Requiem for a Dream - Hubert Selby Jr

 Requiem for a Dream takes us straight into the rotting heart of New York in the disaster years when heroin ruined everything.   Harry Goldfarb and his buddy Tyrone C Love dream of one big score.   Harry's mother Sara sits in her apartment and dreams of being on a TV show.   Harry and Tyrone do indeed score.   Tyrone's contact has some dynamite dope which, even when cut, gives good bag.   But the boys can't resist a taste of their own product.   It is only right to share with their ladies, Marion and Alice.

Harry is a good Jewish boy.   When he is in funds he splashes out on a giant TV for his mother, the best Macy's has on offer.   He finds his mother changed.   She's lost a lot of weight.   She's twitchy and grinds her teeth.   It turns out Sara has been cold-called by a guy claiming to discover contestants for TV quiz shows.   Naturally Sara applies - and immediately starts creating the persona she wants to the viewing public to see.   She especially wants to be able to fit into the red dress she wore for Harry's bar mitzvah.   A friend recommends a doctor, the doctor prescribes weight-loss pills and before you know it Sara is hooked.

At the same time Harry and Tyrone's contact runs out of dope.   There's no decent heroin to be had.   The friends find themselves hustling the streets like the runny-nosed dope fiends they once looked down on.   Things get really bad, really quick.   No one does grim like Selby.   

Selby writes free-form, a sort of bridge between the Beats and the likes of James Ellroy.   It takes a moment to get used to - and he isn't always consistent - but it works brilliantly.   Any other approach and I don't believe readers would stick with it.   As it is, Selby's characters are fully rounded from the moment we meet them.   We empathise with their dreams even though we hopefully don't share them.   Somehow our empathy enables us to bear the horror.   A masterpiece of a very bleak genre.

The Magician out of Manchuria - Charles G Finney

 My only other acquaintance with Charles G Finney was back in October 2018 with The Unholy City.   I suspect I bought this soon after and then lost it in my to-read mountain.

The Magician out of Manchuria is even shorter than The Unholy City.   It is billed as adult fantasy, because the female lead spends a lot of time nude, and not once but twice depilates.   It is in fact a fantastical tale with a sexual side to it.   None of the three main characters has a name, they are simply the Magician, his chela or apprentice, and the Lascivious Queen of La.   The magician's black ass does have a name, Ng Gk.

The main inspiration seems to be Communist China.   There has been a Great Leap Forward; the old lordships have been overturned and the bureaucrats have taken over; magic is being driven from the world.   Some fishermen land an unusual catch, a naked woman whom the magician is able to resuscitate - by the kiss of life rather than magic.   She is dumpy and unattractive but the magician has magic balm that can fix that.   She tells her tale - one of three sister queens who have been betrayed by the ultimate scheming bureaucrat Khan Ali Bok.   The mage and his chela undertake to help her recover her throne and in so doing manage to secure a haven for magic.

Finney is at his best when he lets his imagination run riot.  The riverboat 'Flower of the Lotus' transforms into a craft than can walk on land and then sprouts wings; it therefore becomes triphibian.  Excellent.

(I still haven't tracked down a copy of The Circus of Dr Lao.   That's an asap essential.)

Defy the Foul Fiend - John Collier

 I was not up to speed on John Collier.   No wonder, really.   He was noted (never famous) for contributing the screenplays of famous films (The African Queen, I Am A Camera) and short stories for magazines like the New Yorker.   He died in 1980.   His only novels, three of them, appeared in the 1930s and did well but not brilliantly.   In other words he was before my time and long since out of my main sphere of interest.

I forget now how I came across him.   I acquired two of his novels some time ago and they gradually disappeared into my ever-increasing mountain of the waiting-to-be-read.   Then, by chance, I unearthed Defy the Foul Fiend, the last of the three, published in 1934.   It is a comic novel very much in the style of the young Evelyn Waugh.   Time has moved on however, the dark cloud of the Great Depression hangs over the comedy.

