According to my records, back on December 26 the wife and I went to antique stores in York, Pennsylvania and at one of them I bought a water damaged copy of a 1991 printing of 1989's The Devil's Mode, a collection of stories by Anthony Burgess.  Burgess is of course one of the Twentieth Century's great writers, and this little paperback is covered in extravagant praise from a multitude of magazines and newspapers.  Let's check out the first three pieces in the book, which take up like 80 pages, and see what all the fuss is about.

"A Meeting in Valladolid" 

According to an "Author's Note," this story first appeared in Spanish.  "A Meeting in Valladolid" is about an English theatre company that travels to Spain to celebrate the new Anglo-Spanish peace--among the visitors is William Shakespeare.  The playwright is disgusted by Spanish cruelty towards animals; the Spaniards are in turn sickened by the violence in the abridged version of Titus Andronicus which the Englishmen perform.

Shakespeare meets Cervantes and has explained to him that new literary form, the novel.  Cervantes denounces the English for abandoning the Catholic Church and for their failure to contribute to the European war effort against imperialistic Islam.  (As my well-educated readers know, Cervantes sacrificed much of his own life and health to this struggle.)  Cervantes says the English will produce no great literature because life in England is too easy.  I guess we readers are to get the idea that Shakespeare was going to abandon the theatre and become a farmer but a rivalry with Cervantes's words sparked a sense of rivalry that spurred him to continue his literary career and produce his greatest work.

"The Most Beautified"

More Shakespeare.  Hamlet is not named, but he is one of the characters in this story, which is set in Wittenberg, where Hamlet is a student.  In the middle of a lecture on the nature of beauty, which lecture has a focus on the nature of female beauty, Hamlet is called away because his father has died.  Over the course of the rest of the story we learn that the lecturer discoursing on beauty, and his assistant, are wizards who have sold their souls to the devil.  They exercise various esoteric powers, striking dead a Rector who thinks to (as we say nowadays) cancel them over their erotic lectures, for example.  In a private session for two favored students, the sorcerers conjure up the shade of Helen of Troy in the interest of presenting an example of maximum beauty.  Burgess finishes his tale in classic shaggy dog fashion--the ten-page story's last line is the remark of one of the students: "I don't think she was all that beautiful." 

"The Cavalier of the Rose"

I'm no Shakespeare expert, and I'm not fluent in any language, so lots of references in "A Meeting in Valladolid" (in which people sling lots of Spanish and Arabic) and "The Most Beautified" undoubtedly went over my head.  Facing this fifty-page story I am in even deeper and more treacherous waters--"The Cavalier of the Rose," a note tells us, is "based on the opera libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal;" the opera in question is Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, apiece of work I have never even heard of.  If you have three hours to spare you can watch Der Rosenkavalier on youtube, and I considered doing this, but lacked the drive to listen to 180 minutes of (to me) incomprehensible German.  This leaves me singularly unequipped to judge if Burgess here is offering us a faithful adaptation of the libretto, or a parody, or an update for modern audiences, or whatever.

Vienna in the first half of the 18th-century.  While her husband is away, a beautiful thirty-something princess is having an affair with an 18-year old soldier, a count.  The count is very pretty, thin and with smooth skin and so on.  When the princess's cousin, a big fat slob of a baron, bursts into the bedchamber, the count pretends to be a chambermaid, and the Baron flirts with him and tries to arrange an assignation with him, even though he is betrothed to some rich bourgeois teenager.    

The count is given the job of presenting to the fifteen-year-old merchant's daughter an engagement gift--the silver rose of the title.  When the two beautiful teens meet they naturally fall in love.  The count then plots a series of events involving disguises that put an end to the fat Baron's marriage to the fifteen-year-old so he can marry her himself.   

This is a traditional story with traditional gags--cuckolding, cross dressing, mistaken identities, fat jokes, the distinct vices of the middle class and the nobility, and so on.  Burgess and/or von Hofmannsthal fully recognize this; in the middle of the story the princess talks about the cliched and banal observations one hears when at the theatre, how they are repeated because they convey truths, and even admits to the count that their love affair is banal.  In the end of the story the omniscient third-person narrator remarks on the simple unrealistic charms of the narrative he has just related, saying it is suitable for comic opera and darkly hinting that in real life the count would probably be maimed in a war, his wife die in childbirth, and the cowardly obese Baron live to a ripe old age.

(I guess I'll note that Burgess contrives to include a bunch of Shakespeare references in this story as well.) 

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Burgess is a genius with a vast wealth of knowledge and tremendous skill with a host of languages, and I can't find any faults with these stories, but they aren't actually thrilling or moving or funny; they are like clever exercises from a virtuoso that lack surprise and passion.  I feel like Burgess is holding them at arm's length, that there is too much distance between the reader and the characters for the reader to actually care what happens to anybody, to get emotionally involved.  Maybe if I was an opera fan or a Shakespeare obsessive I would get more out of them; I have to report that I can tell the stories are good, but that I am not the best possible audience for them, and enjoyed them less than most of the novels of Burgess's I have read.

'Never mind who started it.  You've committed the great sin against stability and you see now what a bloody mess you can land into when you do that.'

As followers of my twitter feed--and perhaps several former or current FBI agents--may know, on a recent trip to Wonder Book in Hagerstown, MD, I purchased a Murray Leinster paperback with an adorable title and a great Richard Powers cover, War with the Gizmos, and two additional paperbacks, each by a polymath British genius with some connection to the SF community.  Let's today read one of those, a 1970 Ballantine printing of Anthony Burgess's 1960 novel, The Right to an Answer, which is billed on the covers of my copy as some kind of hilarious comedy and which I am interpreting as a lament about changes in English and world society since the Second World War and a tragic rumination about morality and justice, its primary lenses being the topics of sex and racism.    

The narrator of The Right to an Answer is Denham, the middle-aged son of a printer who has made for himself a successful career travelling the world for an export firm, spending years at a time in Asia and Africa; currently he is head of a big office in Tokyo.  Though a serious man of business, Denham studied English at university and so is conversant with the arts and literature, and there are many references to Shakespeare in the novel.

As The Right to an Answer begins, Denham is returning to England for a few months leave after having been abroad for years, and makes the acquaintance of his retired father's cronies in the suburban pub where they all hang out.  Burgess gives all these characters fun (and mostly sad) little personalities and interconnecting relationships.  One of the novel's multiple themes is how this pub is the center of the community, and its owner-operator the community's true leader and a pillar of its survival; the pub is contrasted with the center of post-war Western life, the TV, which is associated with America and is depicted as an almost impossible-to-resist drug that addicts people and breaks down community, inspiring people to stay at home every night and ignore their neighbors.  Before I moved to New York I watched TV incessantly myself, and after leaving New York I have increasingly found the TV irritating, and so all this talk of television and its baleful effects was interesting to me.  Still, I am considering the main topic of Burgess's novel to be adultery.

Most of the secondary characters in The Right to an Answer, people who are of lower social class than the educated Denham, or, if of similar class status, have failed to accumulate the money Denham has, are engaged in adulterous sexual relationships which Denham feels are immoral.  One of the philosophical topics Burgess addresses in the novel is the question of who, if anybody, has the standing to pass such moral judgements, and it is clear that Denham himself is really in no position to do so: never married himself, he has no grounds to criticize the behavior of married people, and as a customer of prostitutes is himself guilty of violating sexual mores.  Denham has in fact never had sex with an Englishwoman, all his sexual relationships having been while abroad, and it is implied that all of these relationships have been of a sort of exploitative character--in fact, one of the themes of the novel is the disastrous nature of interracial sexual relationships, and, in general, all relations between different ethnic and racial groups.  Burgess in the novel does not portray dealings between the classes in a positive light, either--people who look to Denham for advice and financial support, and they are many, do not fare well.  

