, and found myself for the first time in a Singaporean bookstore (Kinokuniya in the Takashimaya Shopping Centre on Orchard Road), and saw a volume called The New Singapore Horror Collection by local author S.J. Huang, I immediately purchased it.  Not that the 13 short stories inside are what you’d call ‘traditional’.  They don’t have historical settings or folkloric ghosts or monsters.  Huang’s stories take place in the 21st century and in a modern-day Singapore that’s instantly recognisable to me.  It’s the place I see every day from the windows of my apartment, my office and the bus I take to work.  Also, while the horrors featured in many of these stories may be supernatural, they may equally be psychological, created by the minds of their beleaguered protagonists as events tip them over the edge.

 

Huang’s work still provides insight into the character and culture of the formidable city-state they’re set in.  Boasting the second-highest GDP per capita in the world, Singapore is one of the biggest economic success stories of the past 50 years.  But in a society where so much value is placed upon ambition, drive and work-ethic, there are inevitably a few casualties – people who can’t handle the pressure.  And some of Huang’s most effective stories explore what happens when those casualties end up in dark places indeed.

 

The main character of The Office, for example, quickly unravels when he finds himself trapped and alone in his workplace one evening, 66 floors up.  This is just after he’s heard that the former colleague he pushed aside in order to get a promotion has committed suicide by jumping off another tall building.  In Penance, a man who’s always in a hurry – presumably for work-related reasons – causes a fatal traffic accident one day.  He escapes prosecution, but then becomes the subject of a bizarre and madness-inducing haunting that has his mind working at ever-increasing speeds his body can’t keep up with: “His eyes and the corners of his mouth twitched  as if they had a life of their own, quickened by a manic pulse of electricity that coursed through his features every few seconds.  It was exhausting to watch, and I could only imagine what it had to be like for him.”  In The Last Goodbye, a loser who messes up a lucrative business deal desperately summons supernatural forces and makes a bargain with them to turn the situation around.  Or does he?  Perhaps he merely imagines that he has.  Then, after the business deal somehow turns good again and he’s rewarded with a promotion, he realises he has to honour his side of the supernatural bargain he (might have) made…

 

Elsewhere, there are many references to contemporary Singaporean life: national service, which provides the male characters with something to reminisce about, years later, as they start to slip into middle age; the country’s HDB (Housing and Development Board) public housing, which accommodates the majority of the population, but which high-flyers look down on (someone sneers in The Last Goodbye, “As the VP of Sales and Distribution, he was probably the most senior guy at the bank still living in public housing.  It’s totally ridiculous”); the nightlife, which forms the starting point for Taken for a Ride, another psychological horror tale, one that has a nice, nasty twist; and the conservative social attitudes, which form the context for the sad ghost story Lines.

 

Singapore’s education system also gets a look-in with Lights, in which two teams of competitive schoolboys play a ‘wargame’ on one of their school’s sports fields, at night-time, with the floodlights turned off – carrying red or blue light-sticks to show their position and their team’s identity.  There’s an uneasy undercurrent to the game because, some time before, one of their fellow pupils disappeared without trace while crossing the same field after dark.  And when the spectators notice mysterious lights of a different colour starting to appear on the black field, while the game is in progress, things become truly creepy…  In fact, I’d say Lights is my favourite story in the collection.  There’s no explanation given for what ultimately happens, which makes it creepier.

 

Although there’s a Poe-esque emphasis on the psychological, Huang also finds room to experiment and a few stories go off on unexpected tangents.  The Elixir is essentially an old-fashioned Egyptian-mummy tale, although the embalmed cadaver featured isn’t ancient Egyptian, but ancient Chinese, the concubine of a cruel, long-ago emperor.  The Chinese authorities, it transpires, have entrusted her perfectly-preserved body to a ‘Singapore government research agency’ to determine the composition of her mysterious embalming fluid.  Charmingly, The Elixir reminded me of the 1971 Hammer horror movie Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb which, similarly, didn’t feature a lumbering, bandaged mummy but a miraculously-undecayed lady from ancient times.

 

Meanwhile, The Legacy takes place in 2031.  It has astronauts from “the Perses program… founded on 2nd February 2025, as a joint initiative between the Republic of Singapore and the United States of America,” landing on Mars and discovering a cave that leads into a strange extraterrestrial cathedral or temple.  Inevitably, things then take a dark turn.  The Legacy is initially reminiscent of the movie Alien (1980) – or God help us, Lifeforce (1985) – but its final paragraphs made me think of the social satire / comet-disaster film Don’t Look Up (2021).

