Edwin Drood and the Magician's Hand

 Dickens knew that you would know exactly who killed Edwin Drood, and that doesn't matter, because the magician has already told you you're about to witness a trick, but you can't look away from the hand anyway, even as the other hand steals your watch and conceals the ace.

So forget that The Mystery of Edwin Drood isn't finished—deep down, you know what happens anyway—and remember that Dickens isn't there to found the long line of detective puzzles games, meant to snap together in an instant only when the reading is done, because Drood has already drawn you into a maze of illusions, and the reversal is that the thing you thought you had to figure out is not the mystery before you.

Perhaps no one is what they seem: the genteel choir-master is an opium addict, but that's just the first card. The confident young gentleman-protagonist is a victim, gone with all his flaws. The childish, pretty girl is sensible and compassionate. The staid boarding school mistress is a social butterfly. The dusty lawyer is a closet romantic (of course he was in love with Rosa's mother). The exotic orphans, brother and sister, will swap roles and identities. They're all masters of disguise, except the one person who really is in disguise, right Dick Datchery?

And Cloisterham, the staid, quiet, dusty cathedral town? Well, most of that dust is from monuments and corpses. Seen through Durdles' eyes, Cloisterham is a sepulcher, concealing death as much as the cathedral elevates solid English Christianity. And remote? Perhaps, but the toxic traces of empire are everywhere—tea, china, spices, exotic preserves, opium itself are products of imperial trade. The predictable, conventional racism that Jasper leverages to land suspicion on Neville Landless is itself just a thin cover, a pretext, to deflect from how deeply every part of of old England, the nostalgic version that Cloisterham would seem to celebrate, is compromised and transformed by (and complicit in) Victoria's sprawling empire, from Sri Lanka to Egypt.

Dickens never made it back to London and never finished the manuscript, but every time you go back to it, you're struck by how the structure of the murder is already there; it's the world itself that's a labyrinth of images, every character a mystery.

Technical metaphors -- A Scanner Darkly

Sometimes, the locus of meaning in science fiction isn't in the "world-building", the broad setting and social and idealogical conditions, but in the specific technologies applied, which can appear almost incidental. 

Consider Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly. It's about addiction, of course, and also dissociation and paranoia, but in the glimmer of the scanner we also trace the scramble suit. The scramble suit reads at first like an interesting gadget, a narrative convenience. It encloses the wearer, flashing a blurred sequence of faces and features at high frequency, scrambling the identity of the wearer, making them anonymous, unidentifiable. Convenient, because the identity of the undercover officer is perfectly concealed, even from other police.

But I'm reminded of something I thought of reading this essay, "Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans", because in the scramble suit you're a fake person because you're concealed, digitized, anonymized, like any number of pseudo-persons who might be online right now generating posts and tweets and instas and reels, pushing copy-and-paste opinions and misinformation that may or may not come from a "real" person or support a real, human agenda. And so, as the cop in the scramble suit can look at the junkie in the scanner and start to forget that they're the same person because they're pretending to be different people all the time, we're not wholly authentic individuals any more; not caught between the real and the fake but increasingly uncertain and paralyzed by not being able to tell the difference.

A Scanner Darkly is much concerned with this dissociation and its corollary, paranoia, and the incoherent patterns of thought that accompany it, but it doesn't spend any time considering the reasons for addiction, only the technical consequences. Substance D, the fictional drug with an unknown source, breaks down the connection between the hemispheres of the brain, bifurcating the individual mind, and so throughout the book we have these mirror-pairs trapped in the darkened scanner: cops and dealers, straights and junkies.

If there's a hint for the reason for Substance D, it lies in the gap between our technological, mediated, scrambled selves and a longing for connection and authenticity we can no longer achieve.

Ubik - Philip K. Dick

One of the most compelling scenes in Philip K. Dick's Ubik is a struggle simply to walk upstairs, to find a place of rest: a fight against inertia, fatigue, the pure malice of entropy. Reading this scene during the pandemic, after seeing harrowing accounts of the fever and weakness that COVID-19 inflicts, the scene gains a terrible resonance.

At other times, Ubik might seems  prescient for its distillation of routine capitalism into endless payment for trivial services, such as the coin-operated doors and coffee-makers, presaging the economy of micro-transactions and in-app payments. But this, like the plot that sets emergent “psi” powers against their natural, effect limiting counterparts or “anti-psi” operations is simply part of the scaffolding, the incidental background for a more profound and deliberate consideration of how worlds are made and unmade, and what happens when our physical, moral, and even temporal realities begin to unravel. 

