A Return to Form in the Penny Press!

Well, having felt like I'd been suckled in a creed outworn, it certainly came as a relief - and didn't take long - to have glimpses that would make me less forlorn in the Penny Press, and that relief came from the same source it so often does: The New York Review of Books.

It didn't immediately feel so, as I opened the latest issue over a steaming platter of food this afternoon. There were many stumbles out of the gate, from Claire Tomalin's astonishing declaration "[H. G.] Wells's name is probably less well known among readers today than Henry James's" (more people read The War of the Worlds in one year than have read all of James' works combined in the last hundred years) to the pissy-contentious tone Eric Segall takes in his interview with Judge Richard Posner to the groan-inducing typo that kicks off the very first paragraph of Colin Thubron's appreciation of Patrick Leigh Fermor, in which we're told that "he was sometimes fancifully compared to Lord Byron or Sir Philip Sydney" (as long as we're in the land down under, maybe Fermor's paintings should be compared to those of William Hobart?).

But the consolations, when they came, came aplenty. There was Frederick Crews' wonderful piece on the great American doctor (and utterly lamentable dog-torturer) William Stewart Halsted and his pioneering use of  - and ensnarement by - powerful drugs like cocaine and morphine. As is true in the best reviewers, Crews writes as well (or, the reader suspects, better) as his authors about their own subjects, as in the drugs at hand here:

... when cocaine lies within reach of its daily users, no drug produces more reckless craving or more irrational behavior. Occasional recreational users, however, can get by without it when it is unavailable. Moreover, its withdrawal symptoms are much less severe than those of morphine. Thus we see why the partially reformed Halsted, while capable of postponing his cocaine holidays until he was away from Baltimore, needed to inject morphine every single day.

And Crews displays another trait of a really good reviewer - he's willing to call out the experts on their own oversights:

Oddly, however, both Imber and Markel grant only slight attention to an intriguing and possibly important topic: Halsted's sexuality. On the evidence they supply in isolated passages, there can be little doubt that the great surgeon was homosexual.

Elsewhere in the issue, David Cole's piece on the political aftermaths of 9-11 is equally sharp, although mighty damn depressing. But the standout joy of this issue comes toward the end: it's Daniel Mendelsohn's review of two new books on his current definitive subject, the great Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, in this case a collection of the correspondence between Cavafy and E. M. Forster and a selection of Cavafy's prose works - both volumes made by Peter Jeffreys.

To say that Mendelsohn demolishes both the volumes and Jeffreys' professional reputation is to considerably understate the air-raid devastation the piece wreaks. But although that savaging certainly made me smile from ear to ear (so few mainstream critics really let rip anymore), the real pleasure came from Mendelsohn's prose itself. He's one of our most insightful working critical reviewers, and he's our most elegant. The steadfast Michael Dirda plops down across the dining hall table from you, piles his notes and source-books in front of him, and proceeds with an utterly unpretentious and winningly earnest discussion - he is our perpetual undergraduate, always searching for connections, always underestimating how much he can teach us. Reading the literary journalism of Clive James is completely different: he brushes aside the books and notes (no need for them now that he's here!), pours a tall pint for you and a couple for himself, and proceeds to hold forth - he's as wide-ranging as a bespectacled polymath and as erudite as an Oxford don, but what you remember most is his beefy arm around your shoulder and his hearty laugh in your ear. And there are many others - perhaps a dozen more of these titans working among us, this snickering, bawling, jobbing crowd of pilgrims accompanying us to that literary Canterbury that's always just around the next bend in the road. In this company Mendelsohn has always presented his own tone - sharp and bright with learning, but somehow still nerve-open to both disappointment and wonder. There are only a couple of working critics who'd be confident enough to let an opening paragraph carefully descend like this one, octave by octave, from facts to speculation to questions even the critic himself can't answer:

When E.M. Forster sailed to Alexandria in the autumn of 1915 to take up a post as something called a "searcher" - a Red Cross functionary whose job it was to interview wounded soldiers about those still missing - he cannot have guessed at the magnitude of what he ended up finding. It certainly wasn't what he was looking for officially; nor was it quite what he may have been seeking privately, even subconsciously.