The first third or so of the 210 pages of the novel's text are set in England, where (among other characters) Denham meets a printer, Winterbottom, and his strong-willed wife, Alice.  Alice Winterbottom psychologically dominates her weak-willed husband, and he pathetically assents to her vigorous sexual relationships with other men; the weak Winterbottom does not himself have sex with other women.  Another individual Denham meets is a newspaperman who works with Denham's sister, with whom Denham does not get along (another way Denham is depicted as deracinated and alienated from his own people.)  This journalist, Everett, is an almost forgotten poet of the Georgian school, and tries to get Denham to finance the publication of a collection of his poetry--there is no chance such a book will turn a profit, so essentially this is a request for charity, and Denham is reluctant to play the role of patron of the arts.  Everett has a sexy young daughter, Imogen, who returns home to daddy after abandoning her husband, whom she considers a bore.  Imogen, like Alice, is domineering and manipulative, and she takes up with Winterbottom, convincing him to leave Alice and move with her to London.  The weak and naïve Winterbottom falls in love with Imogen, whose feelings for Winterbottom are closer to pity or even contempt.  Without any work, Imogen and Winterbottom join Imogen's father in importuning Denham for financial support for their new London lifestyle and Winterbottom's half-assed effort to start an independent small printing business.  Even if Denham is in no position to criticize these people's marital infidelity and sexual improprieties, his instincts are correct, and they all suffer from their "sins against stability," their destruction of their own and other people's marriages.   

In the middle third of the novel Denham has to go to Ceylon for a month or so to handle some unexpected business, and he runs into a college-educated Ceylonese man, Raj, who introduces himself on the pretext (which we later learn is fabricated) that Denham has the same last name as one of Raj's favorite college professors.  Raj is forward and loquacious and with astonishing rapidity forces his friendship on Denham, so that Denham has yet another person demanding his advice and support, another person who ultimately suffers from Denham's poor guidance.  Raj is headed to England to study for an advanced degree and to do research on race relations, and manipulates events so that he sits next to Denham on the narrator's return flight to Britain; once in Blighty Raj insinuates himself into the elder Denham's circle of friends and acquaintances at that pub.  Raj has various adventures in the suburb inhabited by Denham's father; he is repeatedly assaulted by racists, of example, but, a skilled fighter, triumphs over them.  Raj seeks lodgings, and Denham's father's reluctance to accommodate him--apparently based on racism--is overcome when he tastes Raj's excellent curry--the curry is not only delicious, but cures the old man's persistent cough.  

Denham heads back to Japan and his position there, leaving his room in his father's house to Raj, foolishly thinking that Raj and his father, two men in need of support--the one a foreigner in a sometimes hostile or bewildering land and the other an ailing oldster--will provide beneficial support to each other.  Denham travels to Yokahama as a passenger on a Dutch ship, and Burgess offers us an English view of the Dutch, suggesting the Netherlands is "a jolly nightmare parody of England" and of Japan, where women are so different from the assertive, aggressive and manipulative Alice and Imogen.  Aboard the vessel, he receives numerous postcards from Raj requesting advice--Raj has fallen in love with Alice Winterbottom.

In the final third of the novel the plot accelerates and, for a book advertised as "funny," we get a lot of abuse and death.  Denham's live-in Japanese girlfriend is sexually assaulted by American teenagers, the sons of United States Air Force personnel.  To support herself and Winterbottom, Imogen has taken up a risky bit of thievery, acting the part of a prostitute and accepting payment from her clients and sneaking off before preforming the promised services; she pulls this scam on the wrong guy, and is beaten up, giving occasion for several secondary and minor characters to muse on the nature of justice: some see Imogen's deception as a just punishment of the johns for their indulgence in prostitution, some see Imogen's beating as a just punishment for deceiving and robbing men.  Denham gets word that his father is dying, and flies home on a Scandinavian airline, on a plane on which a French sex symbol and her entourage are also passengers, giving Burgess the chance to caricature the Nordic peoples as he earlier did the Dutch, and to lampoon the artificiality of the world of cinema.  Back in the London suburb he finds his father has died, and that there is reason to suspect that Raj may be in somewise culpable for the old man's demise.  Imogen, missing multiple teeth, has left Winterbottom and moved in with her father, the poet Everett.  Winterbottom returns to his wife Alice, and Raj, perhaps thinking Winterbottom is an intruder, perhaps merely out of jealousy, kills Winterbottom, shooting him by surprise from behind, and then kills himself.  

One of Burgess's themes is the ambiguous and overlapping nature of responsibility and blame, and the black fates of the elder Denham, Winterbottom, and Raj are a good example of this theme--obviously Raj bears responsibility for shooting pathetic Winterbottom, but Winterbottom and Alice's poor choices regarding their marriage and Denham's crummy advice to everybody and his introduction of the alien Raj into the suburban English community set the stage for the cataclysm.

After all this tragedy, there is a deus ex machina sort of ending that rewards the owner of the pub, who has proven himself the true leader of the community throughout the book, and Everett the poet, who represents the world of literature which is sinking beneath the inexorable tide of TV (the untimely death of both the novel's printers symbolizes the peril and decline of literature in the mid-century age of electronics and globalism.)  It is hard not to take "deus ex machina" literally and think that the happy ending for the pub owner and Everett are Burgess's suggestion that only God can accurately judge who is good and deserving of read and who is evil and deserving of punishment.

Despite the happy ending for those two guys, The Right to an Answer is a very tragic book.  Sexual relationships don't work, family relationships don't work, and interactions between different communities are destructive.  It is also a very conservative book which argues that any innovation, anything you might describe as "progress," is a disaster that is going to weaken the community and make life worse.  Technological advance is represented by the American innovations of the atomic bomb which threatens all life and the TV which is destroying the world of print and the English community.  International trade, immigration and increased interactions between different civilizations and nations and races lead to exploitation and violence and the decay of traditional community--American whites rape Japanese women, American TV destroys English neighborliness, British whites assault the Hindu Raj, Raj (who himself is racist against Africans even as he complains of the racism he himself suffers from Britons) comes to England to learn and ends up killing another man and then himself largely because of the advice of Denham.

The Right to an Answer is thus full of interesting and thought-provoking stuff.  But is it fun, is it a good read?  I think it is.  While I only laughed out loud once (when the text incorporated a defamatory newspaper article by Denham's bitter sister and the rejected Everett about Denham), the jokes all actually work and do not irritate or detract from the larger tragic vision.  On the scale of individual sentences and paragraphs there are lots of little clever bits, metaphors and things, like how Burgess compares air travel to an illness, with the flight crew as doctors and the stewardesses as nurses, and how he likens walking through a train station--"past the Station Master and the Telegraph Office and the Restaurant" to walking the Stations of the Cross in a Catholic Church.  On the larger scale of the structure of the novel, Burgess also succeeds, with lots of effective foreshadowing--stuff you learn early on later pays off in satisfying ways.  A good example is the evolution of Raj from a silly and sympathetic character to a dangerous and sinister one--it is totally believable, because Raj himself doesn't really change, just the way we view him--even in his earliest appearances there are hints of the sinister and even in his last moments he is sad and ridiculous, a victim as well as a destroyer; Burgess has not been lying to the reader or tricking him, what happens feels natural and is thus all the more powerful and surprising.  I remember thinking the ends of some of the other Burgess novels I have read, like The Pianoplayers, felt poorly integrated with the rest of the book, but The Right to an Answer doesn't have that problem; all the different parts work together smoothly.

So, thumbs up for The Right to an Answer.  It is a well-crafted novel that, if you are like the peeps at The Washington Star or The New York Review of Books, you will think is hilarious, if you are familiar with Burgess's biography, will present to you all kinds of connections to his own life (for example, Burgess spent years in the East, during which time his wife was raped by American servicemen), and if you are the social history type will offer insight into what an educated and well-travelled Englishman in the 1950s thought of his own country, as well as of the Japanese, Hindus, Americans, Scandinavians and the Dutch.  Worth your time.

Just yesterday at a Pennsylvania antique store I bought a water damaged collection of Burgess short stories, so expect more Burgess here at MPorcius Fiction Log in the future.  But first, a return to the American weird.

'Coming over here with all those bourgeois clothes to sell, but too much concerned with your sexuality, dig, to really get down to a bit of hard work and sell them.  And boasting last night about having a big capitalist shop full of silver and jewels back in England.  Everybody was like disgusted.'

'Not everybody would understand what I was saying.'

'Oh, you got down to speaking Russian pretty good by the time you were trying to tear the clothes off of people.'

It feels like an eternity since I last worked on this ol' blog o' mine, social obligations and the quest for money taking up my time and keeping me from my true calling of reading crazy stories and spoiling them for others.  But today MPorcius Fiction Log is back!  With a mainstream novel I believe worthy of the attention of all readers interested in the Cold War or in sexual orientation and sexual identity, which, judging from what I am hearing on the news, should be just about everybody! 

