Category: Reviews

Days of the Comet

A mysterious green comet from the ancient depths of the dark looms in the sky. It recalls H G Wells, In the Days of Comet in which a green comet looms over the Earth, growing larger week by week.

The book is not one of Wells’s classics and does not deserve to be, and resolves into an attempt to push the author’s naïve social ideas, but one thing leaps from the pages:  by thunder, the man can write.

The comet in the skies as I write this is no monster and for most of us in this land it passes invisible above the cloudy night, but imagine a comet growing vast until it dominates the sky; an ancient superstition marking of unknowable portents in the heavens.

In the Days of the Comet is not science fiction, not in Book I at least, but Wells did not always write science fiction. It marks the point where he stopped writing pure adventure and started writing his social and political ideas. The ultimate argument is fallacious, but casting the whole point of the work aside, it displays mastery in writing.

The book is contemporary to the year it was written. It opens in the Edwardian world of the Potteries towns, a smoke-reeked industrial blot of hard graft and poverty and riches, surrounding the main character, a young man with all the ungoverned passions of his age, with a foot in the town and a foot in the country estate where his family once served. It is a device to show both sides of a social divide (ignoring the innumerable gradations in between, which would spoil the argument of the story). It is a story not so much of Edwardian strife as of the inner workings of a young man’s mind. It is a mind of frustration, impatience, rage and ungoverned passion. In short, it is a brilliant portrayal of the universal young man at the door of adulthood.

Wells sets out explicitly to talk of the division between rich and poor, or with more insight, between those who are secure and those unsecure. The mine owner works hard but need not – he and his family are secure. The labourer’s widow though may not know that she will still be eating in a week’s time. All the while, the comet grows larger in the sky.

The main driver of rage in the young man, William, is not wealth or poverty though; it is a woman, of course. More drive comes from the pants than the purse: never mind the squabbles over lost shillings and impossible employers: the loss of Nettie is the end of all hope, or the beginning of murder. He buys a gun and it is ever present, with a gravitational effect all of its own.

There is a great deal of difference between a teenage crush on a girl, and the realities of her when she blooms into a woman, and young men do not mature as young women do. The change is enchanting, terrifying, alluring, threatening. The desire for possession confused with love can become a form of madness.  This is something Wells portrays with excruciating accuracy. Whether he means to or not, I cannot tell, but it is triumph of his art.

The enemy is identified, the privileged Verrall who has won Nettie’s heart: his class makes him Wells’s enemy, which is projected upon tormented William, but there would be no need for politics, when envy and hatred are universal.  William tracks Nettie and Verrall to the farthermost edge  of the land where they have eloped, in one of those an anonymous beach resorts that were typical of the age, with villas made from old railway coaches. Murder is immediately to hand, the gun in his hand…

Then the comet strikes, and the world is transformed, in a moment, if not quite in the twinkling of an eye at the last trump, as the green miasma spreads over all the world and every living thing across the world falls into sleep.

Those who wake are transformed, and we are into Book II. The science-fiction explanation essayed by Wells is that the comet changes all the nitrogen in the air into a breathable gas so that the brains of everyone work more efficiently and in that state all the worries and concerns of the past life are seen as petty and one gets the impression that the only emotions left are those of regret for past foolishness. (What a dull place it sounds.)

All thoughts of murder are forgotten; the gun drops from the hand.  The war on the sea ceases.

The author assumes that as soon as we all become more intelligent, we will all at once accept the author’s own political ideas as correct. Wells is no different from all species of arrogant political activist these days. The difference is that, over a hundred years on, we have seen what happens when those ideas are put into effect, and we have have mourned over the wastelands they create and the mass graves they fill.

I must have quoted G K Chesterton on H G Wells before “Mr Wells is a born storyteller who has sold his birthright for a pot of message”. Book II and Book III of this work, trundling through his dull vision for the future, demonstrate that and can be discarded as literature. For Book I though, a perfect picture of tormented youth, Wells earns all the plaudits he has received: by thunder, the man can write.

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Bloomsday

It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don’t spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the etherial bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness.