Willoughby Corbo, our hero, is the illegitimate son of the aristocratic waster Lord Ollebeare.   When the cook who bore him runs off with her lover, Ollebeare dumps the boy on his brother Ralph, a grim stockbroker who has a wife desperate to be a mother.   The wife dies and Willoughy is left largely to his own devices.   In the fullness of time he has to go out into the world with which he is largely unfamiliar.   Ollebeare manages to get him a post as secretary to Lord Stumber, an elderly campaigning peer who happens to have a very young wife with remarkably compelling breasts which fascinate Willoughby and other young men of his acquaintance.   So Willoughby gets the boot and embarks on his quest for feminine beauty and a meaningful role in life.

He tries all options - a young prostitute, a sultry siren; hawking unnecessary domestic appliances door-to-door on a purely commission basis.   But Willoughby is essentially mule-headed and a bred-in-the-bone Tory.   We all recognise early on that the rather limpid and artistic Lucy is the girl for him and that Willoughby is fated to follow the Corbo inheritance in all its aspects.

I was fascinated with the twist at the end that is strikingly similar to one in Mrs Craddock which I finished immediately before starting reading this.   Defy the Foul Fiend is also let down by a problem which I noted in the post below Maugham never had.   Maugham always knew when to finish.   Collier very much doesn't.   At least a third of this book could have been cut and what remained would have been brilliant.   There are great jokes here, affecting characters, many well-drawn scenes, but there is also waffle, pages I ended up skipping.   Perhaps this is why Collier only contributed to famous screenplays.   He could enliven and amplify but he cannot construct.

Mrs Craddock - W Somerset Maugham

 

Mrs Craddock was the third or fourth of Maugham's novels, written in 1900 but not published until 1902 - because William Heinemann, of all people, thought it was in some inexplicable way offensive.   He agreed to publish a slightly expurgated version but since 1955 we have all had the real deal.   And there is nothing in any way offensive about it.

This is Maugham's attempt at a New Woman Novel.   The New Woman was a literary genre in the last decade of the Victorian era, sparked by suffragism and various campaigns for womens' rights.   It found expression in 'Theodora: A Fragment' by 'Victoria Cross' in The Yellow Book and the publisher of that journal, John Lane of The Bodley Head, launched a series of books on the theme called Keynotes after the first in the series, a novel of the same name by 'George Egerton' (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright).   Two notable works in the series were The Woman Who Did by Grant Allen, and The Woman Who Didn't by the aforementioned 'Victoria Cross' (Anna Sophie Cory.

Because of the difficulty in getting Mrs Craddock into print Maugham missed the crest of the New Woman wave.   Nevertheless it was a success and in many ways cemented the reputation he made with his debut Liza of Lambeth five years earlier.   The intervening novels, The Making of a Saint and The Hero, hadn't done especially well and Maugham was still searching for his central theme.   He found it in the question of quiet nonconformity.

Bertha Ley is a New Woman.   Coming up to twenty-one, and about to come into a comfortable inheritance, she forms a passionate attachment to the young farmer, Edward Craddock, one of her tenants.   She is determined to marry him immediately and no one can persaude her otherwise.   Her aunt, a middleaged spinster and a woman of independent opinions, sees no point in trying.   The marriage goes ahead and for a time Bertha is blissfully happy as Mrs Craddock.   Edward is an excellent manager of the estate and she finds him physically irresistable.   But she loses her baby son after a nightmare confinement.   The local doctor warns her she can never have another.   Edward does his duty but Bertha cannot recover her passion for him.   So she leaves him and goes to London to lodge with her aunt.

Ultimately Bertha returns to her family home in Whitstable where Edward has simply got on with things in her absence.   Things about him that Bertha once found attractive - his manly appetite, his old-fashioned code of behaviour, his lack of sophistication - she now finds offensive.   Edward is putting on weight, balding slightly, and standing for the County Council.

Maugham handles it all brilliantly.   Bertha is compulsive and irritating.   Edward is dogged and dull.   The character who holds the narrative together, acting as the reader's voice, is Bertha's aunt, Miss Polly Ley, who has actually been a New Woman since before the term was invented.   She lives alone in London and spends the unpleasant winter months abroad.   She has a busy social and intellectual life.   Her counter is another spinster, Fanny Glover, the vicar's devoted sister, who would have made Edward the perfect wife.

