strange and random happenstance

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison
Published by: Gollancz
Publication Date: June 25th, 2020
Format: Kindle, 219 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Shaw and Victoria are an unexpected pairing. Coming together on a drunken night with Victoria ranting about people born looking like fish they quickly part. Are they actually star-crossed lovers or just narcissists oblivious to what is right in front of them? A kindred spirit. Another person who views the world as they do. Only time will tell. While their lives diverge they keep in sporadic contact, though mostly on Victoria's side with long rambling emails that go unread for the most part. Because the oddities of their lives need to be spoken to someone who will understand. Yet they seek no deeper meaning in the bizarre turn their lives have taken, they just need someone to hear their story. They need to hear the sound of their own voices. Shaw is trying to piece together his life. Living in a bedsit the only job he can hold down is as a courier for his neighbor Tim, who is awash in conspiracy theories which he promotes on his blog, The Water House, and runs his business out of a boat. Shaw travels around the country delivering boxes to stores that while all diverse have a samness to them. He's also trying to flog Tim's book which is just as disorganized as The Water House. He doesn't question his job, he just gets on with it, repulsed by the world around him while trying to reintegrate into it. In his spare time he visits his mother who is suffering from dementia, but those visits are too stressful to contemplate. Meanwhile Victoria has taken up residence in the Midlands in her mother's house which she has recently inherited. The townsfolk are odd and seem inordinately obsessed with Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies. The house feels alien to her. The land is menacing, ghostly voices trail through the air, and the water table is rising. Rumors of people with green skin are becoming more and more common. Entropy has taken hold, but are either Show or Victoria able to comprehend what this means? Or will their ignorance lead them into oblivion?

I have no idea what I just read. Google tells me that The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is about the psychogeography of post Brexit Britain. And that doesn't help at all. Because I have no idea what that means either. But thanks again to Google I now know that psychogeography is about how a location can affect someone's emotion and behavior. And, yeah, that does make a bit of sense, because we follow Shaw and Victoria and how their environments change them. How their paranoia takes hold and the weird Lynchian situations they find themselves in and the people they encounter are very much people who Trump would love to have on his jury, so hardcore Brexiters. But here's the thing, I'm not sure even David Lynch could make sense of this rambling incoherent mess other than apparently everyone should be reading The Water Babies. Which oddly enough I have a copy of in my set of Children's Classics that my brother and I got one Christmas despite the fact that I'm pretty sure Charles Kingsley didn't want his book categorized as reading for children. But you don't get to choose once you're dead and gone. He should be content with the classic categorization. One this book will never get in a million years. Because the thing about this book is that there's not really anything here. It's situations and feelings and at the end you're left wondering where your time went. It should be a quick read but it's not. All I have are these vague feelings of unease. Which maybe ties into the psychogeography of it all? Can psychogeography relate to places you only encounter in books? Because if so, yeah, I experienced that. The overriding vibe I had though was that M. John Harrison really wanted to write something political while at the same time Lovecraftian and, well, maybe this is success? Because I felt unease about the politics and the environment, and well, I kept thinking of the people who reside in Innsmouth, the Deep Ones. The Deep Ones are part of the Cthulhu Mythos and have to be related to the "people" in this tale. But this is all just projection. Because seriously, I do not know what I just read. This was a screed, a rant, an unfinished thought. This was oddly a call to arms, but a call to arms that has come too late. We're just here watching the spread of deep-seated dread. So, if you want to be confused, paranoid, and develop some unshakable panic, then this is the book for you!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Brexit, Charles Kingsley, Cthulhu, Entropy, For the Love of Book Clubs, H.P. Lovecraft, Innsmouth, M. John Harrison, Psychogeography, The Deep Ones, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, The Water Babies, Water

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
Published by: EFE Books
Publication Date: 1939
Format: Kindle, 206 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Tod Hackett is looking for inspiration. He wants to do a great painting, it's what his Ivy League education demands, but moving west to Hollywood means his skills are only useful in scenic work on films. Not exactly work that has depth and meaning, which is what could be said for the town and it's denizens. The more people he meets the more he realizes that Hollywood is full of frauds and wannabes with eyes full of hatred. He wants to capture this in his great work, "The Burning of Los Angeles." He wants to watch the town burn and immortalize the conflagration. In his apartment complex there is the full array of the Hollywood unwashed, the failed dreamers, the bookmakers, the screenwriters, and the failed actresses. Faye Greener is a failed actress, though she'd never admit as much. She's just doing what she needs to to get by until her big break. Tod becomes obsessed with Faye. He wants Faye but she always keeps him at a distance which results in him fantasizing of taking her by force. It's Tod's obsession with Faye that keeps him constantly in her orbit. He is stuck in a twilight world of hangers-on. Faye plays her men off each other. She seems to get far more enjoyment from their anger than their attentions. There's Earle, an ersatz cowboy, Miguel, a fake Native American, and most importantly, Homer Simpson. Homer came west for his health, one of those who come to California to die, and has ended up supporting Faye. It's unclear what he gets from the relationship other than pain and heartbreak. All these people scrap and fight in Homer's house in the valley. There's brawls and violence and cockfights and pornography. This group of people is endemic of what is happening in Hollywood and one night it all boils over. Homer tries to leave, there's an incident with a precocious child actor who has been taunting him and Los Angeles burns. Just as Tod envisioned.