I read something like that, and I'm completely restored to my poor estranged Penny Press. A piece like this is utterly faith-rejuvenating - unless you're Peter Jeffreys.

Feints and Jabs in the Penny Press!

 

Yet another banner issue of the TLS this time around (dated 6 August but only now reaching my benighted backwater of a PO box), and one with a couple of Open Letters echoes that involve yours truly.

The bigger of these kicks off the whole issue – someone named Caroline Blythe reviews two books on the great, bat-shit crazy Victorian polymath John Ruskin, and one of those books is Robert Hewison's big, beautifully-produced Yale University Press volume Ruskin on Venice, which I reviewed a little while ago.

I loved the book and consider it a masterpiece of Ruskin studies. Blythe pulls a standard book-reviewing sleight-of-hand, slapping the book's face left, right, left again, right again … and then calling it “important” or “impressive” or some such placid, portmanteau praise. It's hardly illuminating for a reader (to say nothing of gratifying for an author) to so obviously disparage a book and then backhandedly praise it. There's a figure of speech about eating one's cake and having it too …

The smaller of the echoes deals with Shakespeare's play Henry VIII, an odd, muscular little work I love more with every reading (and one I talked about here). Critics for over a century have maintained that one of the main reasons the play is 'odd' is because it's a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher. As I mention in my own piece about the play, I'm not convinced – but either way, I get the impression I'd like the new Globe Theatre (Bankside) production a lot more than TLS critic Michael Caines did.

 

But the highlight of this issue was neither of these (they're just neat because we've touched on them before, and that's always a fun, eerie experience – you see such a piece in the table of contents, you feel a micro-second's irresolution, then you say, “OK, go ahead. I've done my best at rendering this particular book – let's see how you do”) but instead a slam-bang review by Claire Harman of Michael Sherborne's new biography of H.G. Wells.

I've yet to read Sherborne's book (its UK publisher, Michael Owen, may take that as a rhetorical sharp elbow in the ribs), but I could read Harman on Wells until the cows come home. This is exactly the kind of full, flowing, opinionated review that a wag once said makes its own object irrelevant; Harman is even adept at aphorisms. “The idea that he [Wells] owed nothing to anyone, even his own subconscious, was one he nurtured carefully all his life” is very, very good (actual Wells biographers have wasted whole chapters deriving that simple truth), and when Harman comes to Wells' legendary prolific output, she promptly outdoes herself: “At a stroke, Wells had both invented and almost saturated a new genre.” Oh, that's good stuff.

And then there's the little dagger in the letters page – a fierce, intelligent missive from one Tarif Khalidi that gives no quarter whatsoever:

Having just read the review of Jeffrey Herf's Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World by Hans Kundani, I wondered: Do either author or reviewer have any proper knowledge of Arab history, society, culture, or language? How in particular does one “assess” the impact of Nazi propaganda on the Arab world without a knowledge of Arabic, openly admitted in the case of the author (and reviewer)? Sad to say, the Arab/Islamic world is currently the last region on earth where non-experts can freely claim scholarly authority. Sadder still is that the TLS encourages such shoddy scholarship by publishing reviews that merely echo tired and tiresome Israeli propaganda, then go on to claim that the book in question is “important” in the debate (sic) about that tendentious phrase, “Islamofascism”.

 

That's fairly damning (despite the obvious fact that “Islamofascism” is a term, not a phrase) – we'll see what kind of response it draws from the author or the reviewer. I think it's extremely unlikely both of them will just sit quietly at home in the Cotswolds while they're called frauds. I'll keep you posted.

Good Hooks, Bad Books: The Invisible Man!

Be it a third martini, or a second Gulf War, we’re all familiar with ideas that look great in theory but are disasters in practice. In the literary world, those disasters grate especially intimately; there’s no feeling quite like reading a book and wishing it were better, wishing it had seen more of its own potential – or even just wishing its author could write a little better.