A hundred years ago Ulysses was published, to outrage, scorn and delight, the first of the modern novels, tumbling words like Miss Douce’s bronze tresses or the sheets of Molly’s fearinducing bed, unrelenting, the jumbled, selftormeneted thoughts rushing the head of Leopold Bloom in a jumbled humbled, selftormented Dublin on the crowded day of 16 June 1904. To describe it is impossible. It was written for the writer, and knowing it would wreak revenge upon critics, critics who devour with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. tasked with unjumbling an unfathomable Odyssey of the mind.

The realisation comes upon the reader if he dare look up of the principal theme being the longing of men for supple flesh and unreachableness and disappointed execution, the madnessinducingness, unpossessableness, as in a summer’s day the women in all the city streets and bars and strands, goods on display unpurchaseable except at a deadly price, and reaction of the longing man as if to look around on this long train commute I were to find my eyes unwilling drawn amongst the lessly clad maids of the carriage, finding in each the rose, each of a name but unnameable (Molly singing the Rose of Castile, how many were touched by those coral lips?) in feminine carriage swaying in a jingling, sweating carriage, rows of cast steel, thy temple amid thy hair is as a slice of pomegranate, begging she of the Spanishy eyes Sonnez la cloche! (so formal), Sonnez la cloche, La clo, son..

In a tableau pass along the streets of a timeless June 1904, streets soon to be renamed by revolutionaries but preserved in those pages, of shopmen, schoolmen, writers, drinkers, ladies, doxies, haughty priests of the leftfoot and solemn ministers of the right, and the Lord Lieutenantgeneral passing by, the hoofirons, steelyringing, O rose! Castile. The morn is breaking, jingle jingle jaunted jingling, and Bloom between belonging to none, condemned to walk the Earth forever, the wandering salesman.

To read it to be feels you are being hit by a train; a train of thought.  Should I endeavour? Yes I said, yes I will Yes.

Books

Fantasy islands

Who would not want to sail a ship into the heavens and watch a war between the creatures of the Moon and the Sun, to find and conquer a world hidden within a whale and sail behind a curtain to talk with heroes of old in their rest?  The world is too narrow for all the stories our imaginations want to tell.

Dreams take us into impossible places (although for me, my tutored mind intervenes in the dream and insists on putting it into a logical narrative).

Whenever I see a sign labelling “Part time traffic lights” my fancies wander to where the lights might go on their time off. I always imagined they would sit around somewhere, perhaps in company with occasional tables. Lucian thought the same in the Second Century AD, giving us his City of Lamps, which he visited according to his ‘True Story’ while sailing the cosmos. It is a pretty invention that has charmed may writers since – including Margaret Cavendish, a friend and scholar of Hobbes.

Fantasy works are usually pulp nonsense to embarrass a bookshelf, but not all: the Odyssey is a fantasy book, and it is a foundation work of European culture. Science fiction is a rich branch of fantasy, rooted in Homer’s pen.  If it is to become literature, the author must have the audacity to write without apology and create a world which is for a moment believable and desirable.

Lucian’s humour came from the familiarity of the genre he spoofed, and his own inventiveness. Romans would read books of distant travels and wanted to believe there really were men with heads in their chests or with wings, and lands where centaurs roamed, and if the reality is too dull, why not be released from the need to pretend it is true and have an open fantasy? Homer was too serious, as if he wanted to be believed.

Lucian is to Homer as Spaceballs is to Star Wars; a loving tribute to the work it played upon. The morality of the Ancient Greeks was different from ours, but surely Homer saw a problem with Odysseus’s behaviour with certain nymphs and demi-(clad)-goddesses on those fantasy islands? It took Lucian though to portray Odysseus in his eternal rest in the Isle of the Blessed creeping away from Penelope at night to slip Lucian a love-note to take to Calypso.

The Isle of the Blessed episode is full of crackers, showing the heroes of ancient times as just as flawed and more so than mortal men – they need a law court for when Helen’s husbands argue over whose wife she is for eternity, and when Alexander and Hannibal argue about who was greatest general. The Platonists, we are told, are not on the island, as they are still trying to devise their own state.  Here too Lucian meets Homer and badgers him with all those questions that scholars had been debating about him – which shows that lit crit is as ancient as literature itself, and as tedious then as now.