 

I felt The Elixir and The Legacy were the least effective stories in the collection, as they seemed a little too ‘far out’ to be properly disturbing, though I did find both of them good fun.

 

Overall, I really enjoyed The New Singapore Horror Collection.  I especially appreciated S.J. Huang’s prose, which is straightforward, solid and unshowy – and all the better for that.  I look forward to his next collection, which I trust will further explore, to good effect, the sinister side of Singapore.

Posted on

The man who mentored Wheatley

 

© Senate Books

 

With Halloween just three days away, here’s a timely book review.

 

When I was 12 or 13 years old, you couldn’t keep me away from the novels of Dennis Wheatley.  More precisely, you couldn’t keep me away from Wheatley’s occult novels, such as The Devil Rides Out (1934), To the Devil a Daughter (1953), They Used Dark Forces (1964) and Gateway to Hell (1970).  They were crammed with things that at the time seemed utterly cool to me, things such as astral projection, demonic possession, revived corpses, evil slug-like elemental beings from other planes of existence, diabolic homunculi needing virginal blood to be brought to life, chalk pentacles offering shelter from assaults by the powers of darkness, unholy talismans with the potential to unleash the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and devil-worshipping Sabbats climaxing in the summoning of the Goat of Mendes.

 

Incidentally, among Wheatley’s huge catalogue, which included war, espionage and historical-adventure stories, these are the only books of his that anyone remembers today.

 

There was a problem with getting hold of Wheatley’s fiction, however.  In the 1970s, his occult thrillers were published by Arrow Books in a variety of saucy covers.  Each book was adorned with a picture of a naked, big-breasted lady dancing about a flame while some Satanic-looking artefact – a skull, a ghost’s head, a broken cross, a pagan devil-mask – hovered in the foreground.  With so much naked female flesh displayed, I felt extremely awkward as a 12 or 13-year-old boy buying those novels in Whitie’s, which at the time was the main bookshop on Peebles High Street, near where I lived in Scotland.  In fact, when I bought my first Wheatley novel, The Devil Rides Out, I remember Mrs Whitie, a formidable old lady who could probably have taken on a coven of Wheatley’s devil worshippers and beaten them up, staring over the counter at me with a withering mixture of pity and contempt.  Then she sighed and said, “I suppose we’d better stick this in a brown paper bag for you.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © Allan Warren

 

Dated and corny though they seem today, Wheatley’s Satanic potboilers surely unsettled many genteel readers in 1930s, 40s and 50s Britain with their premise that in mansion houses and estate grounds across the land, beastly, posh devil-worshippers were getting up to hijinks during unspeakable black-magic rituals.  Ever the showman, Wheatley made his subject matter seem that little bit more threatening by prefacing his novels with a solemn warning: “All of the characters and the situations in this book are entirely imaginary, but, in the inquiry necessary to writing of it, I found ample evidence that Black Magic is still practised in London, and other cities, at the present day…  Should any of my readers incline to a serious study of the subject, and thus come into contact with a man or woman of Power, I feel it is only right to urge them, most strongly, to refrain from being drawn into the practice of the Secret Art in any way.  My own observations have led me to an absolute conviction that to do so would bring them into dangers of a very real and concrete nature.”

 

“The inquiry necessary to the writing of it”, i.e., the research Wheatley conducted prior to The Devil Rides Out, brought him into contact with author and clergyman Montague Summers, who’d written a History of Witchcraft and Demonology in 1926 and translated the notorious witch-hunters’ manual Malleus Maleficarum (1486) into English in 1929; with the occultist Aleister Crowley, the notorious self-styled ‘Great Beast’ and ‘Wickedest Man in the World’ whose antics in the early 20th century had terrified God-fearing folk who believed everything they read in Britain’s popular press; and with one Rollo Ahmed, whom Wheatley would later describe as “a man of profound knowledge and one whose very presence radiates power” and “a Master, who had devoted a lifetime to acquiring a first-hand knowledge of that grim ‘other world’ which lies so far from ordinary experience, and yet is so very near for those who have the power to pierce the veil.”