For me the proof of Maugham's genius is his ability to make his fiction exactly the right length - a few pages under 300 in this instance.   Unlike so many modern novelists he always seems to know precisely when to stop.

Count Luna - Alexander Lernet-Holenia

 Count Luna is an absolute work of genius by an extremely fine writer who is inexplicably under-translated into English.   Sadly, I have now read all three of the more-or-less available: this, plus Baron Blagge and I was Jack Mortimer.   My posts on the other two have had great responses and loads of clicks, so I don't see some enterprising publisher starts digging into Lernet-Holenia's back catalogue.

Like the others, Luna is a work of wit and imagination.   It also hinges on a serious subject: how does a vanquished people deal with its guilt over the crimes against humanity committed in their name?

Alexander Jessiersky, a third generation millionaire of Polish extraction, lives in a palace in central Vienna.   He has a beautiful wife and loads of children.   He is not especially interested in the family transport business but it functions prosperously without him.   Before the war, however, the board of directors wanted to buy a property owned by the down-at-heel aristocrat Count Luna.   Luna wouldn't sell - it was the last of his inheritance - and the board of directors therefore reported him to the Gestapo who hauled him off to a concentration camp.   Jessiersky had nothing to do with it - but he knows he should have intervened and used his veto.   Guilt has gnawed at him throughout the war and after.   During it, he tried to send Luna money and food.   Now he is obsessed with the notion that Luna has survived his ordeal and is back in search of revenge.

Jessiersky is an obsessive researcher, happiest in his well-stocked private library.   He delves, develops theories - and goes quietly mad.   He takes to killing people.   He flees Austria and ends up in the catacombs of Rome.   We know this from the outset - his disappearance below ground in the Church of Sant' Urbino is where Lernet-Holenia starts his fable.   The interest - the game - is how he came to be there.   The genius is that Lernet-Holenia doesn't leave it there.   He takes us with Jessiersky into what happens next, which is something rather beautiful.

Lernet-Holenia writes like a dream.   He juggles complex ideas like guilt and death and the possible hereafter with deceptive ease.   Jessiersky has done no more than thousands of his compatriots did.   His only sin is that he failed to do something.   The outcome of his inaction may not have been too terrible.  But what Jessiersky does to himself and others fifteen years later is terrible.   Terrible yet empathetic and therefore sad.   We laugh and we sigh but always with sympathy.   Which is what makes Count Luna an absolute masterpiece.

Tales from the Forbidden Planet - Roz Kaveney (ed)

 This was a chance aquisition.   I was in London, in my favourite second-hand bookshop (Skoob, in the Brunswick Centre) and I didn't want to leave without a purchase.   That, I felt, would be letting the side down.   So I saw this, thought what the hell?   Wandered up to the counter where, of course, one of the books I had wanted for some time was on display ... but that's another story.

It was only when I was on the train, leafing through, that I realised this was a collection from the sci fi era currently interesting me - the Interzone Eighties, 1987 in fact, featuring several writers I have beens looking into recently.   Moorcock, of course (an End of Time story), Kilworth, Keith Roberts, and Lisa Tuttle, all of whom featured in the Other Rdens and New Worlds anthologies reviewed here in the last few weeks.   Aldiss is here, too, with a really enjoyable one called 'Tourney', and Iain M Banks (excellent).   I liked John Brunner('A Case of Painter's Ear'), Josephine Saxton's 'The Interferences' and Gwyneth Jones's 'The Snow Apples'.   I did not like in any way the story by Harry Harrison, but that's the point of anthologies, isn't it?

One of the things that attracted me in the shop was the fact the stories all had an illustration by a British illustrator of the period.   I thought this would be a bonus for me and my own illustrations.   As it happens, the only one I enjoyed was Dave Gibbons for the Banks story 'Descendant'.   I liked the cover illustration, too, the work of Brian Bolland.

Turns out the common denominator for the collection is that all these authors had done sessions at the Forbidden Planet bookshops.   As good a connection as any.

