Done counted, Nano

Say that in a stereotyped and offensive ghetto accent, and you be knowing that this is a dig at the world. Like Leonardo trying to throw himself in front of the Titanic. The Sundance Kid stopping a train. Every sod plodding from pavement to pavement. The world be schooled. By a novel - my novel  - my Nano novel - c'mon, you know it isn't that simple. Simple is a deception. In this case, a deceptive introduction to my blogpost. Read on. There's a novel in there, although it is more a sod plodding than Romeo or a cowboy.

As per my last, cobwebbed post, Nanowrimo is a month-long, world-wide premise in which to write a 50 000 word novel. That is definitely a deceptive explanation (rule of thumb: assume everything simple is deceptive. Also everything anyone has ever seen or done and maybe the universe). You (would-be author of Water for Elephants, which, yes, was a Nano novel) sign up online, where you are part of a community of coffee-addicted variations of the writer archetype. You stake out and mine your claim via a dashboard, which shows stats like your word count per day. (Yes, thanks, I get it, computer gnome. I am inadequate.)

You can ONLY start on the 1st (no head starts, fools) and finish by the 30th (late validations have to be done personally). You have to write from scratch - no existing novels and such, because we all have a lame one nursing itself somewhere. Every day you update your word count (no, not an imagined one 'cause then you are just a fool wasting time you could spend writing). Your dashboard updates the stats, so you know for example that it will take you 20 more days to finish (and you're on the 21st), and you have 10 920 words to go and an average daily word count of 3.

The overriding and oversimplified objective is to adapt to the discipline of being a writer. A real one. Not just a wannabe one with a lame novel. Contrary to legend, the trick to being a writer is like any other profession: you work hard. Especially since society in general has no respect for copyright and actively views it as an occasion to 'stick it to The Man'.

Let me duck out of Nano to explain something: Copyright, like general labour law, is a system to reward artists for their intellectual property. Without it, we rely on government subsidy and censorship is um bad. Do I need to explain?

Writers (and musicians and artists) sell their copyright, along with their book, to publishers, because (no matter who tells you otherwise) a self-published author does not usually have the resources to edit, typeset, print (if they need to), distribute, market and monitor sales of their book. In return, the author receives a cut of the sales value (net, mind, not gross). The books that do sell, pay my rent. Or not. So thanks for believing the fools who tell you piracy is a moral necessity.

You can see the link, right? I have to work harder to make less or I stop writing and find something less rewarding but more lucrative - no, that means something else is more rewarding. My argument falters like that of intellectual property pirates.

And... we're back!

To finish your novel on time, you must write 1 600 words a day. I am a trained and experienced writer, and I can usually push out 500 words a half hour or 1 200 a hour. Should I wait while you do the maths? That is about 1,5 hours a day. Hours stolen from the hours you are not at work. Stop cooking? Stop cleaning? Stop sleeping? Drink flagons of potent coffee (basically grounds)? Lookee, you really are a writer! (Here's the secret: the stereotype has always been true because writing requires discipline. More so now that everyone and their pets think they are writers. Lookee, I just pounded on these keys and then Kindle bought it and 3 people read it!)

Focus, focus.

For the first three years, I retired early: before 10 000 words (twice), before 30 000 words and before I started. Even then, I was fairly disciplined about writing for at least half an hour a day. Sylvia Plath wrote 1 500 words a day. (Ya' know before she bought into the patriarchal system and her life went avocado-shaped.) That fact has always inspired me. As you will know if you read her letters and journals, she was prodigious - far more prodigious than one novel would suggest.

This time, what with being part-time unemployed, I had an hour and a half to spare, and I was searching for a purpose. I needed a win. Also a cool pseudonym for some things I need to say. (In the end, I used my real one. Some things gotta be said and someone gotta back them up (and not back down. Fools). Adopt ghetto accent again.)

30 000 and then 42 000 were the trickiest. Around 30 000, I realised that my joke of about 20 000 words was true: my novel had literally lost its plot, it was descending into a teen romance (don't worry, I squashed this pandering to the patriarchy by redirecting her energy) and (now this is unlike me) all description had been replaced with dialogue and facial expressions. Dialogue? What newly creviced crevice of my soul is this? Luckily, I still didn't have a plot. I defy Aristotle, too.

At 42 000, I was close but so far. I started to just spew rubbish, pretending to realign the plot and develop characters and even link it to a previous lame novel licking itself right under my chair. I jumped from section to section because I couldn't remember what had happened and I didn't have time to read back. This one squashed itself, thank goodness. I had no clue how to do it myself.

Sitting in a coffee shop, on my sixth cup of the day and with the sugar of a chocolate danish animating my fingers, I pounded out 5 000 words with only a brief paralysis before the last hour and (I confess) during most of it.

As I looked to the corner of the screen, I yelped and did a dance in my chair that was mostly just moving my hands up and down, ghetto style. (I looked cool, fools. Haters.) I copied the creature and pasted it on my dashboard. I pressed 'Validate' with shaking hands (my hands shake normally. I think they are alive and trying to escape my body, digit by digit). The browser burbled and (really quickly especially for SA's bandwidth) congratulated me. I had written 50 250 words (of dialogue). I scrolled down... to claim my... badge. And... discounts on merchandise. Err...

None of the people exhaustedly trying to suppress the energy of their tiny people turned to acknowledge me, not even my impressive in-the-chair ghetto dancing.