 

Ahmed claimed to have been born in Egypt and was of Egyptian and Guyanese parentage.  Before his arrival in Britain, he’d knocked around South America and the Caribbean, where he’d supposedly gained knowledge of everything from lycanthropy to Voodoo and Obeah.  With his opportunities to earn proper money in a proper job in Britain stymied by the era’s widespread racism, he had to play up his dark-skinned exoticness to survive – which meant selling himself as a yoga teacher, herbalist and general authority on the occult.  Despite his own racist attitudes, which sometimes bubbled up in his novels, Wheatley took a shine to Ahmed, started learning Raja Yoga from him, and happily embroidered his memories of the man with little details that suggested, yes, there was something other-worldly about him.

 

For example, Wheatley alleged that one night Ahmed accepted an invitation to dine with him and walked a long way across London to his house.  The evening was freezing, yet Ahmed arrived without an overcoat or gloves, completely unaffected by the cold and with hands that were ‘as warm as toast’.  A more alarming claim by Wheatley was that, after introducing Ahmed to an acquaintance in the Society for Psychical Research, the acquaintance worriedly asked Wheatley if he too had seen the ‘little black imp’ that he’d seen standing next to Ahmed.

 

Wheatley did Ahmed a favour when, after the success of The Devil Rides Out, he was approached by Hutchinson, the publisher, and asked if he would like to write a non-fiction book about the occult.  Wheatley declined, feeling he wasn’t knowledgeable enough.  (Three-and-a-half decades later, he obviously did feel he had the knowledge, for in 1971 he published a book on the subject entitled The Devil and All His Works.)  Instead, he advised Hutchinson to hire Ahmed for the job.  They did, and the result was The Black Art, originally published in 1936, with an enthusiastic introduction by Wheatley.

 

I recently read a 1994 reprint of Ahmed’s The Black Art, mainly because of my interest in Wheatley.  It’s an exhaustive and, dare I say it, exhausting book.  Its 22 chapters explore every historical period from ‘antediluvian times’ to the modern day, with plenty of detail in between about the ancient Egyptians and Jews, the Greeks and Romans, and the practitioners of the Middle Ages.  Geographically, they cover North and South America, India, ‘the East’ and the British Isles.  And they examine the associated phenomena of ‘vampirism and werewolves’, ‘symbols and accessories of magic’, ‘sex-rites’, ‘necromancy and spiritualism’ and ‘the Black Mass’, as well as the church’s reactions to these shenanigans.

 

Ahmed’s technique with the book is to throw in everything bar the kitchen sink, so that the reader is bombarded by one anecdote or snippet of information after another, sometimes two or three barely-related items cropping up in the same paragraph.  This makes it difficult to process more than a few pages of The Black Art in one sitting.  At the same time, no effort is made to attribute sources to all the anecdotes and information – there’s no footnotes or appendix.  Indeed, I’ve seen one brutal review online where Ahmed is accused of filling the book with material plagiarised from the works of the afore-mentioned Montague Summers.

 

Still, if you’ve enjoyed Wheatley’s novels and you make it to near the end of The Black Art, it’s fun in the final chapters to encounter information that Wheatley apparently incorporated into The Devil Rides Out.  For example, there are instructions on how to create a ‘protective circle’ in which you can carry out, say, an exorcism ceremony without being attacked by the forces of darkness: “a large, five-pointed star should be drawn with chalk and a circle of double lines drawn around it…  The participants should wear garlands of asafoetida and garlic flowers, and where the disturbances are of a material nature they should on no account leave the circle until peace and harmony have been restored.”  Perhaps the most famous scene in The Devil Rides Out involves the Duc De Richleau and his followers taking refuge in such a circle, while the villainous Mocata directs his satanic powers against them.

 

© Arrow Books

 

There’s also an interesting chapter on elementals, supernatural entities that are created, Ahmed says, by humans’ “unexpressed thoughts… upon the mental plane.”  Thus, “evil and destructive thoughts produce ugly and revolting forms as malevolent and harmful as any ‘demon’ could be.”  I suspect that’s what inspired the evil, slug-like thing that plops out of nowhere in a scene during Wheatley’s To the Devil a Daughter.

 

Interestingly, Ahmed doesn’t try to gloss over the multiple failings of famous alchemists and sorcerers of yesteryear.  The 18th-century Italian adventurer and magician Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, who “evolved a masonic system of his own which he called ‘Egyptian Freemasonry’” (and whom, incidentally, Aleister Crowley claimed was a previous incarnation of his), gets six pages dedicated to him.  During these, Ahmed makes it pretty clear he was a thief, vagabond, womaniser, opportunist, manipulator and all-round fraud.  Of Cagliostro’s Egyptian Masonic Lodge, which became quite the thing in Paris for a while, Ahmed notes: “the fair intimates” had “to undergo some very remarkable experiences of an enthralling and slightly ridiculous nature, after having sacrificed large sums of money on the altar to the grand copt.”  Meanwhile, he makes a cutting observation about Franz Mesmer, proponent of ‘animal magnetism’, the man who lent his name to the term ‘mesmerism’ and inventor of the supposed healing device the magnetic tub (again, popular in Paris): the tub “was a very profitable craze for its creator”.