Today’s bad book with a good hook is The Invisible Man, the 1897 novel by H. G. Wells (about Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel of the same name – a bad book with a bad hook – the less said the better), in which a megalomaniac scientist named Griffin develops a serum that will turn him invisible. He tries the serum out first on his landlady’s cat – after first strapping the miserable creature down, of course – and watches astounded as the animal disappears (all except for its inky cat eyes, which appear to defy even modern science, then as now).

Shortly after that initial success, he makes himself disappear, and by rights the novel – now empowered by one hell of a good hook – should take off.

But it doesn’t, and the reason is very simple: not only is Griffin (visible or in) a putz, but he’s also a completely ineffectual one – in his own words, a ‘helpless absurdity.’ Wells might have, shall we say, absorbed the idea for his famous book from other ‘invisible men’ books 0f the time  (among the many, many other candidates are E. P. Mitchell’s 1881 The Crystal Man and Ambrose Bierce’s 1893 The Damned Thing), but he himself was a trained scientist, and as usual, trained scientists ruin everything. Instead of letting his imagination go wild (as Wells could sometimes do), he adheres strictly to the hypothetical of his premise: what if, by playing footsy with chromatics, a man could make himself invisible?

Well, Herbert George reasoned, you’d have an invisible man. A man, in other words, you couldn’t see. And that’s it. You could still see his clothes. And hell, Scientifically speaking, if it’s his body that’s been changed by the serum to be invisible, then anything entering his body – like friggin food – would need a little while to turn invisible too. So you’d be able to see his eggs benedict pretty much until the moment they became poo.

So after ‘stumbling upon’ this great hook for a book, Wells gives us page after page of what would happen if a megalomaniacal schmuck ran around outside all day naked in freezing cold weather (taking breaks now and then to hide in a dark closet long enough to digest something, for cripes sake). Griffin immediately catches cold, and he spends the entire book coughing and sneezing right next to people who can’t see him and so can’t tell him to cover his mouth. After about a million years (scientists – yeesh), he realizes he needs steal some clothes so he doesn’t freeze his invisible ass off. He sneaks into a junk shop in Drury Lane and spends a miserable few hours there when the proprietor accidentally locks him in a room. Thrilling stuff.

Eventually Griffin comes to a conclusion – a boneheaded conclusion, precisely the reverse of right: he decides the only way his newfound power will be really effective is if he decamps for some small town in the country. And he does indeed cause untold petty havoc in one such town – for about the five minutes necessary for the startled townspeople to realize that even though he’s invisible a) dogs can still smell him, b) he can still be punched and kicked and grappled, and c) he can still be shot, for cripes sake. He makes his desperate escape to the house of Kemp, an old school chum to whom he unburdens not only his secret origin but his diabolical plans, which by this point in this bad, bad book are nothing short of hilarious:

[The Invisible Man] must now establish a Reign of Terror. Yes – no doubt it’s startling. But I mean it. A Reign of Terror. He must take some town like your Burdock and terrify and dominate it. He must issue his orders. He can do that in a thousand ways – scraps of paper thrust under doors would suffice. And all who disobey his orders he must kill, and kill all who would defend the disobedient.

Scraps of paper thrust under doors … the blood chills. This pea-brain couldn’t terrorize a toddler’s tea party, and Kemp very quickly realizes this and begins instructing the locals on all the various ways to track, apprehend, and even kill an Invisible Man:

‘Bear in mind,’ said Kemp, ‘his food shows. After eating, his food shows until it is assimilated. So that he has to hide after eating. You must keep on beating – every thicket, every quiet corner. And put all weapons, all implements that might be weapons, away. He can’t carry such things for long. And what he can snatch up and strike a man with must be hidden away.’

‘Good again,’ said Adye. ‘We shall have him yet!’

‘And on the roads,’ said Kemp, and hesitated.

‘Yes?’ said Adye.