Our last blog post was about a Fritz Leiber collection on the theme that "man is wolf to man," and within it we noticed an ad for books by Anthony Burgess, the famous British writer responsible for A Clockwork Orange.  One such book was Honey for the Bears, a 1963 novel.  Advertising works, and I was duly inspired to read Honey for the Bears, and settled on a scan available at the internet archive of a 1978 Norton hardcover edition.  

With the sole exception of a chapter which consists of the text of a letter, Honey for the Bears is written in the third-person and our main character, Paul Hussey, is always on screen.  Hussey is an English antiques dealer and an RAF veteran of the Second World War; it was during the war he met his American wife, Belinda.  During his war service, Paul was close to a fellow airman, Robert, whose aircraft was shot down by the Germans and who endured an ordeal in the ocean from which he never truly recovered.  Some years after the war, after both men had married, Paul and Robert reconnected and the two couples became very friendly, spending much time together; they even, it seems, engaged in what amounts to what people call "wife-swapping" or "swinging."  Robert died recently, apparently of a heart attack brought on by lingering effects of his war injuries, throwing Robert's wife, Sandra, into a financial crisis.

Robert, an aficionado of Russian culture and a fluent speaker of Russian, had a risky way of making money.  Robert would buy cheap synthetic dresses by the hundreds and then smuggle them into the Soviet Union, selling them wholesale to a man in Leningrad who would then retail them on the black market.  Robert's untimely demise came after buying one consignment of "twenty dozen" dresses but before departing for the Eastern Bloc, leaving these dresses on Sandra's hands.  Sandra convinced Paul and Belinda to secretly carry the dresses, in violation of Soviet law, to Russia to sell them to that black marketeer, and the couple set off on a Soviet passenger ship with the idea that their trip to Khrushchev's USSR, shortly after the flight of Yuri Gagarin, would be like a holiday.  As the novel begins, they are aboard ship, bound for Leningrad, and things are already going haywire, as Belinda has contracted a mysterious and painful rash and the ships' Soviet doctor doesn't have any penicillin with which to treat her: 

'...it [penicillin] is an English medicine.  But we are on a Soviet ship and it is right we use Soviet medicines.'

This woman blames Belinda's illness on the poor food available in Great Britain, and assures Paul that they will eat better in the USSR.

For most of the novel Belinda and Paul are separated, she in a Leningrad hospital where the medical staff psychoanalyzes her (I don't think we ever learn what that rash was all about), he out on the streets, desperately trying to avoid arrest by the authorities, who have already seized Robert's Russian associate and are pretty sure Paul is equally guilty of "bringing in capitalist goods in order to sell them and thus upset the Soviet economy."  Equally important as the plot threads concerning Belinda's health and Paul's liberty are the many mysteries about Paul and Belinda, the dead Robert and the absent Sandra, that unfold as the novel progresses.   

There are several interesting recurring themes in Honey for the Bears.  A big one, of course, is the Cold War, and Burgess offers a peculiarly English or British or maybe European view of the struggle between the liberal democracies of the West and communist totalitarianism of the East.  Burgess portrays the Soviet Union as poor and dirty, the communist system as inefficient and inhuman and its officials as incompetent and inhumane; Western supporters of the USSR are shown to be, at best, a bunch of dopes--among Paul and Belinda's fellow passengers are a leftist British "lecturer" (I guess this is equivalent to an American assistant professor) and her posse of students, jerks who slavishly parrot the propaganda from Moscow.  But all you commies and Russophiles out there will be relieved to hear that Burgess has many arrows in his quiver and a lot more to say about the Cold War than that.  For one thing, he stresses continuities between Tsarist (as he spells it) and post-Revolutionary Russia.  More interestingly still, Paul repeatedly notices similarities between the Russian people and the working-class English people among whom he grew up.  (Paul, though now a middle-class shop owner interested in serious literature, was born into a working-class family, and did not attend university.)  Again and again a Russian's appearance reminds him of a relative of his own he knew in his youth, and Paul quickly comes to like the ordinary Russian people, no matter what atrocities the Soviet authorities inflict on him.  The ordinary people of Russia and England are essentially, Burgess seems to be suggesting, the same. 

Belinda being American, and the fact that Paul meets other expatriate Yanks in Leningrad, gives Burgess a ready platform to present opinions of the United States, and he sets up a sort of parallelism between the land of the free and the home of the brave and the Evil Empire, with Paul saying stuff like "You Americans and Russians are all the same.  You promise things and you don't keep your promises.  You just can't be trusted, that's what it is."  (Again the idea that people separated by geographic, political and ethnic boundaries are essentially the same.)  How seriously we should take Paul's assessments is an open question; for one thing, Paul is portrayed as not only a loser but also as an aggressor himself.  It seems possible that Paul's attitude is meant as much to portray the psychological effect on Great Britain of being demoted from world leader to junior partner as it is to reflect reality; it is absurd to think that two nations as different culturally, economically, politically as were the USA and the USSR in the early Sixties are "the same," but from the point of view of an exhausted Britain the similarities of the two superpowers, both (apparently at least) vigorous and expanding their might and influence, perhaps their similarities are more notable than their differences.  

Having raised the idea that Paul is a loser and an aggressor brings us to another of Honey for the Bear's big themes: sex, and in particular homosexuality and sexual ambiguity.  Homosexuality is mentioned on the first page when a minor character, Madox, opines that, in the same way homosexuals aren't homosexuals all the time, say when they are asleep or on the toilet, communists can't be communists all the time.  Burgess's novel is full of mysteries--some of which are resolved, and others of which go unsolved--and they all seem to revolve around sexual identity and sexual orientation.  For example, Paul is unable to identify the sex of another secondary character introduced on page one, an irascible trouble-making oldster in a wheelchair whom Paul dubs "Dr. Tiresias," a reference to Greek myth and of course T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, of which Burgess was a devoted fan.  We never learn this mysterious figure's sex or name; Madox, this individual's assistant, just calls his employer "the Doc."

We gradually learn as the novel progresses how unusual Paul's and Belinda's sexual lives have been.  Paul is less interested in sex than is Belinda, and it turns out that Paul and Robert had a brief homosexual fling; the woman doctor treating Belinda in the hospital claims that one of Belinda's problems is that Paul is gay and is thus does not really lover her and is unable to satisfy her.  At the apartment of a young left-wing American (who claims to want to help Paul but betrays him to the Soviet authorities), Paul gets terribly drunk and sexually assaults a series of men.

At the start of the novel, Belinda expresses bitterness, even hatred of Sandra, claiming she probably murdered Robert.  At first Paul simply thinks this is because (as he suspects) all women really hate each other, and later he wonders if it is jealously that has raised her ire--maybe Belinda suspects Paul of preferring Sandra to his own wife, or maybe Belinda preferred Robert over Paul and envies the time Sandra spent with the now forever lost Robert.  Eventually Paul realizes that Belinda and Sandra were lesbian lovers.

Paul is something of a screw up, and is repeatedly portrayed as impotent and emasculated.  For example, in a bicycle accident years ago he lost his four lower front teeth, and wears a little denture in that space.  Well, the Soviet customs agent who fails to confiscate the 240 contraband dresses or Paul's copy of the forbidden Doctor Zhivago seizes the tube of adhesive Paul uses to secure this denture, saying it is a narcotic, and throughout the middle section of the novel the thing threatens to fall out, despite Paul's efforts to jam it in place with cotton and little pieces of wood (ouch!); it is finally lost when Soviet police beat up poor Paul (ouch again!)  Paul physically forces himself on a woman who shows contempt for him and when she has finally succumbed to his desires he finds himself unable to maintain an erection, inspiring her to laugh at him.

(The sexual transgressions don't end there--we learn that Belinda was raped by her father--a professor of English--and that the young Paul was aroused by the smell of his mother.  Yikes!)

Burgess combines two of his themes--the alleged similarity of the United States and the Soviet Union and Paul's impotence--in a scene in which Paul is interrogated by the police; this scene strongly suggests Paul is meant to represent a Britain/Western Europe that is psychologically scarred by the World Wars and feels hopeless and impotent in a world in which it lies trapped between two revolutionary superpowers characterized by boundless ambition, one that transforms the world with market capitalism and the other that seeks to do so with totalitarian socialism.

'You are very optimistic in the West, that must be admitted.  You look forward to a future.'

