This Week’s Reading
Starting a new experiment
As my Masters has finished (still waiting for the official final classification, but I’ve done well) I’ve now got time back for reading for myself, and I thought it would be useful for me to do a weekly post covering the books I’ve been reading and finished over the past week. Some of it’s for tracking what I’m doing, some to motivate myself to find the time to read, some to recommend things I’ve read, and part to leave a marker for books I want to write and talk about in more depth, here and elsewhere.
Also, if I read interesting articles here on Medium or elsewhere, it’ll be a good place to just share links, but as I’ve only decided to this in the last 24 hours, anything in depth and interesting I read online in the past week has floated through it and back off into the ether, so that will have to wait for another time.
I’ll do these as general, unpaywalled posts, so anyone can read them, I can’t promise that links to anywhere else will be the same, though. Especially as publishers insist on people paying for their books. Anyway, let’s get going
Books I finished this week:
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut (Bookshop.org|Amazon)
This is one I’d read before — more than once — but not for a few years, and I’d picked up a new copy of it which has been sitting on my to be read shelf for so long I can’t remember where I got it from. It’s one of Vonnegut’s best, though perhaps not as well known as some of his other novels like Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle or Player Piano.
Possibly that’s because it’s one of his most conventional novels, there’s little in the way of the weirdness that permeates his other work, right up to the point that, as he notes in the introduction this is is the only work of his that he knows to have a moral: we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
That’s an idea I want to examine in more detail in a future post, because I don’t think Vonnegut would have expected how much our world has — sixty-five years after this was published and twenty years after his death — become dominated by what people pretend to be.
But that’s for another post, here I’ll instead explain this the book is presented as the prison memoirs of Howard Campbell, an American who became notorious as a presenter of Nazi propaganda broadcasts during WW2, now sitting in a Tel Aviv jail cell next door to Adolf Eichmann awaiting trial.Campbell’s defence is simple: he didn’t believe a word he was saying or writing, and was in that role purely because it enabled him to surreptitiously transmit secret information about the Nazi regime to US intelligence throughout the war.
It works because Vonnegut finds a voice for Campbell that’s very different from his usual narrators. Campbell isn’t a man with an interest in the wider world around him, even as war rages, and he’s convincing as a man who could persuade himself that the monstrous actions he’s party to are justified by his higher purpose. The first person the propagandist has to persuade is himself, and the novel explores how that persuasion slowly unravels as Campbell seeks to explain himself.
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Campbell, of course, appears in a minor role in Slaughterhouse-Five, and Vonnegut wrote this first. One wonders how much it helped him to take this tangential approach to the war first before being able to approach his own experience in the war directly. Recommended, anyhow.
The Alteration by Kingsley Amis (Bookshop|Amazon)
Another one read several years ago, then acquired for a re-read and retrieved from the to be read pile this week, The Alteration is a curious anomaly in Amis’s work. It’s an alternate history novel in a world where Arthur Tudor lived long enough to have a son with Catherine of Aragon before dying, leading to a Catholic invasion of England to support that child’s (Stephen II) claim when his uncle — known to this history as Henry The Abominable — tries to usurp the throne. Martin Luther becomes Pope, and the Church remains secularly powerful deep into the twentieth century.
Though it now perhaps seems more anomalous than it was when first published in 1976, when alternate histories weren’t as common in fiction. Amis obviously knew many books playing with history like this (including The Man In The High Castle, Pavane and Bring The Jubilee) but his interest wasn’t as much exploring the world he’d created, but in establishing a world where he could examine the issue that he was seeking to explore.
The alteration of the title is not what has been done to history but what is planned for the novel’s protagonist: ten year old chorister Hubert Anvil, possessed of so beautiful a voice that the Church plans to make him a castrato so as to preserve it to better praise and honour God. Amis’s question is how much great art relies on there being a sexual urge to drive it and whether removing that urge would lead to someone who could deliver magnificent performances but not be able to create great art.
It’s an interesting book, and you can see that it had more than a minor influence on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials with both its contention that unchecked sexuality threatens the church and Oxford setting. Some of the more satirical elements — Pope John XXIV is meant to be Harold Wilson, for example — haven’t dated too well, but the central idea remains interesting and drives a clever, but tragic, plot.
New Maps Of Hell by Kingsley Amis (Bookshop|Amazon)
And now a book I did buy this week having not read before, because I was reminded of it by reading The Alteration. Based on a series of lectures Amis gave in 1960, this is one of the first works of literary criticism to take science fiction seriously as a genre. Amis had been a fan of it since he discovered American pulp magazines in his youth, and so he approaches it as someone familiar with the conventions of the genre and wanting to present and explain it to a wider audience.
While not referencing Sturgeon’s Law (“ninety percent of everything is crud”) he does take a similar approach by showing that while much of SF — still at this time a genre principally presented in magazines not novels — is principally entertaining rather than enlightening, some of it rises to a higher level and is worth engaging with as interesting literature. The gimmicks, bug-eyed monsters and exploration of technical advances might draw the reader in, but the SF that matters goes beyond to explore wider questions of human nature and existence, or to satirise elements of our own society.
As a piece of criticism it is somewhat dated, but partly because it identified the ways in which it SF could most profitably develop as a genre. As a piece of history, though, it captures a moment just before the New Wave of SF broke out and paired with The Alteration it gives an interesting view of Amis’s engagement with the genre.
It might also have had a very significant if inadvertent effect on television SF. I’ve seen suggestions (such as in the first volume of About Time) that New Maps Of Hell showing how SF could be literarily worthy was one of the arguments that led to the BBC in 1962 asking its Survey Group to consider how science fiction could be presented on television, which was the beginning of the process that led to Doctor Who. Who said literary criticism was worthless, eh?
And there we are, three books finished this week. Time to get started on the next one.
