What Makes This Book So Great (42 page)

And Individ-ewe-al:

I basically don’t reread, because when I was a kid I was always overwhelmed by how many new things there were out there, rather than afraid of running out of books. Nowadays I occasionally reread my absolute favourite books.

And Atrus:

I lived pretty close to not one but three public libraries, so the concept of a limited amount of available books was—and is—completely alien to me. Like p-l, my problem at most was one of too much choice and not enough direction.

This is all very alien to me. Even though the world is full of books, I don’t want to read most of them. Even if you only count fiction, there’s a lot written in genres I don’t like, or written by authors I don’t enjoy. Also I read fast, and I read all the time. I don’t find libraries infinite—I mean I adore libraries, but I can read my way through everything I want to read in a couple of months. When I was twelve I read all the science fiction in Aberdare library in one summer: all of it, Anderson to Zelazny, in alphabetical order. These days it wouldn’t take as long, because I’d already have read most of it. And I’ve read everything by my favourite writers too, and they don’t write fast enough to keep me going. It never feels like a zero-sum game to me, it always feels as if there isn’t enough to read, and even if there is, as if tomorrow there might not be. I’ll admit I have a whole bookcase of unread books, and when I moved to Canada I had four boxes of them, labelled: “Misc Readpile,” “More Misc Readpile,” “The Further Adventures of Misc Readpile” and “Misc Readpile Goes West.” One or two of the books from those boxes may still be on my unread shelves.

Even when I have plenty of books, and access to libraries, that doesn’t mean that I’ll be able to put my hand on the kind of thing I want to read this minute. Re-reading always gives me that. There’s a pleasure in reading something new, certainly, but there’s also pleasure in revisiting old friends. I think I’ve said before that I consider the first re-read of a book the completion of the reading experience, I don’t really know how I feel about a book until I come back to it. I feel that something worth reading only once is pretty much a waste of time.

My ideal relationship with a book is that I will read it and love it and re-read it regularly forever. Sometimes I will know ahead of time that I’ll love it, other times it’ll be a surprise. Some books that lie around for years waiting for me to get to them later became favourites. More often I’ll pick up something because it looks interesting and then immediately read all of that new-to-me author’s backlist as fast as I can find it. I don’t do this only with fiction, there are biographers and historians whose complete works I have gulped down this way.

I think the real issue is psychological. The people I quoted at the beginning of the post feel as if reading is finite and they shouldn’t waste any time. I feel the complete opposite, that reading is infinite. Of course, some of this depends on reading speed—I read fast, and I read a lot. It’s a rare week I don’t get through at least a book every day, and some weeks a great deal more. If I’m stuck in bed it’s not unusual for me to read half a dozen books in a day. I know I’m not going to live forever, I know there are more books than I can ever read. But I know that in my head, the same way I know the speed of light is a limit. In my heart I know reading is forever and FTL is just around the corner.

On the re-reading panel at Anticipation, I said a couple of things that Kate Nepveu described as “making lemonade out of very sour lemons.” The first was that I have some unread books that are the last book, or the last book I got hold of, by favourite authors who are dead. They’re never going to write anymore, and when I’ve read that book I’ve read everything. I’m saving these books for when I get diagnosed with a terminal illness. That way, when life does become inescapably finite, I’ll have new books by favourite authors to look forward to. The other thing is, that should I not be diagnosed with a terminal illness but instead get Alzheimers, I’ll forget writing my own books and be able to read them as if for the first time, as if someone else had written them. And that will be fun too!

APRIL 14, 2010

107.
Bellona, Destroyer of Cities,
Jay Scheib’s play of Samuel Delany’s
Dhalgren

When I posted on my LiveJournal that there was a play version of
Dhalgren,
one of my friends thought it was an April Fool.
Dhalgren
’s more than 800 pages long, a cult classic, it really doesn’t seem like something that could be adapted for a stage version. Since it had been, I felt I had to go—indeed, since it was there and I could, that it would be irresponsible not to. So I went to New York on the train, and last Saturday evening ten of us went to an avant-garde theatre called The Kitchen to see
Bellona, Destroyer of Cities
.