'No,' said Paul, 'not a future.  At least not in Europe.  America's different, of course, but America's really only a kind of Russia.  You've no idea how pleasant it is not to have any future.  It's like having a totally efficient contraceptive.'  

'Or like being impotent,' said Zverkov.  Paul blushed.  

In the last quarter of Honey for the Bears, Belinda leaves Paul for the lesbian doctor who has been psychoanalyzing her, following her to her ancestral home in the Crimea on the coast of the Sea of Azov.  Belinda leaves Paul a letter that constitutes the entire text of a chapter and gives Burgess a chance to parody both Americans and English people by depicting an American view of England.  Perhaps the most memorable sally in the letter is Belinda's idea that a life of relative freedom and wealth has made Love with a capital "L" almost disappear in Britain and America, because so many substitutes for Love are easily available; in Russia, by contrast, Love flourishes, because Love is all the people of the USSR have amid their many enduing hardships. 

Dr. Tiresias returns to the narrative--it is revealed this mysterious character is a smuggler who brings contraband to the Soviet Union secreted in his or her wheelchair.  Because Belinda is staying behind, Paul has an extra passport and an extra place on the ship upon which he will be leaving the worker's paradise; the Doc arranges for a young Russian man wanted by the authorities who has long been in hiding to take Belinda's place on the ship.  Is this guy really the feeble-minded but physically massive son of a dissident musician who was Robert's favorite composer?  Or just a violent criminal who has aided Dr. Tiresias in his or her smuggling and will rat out the Doc if the ruthless Soviet cops get their hands on him?      

In keeping with the novel's themes of gender-bending and of ludicrous incompetence and failure, this joker is very badly disguised as a woman, and he and Paul are caught by the crew of the ship en route to Helsinki.  In port in Finland the two Soviet police officers who beat up Paul come back into his life, tasked with taking him and the cross-dressing fugitive back to Leningrad.  In an inversion of the shipboard events at the start of the story, in which a communist English academic and her mob of leftist students maligned Paul, Paul and his slow-witted companion are rescued by a Russophobic British lecturer who leads a squad of hefty English football fans in disrupting the transfer of the captives to the shore.  

The story ends on a hopeful note as Paul accepts his homosexuality and reflects that small countries like Finland and England have a role to play in the world now dominated by the Americans and the Soviet communists: the job of preserving the beautiful high culture of the past from the market efficiency of the USA and the gruesome totalitarianism of the Soviet Union.  Maybe we should see Honey For the Bears as a warning from a conservative about the dangers to happiness, love and freedom posed by both the market and the state.

As I have chronicled, Honey for the Bears addresses all sorts of interesting topics and is full of allusions and references to art, music and literature (I have limited myself to a mention of Eliot, but Shakespeare and Tolstoy and others are in there.)  The novel is also cleverly structured and written; everything fits together in a satisfying way--the way passionate lecturers, a female useful idiot and then a male historian who oddly has it in for Russians because of things he read in his research on Richard Chancellor, bookend the story is one example.  At the same time, Paul's saga is kind of sad and sometimes disgusting, and in many ways, including morally, it is ambiguous--none of the characters is very likable or admirable, for example.  So, it is not exactly a fun or light read. 

Thumbs up from me, but be forewarned, though it is marketed as a comedy, Honey for the Bears is no joy ride, people!

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It's back to science fiction stories for our next episode, oh my brothers.  Stay tuned!

How bloody stupid he had been to trust Dr Railton and everyone else.  To them he was already a thing, could not be less of a thing if he died under the anaesthetic: regrettable: Dr. Spindrift has changed into a mere chunk of morphology.

Back in 2016, as I chronicled on my thrilling Twitter account, I came upon an impressive collection of modern literary fiction in trade paperback at a Goodwill in Ohio.  One of the books I bought for 99 pennies was a late '90s W. W. Norton printing of Anthony Burgess's 1960 novel The Doctor is Sick, the story of Dr. Edwin Spindrift and the radical turn his life takes.   

Edwin Spindrift is an English linguistics professor with an American degree and a teaching job in Burma.  He has plenty of problems.  He has lost his libido.  His sense of smell is all mixed up.  He collapsed in the middle of class, and so he and his wife Sheila have returned to England, where he is undergoing tests in a London hospital while Sheila stays in a nearby hotel.  Long ago, Edwin and Sheila, who seems kind of vapid and is quite keen on drinking and fucking, agreed to have an open marriage, and Sheila has been spending a lot of time in pubs, hitting the sauce and picking up guys.  She is so busy with those other guys she doesn't avail herself of opportunities to come see Edwin in the hospital--some visiting hours he spends alone, while others he shares with the somewhat creepy working class and lower class guys Sheila has met in pubs and sent to the hospital in her place!

Burgess, a linguist himself, fills the novel with loads of "fun facts" philological and etymological that Edwin offers up to an uninterested audience.

'Ye Old Tea Shop is a solecism.  The "Ye" is a mistake for the Anglo-Saxon letter called thorn, which stood for "TH".'

Burgess also describes in some detail various medical procedures from the point of view of the patient--some of these are not for the squeamish!  These descriptions provide the author an opportunity to lay some interesting metaphors on us; for example, when a "negro" and his Italian assistant shave Edwin's head in preparation for brain surgery, the falling hair is compared to autumn leaves and then Arabic script and the strokes of Pitman shorthand.            

One of the noteworthy things about The Doctor is Sick is the diverse panorama of people living, working and making trouble in the London depicted, from the hospital where Edwin endures all manner of tests and interacts with various wacky fellow patients, to the drinking establishments Sheila frequents, and to the streets: not only are there people from different social strata and various geographic locations within the British Isles, but also Americans, "negros," Italians, Slavs, Germans, "Semites," etc.  Some quotes from T. S. Eliot that the learned Edwin throws out (all through the novel he is demonstrating his erudition to those who have no ability to appreciate it) made me wonder if the multitude of foreigners and minorities in the novel were meant to play one of the roles played by London-dwelling Jews and foreigners in Eliot's early poems like "The Waste Land" and "Gerontion," as a dramatization of the alienation and deracination characteristic of the modern globalized city.  (Spoiler alert: Maybe she should see The Doctor is Sick as the story of an Englishman who, after studying in America and working in Burma, gets back in touch with his British roots and settles down in England.)   There is considerable interethnic strife depicted in the novel, between Jews and German and between whites and blacks in particular.  (Here is where I warn you 21st-century kids that the book makes frequent use of the dreaded "N-word" that those of us with no balls are now too scared to type.)

(I also saw Edwin's sad sexual relationships as possibly echoing the sad sexual relationships in Eliot's early poems.)

Edwin is certainly alienated, a man apart from society, even apart from real life--as an intellectual, a man of words, he has no knowledge of, no feeling for, the world of flesh and blood people.  Midway through the book Edwin reflects that 

He had lived too much with words and not what the words stood for...Apart from its accidents of sound, etymology and lexical definition, did he really know the meaning of any one word?

Edwin has no ability to relate to the people around him; between him and most of those in the hospital lay barriers of race, ethnicity, sex and class, and even the British male doctors seem to be rejecting him from their club when they forget to call Edwin "Dr. Spindrift" and instead call him "Mr. Spindrift."  (Burgess makes much in the novel of homophones and words that have multiple meanings, and "doctor" is one of them.)

Remarking to himself that the hospital staff do not think of him as human, but as a mere thing, 75 pages into the 261 page novel Edwin decides to flee the hospital, right before he is to have his brain operated upon. 

Unfamiliar with London, his head shaved, clad in a weird assortment of pyjamas and street clothes, Edwin's alienation is even more stark.  Sheila has moved out of her hotel with all their money and without leaving any clue as to her whereabouts, and when Edwin visits the global HQ of The International Council for University Development, the institution that manages that school in Burma, he is refused any advance on his salary.  When Edwin finds himself in a dispute with an illiterate man who has stolen his watch, passersby take the side of the thief, Edwin's unusual attire making them think him a foreigner. 

