The Satanic Verses

I finished The Satanic Verses last night. I’m sure that retrospectively, I’ll feel much more affection for this book than I did reading it, unless I’ve managed to get that idea so ingrained now that I always remember it first and foremost. There were undoubtedly some ideas of great brilliance here, and Rushdie has a pleasing writing style, a self-effacing grandiloquence, a way with words that suggests he has a mastery of the language but a modesty that allows him to mock himself and therefore prevent a wall being constructed between wright and reader. Nabokov has the same gift, but for his contemporary audience; The Satanic Verses was written in the 80s, and aside from some cardboard, slang-spouting teenagers, still has a certain degree of ‘hipness’.

The story is simple – if fantastical – and yet also convoluted. Two Indian men, both actors – one a brash movie star with heaps of arrogance and pride, the other a voice actor who’s spent his entire life trying to hide his heritage and fit in with the English he feels are to be venerated, even if the youth are spoiling the country’s proud heritage – are involved in the terrorist hijacking of a plane. After bonding, to a degree, during their captivity, they somehow survive the midair explosion and in plummeting to Earth, are transformed, characteristics to a degree swapped – the film actor Gibreel Farishta into the archangel who inspired his name, and the voice actor Saladin Chamcha (née Salahudin Chamchawala) into a demon. Then begins the protracted and uninteresting main portion of the book, in which Gibreel has fantasies of various stories of the archangel’s influence, like inspiring an entire village to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca, a minor story whose story-book ending is the perhaps the low point of the novel, and begins to think himself an angel searching for his powers and redeeming sinners while most around him think him merely delusional, while Saladin grows horns and a tail and is forced to hide inside the soap opera of an Indian family living in a café, where tradition and spirited youths intoxicated by Western concepts of freedom clash (and we’re supposed to accept that horns and halos could become feasible everyday fashion accessories), also getting mixed up in some very over-exaggerated political situations. This part is protracted and disjointed, and it’s hard to care about old ladies who see visions of invading armies only to be forgotten, and while Allie’s ascent of Everest was interesting to read about and justified when her character becomes a major part of the story, it could have had an equal impact at half the length.

The highlight of this part of the book is Gibreel’s visions of himself appearing to the prophet ‘Mahound’, giving a social and religious context to the Muhammad story with remarkable realism. It is this part that resulted in the fatwa against Rushdie and all the resultant criticism. It centres on the relationship between Muhammad and the sceptical poet Baal, first with Muhammad struggling against a polytheistic society with only a handful of followers, and later with Muhammad a powerful leader whose bloodthirsty underlings force Baal to seek refuge in a harem. It is the portrayal of Muhammad as a cold-hearted businessman, a sell-out who accepted false gods to get a foothold in the theocracy, only to retract his words later, and even as a liar who was claiming divine inspiration only to put himself above question – whose angel appeared at very convenient times to lay very convenient laws – which is understandably controversial. It seemed to me that a little more balance may have been preferable, but perhaps that would have undermined the purpose of the segments, and would have been difficult from Baal’s point of view.

The last part of the book is the worthwhile part, the conclusion of the pilgrims’ story aside. Here our main characters’ stories become truly significant, and once again it is the green-eyed monster that drives the plot, with Saladin cleverly and eerily sowing the seeds of Gibreel’s downfall. The very end is a little flat, and I don’t know why we need to have such a frank and detailed depiction of human decline just to make the point that one can die contented without believing in God, but the machinations and the execution of the plan, as well as how it ties into the title, is done with skill.

Ultimately, a book I’m glad I read, and certainly validated in stylistic terms, but it was frustrating, trepanning for gold when there was really too much sludge.

I think I’ll take a break with something nice and light. Philip Reeve’s cutesy steampunk-flavoured Larklight, then The Kite Runner, then some more silly fantasy, and then after that Anna Karenina?

Allan Stein by Matthew Stadler

Matthew Stadler didn’t give me much reason to read another one of his books after the flamboyant but hollow mess of The Sex Offender, but this book had a far better concept, tied to actual historical figures. It is the story of a teacher who loses his job after allegations of molesting a student (an idea that hadn’t occurred to him until he was accused, but which he actually undertakes once he knows he’s going to lose his job anyway, his attentions being ironically what turns the surly and miserable adolescent that his parents assumed was being abused into the happy boy they always wanted). His friend who works in a museum, Herbert, is interested in some paintings of Gertrude Stein’s nephew Allan, who may be the boy who modelled for Picasso’s famous ‘Boy Leading a Horse’, but isn’t very eager to go to Paris chasing it and agrees to let his friend go in his place, assuming his name. But the host family in France includes a beautiful fifteen-year-old boy called Stéphane, who is enchanting.