It’s striking that the forces of entropy are yoked to malice and cruelty in Ubik, just at a time now when reactionary politics in the US are also heedlessly erasing or countermanding progressive reforms in an attempt to wind the clock back to an era of “greatness” that never applied. In contrast, the cure-all “Ubik” seems to come from a humanizing impulse to heal and restore, an almost spiritual impulse to resist the death urge: “watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life.”

And yet, as in most of Dick’s work, for every action there is a reaction, for every reality a counter-reality, and the tension between life and half-life is never wholly decided. Perhaps this is why Ubik is both fascinating and unsettling — we’ll never quite know where our world stands; the only valid choice is what we’ll fight for, what we need to resist.

The Last Battle

Beginnings are tentative, difficult, subtle. Few parts of your work face as much revision, as much rewriting, than beginnings. 

Endings, on the other side, roar in and seem to compose themselves, inevitable, like the cresting of a wave.

This is how endings should be. Lay the ground, set the pieces in motion, the end game will play out itself. 

As I've grown older, as a reader I've found it harder and harder just to finish a book I like, not through dislike of the task, but because the pleasure of reading, discovery, is something I want to sustain. 

As a writer, the agony of ending a piece is the constant stream of distractions that break the whole into fragments of work, and the awareness that the measured end-game also requires its own patience, its own pacing. But of course, the ending is never the end of the writing task, only the point where you go back to review and revise again.

When Bilbo gets to the end of The Hobbit, he has his share of the treasure. All he has to do is get it back across the Mirkwood, the Misty Mountains, and the wilds of Eriador again. 

What have other found at the end?

Childish Audacity - The Secret Agent

I've mentioned elsewhere Conrad's masterwork of urban terror, political agitation, anarchism and authority, The Secret Agent. His portrait of the the shabby. monstrous Professor, the essential suicide bomber, is both relevant and terrifyingly familiar to us today. But The Secret Agent is also a domestic tragedy played out as a bitter farce, with deep insights that continue to cut against contemporary conditions.

One phrase, among many, struck me as notable: "Barefaced audacity amounting to childishness of a particular sort". Anyone who has had to witness the absurd contortions about the Ukraine scandal, the unforgivable betrayal of the Kurds, or the pointless provocation of Iran, will recognize this phrase as eerily applicable. On one level it means that malice and folly are never far apart – "Oft evil will shall evil mar" as Tolkien would have it – and there is, in our current discourse, a dangerous tendency to ascribe deeper motives or at least clarity of purpose to what is in fact mere lying, blundering, and cruelty when the liars have the power to frighten and appall us.

But beyond that, every character in The Secret Agent is locked into a form of childishness. For like Stevie, the man-child and first victim of the misguided terror-attack, every character is trapped in their own perceptions, their own circle of thoughts and fears and illusions, and none of them, not even the policeman, has the clear insight to regard another human being with accuracy. This is, of course, the basis of the novel's dramatic irony — we are all secret agents, operating only to ourselves, opaque to others.

Ready Player One - Ernest Cline

My water-damaged, crumpled copy of Ernest Cline's geek friendly science-fiction adventure Ready Player One certainly now looks like a vacation read, and as an entertaining ride that ultimately offers few challenges to the reader, a vacation read is probably the best summary of its qualities. In this case, appearance and reality coincide.

Which is not to say that the premise, an extended dive through a global virtual-reality game that has come to stand in for the Internet in search of a departed billionaire's fortune is not both intriguing and well-executed. The execution of the plot is pitch-perfect, and the near-future dystopia, in which the energy crisis and global warming have driven human beings into the refuge of a virtual world, is intriguing. But the game ultimately proves more compelling than the characters' fictional reality, and so as speculative fiction, Ready Player One falls short.

The quest for the Easter Egg buried in the vast, shared virtual-reality world of OASIS, which grants access to the entire game as well as its creator's legacy, is as much a tour of Geek culture as the story itself. No movie title or song goes by without its due, reverent, acknowledgement. The products of Eighties geek culture, from arcade games to D&D to Monty Python to John Hughes' movies, all get their moment on screen, but there's no lightness of touch or satire in Cline's relentless referencing. This means that, firstly, the culture is predominantly the dominant culture of US media and games, but that Cline also conveniently leaps over cyberpunk, over Willam Gibson (Neuromancer, 1984) over Philip K. Dick, over the all the science fiction and culture of the 80s and beyond that has taken the same ideas about reality and virtual reality, the real and the fake, but questioned them with much more rigor and effect.