That city inhabited by lamps, which live in fear of being extinguished if they do not do their duty, comes from the heart of a householder fed up with guttering oil lamps. (In the City of Lamps Lucian encounters his own house lamp and discusses with it matters at home – he says nothing about an occasional table.)

The squabbling worlds on the planets and the zodiac, the lost islands of the sea, the kingdom in a whale’s belly and the giants rowing islands to hunt it, are exercises in audacity just the right side of silliness.

I was musing on that here recently about ancient works that have been called ‘Sci-Fi’ which are not really, but which are fantasy as grown-up literature. Defining ‘science fiction’ is a whole topic on its own, and as a good Hobbesian I must feel the necessity to define it:

For the errours of Definitions multiply themselves, according as the reckoning proceeds; and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see, but cannot avoyd, without reckoning anew from the beginning; in which lyes the foundation of their errours.

Not now though. I just wish to appreciate that works of fantasy can be literature, even if the majority of them have given the genre a bad name. How they become literature is another question.  It is not by modelling a tale on the fancies of dreams as they are personal and dependent on the day’s experience or internal distempers as Hobbes explains:

divers distempers must needs cause different Dreams. And hence it is, that lying cold breedeth Dreams of Feare, and raiseth the thought and Image of some fearfull object (the motion from the brain to the inner parts, and from the inner parts to the Brain being reciprocall)

To be any good, a story must speak to a wide audience who are not all in on the internal workings of the writer’s own brain. I would go further: a really good book should work even if you strip the fantasy element out, and leave just the personalities and their deeds. The Romans called Homer’s hero Ulysses, and built more robust stories around him.  Following their lead, if you take the wanderings of Ulysses out of the fantasy islands and the mythical age and place him in, say, Dublin in 1904, it will work very well indeed.

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Oscars round-one-up

Thrills, surprises, and now we know why that carpet is red – the biggest camp-fest in the world hit our screens again. America punches above its weight in showbiz, and the annual shindig always strikes a high note.

Never mind that it is less sophisticated than a provincial Edwardian musical hall, just with a bigger stage and fake diamonds: this year we saw one burst of unaccustomed honesty, which shocked the world.

The heavyweights of the industry all gathered in one room, filled with confidence and with whatever they  managed to smuggle into the cloakrooms, were all there to celebrate themselves, their bank balances, their escape from the Epstein probe and most of all to laugh at everyone else; the little people who gave them every dollar they own.

The stars hit red carpet early – the men dressed to the nines; the women undressed to them, and the lens-men knowing what the newspaper wants to see to sell papers to men pretending to be interested in the art. We have missed all this over the lockdowns – not having the Oscars ceremony left a hole in the social calendar that showed us more than anything how much we did not miss it.

I feel for the academicians, pounded into submission by studio bruisers and frightened by social justice warriors, and each of them with a future career in the balance attacked from both sides.

To the punchline though: the awards themselves.

The most coveted award, Best Picture, pulled off a shock – award-watchers were convinced that any film where the protagonist is a whoopsie would sweep the field, but Power of the Dog lost it at the punch to an outsider – a film about a disabled family, CODA walloped its rival – a brilliant entry to tug the wokestrings that astoundingly was actually well made, and that in itself is a shock for recent Oscar trends. Benedict Cumberbatch struck out, but we have to applaud him for carrying a western film alone without shooting any of the crew dead during filming.

Kenneth Branagh, a big-hitter for half a lifetime, at last won the ‘Being Kenneth Branagh’ Award that has eluded him for all these years – and no one mentioned that one his his past wives has effortlessly won two.

For best actor though – Will Smith beat them all (and on camera too) – he’s not caused a gasp like that since he lamped that genie. But best not give him any publicity, eh?

Viewers may have clocked the real winner of the night: Dune was awarded all the categories that indicate ‘Not woke enough to win but it’s the real best film’.

It was good too to see that actress who used to have bit-parts in Mitchell and Webb tapped with a Best-Actress  nomination, which she never got for the ‘Avocado Bathroom’ sketch.