A book needs to have something going for it, a compelling plot, compelling characters, or a compelling message. If you have all these things, all the better, if you have none of them, you have The Day of the Locust. I know, you could argue with me that it does have several messages, the deevolution of man to animals instincts, that California is where the American Dream goes to die, that it was a clarion call to take heed of the rise of fascism, but guess what? I don't care. This isn't an introduction to literature class where we sit around and justify this book as a Classic with a capital "C." This is nothing more nor less than a study in entropy with such violence against women that it is triggering to read. Tod again and again has rape fantasies. He plainly states that "[n]othing less violent than rape would do" in his pursuit of Faye. That isn't love, that is violent obsession. And I'm sorry, but that doesn't make him a quicky character, that makes him a sexual predator. I can't get past this. Tod is the epitome of all the characters in this book, horrible people living lurid lives. These are not people I want to read about because these are not people I want to spend time with. Have you ever been at a party you didn't want to go to and you don't really know anyone at and then all of a sudden the atmosphere shifts and you realize not only do you really not want to be there but that it could be dangerous? Well that's The Day of the Locust. I mean, maybe if it was eloquently written there could have been some redeeming factor. I think you can gather already that there was not. Nathanael West can write descriptions but when it comes to action? Oh, the cockfight and the riot are such a mess that they literally did not make sense. There was one section of the book where Tod goes to a party and for a second I was confused, the writing was assured, the story made sense, and then I realized that it was completely lifted from The Great Gatsby, female tennis pro and all, but with a lurid pornography twist. In an interesting aside, West was good friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the day after F. Scott died of a heart attack Nathanael West ran a stop sign that killed both him and his wife. A cruel person would say that perhaps West had no more reason to live because he had no more work to rip-off... But I'm not quite that cruel, unlike the other reviewers who said that The Day of the Locust was overly praised because of West's death before he was even forty. I will just say this book was not for me and no matter how people praise Miss Lonelyhearts there's not a chance in hell I'm ever reading it.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: American Dream, Classics, Entropy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, For the Love of Book Clubs, Hollywood, Homer Simpson, Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West, Rape, The Day of the Locust, The Great Gatsby, Triggering

Lost in a Good Book: Thursday Next Novel the 2nd by Jasper Fforde
Published by: Viking
Publication Date: March 31st, 2003 US, 2002 UK
Format: Hardcover, 399 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

When last we saw Thursday Next she was getting her happily ever after with Landen. Of course she had also saved Jane Eyre, even if she significantly altered the ending, eliminated Hades, imprisoned Jack Schitt, the Warmongering Goliath operative, within the pages of Poe's The Raven, ended the Crimean War and generally saved the day. But saving the day tends to get people looking at you as a hero, and heroes need to do the PR rounds, or so says Cordelia Flakk, Spec Ops one woman PR department, who has been desperate for a face to help Spec Ops gain a more friendly foothold with the public at large. After months of press junkets, Thursday has had enough, and after her "no holds barred interview" with Adrian Lush, which ended up being about her Dodo, Pickwick, she's had enough. It's time for her and Landen to settle down and let life get back to normal. But normal is a relative word for someone like Thursday, seeing as her day starts with hearing voices in her head, finding the lost Shakespeare play, Cardenio, getting on a Neanderthal hijacked skyrail where the first time she's shot and the second time, after her father saves her and tells her the world is to end in a few weeks, she's arrested for assaulting an unarmed Neanderthal and ends with Mycroft's retirement party where all the food is pear based and at the end Mycroft and Polly disappear. But despite all that and the SO-5 operatives that are trailing her in an ever changing rota (they keep dying) as well as the Goliath goons, she and Landen bravely try to carry on with their life together, which will soon include a baby. But a picnic leads to another bizarre occurrence of coincidences, confirmed by the Entroscope Mycroft gave her, and culminating in a Hispano-Suiza falling on their picnic, which just might have killed them.