The first half of this book is really outstanding. The florid and poetic prose of The Sex Offender is hung around a clever, solid and believable, if highly ironic, plot. You realise that although portions of the book are indeed ‘pure pornography’, the boys are peripheral, filtered, objectified, much like Lolita: the adult seducing the youth tries to force them to be something they are not and they resist. At first, it is frustrating, reading about these supposed love affairs that are little more than sex and patronisation, with no actual connection between individuals, no love, but you soon realise that is the point, that it is the flaw of our protagonist, and the way Allan is peripheral and controlled by the desires of others and thus ends up a fairly pitiable figure reflects directly on what happens to the boys in the story.

However, in the second half the idea meanders. The actual scenes of seduction are fairly laughable, especially the one with the guitar. Ultimately, while showing hollow love affairs makes a strong point, they are uninteresting to read, and everything else in between, the abortive attempts to chase an obscure historical figure, feel like padding.

A gifted writer and a very good idea, but ultimately the story falls short of its potential and ends in a way that may be quite clever, but which is ultimately unsatisfying.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Like most British children, I grew up knowing the characters of gentle Mole, brash Toad, firm old Badger and the more forgettable, everyman Rat. The characters appeared on the periphery of my attention, speeches in drama classes being derived from dramatisation, BBC animated adaptations occasionally being replayed early in the mornings, simplified versions of the book lying about unread. But I had never actually picked up and read the book until I decided to on a whim back in uni. I began going to sports clubs less frequently in Cambridge, which meant I bathed less there, which finally meant that I didn’t finish the book until now. And I’m extremely glad I read it.

Grahame is just a very good, incredibly modern writer who expertly writes four instantly-recognisable characters. Crucially, though, he does not make his animals loveable and without fault, but rather flawed, silly and bumbling sorts, who have layers of complexity to them, so that the mild-mannered mole may be devious or selfish, the harmless Toad may genuinely be quite vicious, or the paternal badger may not always say the right thing. And most of all it is Ratty who grows and changes over the course of the book, from somewhat boring but well-meaning fellow to a really admirable and caring individual. Milne adapted the story for the stage, but while he may have had a better grasp of humour and innocence, his world certainly didn’t have the nuance or complexity of Grahame’s.

This is not to say that the humour here is lacking. It is abundant, and quite brilliant. Toad’s adventures are the most immediately funny, the undermining of his absurd puffery always entertaining, and there is one outstanding moment where the comedy jump-cut is pre-empted in the literary world by quite some years (though if there is a precedent I do not know), as an indiscretion immediately leads into a courtroom scene. There are many laughs to be had, though, and a great deal of warm smiles at expressions of friendship.

Even with all this praise, though, the book would have been a solid, well-written and deftly characterised little novel with just the right, loose balance between portraying its characters as humans and as animals, but for the fact that all of a sudden, the chapter ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ hits the reader directly in the centre of the forehead with such implacable force that the work becomes unforgettable. What a magnificent piece of writing, in the centre of a generally conventional little children’s story. The powerfully poetic descriptive passages, the mysticism, the hallucinogenic strangeness that no doubt inspired Pink Floyd to name their first album after the chapter, and the feeling afterwards of having been transported somewhere wholly unexpected and unsettling will stay with me always. Grahame flexes literary muscles and shows a strength that I could never have anticipated.

Without that, the book is a warm and nostalgic children’s classic. With it, it becomes something I greatly respect.

Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett

Finished reading Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett, which is actually the first of his Discworld books for kids that I’ve read, since they fell in the period (from about 2001 on) that I stopped reading every Pratchett book as it was released. Only midway through did I realise that Wintersmith was the third part of Tiffany Aching stories, and that there are a fair few more books I need to read before I can once again say I’ve read all of Pratchett’s novels (and since that process has been going since I was about 7, I probably ought to re-read a handful!).

I enjoyed the book, though. I tend to like his stories about witches, which always seem to have more warmth and heart than the other continuities. I also think that if his stories for kids tone down the clever-clever satire and often jarring need to insert parodies with the real world, that might make for more sincere, likeable books.

I was just a little disappointed that the preview chapter I read was followed by a skip back in time that lead back up to it, because it was the prospect of the story continuing from that point that appealed to me, rather than the slow realisation that it will be almost the very end of what will unfold, but that is a minor quibble, because the story was rich and intriguing and sweet enough that I enjoyed it throughout. I’ve even grown to like the Nac Mac Feegle, who I initially thought were such a bad idea. Best, though, is the evocation of a gentle, bucolic lifestyle that is hard but noble and where practical skills are what is really important in life. It’s all done with such conviction.