The effect of this is that as speculative fiction, Ready Player One falls enticingly short. The real world of the novel, including stacks of mobile homes that make for compelling cover art on my water-damaged edition, with its collapsing energy economy, galloping inequality, and corporate slavery, is intriguing, but Cline never attacks these themes head on, and the ramifications of the tension between material realities and virtual realities are handled more predictably than analytically. Although Wade's online best friend does turn out to be black, female, and gay, rather than a white gamer bro, this is no surprise, and Wade's love interest remains "the girl", minor blemishes aside. Wade and his friends fight and hack a murderous corporate entity to win the prize, but the fact is the prize is.... control over an even more ubiquitous corporate entity.

The end of the novel makes a gesture towards rejecting the virtual reality that Wade has always used as an escape from a collapsing world, but this is only possible because Wade and his friends have mastered the Geekosphere and escaped from virtual reality to the even more tenuous reality of the ultra-rich. They may choose to save the world at this stage, but never ask what world, exactly, is worth rescuing. Other works in the same vein, such as Charles Yu's sardonic "Hero Absorbs Major Damage" (of which I hope to say much more) bring a sharper critical eye to bear in less space.

Which is not to diminish the fun of this airplane read, but only to observe that Ready Player One would be stronger, and more memorable, if its contemporary cyber-nostalgia was tempered with more of the spirit of cyberpunk.

Unfinished, not unread

I firmly believe that writers should be readers, that reading is an act of faith in writing and essential to the craft.

And while I dislike leaving a book unfinished, it sometimes happens that, due to work, writing, or other contingencies, a book has to be set aside. Sometimes, this is because a book is dull, unreadable, or impossible, but mostly not.

At the moment, I'm coming close to the end of a revision of A Hangman for Ghosts, and so I have less time than usual for reading. But, as a record of my efforts, here are three partial reviews of three books started and left behind, through no clear fault of their own.

The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton

I owe a significant debt of allegiance to this, an historical novel, also a literary mystery, by a New Zealand author. It is a considerable work, with a deep and complex narrative, rich structure, and sensitive voice. It probably deserves greater attention that I could spare at the time.

Catton's model for the Victorian multi-plot novel, however, is not Dickens but George Eliot. Middlemarch springs to mind, for the breadth interaction and the close attention to the minutia of human interaction. The danger here, for Catton, is that much like Eliot she often describes the secret key, the inner nature of her characters, in subtle terms, but – unlike Eliot – she cannot quite reflect the inner character in their outer actions.

The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro

A literary fantasy by a significant author. Certainly there is something haunting and evocative about his post-Roman Britain, a land where fantastical beasts and terrors are real, and where the culture is as contained and occasionally fearful as the upper-classes of England before the Second World War, or in 1930s Shanghai. But there is, I think, a limit to the effectiveness of Ishiguro's rigorously affectless prose. His characters may have fenced off their memories and feelings, but in a world of magic and looming strangeness, should their feelings also be fenced off so effectively from us?

The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss

Completing the move to more commercial fantasy, The Name of the Wind is engaging, highly readable, a perfect traveling companion (which is how I started reading it). The fictional world suggests depth and interest, and the work is well-written, occasionally poetic, which serves it well. Unlike Ishiguro, however, Rothfuss does not quite grasp the mindset of the pre-technological, mythic era he describes, and occasionally lapses into odd anachronisms, or drops modern phrases ("Okay" is particularly jarring) into his dialogue. If Rothfuss has embraced the need to make his imagined world coherent and believable, it seems to have been imposed from the outside rather than growing from an inward imaginary.

But, as the book moves on, it begins to solidify some of the cliches that it appears at first to eschew, and attention wanes. The hero at first becomes a Harry Potter-esque magical prodigy, complete with a visible physical tell, is then violently orphaned, then finds his way to the University (of magic – which operates more like a modern American college than a medieval school), and then teaches a lesson to the stuffy and insular faculty, and so on. This may indeed be an "adult Harry Potter", but others, such as A Wizard of Earthsea or The Magicians sequence, have made more original work of this.

Since this book is still unfinished, the summary is partial and unfair. My biggest hope is that eventually Rothfuss will begin to unwind the tropes he summons.

A thought about metaphors

All fictions, all fictional worlds, are to some degree extended metaphors. Recently, I've had reason to wonder how metaphors work, and that kind of work they do. We all sense that through the process of reading we not only gain an experience but discover, or recover, something. But what kind of meaning or knowledge is this, and how does the metaphor generate this response?

For a long time I was much taken with a remark by Umberto Eco: “What… is known is what a language has already said, and it is possible to recognize a metaphor that demands unprecedented operations, and the identification of semes not yet identified” (Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 122), which suggest to me that the telling metaphor can produce a realization or sense of ideas not already known. Eco’s discussion is dense with pseudo-mathematic notation, but the idea that a metaphor that is not closed can prompt the identification of a new meaning is a powerful one.