Looking for Sheila, Edwin goes to the pub and illegal drinking club where Sheila has been hitting the sauce and meeting men and he gets mixed up in the sundry petty criminal schemes of the people who hang out there, many of whom try to take advantage of him one way or another.  He plays shove-ha'penny, something I've never heard about before, for high stakes.  He is kidnapped by a predatory homosexual masochist.  He is persuaded by the operators of the illegal drinking club, a pair of Jewish twins who constantly talk about money and the tragic history of their people and who have a long tragic history of disreputable and illicit money-making schemes of their own behind them, to give a linguistics lecture to their patrons in hopes it will deceive the police about the true nature of their club.  These same operators shanghai Edwin into participating in a televised contest for the best-looking bald man in town ("MAMMOTH CONTEST: BALD ADONIS OF GREATER LONDON").  Edwin, a relatively young and handsome man who of course is not really bald, merely shaved, wins the contest and becomes famous. 

Then he wakes up in the hospital after his operation and he and we must consider what proportion of his adventures were dreams induced by anesthesia and coma and what proportion really happened.  Regardless of whether they were mostly or entirely imaginary, his adventures have changed Edwin, and he has a future to look forward to in which he is free of Sheila and free of his connection with The International Council for University Development and any need to return to Burma, with a job outside of academia in prospect.  Edwin is also free of his inhibitions against breaking the law--on his way out of the hospital he loots the lockers of his fellow inmates.   

The theme of alienation may have jumped out at me, but another big theme of The Doctor is Sick is freedom and confinement.  Not only is Edwin confined in the hospital and then in the masochist's fortified top floor apartment, and both he and Sheila trapped in an unsatisfactory marriage, but many secondary and minor characters talk about their personal histories of being imprisoned for crimes and held in thrall by criminals, and their ethnic groups' histories of suffering oppression and enslavement.

We might see the story of Edwin as a tale of liberation from the confines of sterile intellectualism and a sterile marriage, but Burgess may be doing more than celebrating freedom here; he also portrays the costs that one might suffer and might impose on others when flouting the social order in pursuit of independence and freedom of action.  Shelia refuses to be confined by the conventional rules of marriage, but can we admire a woman who doesn't even take time to visit her dangerously ill husband in the hospital?  And are we really to see it as a positive development when Edwin's desperation after busting out of the hospital and failing to find Sheila leads him to turn to thievery with gusto, and when his struggle with the gay masochist unleashes within Edwin a lust for violence?  

The Doctor is Sick is a good novel, but I'm not in love with it.  The jokes work, but they made me smile, not laugh out loud.  Burgess is of course some kind of genius with a vast storehouse of knowledge about language and literature and every page has some clever wordplay or exotic slang or double meaning or erudite reference (I caught the Eliot references and an obvious Shakespeare quote but presumably there are legions of references that sailed right over my uneducated cabeza) which of course is good.  But Burgess also puts his remarkable facility with dialects and accents to use doing something which is a pet peeve of mine, rendering long stretches of dialogue phonetically.

Can't 'ave you marchin' rahnd wiv all vat leg showin'.  Indecent, apart from anyfink else.  What a bleedin' evenin' vis is turnin' aht to be.

Perhaps I'm a lazy or impatient reader, but I find reading such passages laborious.  I'm also not exactly crazy about the equivocal "was it all a dream?" ending.  

All in all, though, The Doctor is Sick is a worthwhile read that is fertile ground for all kinds of interpretations and deconstructions. Ninety-nine cents well spent!

"Half a dollar every time you come," he said.  "I know this is going to be Against the Law, you being under the Age of Consent, but I reckon you don't want to be put away as a Young Person in Need of Care and Protection any more than I want to be put away for having Seduced a Minor."

Anthony Burgess was one of the most respected writers of the 20th century, and the first four pages of my 1987 paperback copy of the 1986 novel The Pianoplayers are full of extravagant praise for the novel from such august institutions as Time magazine, USA Today and the Worcester Sunday Telegram.

The Pianoplayers is the memoirs of an aged Englishwoman, Ellen Henshaw, living in the south of France, who has dictated them into a tape recorder and had them typed up by a young American writer.  In the first chapter of the novel we learn that Ellen became wealthy as a sort of high-class prostitute who has had sex with famous men, and that her father was a talented but unheralded musician, and the succeeding chapters recount the courses of their difficult lives and Ellen's final triumph (if it really is a triumph.)

Ellen's father Bill was a pianoplayer and a petty thief, forced to raise Ellen by himself when, while he was serving in France in World War I, his wife died of the famous Spanish influenza.  Bill is a creative and individualistic musician, unable to follow rules or direction, and so unable to play with an orchestra, so he gets jobs playing the piano in motion picture theaters; he watches the film and makes up his own music and contrives sound effects that go along with the action on the screen.  His career is a spotty one, as he has trouble getting on with his bosses, and drinks too much besides, and then arrive the talkies, which render him obsolete.  Bill then gets work with a "concert party," a sort of musical/comedy troupe, and fouls that up by getting mixed up with the unfaithful wife of the group's violin player.  

Meanwhile, little Ellen is learning about music from her Dad, who has his own idiosyncratic methods of teaching musicians, and learning about sex from the adult men--and at least one adult woman--who admire her thirteen-year-old body and take advantage of her.  These relationships have a mercenary character, allowing Ellen to supplement the family income. 

After he is thrown out of that troupe, Bill is recruited by a shady character to be the star attraction of a crazy business scheme: Bill will embark on a piano marathon, try to play for thirty days straight, with only a two-hour break each day.  Halfway through the marathon, which features Bill not only playing pop tunes and famous classical pieces but composing his own opera on the fly (one about the struggle between communism and businesspeople, international war and modern man's abandonment of God) as well as his own symphonies, and two-thirds of the way through the novel, Bill dies of a heart attack.

Ellen, not yet 14 and an orphan, with no relatives with whom she gets on well, is recruited by some sneaky French people posing as nuns and taken to the Continent to work in a brothel catering to men who have some kind of father-daughter incest fetish.  When Ellen gets too old for that, she graduates to vanilla sex at a different brothel.  Our narrator returns to England shortly before the start of the Second World War and gets married and gives birth to a son.  One of the more disturbing aspects of the novel is the revelation that Ellen does not love her son, and considers raising a child pretty boring after an exciting career of being a whore in France:

...he was a sweet child, but I don't know what it was, I didn't have a real motherly feeling towards him, perhaps I was not cut out to be a mother, and I liked him only as I liked the kid of the lady next door.

Ellen leaves her son with some of her husband's relatives and gets a job as a liaison with the Free French, and returns to her calling of having sex with strangers for money.  When her husband unexpectedly comes back from fighting the Axis in North Africa to attend Staff College, he catches her with a client and the marriage goes kaput.  Showing us readers what sex means to Ellen, she tells him

"What you've had for the cost of a marriage license...adds up to a fair sum of money at the rate I'm entitled to."

For Ellen, sex is not an expression of love, but a service to be bought and sold.

After the war, Ellen returns to France and advances in her career as what we now call a sex worker.  As we approach page 200 of The Pianoplayers we get the metaphor/analogy/allegory trumpeted on the cover of my paperback: having sex with a woman, Ellen suggests, is like playing the piano--doing it successfully requires talent and training most men lack.  By 1956, Ellen is running her own brothel in Singapore and she puts into practice an idea she has had for a while, teaching men how to sexually satisfy a woman, using principles not dissimilar to those used by her father to teach her how to play the piano.  She founds schools which provide practical instruction all over the world.    

The success of the schools is the real end of the novel, in my humble opinion, but there is a final chapter in which Ellen relates the absurd and farcical history of her son Robert's marriage.  Robert loves music, but is not quite good enough to be a professional, and gets a 9-to-5 job but loves to play the piano on his time off.  He marries a woman who, before the ceremony, pretends to love music, but who reveals after the wedding that she would rather watch TV.  Even worse, she is not interested in having sex.  Worse still, her fat domineering mother moves in with them.  His tyrannical mother-in-law sells Robert's piano, buys a car, and insists Robert drive her and her daughter across France to Italy for her first trip abroad.  On the trip the mother-in-law dies and there is some black humour about getting the body back in England, complicated by the fact that the secondhand car the mother-in-law bought keeps breaking down, neither Robert nor his wife can speak Italian, the Italian police engage in a car chase and a shootout with kidnappers on the same road the English tourists are on, etc.  Finally back in England, Robert, driven to the edge of insanity, becomes violent and his aggression breaks his wife's resistance to music and to sex, and the two love happily ever after.  This chapter, though competently written, is barely connected to the main narrative and is by far the weakest part of the novel.  