‘Powdered glass,’ said Kemp. ‘It’s cruel, I know. But think of what he may do!’

Think of what he may do? Jack, pretty much. If you make the mistake of not listening for footsteps on the creaky floorboards next to you, there’s a chance Wells’ invisible man might sneeze on you, but that’s about it (well, aside from the ewww-factor of watching his invisible juices go to work on his steak-and-kidney pudding). The good hook – as simple and effective then as it still is today (readers are heartily encouraged to read H. F. Saint’s fantastic 1987 novel Memoirs of an Invisible Man for a look at Wells’ exact premise done wonderfully) – lodged in a bad book.

And a bad book that could easily have been good, if Wells hadn’t been such a poindexter! The premise of invisibility is patently ridiculous in the first place, so why not add to it just enough to make it dramatically effective? Virtually any such addition would have saved this book; say the Invisible Man can turn invisible, at will. Done! Say the Invisible Man’s body emits a field that turns things close to it – like weapons or friggin clothing – invisible as well. Done! Say the Invisible Man can make his body not only invisible but intangible. Done! In any such instance, a botched plot is salvaged from its own scientific credibility and at least the beginning of a Reign of Terror are believable.

As it is, all we’ve got is some schmoe with a drippy nose.

Timeline!

Our book today is Timeline, the 1999 time-travel potboiler by Michael Crichton. Now that Crichton is dead, I suppose it's time to start overviewing his total output (and deploring the endless series of 'final manuscripts' that will be making their periodic way to bookstore over the next decade - that hoary old device, "wait wait! We found one more manuscript!" - is finally due to be retired forever, and it'll get its due what-nots in the fullness of time from Stevereads) and assessing just what he meant to the millions of non-readers who read his books as the 20th century's technology blossomed like a time-lapsed mushroom cloud.

He wrote 'science fantasies' in the vein of H. G. Wells, and it's pretty clear that for better or worse he was the Wells of his age: he wrote absolutely dreadful prose, his characters were not only cardboard but low-quality flimsy cardboard, his social commentary varied from ham-fisted to outright-nefarious ... and he regularly came up with plot ideas so slam-bang fantastic, so telegraphically immediate, that some of them entered straight into the public zeitgeist (with some help from the movies, but then, Wells got lots of help from the same source), no muss, no fuss, no waiting around on library shelves for fifty years of critical re-appraisals.

I'm still undecided on whether or not Crichton consciously mimicked the masters - or whether the bedrock fascinations and problems of science have remained the same for a hundred years. Certainly what worked for such old-time mountebanks as Wells, Verne, and Doyle worked equally well for Crichton even in the era of computers and biotechnology, and perhaps somebody once had a talk with him about updating the canon of cautionary tales. The War of the Worlds and The Andromeda Strain are basically the same book. Prey and The Invisible Man both deal with the unseen terror among us. Next is The Island of Doctor Moreau run amok and given grant money. The mega-selling Jurassic Park and its sequel tip their hat directly to Doyle, with that sequel's title.

And then there's Timeline, which Crichton certainly had to consider at least partially an homage to Wells' intensely odd signature work, The Time Machine.

Crichton's book involves his customary team of sexy graduate students (where does he find such contradictory creatures?), specialists in various aspects of medieval culture, all working on an archaeological dig centered at the ruins of the English stronghold Castelgard, in the Dordogne region of France. The team, led by a crusty, charismatic professor, includes the usual Crichton staples: a matching pair of feisty, stupid him-and-bimbos, a nerd, a saint, a strapping he-man, etc., and when irregularities appear in their dig-site, the crusty professor goes off to the headquarters of ITC (International Technology Corporation), the shadowy conglomerate that funds the dig, to get some answers. His students think of this as nothing more than the usual university politics and go about their careful reconstruction of Castelgard, in which one of them unearths a note, written on period parchment but in modern English, saying "HELP ME" (this is what I meant about killer zeitgeist moments, and Crichton had an eye for them).