More recently, I came across this remark by David Gelernter in his essay “Machines that Will Think and Feel” that metaphors and the experiences they encapsulate are indexed, arrayed in memory, by emotion:

The poet Rilke compares the flight of a small bird across the evening sky to a crack in a smooth porcelain cup. How did he come up with that? Possibly by using the fact that these very different things made him feel the same way.
Emotion is a hugely powerful and personal encoding-and-summarizing function. It can comprehend a whole complex scene in one subtle feeling. Using that feeling as an index value, we can search out—among huge collections of candidates—the odd memory with a deep resemblance to the thing we have in mind. 

A striking or difficult metaphor generates an complex emotion that in turn points to another related thought curated by the same subtle emotion. In other words, it is how we feel about a metaphor that brings other metaphors, other possibilities of meaning to mind.

Are these two notions aligned? The best metaphor draws us both beyond ourself and within ourself to find a connection between things we could not previously describe. This connection is an authentic discovery, forged through memory and imagination; it extends beyond what has already been said, the given properties of the language, to see things differently, to say what we can't yet say, to connect and enrich our inner and outer worlds.

We need to talk about Conrad

Clive James's recent essay on re-reading Joseph Conrad reminds me of a writer I have not read consistently for over a decade, but whose work, like Dickens', has a persistent influence. I have on my shelves a rather fine hard-bound collection of Conrad's major works: the best of which, not counting the superb Heart of Darkness, are Lord Jim and Nostromo.

As James points out, Conrad's work anticipates with startling clarity the grand terrors of the modern world: revolution and totalitarianism, political violence, terrorism, and the disorder we see presently from Africa to the Middle-east and beyond. Whereas Dickens turned his fiercest satire on his contemporaries, Conrad focused his irony on colonialism and what we might class as issues of globalization, the open, shifting world of the seafarer.

It strikes me that Conrad anticipated so much: in Nostromo the "material interest" in the great silver mine that dominates the novel and drives the central conflict could stand as a precursor to our  corrupting material interest in fossil fuels, the toxic treasure trove of the Middle-east. As Mrs. Gould realizes at the end of the novel,  the colonial intervention, even when idealistic and successful, is also a form of oppression: "She saw the San Tome mountain hanging over the Campo, over the whole land, feared, hated, wealthy; more soulless than any tyrant, more pitiless and autocratic than any government; ready to crush innumerable lives in the expansion of its greatness." This is a strange prescience into Western interventions: as these material interests bring both wealth and "development", they also corrupt the best moral intentions, sowing the seeds of resistance and revolution, and pitiless conflict, in return.

Conrad's ability to wed the action and danger of a thriller to substantial moral scope and purpose, to show without judging, to examine evil as well as good without flinching or hedging, is a heavy challenge for any writer. In his characters we often see how idealism, the illusion which we create to sustain our sense of self, also leaves us blind to the fatal realities of ourselves and others. It's certainly time to revisit Conrad and remind ourselves just how precise his insights were.

Leafing through Nostromo, I realized that several characters in A Hangman for Ghosts share names with characters in that novel. This was entirely unconscious, but the background to this murder mystery is a colonial venture, and the protagonist is a fallen idealist. I hope the reader will of course see one or two Dickensian ghosts in the story, but I wonder now how the spirit of Conrad inhabits the novel as well.

The Sword in the Stone - T. H. White

Tolkien, I recall, had reservations about Lewis's blending of inconsistent sources and traditions in the Narnia stories: Roman fauns and Greek centaurs against Nordic wolves and a White Witch, for instance. But I wonder what he made of T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone, an extraordinary melange of elements: sentimental medievalism blended with precise historical detail and conscious anachronism, children's story and searching political allegory, legend and fantasy, and comedy with a looming thread of adult tragedy.

Among those concerned with writing modern fantasy, much is made of world-building, which means the coherence and integration of the world, and the application of a realist logic to unreal categories. But as M. John Harrison has observed, fantasies are extended metaphors, idealogical and not physical landscapes, and they serve to generate interpretations, not factual consistency. In this respect, The Sword in the Stone is a novel of education, but its lessons are about encountering and integrating, without necessarily reconciling, a multitude of viewpoints.