Putting aside the last chapter, The Pianoplayers is an engaging mainstream novel.  A musician himself, Burgess fills the novel with information about music, and the same age as the narrator, offers charming anecdotes and insights about ordinary life in the 1920s and 1930s--what people ate, what cinema and the popular theatre were like, etc.; all this is entertaining and enlightening.  The pace is brisk and Ellen's voice is colloquial and fun; though almost everything that happens in the novel amounts to some kind of tragedy, act of exploitation or crime, the whole thing is presented in a spirit of fun, and it is fun.  

Maybe today people would object to a man writing in the voice of a woman and depicting in a pretty light-hearted--on the surface at least--fashion sexual relationships between adults and a teen-aged girl, relationships that we today would label abuse, sex trafficking and pedophilia or ephebophilia, and that even at the time depicted were considered sinful by the religious authorities and were prosecuted as crimes by the secular authorities, a fact of which Ellen and the Englishmen who take advantage of her are very aware (though the Frenchies seem to blow it off as business as usual!) 

Remember when we read Burgess's The Wanting Seed, how we talked about Burgess's theories of history and government and all that?  Well, is there a "point" or an argument we can discern from The Pianoplayers that we can discuss?  It can't just be a wacky comedy with a strong vein of nostalgia that serves a means for Burgess to voice his love of music, can it?  

Perhaps the comedic tone of the novel indicates that the point is that, no matter how hard life is, you can find some pleasure in it if you have the right attitude,  Another, related, possibility is that we should see Ellen's wit and bright attitude as a mere smokescreen, that the novel is a reminder that life is horrible and perhaps getting worse.  If we move into esoteric territory, perhaps we can see The Pianoplayers as a sneaky defense of traditional gender roles and an attack on sexual license and the sexual revolution.  (I know I said this sort of thing about a Thomas Disch story in my last blog post, but it fits here too!)  Ellen, deprived of a stable home life by the death of her mother and her father's irresponsibility, becomes a whore who is unable to love her husband or her own child.  (Just like I said about the Disch story, the depiction of men's treatment of women, and of employers' treatment of employees, may also make the story fertile ground for feminist and anti-capitalist interpretations.  What Burgess's novel has that Disch's lacks is a bunch of religious references that perhaps put forward the idea that mankind's unhappiness is a reflection of our refusal to embrace God and comport ourselves properly in the wonderful world He has given us, a world that, were we to behave, would offer us all a decent life.)   

The breathless blurbs overdo it, but The Pianoplayers is an easy to digest, entertaining piece of work.  

Raven said to Charles: "Well, Mr. Grayner?  Destruction or salvage?  A corrupt and decadent world--do you destroy it or do you try to mend it?"

Charles stood in silence; he felt that his irresolution must be written all over him.  Raven and Dinkhul were both looking at him--Raven with calm confidence, Dinkhul with the trace of a mocking grin.

He said: "I don't know--"  

I can't actually remember any pretty blonde ladies in the book

Like so many people, I found John Christopher's first three Tripod books entertaining.  I liked No Blade of Grass when I read it a few years ago, and thought The Long Winter not bad when I read it before this blog first exploded into the public consciousness.  (Joachim Boaz rated The Long Winter "Good" back in 2012.) So, when I saw the 1959 Avon printing of Christopher's Planet in Peril with the cool Emsh cover, I got it.  As I announced to the world via twitter, which, despite my best efforts to create mesmerizing content like blurry pictures of the birds and graffiti I spot while visiting Akron, Ohio, is apparently in terminal decline, this edition is very fun, the book designer integrating elements of Emsh's cover illo onto the back cover and the title page.  My copy was owned previously by a Michael Wachover; amateur handwriting analysis suggests it was some other owner who wrote "Good" on the inside cover along with a long cryptic string of characters.  Mr. Wachover also wrote his nickname "Mike" on page 23, and that string of numbers (and letters?) appears a second time on page 11.  This paperback has lived a long and eventful life!

Planet in Peril was first published in the United Kingdom in 1955 with the considerably more appropriate title The Year of the Comet and stars Charles Grayner, 21st-century scientist.  Grayner is a sophisticated man--when he comes home and finds the cleaning lady has left the telescreen on the pop music channel, he switches it to the classical music channel.  After a long day studying diamonds as a possible power source, a little Mozart is just what he needs!  In the first ten pages of the book Grayner visits a used record store, where he runs into the guy who operates and stars on (as a kind of DJ or talk show host) the classical music TV channel, Hiram Dinkhul.  Even though they have only met once before, this guy seems to know all about Grayner's career, including the fact that the diamond expert has just this very day learned he will be transferred from Michigan to sunny California!

Fellow SF fan Michael Wachover, we salute you!

Planet in Peril is set in a world in which almost nobody, even a sophisticato like Grayner, knows any history.  Luckily Grayner and we readers have Dinkhul to handle the exposition duties for us.   Following a cataclysmic 20th-century war, the Western world was rebuilt by and is now run by "managerials," the various pre-war business sectors (they have names like "United Chemicals," "Atomics," "Steel," "Agriculture," "Genetics Division," "Telecom," etc.) consolidated into monopolistic entities which act as independent states.  These states are fascistic/socialistic, their citizens assorted into rigid classes and assigned their roles from above during their youth after psychological profiling.  (We learn that at school Grayner was assigned to Squad D, "research and development work.")  Like jobs, all goods and services seem to be distributed by the bureaucracy.

Outside this managerial system is "Siraq," a religious state (Dinkhul calls it a "deity-centered nation") that controls the "Near East."  (Though Grayner and Dinkhul are Americans, they use British lingo--Dinkhul at one point talks of the paucity of students who "read History" instead of the American usage "study History," while Grayner tells Dinkhul that he "tipped down the drain" the "containers of mescalin" provided him by his managers for use on vacation.)  While Westerners all smoke cigarettes, use "mesc" and engage in casual promiscuous sex (Grayner is said to frequent brothels), the Siraqis refrain, having what is said to be a "puritanical" culture.  (Christopher never uses the words "Islam" or "Muslim," just like he never uses "socialism" or "fascism.")

Like the Siraqis, Dinkhul is critical of the managerial states and to some extent lives outside of them.  His TV channel represents "one of the few remaining strands of capitalism in the modern world," he tells Grayner, and he complains that the society of the managerial states is decadent, pointing out the failure to colonize Mars and Venus though the technology to do so is available (Raymond F. Jones in The Cybernetic Brains also used the failure to explore space as a sign that a socialistic high-tech society had fallen into decadence.)  We later learn that Dinkhul, besides being a broadcaster, is a bigwig in an underground organization trying to undermine the managerial system, The Society of Individualists.  This group doesn't have a plan to take over, they just want to see the whole managerial system fall apart, assuming what comes next will be better.

I guess those are the Siraqis on their diamond-powered flying machines

Grayner's managerial is United Chemicals, and his superiors transfer him to Cali to take the place of some other diamond expert, Humayun, who got killed in a boating accident.  Grayner falls in love with Humayun's (now his) assistant, Sara Koupol.  Koupol, like Humayun, is a political refugee who fled from Siraq; her father, a history professor, escaped Siraq with her.  Sara thinks Grayner's predecessor was murdered, and when she disappears before Grayner can even get in her pants (damn her puritanical Siraqi upbringing!) her father purportedly commits suicide.  Of course, Grayner and we readers think all these people have been kidnapped or murdered.

Much of the book consists of Grayner being cajoled or kidnapped by Dinkhul's Individualists or one managerial or another, all of them trying to convince Grayner to work for them.  Again and again Grayner is liberated from captivity at one managerial by another managerial or by the Society of Individualists--in this book people are always getting put to sleep by gas or drugged drinks or hit on the head by blunt instruments and then waking up in the custody of some other faction.  People in this book are also always putting on disguises, and members of one managerial keep turning out to be moles or turncoats who are in fact working for a different faction. When Grayner is "reunited" with Sara Koupol, Dinkhul, after some days, exposes this woman as an impostor (no wonder she was putting out!)  This is the kind of book in which the protagonist is carried along by the winds of fate and manipulated by mysterious forces--until the very end Grayner doesn't make any decisions, figure out any mysteries, or defeat any foes; Grayner does not drive the plot in any way, he is merely its passenger.

Anyway, all the managerials want Grayner (and Humayun and Sara Koupol) under their control because everybody realizes that they are on the brink of figuring out how to turn diamonds into a super efficient power source and super powerful weapon--if one managerial gets this power before the rest it will be able to rule the world.  Dinkhul, who I guess is like the book's conscience and Christopher's spokesman, tries to preserve Greyner's freedom to choose his own way while hoping Greyner will not stand in the way of a collapse of managerial society.