Antwerp - Roberto Bolano

 I remember reading The Savage Detectives when it first came out in English translation, sometime around the Millennium.   I loved it.   I remember eagerly awaiting the appearance of 2666.   By then Bolano had died.   I got hold of 2666 but couldn't come to terms with it.   The other day I spotted this in the British Library bookshop.   A novella - perhaps even a series of vignettes - by Bolano?   No brainer.

And I have really enjoyed it.   Antwerp might even have been his first attempt at sustained fiction, back in 1980, tinkered with over the years (as Bolano himself tells us in a sort of preface) and finally published in Spain in 2002, the year before he died.   It wasn't even called Antwerp back then.   I prefer Antwerp and Antwerp is probably my favourite anecdote in the book.

It's experimental, naturally, with few if any clear links between the fragments - a hunchback, probably Mexican, the struggling writer who can't write anything other than bursts of words, detectives on a mystery trajectory, thin young women.   It's a world of ideas whipped into a swirling mass with us, the reader, standing in the middle with Bolano, trying to snatch the odd one as it whirls by.

It's only seventy large-print pages but it took me three sittings to read.   It is so densely packed, so stuffed full of ideas and wit and suggestions of things to come.   Maybe it's time for another go at 2666.

NOTE:

Well, what do you know?   I'd completely forgotten I'd read Bolano's The Third Reich back in 2017.   I only found it when 'Roberto Bolano' turned out to be already saved in my labels.   Try it yourself - it's also in the labels for this post.   Or use the search box.   Spoiler - I moaned about 2666 but absolutely adored The Third Reich.

Other Edens - Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock (eds)

 Other Edens is a sci fi collection from 1987 and very much from the Interzone period of British imaginative fiction.   Some of the most noted writers are respresented - Moorcock, Harrison and Aldiss - but not with their best work.   Those who stand out here are those who were then breaking through: Garry Kilworth, who I only knew from Interzone; Lisa Tuttle, who I had heard of but never read; and a couple of others completely new to me, such as Graham Charnock and Keith Roberts.

Roberts' story Piper's Wait was probably my overall favourite, a temenos story stretching very effectively over the ages.  Tuttle's The Wound was a close second, a very exciting take on mutable sexuality.   Kilworth's Triptych was by far the most radical and complex, a fragmented three-parter positively bursting at the seams with ideas.   I am increasingly interested in Kilworth.  He seems to have been extraordinarily prolific with over eighty novels spanning many genres, so it shouldn't be too hard to track one down.

The Labyrinth Makers - Anthony Price

 Number 26 in the new thirty-strong run of Penguin crime and espionage modern classics, this drew my eye with the legendary green cover.   Anthony Price was a high-grade journalist who wrote on the side and The Labyrinth Makers was his first novel in 1970.   It won him a Silver Dagger from the Crime Writers Association, and no wonder.

Twenty-five years on from World War 2, we are deep into the Cold War.   Dr David Audley is a reclusive desk operative for the Secret Service, specialising in the Middle East.   Then a wartime RAF Dakota is unearthed during construction work for a natural gas pipeline and Audley finds himself inexplicably switched to a multi-agency investigation.   The plane and its pilot are no mystery: everybody has been looking for Flight Lt John Steerforth and his Dakota since they vanished during the Berlin Airlift in September 1945.   Until now they were assumed lost at sea.   But Steerforth evidently managed to nurse his plane back to England after ordering his crew to bale out over the North Sea.   The question is, what became of his cargo?

Because John Steerforth was not only a decorated war hero, he was a post-war smuggler.   For him the ruins of Berlin were a honey-pot of looted goodies and Steerforth might, by accident or design, have hit upon a very special treasure indeed.   The Russians, from whom it was stolen, have never given up looking for Steerforth's plane.   Now it has been found, they are very interested indeed.   And because they are interested, those higher up the intelligence food chain in London are also interested.   And they have decided, for reasons unknown, that David Audley is the man they need on the ground.