 

Even Dr John Dee, who was genuinely remarkable, gets short shrift from Ahmed, mainly because of his association with the disreputable, alleged scryer Edward Kelley: “In the course of time… he (Dee) became hopelessly credulous, and after he had taken Kelly into partnership he allowed himself to be involved in various nefarious schemes, completely under the domination of the other.”  Dee’s achievements as a cartographer, mathematician, antiquarian and political advisor get no mention.

 

I suspect Ahmed was jaded about his occult predecessors because he knew all too well himself that establishing yourself as a master of the black arts required more than a little self-promotion and grift.  No matter how genuinely interested you were in the field, you were aware that, to keep the money rolling in to feed you and your family, and pay the rent, you depended on the interest of other people – and especially the interest of gullible people, who could be easily exploited, manipulated and parted from their cash.  And while Ahmed undoubtedly cut a striking figure around bohemian 1930s London, his story had a sordid side too.  He was arrested for fraud several times and, later in life, was reduced to posing as a fortune teller and preying on gullible old ladies.  Along the way he lost all his teeth, an indignity he put down to a black magic operation going wrong – it’d happened while he’d been trying to trap a demon.  Anything to shore up those occult credentials.

 

The Black Art is a slog, then, and I’d recommend it only to Dennis Wheatley completists.  However, Ahmed wrote one other, very different book that I’d like to read sometime.  It has a self-explanatory title: I Rise: The Life Story of a Negro (1937).  Dedicated to the mighty Paul Robeson, no less, the autobiographical I Rise chronicles the racism that Ahmed and other people of his ethnicity had to endure in 1930s Britain.  It’s a reminder that, while he spent much of his time in an exotic, esoteric and largely make-believe world, where he mentored Dennis Wheatley and wrote knowledgeably of protective circles and elementals, he had a depressingly real and hostile world to negotiate too – its attitudes “ugly and revolting… as malevolent and harmful as any ‘demon’ could be.”

 

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More Wordsworth’s ghosts

 

© Wordsworth Editions

 

Another Halloween-inspired reposting about books of Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories…

 

I’ve just read two more collections of ghost stories published in the excellent Wordsworth Editions’ Tales of Mystery and Imagination series.  Other books in this series have featured work by still-celebrated writers like E.F. Benson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, M.R. James and Edith Wharton; but also by writers like Gertrude Atherton, Amayas Northcote, J.H. Riddell and May Sinclair, who were prolific and / or acclaimed in their day but whose names slipped into obscurity following their deaths.  Getting republished by Wordsworth Editions might, of course, help to rescue their names from obscurity.

 

The two latest Wordsworth collections I’ve read were both published in 2006. They are A Night on the Moor and Other Tales of Dread by R. Murray Gilchrist and Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer by Alice and Claude Askew.

 

Firstly, I’ll talk about the collection I enjoyed less.  R. Murray Gilchrist was born in Sheffield but lived for much of his life in Holmesfield, 800 feet up in Derbyshire’s Peak District.  By the time of his death in 1917 at the age of 50, he was responsible for 22 novels and about 100 short stories.  However,  A Night on the Moor and Other Tales of Dread is something of a misnomer because most of the stories featured don’t particularly evoke feelings of ‘dread’.  Rather, they are tales of darkly gothic romance, where the atmosphere – and, alas, the prose – is often stiflingly thick.

 

These are stories where every building is an imposing structure with ‘stacks of twisted chimneys’ and ‘great square windows’ and is ‘a vision of gables’ that’s ‘so covered in ivy that from a distance it seems like a cluster of rare trees with ruddy trunks and branches’; where every garden is adorned with statues of satyrs, nymphs, dryads, dragons and the goddess Diana; and where the air is always suffused with the sickly-sweet smells of flowers, such as roses, lilies, honeysuckle, ‘withering snowdrops’ and ‘scarlet poppies, with hearts like fingers’ that effuse ‘a close and sleepy perfume’.  The villain of the story The Manuscript of Francis Shackerley even gives off ‘a rich smell of violets’ and it’s said that ‘his skin by some artificial means had been impregnated lastingly with their odour.’