It’s hard for me to be objective about Pterry, so much of my life, and early life, being influenced by what he wrote. Some of his earlier books will always be very dear to me, and I have utmost respect for him. I haven’t liked recent novels so much, and am well aware that I will likely be disappointed with a few of the books if I go back to reread them and find flaws that I didn’t notice as a child, but this was a genuinely good, solid, simple but well-wrought yarn.

Scott Pilgrim

I was expecting to give my impressions of the Black Rock Shooter anime today, but it seems it will be several episodes long rather than just one, so I’ll wait til I’ve seen it all. Instead, well…if I write about manga on my animation blog, it’s not so strange to write about a comic series, especially a limited one.

I didn’t get into Scott Pilgrim early. It’s not the sort of thing that interests me – but the amazingly retro game adaptation looks extremely fun, and after all there’s a movie coming out soon from the director of Sean of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, so it’s worth at the very least paying attention to.

On the other hand, if I’d looked a little closer I’d probably have realised I was never going to like Scott Pilgrim. Joss Whedon sang its praises, quoted on volume 6, and I’ve never liked anything he’s done except a couple of episodes of Firefly, and think the effect of Buffy on pop culture has been extremely negative. And I never did like Spaced, even though I expected to.

Scott Pilgrim does indeed fit well with Buffy and its audience – at least, the ones still keen long after the ones who were only in it because it turned them on have vanished. Other, more unkind critics have said the core audience is ‘hipster faggots’, by which they mean shallow twenty-somethings who follow the latest trends in music and entertainment and then reject them once they are perceived as too popular, all in a sheep-like fashion following online gurus and word-of-mouth trends. They like their entertainment smug, postmodern and ironic. They like it to put forward clichés and tropes and then ‘subvert’ them, by which they mean draw attention to them, but not actually use them in any way more sophisticated than the original. Essentially, they do things they know are bad, but show that they are aware of this fact, which is supposed to magically transform them into something good. It does not.

Scott Pilgrim follows the eponymous character, a hapless slacker in his mid-twenties, through a tricky relationship with a girl named Ramona Flowers. For the first half of the first volume, I was happy with this. He was a bit useless but likeable and tried his best. He made some pretty bad mistakes, being very self-centred and cheating on his young, vulnerable girlfriend, but I thought that this would all be for the sake of learning humility and life-lessons.

Yeah, it’s not. From a naturalistic start with believable, flawed and likeable characters grows the total crap that is supposed to be iconic and knowing. Scott has to defeat Ramona’s seven evil exes in video-game fashion, with lots of flying kicks, video game references and lack of consequences for murder. It’s all supposed to be clever and silly, and indeed, if this were all there were to Scott Pilgrim, it would be more tolerable. The trouble is that it’s interspersed with the soap opera of different relationships, and every time the writer finds himself with something that could actually be tricky to write and challenging, he cops out. Instead of sympathy for the jilted teenager, she becomes a nutcase first and a moronic stereotype later. Instead of Scott actually learning from anything, he is shown to be ever more of a moron until finally it’s suggested he literally doesn’t have to remember anything he did, and indeed that it’s fine for him to try to sleep around while he doesn’t know where his girlfriend is, because he’s dumb enough to just follow advice from his gay friend – and as we know, gay people are all about the sleeping around. (The gay people in these books are some of the most sympathetic, but always shallow and treated as ‘others’, while suggestions straight characters might be gay are rather a joke, even when it turns out that one of them is.)

I thought that the last volume would be a turnaround. Scott’s cheating catches up with him and he’s left alone. He’s forced to actually stop and reconsider his life. But no, we get more jokes about his dumbness (I smiled the first time the ‘memory cam’ came up, the only time in the whole volume, but then of course it got repeated three times and made unfunny) and an extremely superficial sort of sympathy passed off as ‘understanding’.

What I dislike about the hip, postmodern style is that it believes itself something better than it is. This is in any medium the thing which irks me the most. I like things that aim high and accomplish them. I like things that aim for something simple but do it well. I even like things that are rubbish but have tried hard. I don’t mind things that are like panto or Python and go, ‘Here you go, something rubbish, but we know it’s rubbish, and will make fun of it.’ But what I hate is things that go, ‘Well, you know, other less intelligent individuals would but something like this forward, aren’t they stupid? We’re doing the same thing, but we know it’s dumb, so what we’ll do is put in a lame wisecrack and exaggerate, and that will show how superior we are.’ Whedon does it a lot. The Doctor Who revival did it, especially under Russell T. Davis. Indie bands sometimes do it. And Scott Piglrim does it.

When I first started to read Scott Pilgrim, I said it was like something a board of men in suits think stoners would like. I stand by that. But it’s a triumph of marketing and media saturation. Not to mention the quite amazing feat of getting a core audience of teenagers for a book that at heart is about what it’s like to be 24 and scared to grow up.