The snag is, the crates found in the wrecked Dakota are not the crates the Russians are mad keen on recovering.   They are decoys, filled with building rubble.   Which means that Steerforth must have stashed them on the day before the doomed flight, somewhere near his isolated base in Cambridgeshire because there was no time for one man working alone to move and bury so much treasure.   Which is why Audley has been winkled out of seclusion.   He might have no experience of field work but he does have a gift for lateral thinking.

The Labyrinth Makers is a great read, a classic espionage thriller of its era, smartly written with genuinely interesting characters.   Faith Steerforth, for example, the late Flight Lieutenant's daughter, is not just sex interest, as she would have been in Ian Fleming or even John le Carre circa 1970.   She helps Audley solve the mystery.   Likewise our supposed villain, the Soviet masterspy Nikolai Andrievich Panin, whose reputation is cleverly built up until he finally turns up thirty pages from the end, is no one-dimensional Fleming villain or even the far complex Karla; he wants the stolen booty back because he suffered the ignominy of losing it in 1945.   His only plan for the treasure is to donate it to a German museum.   The two files of old intelligence files which Steerforth took with it by mistake, Panin is quite happy to burn right here and now.

A real find, this.   I want more and quick internet searches reveal there is quite a lot more.   Price even has another Dagger-winning novel in the Penguin series.   His Other Paths to Glory is at lucky number thirteen in the list.

The Glass Pearls - Emerich Pressburger

 Another fabulous reissue from Faber Editions - the second and final (1965) novel from Emeric Pressburger following his break with movies and his legendary partner, Michael Powell.   At the time, apparently, The Glass Beads was critically panned, thus silencing Pressburger for his remaining twenty-odd years.    It's understandable, but a terrible shame.   Understandable because 1965 was probably too soon for a sympathetic Nazi as protagonist.   A shame because it is a magnificent work of fiction.

We know early on that Karl Braun, an amiable but solitary London piano tuner, is in fact a Nazi war criminal in hiding.  Indeed Dr Otto Reitmuller was the very worst kind of war criminal, a brain surgeon who experimented on the brains of living concentration camp victims, thus one of the most wanted Nazis still at large.   In February his former colleague von Stempel came to London to try and persuade his friend to emigrate to Argentina - only to die of a heart attack on the London Underground.   Worried that the net might be closing, Braun has changed his rented room.   He has now moved in with two amiable Jews, Strohmayer and Kolm, in Pimlico.

Braun is still a youngish man, and yearns to find a woman to settle down with.   The prim and proper Lilian Hall, at his workplace, has developed a crush on him.   He, meantime, is rather taken with Helen Taylor, the letting agent who found him his new accommodation.   Braun takes them both to the opera.   Miss Hall appreciates the occasion, Helen is just a humble divorcee with a child but eager to learn and easy to impress.

Still Braun finds himself under mounting pressure.   The statute of limitations, which had been twenty years and thus about to end, has been extended for war criminals to twenty-five.   A former assistant at the camp has started giving evidence against Reitmuller to save his own neck.   It's in all the papers. Braun has to find a way out.   He and von Stempel smuggled out some hard currency when they escaped Germany and set up a numbered bank account in Switzerland.   Now von Stempel has died, Karl can claim the lot, which will easily fund the flight to Buenos Aires and a comfortable retirement when he gets there...

He talks Helen into a brief trip to Paris...  And then things start going very wrong...

The twists are brilliant and, unlike critics in 1965 we should never forget that Pressburger lost his entire family in the Holocaust.   Hindsight, of course, is a wonderful thing and I for one remember the effect documentaries about the camps had when they started to be shown on TV.   But that was in the seventies, otherwise I would not have been old enough to watch.   My dad, who was an eighteen year old new recruit when the Hamburg concentration camps were finally liberated, and who processed some of the Nazis involved because he was a good German speaker, never ever discussed it with me but did force himself to watch the docs.   I wonder now how he felt.   I know absolutely that before about 1970 facing up to those horrors from their youth was too much for most of those involved in the liberation.   Hence the failure of The Glass Pearls.

Now, though, when unspeakable autocrats are actively committing crimes against humanity in various parts of the world, might be the perfect time to celebrate Pressburger's achievement.   I hope so.