The first thing is that it was
Dhalgren
. It felt like
Dhalgren
. What it felt like was quite familiar to me—it was just like when you go to see a Shakespeare play where they’ve cut some scenes, set it in a different period, switched the gender of some characters and conflated others. You want to argue with their choices, but that argument doesn’t stop it being a legitimate version of the play. And that’s just how this was. There were things I liked and things I didn’t like, things that worked, odd choices, things that got left out or underplayed that I’d have kept, but it was inarguably
Dhalgren,
and that’s really quite an achievement.

The set was the skeleton of buildings, with some walls present, so you could partly see in. Things happening that you couldn’t see could sometimes be seen on a big screen, so your attention was constantly divided. I often don’t like this kind of technique, but it worked really well for this material. A couple of other effective theatrical things were a character in a spacesuit being carried by two other characters as if weightless and floating, and Eddy flinging himself around and slamming himself to the floor. Most of the sex happens in flashes in the back room and is incomprehensible and multiplex, just like in the book. I loved the way we kept seeing the original
Dhalgren
cover, first on the floor behind a sex scene on the screen, and then as the cover of the poetry book.

When you reverse genders, you learn an awful lot about gender expectations. Charm, which the Kid has, is an expected quality in women, less so in men. So making her a woman made her much more conventional. The same goes for sexual receptivity—the Kid doesn’t initiate but falls into what sex comes along. I think she’s a less interesting character as female. You also lose a lot of the queer stuff, especially as they chose to leave out the threesome and the whole dynamic of that. The thing I didn’t immediately notice is that the same goes for violence. In the book, Kid is beaten up, but later is violent himself, in the Scorpion runs, and mugging a guy. Here we see the beating, but not any of the performative violence. This changes the balance. I know why they did it. There’s a way in which the plot of
Dhalgren
wraps—not just the Joycean beginning with “to wound the autumnal city” and ending with “I have come” but the parallel scenes and dialogue with the people leaving/arriving as Kid arrives/leaves. Those people are women when Kid is a man, and so it must have seemed like a great idea to have a female Kid and another iteration. But Delany had already been reversing expectations. Taking a largely passive gentle poet and making him female plays into stereotypes and expectations, not against them, and they could have done with more awareness of that.

Most of the play is very close to the book, but with very different pacing. Much of the dialogue is straight off the page. Characters are conflated, huge chunks are left out, but I could always see why they’d done it—and with all that, it’s really surprisingly true to the original.
Dhalgren
’s a book with a lot in it, and because of its Moebius spiral structure it’s hard to say what’s essential. I have no idea how comprehensible the play would have been without the novel breathing down its shoulder. But they gave us the ruined city, the spiral, the whole thing with the poetry, the elevator shaft, George and June, and the vexed question of shots and the riot.

What we didn’t have was science fiction. All the things that make
Dhalgren
take place in the vague future—the holograms, the orchids, the chain with prisms and mirrors and lenses—were left out. Instead of science fiction’s promise of answers just out of sight, the play gave us magic realism, or maybe magic surrealism. I’d been wondering how they were going to do the holograms, which are very important to the novel, and had thought of several ways that would work. I was sorry but not distressed—what bothered me was replacing the orchid with a gun. Mind you, it bothers me when they replace swords with guns in Shakespeare plays, and for the same reason—it’s a different distance of violence. Delany deliberately gives the Scorpions claws, not guns, there’s a scene in the book where they explicitly repudiate a gun. It’s strange that they got some of the hardest stuff so right and then did this. Oh well.

The actors were all very good and the doubling was clear and effective. The run is over, or I’d recommend it. Perhaps it will be revived. It was
Dhalgren,
and I’m very glad I saw it.

JUNE 4, 2010

108.
Not much changes on the street, only the faces: George Alec Effinger’s
When Gravity Fails

When Gravity Fails
was published in 1987 and its future has dated astonishingly well. Indeed, it seems much more plausible as the future of 2010 than it did when I first read it in 1988—though it doesn’t seem as if it will take as long as 2172 to get there. The Soviet Union has disintegrated at some point in the past into numerous splinter successor states. The United States has done the same, and so has the European Union, mostly splintering down beyond the country level—but Germany has reunited. The Islamic world looks on with hungry eyes. Meanwhile, everyone has a mobile phone, direct neural interfacing using modular personalities (“moddys”) and add-ons (“daddies”) is common, and gender reassignment (male to female or female to male) is optional, effective, and easy, but expensive. Marid Audran, son of a Fellahin mother and a French father, is just trying to make a living as a private investigator in an unnamed North African city somewhere east of Algiers, when his life gets complicated by a series of murders. It has barely dated at all.