Loosely affiliated with the Society of Individualists is an underground cult of religious fanatics known as the Cometeers who think the appearance of a comet in the sky is a sign that managerial society is about to fall.  (You probably know that comets are associated with the crisis of the collapse of the Roman Republic and the Norman conquest of England.)  The managerials tolerate the Cometeers, and their revival-style meetings provide a cover for the Society of Individualists' own smaller meetings.  In the last 30 pages of the 159-page novel Dinkhul leads Greyner on a country-wide tour of Cometeer groups, seeking clues about the whereabouts of Sara Koupol.  As the puritanism of the Siraqis contrasts with the indulgence in drugs and promiscuous sex of the managerials, so the ecstatic Cometeers provide a contrast to the passionless managerials--on their faces Greyner sees "a concentration, a passion, which he never remembered seeing anywhere."  Dinkhul and Greyner get kidnapped again, and this time taken to Siraq--it turns out the Cometeers are being financed by the Siraqis as a means of further undermining the managerials.  We learn that Humayun, Sara Koupol and Professor Koupol have taken over Siraq in a palace coup, built the diamond-based super weapon, and are going to take over the world.  Greyner has to decide if he will try to alert the managerials and save the (drug-addled, corrupt and static) West from the (semi-capitalistic, imperialistic and puritannical) East, or just settle down with Sara and live a happy life with her as a member of the world's new ruling class.  

When I bought Planet in Peril, and when I started reading it, I had hopes it would be an exciting adventure story and/or a human drama.  I was disappointed because it is a kind of satire of and meditation on modern Western life, religion, radicalism and conservatism.  (I didn't realize it at first, but the character's names have an allegorical ring--Grayner, Ledbetter, Raven, etc.  Is "Humayun" supposed to reminded us of "houyhnhnm?")  Do I agree with Christopher that individualistic capitalist societies are more vital and productive than bureaucratic collectivist ones?  Of course I do.  Do I agree that while religion is a scam, it brings structure, meaning and even joy into people's lives?  You bet.  Does my agreement with what I think Christopher is trying to say here mean I loved this novel?  No way.

Sad!

Planet of Peril's plot, characters, and tone are weak.  The story conveys no emotion--all of the characters remain calm and detached, either gently ironic like Dinkhul or, even worse, cold fish like Grayner. Perhaps by design (to show how a technocratic society saps the life and emotion out of people), perhaps due to incompetence, Christopher's characters have no passion and the story develops no tension.  We don't get any sense that Dinkhul really hates the static collectivist society of the managerials or that Grayner deeply or ebulliently loves Koupol or is bitter or angry about the way the various factions are manipulating him.  The stakes feel low because the different factions don't threaten or bribe Grayner, and none of the characters gets shot at or risks death or maiming--looking back, I suspect that all the scenes of people getting knocked unconscious were played for laughs, though I didn't laugh.  The lack of feeling and danger makes the book flat and boring.

The scene I quoted as an epigraph to this blog post, in which Dinkhul and Raven (head of Atomics) both try to sway Grayner, reminded me of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, in which a representative of modern liberalism and a representative of religious and communist radicalism compete for the soul of a bland middle-class guy. The book as a whole reminded me of Anthony Burgess's satiric The Wanting Seed, which I also found didn't inspire in me much feeling.  Planet of Peril, however, suffers in comparison to The Wanting Seed because while Christopher is subtle (to be kind) or limp (if you want to be harsh about it), Burgess is loud, sharp, edgy.  Burgess just comes right out and tells you homosexuals are disgusting and that English people are superior to Third Worlders and lays his theories about history and religion right on the table for you to see.  This is a way to generate excitement, or at least interest, in your novel if it lacks human drama and tension.  Christopher's Planet in Peril, unfortunately, though it has a provocative theme (Muslims armed with a super weapon are going to conquer the world, and we decadent Westerners should welcome it!) isn't stirring or captivating because it is too soft and too vague.

Barely acceptable.

"What you're doing to Tony there--can you justify that as satisfying a need?"

"Of course I can.  The need for innovation.  It's as potent as the need for sex, or for power."

Against his rationalizations I could only range a deep, instinctive repugnance.

As a kid growing up in Northern New Jersey I spent lots of time riding in the car on Route 80, travelling between home and my maternal grandmother's house. Nana, as we called her, had lots of cool old toys that I now see in antique stores, a round tin box full of like 12 pounds of fascinating buttons for us to sift through, and a bookcase full of hardcover books, including an encyclopedia published during World War II that, among other things, had black and white reproductions of Charles R. Knight paintings under the dinosaur entries, and a lot of those Reader's Digest Condensed Books. I bring this up not just because I like reminiscing about my prosaic childhood, but because it appears (according to this page at the New York Review of Books website) that critically acclaimed SF author D. G. Compton has done work for Reader's Digest Condensed Books as an editor and as a condenser!

Compton's first science fiction book published in America was 1968's Synthajoy, and this week I read my copy, the Ace Science Fiction Special edition with the cover by the Dillons.  I liked Compton's Steel Crocodile when I read it in July, so I expected to like this one as well, and I was not disappointed.  Joachim Boaz read Synthajoy in 2011 (check out his review here) and on this topic we are in close agreement--he also quite liked it.

Synthajoy is presented in the form of a first-person narrative from Thea Cadence, a nurse and the wife of Edward Cadence, a doctor and the co-inventor of Sensitape. The text switches back and forth between a day to day narrative of her confinement in a mental hospital, and flashbacks to what I think of as "the main plot," the story of the development of Sensitape and of Thea's relationships with Edward and with electronics expert Tony Stech, the other half of the Sensitape development team. The irony is that Thea is now receiving the very Sensitape treatment she helped devise with her husband Edward and his partner Tony!

Synthajoy sees use of literary or "New Wavey" techniques, like a sentence typed in undulating curves instead of on a level line, passages written in the form of a film script or a play, and sections and chapters that end in the middle of a sentence--many of these sentences are never completed.  Most importantly, the main plot is not related in strict chronological order.

The main plot: An increasing number of people in overcrowded England have come to feel life is not worth living, and they just lay down and, after a few weeks, even though their bodies are perfectly healthy, die. The medical professionals call this "Uncompensated Death Wish," or UDW, and over a million people a year are dying of it!  Edward and Thea Cadence treat UDW cases, one of whom is the Jewish owner of an electronics shop, Jacob Stech. Jacob's death inspires his son, Tony, to devote his electronics expertise to curing the disease, and together Edward and Tony invent a machine that cures UDW, Sensitape. Sensitape is a system by which people's thoughts and feelings are recorded and can be played back for others via a headset; the first tape, called Relaxatape, plays a recording of the brain waves of a person at peace, and the brainwaves of those who "listen" to the tape conform to the recording, forcing them to relax. Millions of lives are saved from UDW through use of such therapeutic tapes and Edward becomes a national hero, but the Sensitape team doesn't stop there.  Soon Edward and Tony are at the head of a major commercial enterprise, recording tapes of all kinds of experiences, from artistic creation to sexual intercourse, and selling the tapes and the machines needed to play them not only to medical institutions for therapeutic use, but also on the retail market for entertainment purposes.

While not a scientist herself, Thea is instrumental in the development of Sensitape; for one thing, she introduces Tony to Edward, suggesting that Tony ("the electronics king of West London") could be of assistance in overcoming apparently insuperable technical challenges faced by Edward.  As Thea begins to doubt the morality of Senistape, her essential role in its development burdens her with tremendous guilt. ("All this, the whole hellish structure, is my fault....I could have altered the fate of the human race.")  As she sits at the machinery with Edward and Tony while they record the brain waves of a couple having sex, she becomes vomitously ill.  She is in physical contact with a dying priest as his last thoughts are recorded and is a witness to Edward convincing musicians and artists to have their acts of performance and creation recorded.  And then there is a scene which explicitly tells us Sensitape is something like drug abuse, when gangsters who control the European heroin and cocaine trade knock on the Cadences' door and, guns drawn, demand they be given a cut of the profits of Sensitapes sold as a narcotic substitute because this product is driving the drug dealers out of business.