Thursday has obviously too much to deal with, and after her hearing with SO-1 about the Neanderthal incident, things get even weirder. Laden is gone. He has been completely eradicated. Goliath has decided to prove a point. They want Jack Schitt back or Landen will stay gone, having tragically died when he was two years old. Thursday goes into a tailspin... she is still pregnant, but is the baby even Landen's? Where does she live? What has changed? As it seems, much is still the same, despite the eradication of Landen, time being very flexible. But how can she even get into The Raven to get Jack Schitt? The only person she knew of who could bookjump was the Japanese tourist, Mrs. Nakajima, whom she met at Haworth when she was young and again within the pages of Jane Eyre. To Osaka Thursday must go, on the off chance that she can find a clue.

On the short Gravitube ride to Japan she meets the man who she has been hearing in her head. Turns out he's fictional and is to represent her in her trial. Apparently there's an organization inside books, Jurisfiction, which like SO-27, monitors books, and she must answer for her crimes against Jane Eyre... mainly improving the narrative in an unauthorized manner. After another close call with negative entropy and Goliath, Thursday finds herself in the Great Library where she has been expected for some time. Thursday is destined to be a Jurisfiction PROs agent and they have been waiting for her in the Great Library, THE LIBRARY of all books. She is apprenticed to Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, who turns out to be, as expected, a bit of a man hater, but unexpectedly, a speed freak who loves to drive cars. After an unfortunate incident back in Swindon with Miss Havisham at the wheel, where luckily no one was killed, after Thursday's trial was postponed, Thursday must risk her life at a book sale to get a boxed set of romance novels for Miss Havisham before her nemesis, the Red Queen gets them. With a lot of cunning and a little trickery, Thursday passes her test and it looks like she might be a PROs agent yet! But is it a conflict of interest if she's taking the job just to get Landen back? Also is Poe really off limits to all PROs agents as Miss Havisham warns?

But between her duties at Spec Ops, the mysterious appearance of Cardenio, her new duties to Jurisfiction, her landlord, her pregnancy, her missing husband, the general election, Cordelia Flakk and her contest winners, and the fact that the world just might end in a few days, Thursday's life is more complicated then ever. Also the fact that only an evil genius could be behind the forthcoming apocalypse and her attempted murders by coincidence is unnerving to say the least. Hades is dead. Isn't he? But then who is this person of equal evil with the same initials who keeps offing the SO-5 agents and wants Thursday fitted for a coffin?

This book took a long time for me to get into, but it was totally worth the wait. So much of the beginning is tying up loose ends, to an extent. It's not that they're really loose ends even, more repercussions from what happened in the first novel that feel like loose ends while you're waiting for the novel to really start. Also the Neanderthal's are really kind of stupid, not intellectually mind you. I would say pointless, but I get the point of them, especially if you take into consideration animal testing and then genetic experiments, I see why they are valid, and I do love Granny Next's interaction with them, but overall I feel they detract from the book and the world Fforde has created. So once you get past the Neanderthals and Thursday's blissful honeymoon days of her marriage and Landen gets eradicated, the novel really starts to pick up. But it is not until she actually jumps into the Great Library and meets the Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat (previously the Cheshire Cat till county boundaries were redrawn) that I fell in love with this book.

The world of Jurisfiction is beyond anyone's wildest biblomanical dreams. It's a place where you can go from book to book, from back-stories to footnotes and partake in the book character exchange program. Where bowdlerizers are very dangerous and gammersites, especially adjunctavores that stripe an object of adjectives are a very real threat. The place is like a grown up version of Alice in Wonderland, very fitting seeing as who the librarian is. Then there is Thursday's teacher, Miss Havisham... she is outrageous, a wonderful contradiction! Fforde has taken a very sad, lonely woman and made her almost more alive and over the top than Dickens could have ever done... well he couldn't have really made her love of automotives known given the time period he wrote in. The fact that she wears trainers and carries a gun, to deal with her nemesis and the throngs of book buyers, is beyond hysterical. The scene at the book sale is one of the best in the book. With the injured Miss Havisham spurring Thursday on by telling her if she doesn't succeed against the Red Queen to get the trashy romance novels box set then she doesn't have a hope of becoming a Jurisfiction agent is pitch perfect.

The world within the world of books Fforde has created is what makes this series so wonderful. He has expanded on literature's beloved characters and given them truly paradoxical behaviors, but ones that we've long suspected they might hold. He has shown us something that we've believed in and held true for years but have never been told outright before. The world within books is far greater than we could ever imagine! It is best not to over-think this though... sometimes I'd find myself questioning the logic of his world, and in books it's best not too. Because between the pages and lines anything could conceivably happen so it's best just to enjoy the ride, just not with Miss Havisham driving. Also, I know Mary Anne Dashwood was driving a plane, but could you please get her out of the Victorian dress, thank you very much.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 5 comments  

Labels: Cardenio, Cordelia Flakk, Entropy, Jane Eyre, Jasper Fforde, Jurisfiction, Landen, Lost in a Good Book, Miss Havisham, Neanderthal, Pickwick, Spec Ops, The Raven, The Red Queen, Thursday Next