I originally picked it up back in 1988 because the notion of a noir detective in an Islamic future intrigued me, and I bought it because the first paragraph just totally hooked me.

Chiriga’s nightclub was right in the middle of the Budayeen, eight blocks from the Eastern gate, eight blocks from the cemetery. It was handy to have the graveyard so close-at-hand. The Budayeen was a dangerous place and everyone knew it. That’s why there was a wall around three sides. Travelers were warned away from the Budayeen, but they came anyway. They’d heard about it all their lives and they were damned if they were going home without seeing it for themselves. Most of them came in the Eastern gate and started up the Street curiously; they’d begin to get a little edgy after two or three blocks, and they’d find a place to sit and have a drink or eat a pill or two. After that they’d hurry back the way they’d come, and count themselves lucky to get back to the hotel. A few weren’t so lucky and stayed behind in the cemetery. Like I said, it was a very conveniently located cemetery and saved trouble all around.

Effinger’s writing on the word and sentence level is just beautiful, the voice is perfect, and remains so all the way through, and the way he wraps the theme around there is what he does in the whole book. This was a book that couldn’t have happened without cyberpunk, but that itself isn’t cyberpunk. There are no hackers here, and almost no computers—though it feels reasonable for the Budayeen that there wouldn’t be. Holoporn, yes, drugs to get you up or down, prostitutes of all genders and some in between, personality modules of anything from salesmen to serial killers via sex kittens, but no computers. The Street is what comes from cyberpunk, and perhaps the neural wiring, a little. But what Effinger does with it, making it a North African street that really feels like something out of the future of another culture, is entirely his own. Effinger said the Budayeen was based on the French Quarter of New Orleans, where he lived, as much as it was based on anywhere, but it has the feel of a real place, grimy and edgy and rundown and full of the wrong sort of bars.

The detective story is just the plot that keeps everything moving. The real story is about Marid Audran’s orbit through the Budayeen and himself. He solves the mystery, both mysteries, but that’s not the most important thing. The book’s title, which sounds so solidly science-fictional, is from Dylan: “when gravity fails and negativity won’t pull you through.” This is the story of what happens to you when that happens to you. Effinger could really write and he doesn’t pull his punches—this can be disturbing, and it’s all first person and very close at hand. It’s also very clever and darkly funny.

There are two sequels,
A Fire in the Sun
and
The Exile Kiss
. They’re just as brilliantly written, but I seldom re-read them. There are two reasons for that. The first is that
When Gravity Fails
stands alone pretty well, there’s room for more, certainly, but it finishes a trajectory. The three books taken together set up a new trajectory that aches for a fourth volume, which will never be completed due to the US’s lack of a decent health care system and Effinger’s consequent early death in 2002. The other reason is that the second and third book get very bleak, and I don’t always have the fortitude for that.

JUNE 8, 2010

109.
History inside out: Howard Waldrop’s
Them Bones

Howard Waldrop is known for his imaginative and quirky short stories,
Them Bones
(1984) is his only solo novel. It’s also original and quirky and weird, and I love it to bits and always have. There’s an overall frame story about people in the dying post-nuclear horror of 2002 trying to go back in time to change the past that led to their future, but the real story is in three strands. There’s the story of Yazoo, the advance scout who winds up in an alternate world, and there’s the story of Bonnie and her group of soldiers who end up in the thirteenth century, and there’s the story of Bessie and the archaeologists in 1929 who find something quite impossible when excavating a Mound Builder mound. These three strands alternate and interweave, so by the end of the book the reader knows everything without necessarily having been told everything. What makes this book so great is Waldrop’s knowledge of history and masterful interweaving of stories to make them more than the sum of their parts.