We've seen this sort of thing, artificial dreams or recorded thoughts used as therapy or entertainment/pornography/addictive substance more than once over the course of this blog's life, in numerous early '70s Barry Malzberg stories, in Lin Carter's 1968 "The Thief of Thoth", and Evelyn Lief's 1972 "Every Fourth House."  New Jersey's own Malzberg, one of the premier critics and historians of science fiction, in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, cites Peter Phillips as being the first to do this sort of thing back in 1948.

The human part of the plot concerns how Edward's and Thea's marriage is a cold sham, how Edward starts having an affair with the woman known as Mrs. X (the woman who was recorded for the sex tape--she has perhaps the highest sex drive in Britain!) and then Thea starts an affair with Tony.  Everything comes to a head after Tony dies in an experiment in which he "listens to" an experimental tape which Edward has prepared, Synthajoy, a tape which synthesizes various pleasurable and ecstatic experiences to create the ultimate pleasure, and Thea has a bad reaction to a recording of the emotions of a genius conductor leading his orchestra--she can feel the love of the genius for Brahms, and it makes her feel like an abominable interloper. ("To experience the tape was to trespass on that love....")  Edward is murdered; Thea tells us that Mrs. X, wanting to renegotiate her sex tape contract for a bigger share of the profits, killed Edward so she could steal the contract, but Thea herself is convicted of the crime. (All this adultery, murder, and murder trial jazz perhaps reflects Compton's career as a mystery novelist.)  Thea is sentenced to confinement in the very hospital for which she did interior design and subjected to the very sort of therapy she helped develop, compelled to experience tapes designed to induce contrition...or is it guilt?

In the last pages of the novel we realize how mentally unstable and how unreliable a narrator Thea may really be when she provides a different version of the story of the murder, we learn the truth(?) about her alleged frigidity, and, after spending the whole book talking about how she hates Sensitape and what it has done to British society ("hellish structure") and how she looks down on profit seekers ("To buy (with money) what Beldik had recorded (for money) was to compound a moral felony"), she declares she will perfect Synthajoy--the ultimate Sensitape!--and make a bazillion pounds selling it, apparently to get revenge on Mrs. X.  (Shades of Winston Smith!) To what extent has Thea always been flawed, and to what extent has the Sensitape therapy/punishment/brainwashing turned her into the troubled person we have spent this book with?

Synthajoy is a good novel and I enjoyed it.  The characters and their relationships are all believable and interesting, and all the literary touches (the somewhat experimental stuff I've mentioned, and also more conventional things like detailed descriptions of rooms and landscapes) aren't just showoffy frippery that obscure the narrative, but actually make the book more engaging.

Back of my copy

The science fiction elements are alright, but are secondary to the human drama.  The obvious novels to compare Synthajoy to are Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, but while those novels create rich fictional worlds and address, head on, important political and philosophical debates, in Synthajoy Compton doesn't really describe a world much different than our own or make a very direct or convincing moral or political argument.  The reviews from UK periodicals quoted on the back of my copy claim the novel is "horrifying" and "hair-raising," but I didn't feel that it was all that "horrifying" myself.  The England depicted by Compton isn't some kind of totalitarian nightmare; it seems like everybody whose brainwaves are recorded on Sensitapes, and most everybody who uses Sensitapes, is doing so voluntarily.  (As a convicted murderer, Thea is the exception.)

Compton's gripe seems to be that the people who produce the tapes are doing so for money, and that those using them are decadent sheep, the prey of manipulative sleaze merchants; Compton's complaints about Sensitape are reminiscent of the evergreen complaints we hear about drugs, pornography, television, rock and roll, comic books, etc., that these are shallow forms of addictive entertainment that turn their consumers into soulless zombies, or at least fail to elevate them the way high brow or wholesome art is reputed to by the intellectual elite or moral arbiters.  Synthajoy is an attack on capitalism and on innovation for innovation's sake, on business and science run amuck, and Compton's case is not based on logic or evidence or historical analogy--it is based on irrational emotion, the "instinctive repugnance" expressed by Thea in the lines I chose as an epigraph for this blog post.

A clue that the book is taking a conservative stand based on tradition or prejudice or some kind of "precautionary principle" is that the book's villains, those who keep promoting Sensitape and keep pushing the envelope, accuse Thea, our heroine, of being a prude, a puritan, or a reactionary, while calling themselves "progressive" and trumpeting how they are serving mankind even as they claw and scrape for money and fame.  

There are lots of thought-provoking things going on in Compton's book that are worth talking about.  As a man, the author takes a risk in writing a first-person narrative in the voice of a woman; and when I say "risk" I basically mean a risk that women will find his depiction of a woman unconvincing and that feminists in particular might consider it an outrageous act of misrepresentation or cultural appropriation.  (Let me repeat that from my perspective the character of Thea is convincing and compelling.) On the one hand, Compton does things with Thea that feminists may appreciate: her husband uses her to advance his career, he can be dismissive of her, and he can fail to recognize her contributions.  There's a good scene in which Thea enters the room where Edward and Tony are working on their invention; the men just met this very day, but Thea finds she is already treated as an outsider by them--among men she is "the other" despite her essential contributions and her previous relationships with them.  On the other hand, Thea says stuff like "No more or less than men, women judge you, dominate you, flatter you, compete with you.  But unlike men, their motives are unfathomable," her frigidity is a major plot point, she is a victim, she acts kind of hysterical, and much of what she tells us may be a self-serving lie.

While relationships between the sexes are at the center of the novel, there are also issues of race, ethnicity, and cultural difference presented in Synthajoy, and I have to admit I am not sure why these issues were presented (though I have a theory!).  The Steches, Jacob and Tony, are Jewish, and Thea's attitude about Jews is to see them as a sort of exotic species.  "I'd seen him [Tony] and his father together--there was a feeling between them my hospital experience had already shown me to be peculiarly Jewish."  After Jacob's death, Thea goes to visit Tony's shop: "I was there because I was cold, and already dead, and I wanted to see how Jews kept warm and alive."

There is also a minor black character, Dr. Mbleble, the giant ("six feet seven, with neck and shoulders like a big black bull") Nigerian sexologist who diagnoses Thea as being sexually dysfunctional because of what he calls "the repressive puritanism Mrs. Cadence was brought up under."  I probably don't have to tell you that the oversexed Negro is a sort of cliche.

My aforementioned theory is that a minor subtext of Synthajoy is of non-Christian, non-English people changing English society, and not changing it for the better.  Tony basically invented the Sensitape that changes English society in ways Thea finds so objectionable, and Mbleble spars with Thea's lawyer at her murder trial--he not only represents sexual license, but is a threat to her freedom.  The idea of the Jew as influencer is highlighted by this line: "'No strings,' he [Edward] said, spreading his hands in Tony's Jewish way."  Tony's "Jewish ways" are infecting English Edward!

I've already told you I see Synthajoy as an attack on capitalism and the profit motive, and I probably don't have to tell you that for centuries a standard trope among anti-Semites has been the image of the Jew as the cunning and ruthless businessman. Well, late in the novel we realize Jews aren't the only category of people Thea finds exotic and fascinating:

I occupied my time observing the other members of the board, businessmen, a phenomenon I had only recently come into contact with.  Everything about them fascinated me, the way they worked, what they thought, the faces they made.  Merchants, with merchants' eyes.

Here I will note that Mrs. X, another threat to Thea, is also a foreigner, though not a particularly exotic one; she is an American.  The United States, of course, is seen by many people as a sort of archetypal capitalist country, and it is common for people to characterize the U. S. A. as a place where the only thing that matters is money. According to my theory, the Jew, the American, and the black represent a new English culture, one based on technology, profit-seeking and sensuality that is killing the old English culture based on things like Christianity and classical music (over the course of the book a priest dies and a musician has a stroke in Thea's presence) and the heroism of people like Horatio Nelson, whose column is mentioned a few times. Maybe we should see this as a bourgeois or popular revolution against society's traditional elites?

As I have suggested, to me these (perhaps unsavory) elements of Thea's personality and/or Compton's beliefs serve to make her and the book more interesting, but it seems possible that other residents of our early 21st century might find them, as the kids say, "problematic."  Your humble blogger does not hesitate to recommend Synthajoy; it is a smooth and entertaining read without any fat or fluff that is also thought-provoking and rewards close attention.  Worth the time of anybody at all interested in "literary" SF or SF that touches on psychological or gender or race issues.