Merlin, living backwards in time, has already seen the tragic future and the even more baffling modernity which occasionally intervenes in the text, but he can only prepare Wart for what he will discover and ultimately do as the Once and Future King. He can guide but not resolve. Wart's lessons, through Merlin's magical transformations, are often about the burden of power, and his encounters, such as with the mordant pike or the mad, militaristic hawks, highlight the dangers of tyranny and the moral price of authority. If the fantasy England of the narrative is but a nostalgic rendering, this serves to highlight that it is also lost in the past as the whole golden age of Arthurian legend is lost, that these soft edges are just a comforting illusion, but one we can't give up quite yet. This is what Merlin sees and Wart cannot, and the discrepency lends the comedy unusual poignancy and insight.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon

The principle difficulty with mystery fiction is the business of telling two stories at once. There is the leading narrative, which must be lucid as any story, composed of incidents and characters that are intelligible and reasonable to the reader, and then there is the covert narrative, built out of clues, hints and sheer misdirection that keeps pace with the primary narrative but must ultimately be unravelled and accounted for as clearly and logically as its counterpart.

Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time cleverly plays with the conventions of mystery by shifting this difficulty from the mystery (the murder of the eponymous dog) to the character of the detective. What is most engaging and moving about the novel is that it forces the reader to read its narrative as though it were a case and points to the distinction between the bare facts and meaning on which detection itself depends.

To explain: Haddon's protagonist and nominal detective, Christopher, is autistic. The condition is never named, but Christopher cannot tolerate lying, cannot read faces or parse the complex emotions that expressions communicate, and cannot tolerate figurative language, although he is an extraordinarily precise observer of facts and details, with a mathematically acute mind. Christopher's revulsion at lies is perhaps aligned with his desperate need to maintain distinction, order and unambiguity in the face the overwhelming stream of reality. His memory for facts and details makes him, in the Holmesian mode, a perfect observer, potentially a perfect detective. All this we understand by inference and reading.

But although Christopher discovers the truth about the mystery, and thereby the suppressed truth about his own family, the solution is trivial compared to the complexity of adult emotions, needs and betrayals to which Christopher is almost completely blind. As a detective, Christopher can uncover the means, but the motives are forever obscure for him. As the last pages in the book outline Christopher's mathematical proof, ending with the triumphant QED, we realise that some proofs and some mysteries will remain outside of Christopher's perceptions.

The reader's task, then, in this work, is not to puzzle out the solution but to experience Christopher's puzzlement, and to understand that though plots are resolved by logic, stories are only brought to life by imagination and sympathy.

Slow reading The Lord of the Rings: The End (and Back)

Well, I finished slow reading The Lord of the Rings, which means that part of me, like Samwise, goes home, and part of me also continues, sailing out of exile and loss to the Everlasting West. For Tolkien did not mean our visit to faerie to be settling and cosy; it was also meant to be a glimpse of something wild and fair and far, that would change us and remain out of our reach.

But for this last post, I want to talk about the whole work and the structure of reading and writing the extended process of its creation reveals. The impression of depth The Lord of the Rings creates is not located simply in the expanse of Tolkien's world-making and languages, or in the quest narrative, but also in the process of writing and reading itself. By this I mean that The Lord of the Rings changed as it was made.

The Lord of the Rings begins as a sequel to The Hobbit, in tone and content, close to the fairy-tale and the children's book, in the pastoral, pre-industrial Shire. It rapidly becomes something graver and more compelling, as glimpses of the past appear, but one of the passages that always captures my attention is the strange fox in the woods that notices the hobbits, early in the first book. The curious, anthropomorphic fox is to my mind an artefact, almost an archeological fragment, of the earlier children's book narrative.

The passage through Moria changes the book again: here there are depths beneath the earth, shadows and terrors shrouded in ages and darkness. History begins to loom more heavily over the timeless world of the fairy-tale, and the language of action as well as introspection begins to dominate.

By the time of The Return of the King, we have encountered realms and cultures far older than those of the Shire, and the archaic language and rolling, epic diction of the battle scenes pull us even further back in time. We are, in effect, reprising the narrative forms of epic and chronicle, the language of Anglo-saxon battle, as we travel into the deep time of Middle-earth.

Finally, the return to the Shire is a return to modernity, as Saruman's brutal totalitarianism (is there any other kind?) is a reflection of Sauron's absolutist spiritual tyranny. The scouring of the Shire is a necessary return but also a sort of resetting of the clock. The problem is that immersed now in a greater world, the Shire cannot remain an unchanging childhood idyll. Through Sam and Frodo, we can both come home and move on.

And so The Lord of The Rings expands and draws us through its narrative not only in terms of imagined geography or imagined history, but in the very ways of telling that it employs. To read slowly is to see these modes and how wonderfully and deftly they are woven together book by book.

You can read all the Slow Reading The Lord of the Rings posts here.