The note is from their professor, yet it was indisputably written in Castelgard centuries before, and quick as you can say "exposition coming," our students are dealing with ITC themselves and hearing how it all happened: time travel. The professor is back in the past, and ITC wants his students to use their expert knowledge of the period to go back and get him out.

Somebody - I think it was Montaigne! - once said every era imagines the technology of the future in terms of the technology of the present. So in Wells' book, it's an actual machine, with gears and controls, that travels between times. By 1999, that approach clearly wouldn't do (unless you were the Doctor, that is), and so Crichton's characters don't pile into a steam-and-chrome jalopy - they attach themselves like email documents and hit SEND:

"Excuse me," Chris [the himbo] said. "Are you saying you compress a person?"

"No. We compress the information equivalent of a person."

"And how is that done?" Chris said [Dude! Have a brewski and chill!].

"With compression algorithms - methods to pack data on a computer, so they take up less space. Like JPEG and MPEG for visual material. Are you familiar with those?"

"I've got software that uses it, but that's it."

"Okay," Gordon [one of the scheming ITC guys] said. "All compression programs work the same way. They look for similarities in data. Suppose you have a picture of a rose, made up of a million pixels. Each pixel has a location and a color. That's three million pieces of information - a lot of data. But most of those pixels are going to be red, surrounded by other red pixels. So the program scans the pictures line by line, and sees whether adjacent pixels are the same color. If they are, it writes an instruction to the computer that says make this pixel red, and also the next fifty pixels gray. And so on. It doesn't store information for each individual point. It stores instructions for how to re-create the picture. And the data is cut to a tenth of what it was."

"Even so," Stern [the nerd] said, "you're not talking about a two-dimensional picture, you're talking about a three-dimensional living object, and its description requires so much data -"

"That you'd need massive parallel processing," Gordon said, nodding. "That's true."

Chris frowned. "Parallel processing is what?" [dude!]

"You hook several computers together and divide the job up among them, so it gets done faster. A big parallel-processing computer would have sixteen thousand processors hooked together. For a really big one, thirty-two thousand processors. We have thirty-two billion processors hooked together."

It's been ten years since Timeline was published, so probably some kid in Osaka has that much processing power on his phone by now, but the point is, minus a few limitations (and factoring in the wonderfully-named lurking danger Crichton dreamed up, 'transcription errors' - hee), our team can be sent back - almost faxed back - to the Castelgard of centuries ago, and the bulk of Timeline therefore paradoxically takes place in an era where there is no higher technology to speak of - a straight-up historical novel in which a few characters just happen to know what MTV is.

In the past-centered, er, timeline, Crichton uncorks breakneck plot twists, hairsbreadth escapes, vile villainy, lots and lots of derring-do, and even a very well-utilized countdown. Say what you will about the quality of the man's prose (as you can tell even from that brief excerpt, he manages the not inconsiderable feat of making Wells read like a literary giant), but when he stretches his legs on the level field of adventure-writing, you get your money's worth.



Timeline is partially soiled in the zeitgeist, I sometimes fear, by the fact that although the movie made of it was very entertaining in parts, it starred (and I mean relentlessly starred ... he's in virtually every scene) the worst actor in the history of film or theater. Of course I'm talking about that vacant-faced mannequin Paul Walker, who here pulls down the whole movie, even though it also stars Gerard Butler as the group's studly hero. The movie was directed by Richard Donner, so the action-sequences are slickly and perfectly done ... but in his attempt to get his actors to act like 'real people' he only manages to make them act like real boring people, so apart from its stunning visuals, the movie doesn't really duplicate the sordid fascinations of the book.

Or maybe it does - maybe those fascinations are the equivalent (the data equivalent?) of the movie's stunning visuals. The only way we'll know for certain is to get Brian over at Moving Picture Trash good and drunk, then have him review Timeline and sort it out.

But in the meantime, I can attest to the fact that Timeline is at least as entertaining as The Time Machine - so good, in fact, that in writing about it I was hardly tempted at all to go off on a furious tangent about State of Fear.