 

Unfortunately, Gilchrist’s writing is frequently hamstrung by melodrama (“O the midsummer noontide; the trembling air; the golden dusk that clung around the fir trunks!”) and is occasionally, clunkingly awful (“My thoughts had withered, my words had grown unpregnant”).  There’s an attempt to emulate the morbid, decadent intensity found in such tales by Edgar Allan Poe as Berenice (1835), Ligeia (1938), The Oval Portrait (1842) and Eleonora (1850), but while characters indulge in much internal and external pontificating and running hither and thither to no great effect, the impression you get is one of bluster rather than of anything genuinely, dissolutely macabre.  Some of the stories I found a real chore to get through.

 

Still, there are a few items where Gilchrist dials it down a bit and manages to strike a properly creepy note.  The Lover’s Ordeal is a tale of a dare that unexpectedly ends up featuring a vampire.  The Grotto at Ravensdale sees a newly married couple encounter tragedy at the titular, and haunted, cavern.  The Priest’s Pavan is about a harpsichordist forced to play some demonic music at a wedding party.  And A Night on the Moor itself is an atmospheric piece where the main character experiences a time-slip.

 

Also, two additional stories, The Panicle and The Witch in the Peak, are tagged on in an appendix at the end.  Presumably this is because they eschew the aristocratic characters, lavishly gothic settings and rather po-faced tone of the other stories and instead have straightforward and refreshingly humorous narratives where working-class people experience supernatural goings-on in the Peak District.  The 19-century Derbyshire dialect is rather hard to decipher, but I enjoyed these two stories more than anything else in the collection and would have liked more with their flavour.

 

© Wordsworth Editions

 

Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer is more modest in its ambitions and I have to say I found it the more enjoyable read because of that.  It has eight stories, all connected by the recurring character of Aylmer Vance – ‘a curious-looking man, tall and lean in build, with a pale but distinctly interesting face’ – who as the title indicates is sensitive to paranormal activity and acts as a supernatural detective, trying to explain and put an end to hauntings suffered by other people.  The narrator, however, is an acquaintance of Vance’s called Dexter.  Vance tells the first three stories to Dexter, then Dexter becomes an unwilling participant in the fourth one, and then for the remaining four stories joins forces with Vance and serves as a Dr Watson to his Sherlock Holmes.

 

There’s nothing spectacular here, but there are some imaginative ideas – the fire-raising ghost of a frustrated poet in The Fire Unquenchable, for example, or the malevolent spirit of a pianist using his music to haunt the woman he lusted after when alive in The Indissoluble Bond.  Meanwhile, The Stranger, about a young woman attracted to a mysterious figure she encounters in a local wood, is a nicely pagan affair with a hint of Arthur Machen; and the final story, The Fear, is impressively oppressive and ‘does what it says on the tin’.

 

Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy Aylmer Vance as much as I might have done.  This was because a year earlier I’d read a Wordsworth Editions collection called Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, written by William Hope Hodgson, which was a set of tales about, yes, another supernatural detective called Thomas Carnacki.  The Carnacki stories were good enough to have influenced later writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Dennis Wheatley and the Vance stories can’t help but seem a little pedestrian in comparison.

 

Aylmer Vance also suffers from a problem that’s inevitable when you have a series of supernatural stories that are mostly self-contained and have different elements (ghosts, poltergeists, vampires, etc.) but also have the thread of a recurring character.  If paranormal activity does happen, it must happen incredibly rarely.  Otherwise scientists would have observed and recorded it and acknowledged its existence by now.  So how does someone like Vance manage to defy all laws of probability and have eight full-blooded encounters with the supernatural in its different forms?  William Hope Hodgson at least seemed aware of this credibility problem, for he interspersed his genuinely supernatural Carnacki stories with ones where the hauntings turn out to be hoaxes.

 

Vance writers Alice and Claude Askew, incidentally, were a husband-and-wife team who supposedly penned over 90 novels during a 14-year period in the early 20th century.  During World War One, they found themselves in Serbia and later in Greece, working at a British field hospital and then for the Serbian Red Cross and also writing war despatches for publications like the Daily Express.  Like R. Murray Gilchrist, they died in 1917 but in a particularly tragic manner.  Both were killed while they were travelling from Italy to Corfu, when their boat was torpedoed by a German submarine.  Claude’s body was never found.  However, Alice’s body was recovered and she’s buried on the Croatian island of Korčula.