A new award for the audience favourite curdled the purists of this fake-festival, but a thumping great action film should win recognition. Army of the Dead though? Appropriate I suppose for a ceremony that is becoming zombified.

At least no one talked about Bruno, except Frank Bruno for some reason.

We may be reaching the end of the road of the Oscars.  It was clobbered by COVID and has taken a body-blow from changes in the market.  Audiences are dropping and the world of glitter and painted-on dresses is ever further away from the audience, for most of whom the cinema is a quaint word for a place they have never been. Next year will it even be held? The whisper is that it will be combined with the WBA World Championship.

Books

Blazing trails

Fiction, especially science fiction, requires vision and imagination. Familiar themes of the modern SciFi, of travel to strange new worlds with outlandish peoples, are found in the work of Margaret Cavendish Duchess of Newcastle, The Blazing World. It has been called the first work of science fiction, but while it has science and fiction, it is not science fiction.

The nature and origin of science fiction is a whole article. Margaret Cavendish deserves her own.

Many an educated lady read well, but Margaret, unusually, wrote also. She wrote a number of volumes on sciences and philosophy. The work by which she has become best known, The Blazing World, was minor in comparison and written as an amusement and a companion to her philosophical work: it is dedicated to other ladies who have read her philosophical work.

A slip of a girl when she married Thomas Cavendish, she knew Thomas Hobbes well – her brother-in-law was his patron and they were all with King Charles’s court in exile in Paris together. She read and became familiar with the ancient and modern philosophers, in particular Hobbes, though his picture of mankind was perhaps too uncomfortable in its reality.

The book is a fantasy, travelling to another world. There are strange creatures there and a strange mode of life, and a place of peace and paradise in comparison to our own war-torn world. The book is a thought-experiment. Most of the book concerns not adventures as one would expect in a science fiction novel, but dialogues and reflections on theories and discoveries in science. Overall, it poses the question “If a world had no previous experience of philosophy or science, and schools were erected to answer scientific questions, how would they answer without drawing on the understanding or the baggage of the ages?”

It is an odd world, certainly; calmer and without the torments as ours. Here the bird-men can fly up and dismantle a star in order that the Empress can light her temple and her headdress with star stones.

One new world is not enough: the Empress sets out to create worlds in her mind, and this is where the rival schools of philosophy play, the ideas of Descartes and Hobbes amongst them:

she endeavoured to make a World according to Des Cartes Opinion; but when she had made the Æthereal Globules, and set them a moving by a strong and lively imagination, her mind became so dizzie with their extraordinary swift turning round, that it almost put her into a swoon; for her thoughts, but their constant tottering, did so stagger, as if they had all been drunk: wherefore she dissolved that World, and began to make another, according to Hobbs’s Opinion; but when all the parts of this Imaginary World came to press and drive each other, they seemed like a company of Wolves that worry sheep, or like so many Dogs that hunt after Hares; and when she found a re-action equal to those pressures, her mind was so squeezed together, that her thoughts could neither move forward nor backward, which caused such an horrible pain in her head, that although she had dissolved that World, yet she could not, without much difficulty, settle her mind, and free it from that pain which those pressures and reactions had caused in it.

The world constructed by the opinions of Hobbes sounds just like our own, if not like the ordered society of Bolsover Castle.

Because of the fantasy and other-world element, the book has been looked at as a as a science fiction book, but it is not. Comparison is made with a satirical fantasy work by Lucian in the 2nd century : not only was Margaret Cavendish familiar with Lucian but refers to him. At the same time she takes a swipe at ideas from the fevered brain of Jan Baptist van Helmont, from which in fact the name of the book ultimately comes.

Lucian’s World of Lights, had been for some time in a snuff, but of late years one Helmont had got it, who since he was Emperour of it, had so strengthened the Immortal parts thereof with mortal out-works, as it was for the present impregnable.

Lucian again may need another article, and I would not want to lessen the lamp of Margaret Cavendish by comparison.

It has science and it has fiction, but The Blazing World is not science fiction. It is a philosophical game and a love-letter to her husband, and that is a fine think indeed.

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