It ended the way it began (and had never ended before). Quietly. To the aroma of coffee and chocolate croissants. I have 50 000 words, although not a novel, contrary to Nano's hopes. Please, you have read (at least this) my blogposts. You should know that I employ most of the words in the dictionary, instead of just the word dictionary. I barely even have a middle - just dialogue and facial expressions (read the sample on my profile and you will understand). Halfway through (calculate that however you like) I realised that I had a solution to the inertia of my first novel. I had the plot and it had been sitting on my nose like a freckle all along (it's difficult to pick out).

Oh, are you waiting for something? Oh, right, you want to know what the plot is. Dear fools, then you wouldn't buy the novel (or pirate it and therefore rob me of all acknowledgement of this incredible achievement) and I will continue to be partly unemployed and eventually my service provider will rob me of data because it doesn't believe in not getting money for its service and I won't have any. Thieves!

To convince you to ghetto dance with me, I dare you to Nano it up next year. Feel the muscle burn in your brain and fingers, the paralysis, the aches from sitting in a chair on your legs for too long (bad habit). Feel the Nano. And then, let's talk international property law and why I should be your very employed agent.

Nanowrimo: the countdown

What month is it? Yes, November. Yes, a countdown to religious holidays involving fake trees and gold tinsel. I bet you didn't guess correctly! Oh wait, if you didn't guess from the title of this post, please shut down your browser and never come here again. Yes, it's Nanowrimo!

For the (majority of) people who don't know this is an acronym, it is. It stands for: National Novel Writing Month. Because we are all one nation on the internet? No, because we aren't, unless you are a first-world hipster looking at everything through rose-tinted Google Glass. You can keep reading, but only if you take that headset off, because you look less like a sci-fi hero than a real-life dork and not the cool kind.

I am guessing it started as an American campaign and went global. Lack of foresight, but the alliteration works. The campaign encourages people to write by creating communities. Every November, aspiring authors log in to their accounts (most have forgotten their passwords and need to reset - not me, of course. Of course. No, not me) and fill in the details of their project: title, summary, extract and cover.

There are a couple of rules:

1. It has to be a new novel, not one you have already started.
2. You cannot copy and paste ten times to reach the word count (this seems obvious but if not, time to, yes, shut down your browser).
3. You 'win' when you reach 50 000 words. You win, I win, we all win. Like a marathon where we all get medals for finishing, at which point I'm wondering why I am putting myself through this.

We got here sooner than I expected. I signed up in 2010. I lost in 2010, 2011 and 2012. I didn't even try in 2013. I lost because a week into the marathon, I asked myself why I was putting myself through this.

Why? you ask. Why do you writers pretend writing is so difficult? We all write every day: emails, application forms, notes. Yes, you do (and may I point out, from an editor's point of view, that if you didn't have spell and grammar check, your 'writing' would be illegible. And even then people can't tell the difference between 'its' and 'it's'). I am all for you writing 50 000 words of emails. Please don't send it to me, but go ahead.

The Most Difficult Thing about writing is resisting the urge to purge the file or set the pages alight. This urge should take hold of you at about word 14. If as a first-time writer you make it to 4 000 words, I will actually read your (pending) 50 000 word email.

I have been writing, properly, for ten years. I still have to wrestle that urge and chain it under my desk. Like David Copperfield, he will free himself, but it gives me a headstart. I first tracked his movements by writing stream-of-consciousness style for 30 minutes a day. No lifting pen from paper except to turn the page (and unless you print and between words, but you get it). It takes about 20 minutes to start writing fluidly.

Where do you find 30 minutes a day? I don't know, it's your schedule. If you are serious about this, you will quit gym and write instead. And potentially die early of heath problems. Which would make you a bona fide writer. I used to write first-thing in the morning (Jessica Simpson swears by this), but I am not a morning person. Unless you count waking up at 11. So now I write in the evening.

Sylvia Plath (of whom I am such a fan that I hate Ted Hughes with a passion) wrote 1 500 words a day. She started the habit late in high school and published a number of poems and short stories in college. 1 500. That was the length of some of my essays in undergrad.

So ten years of wrestling the monster of writer's block later, I can write about 500 words per half hour, sometimes more if I don't edit. That's an hour to an hour and a half. Sorry, how long did you say it took you to write 4 000 words? Because it just took me two days.

In other words, writing is a discipline. Write the same amount of words at the same time in the same place. Be prepared to do this for years and years. Train yourself to wrestle that monster. In addition, you will need to do research and be prepared to burrow into the bits of yourself you wouldn't stare down in a lit room. Or maybe you get it right first time. It happens. I hate you.

We have bumped into Nanowrimo again. It is November, after all. One of the functions of Nano (apart from creating a community) is to train you to do all of those things above (I don't need to recap do I?). I have gone through periods of writing religiously (I mean that word seriously - if I had a single belief, it would be in words) and of letting the words build up until I am a little volcano. So Nano is definitely worthwhile.

But a week has always been my limit. If you do the maths, you need to write about 1 600 words a day to finish on time. Remember: an hour and a half. I used to work a lot. For various reasons that even therapy won't fully explain. Identity, self-worth, self-destruction. That is a bleak path, dear reader. Now I know better, although knowing isn't always understanding. So finding that hour and a half when you work at least 10 hours a day and don't eat lunch is difficult.

So my strategy had two parts:

1. Start strong: write as much as you can in the first week.
2. Continue strong on the weekends, when you have time.

I mentioned I never made it past number 1? Except for 2012, when I wrote 28 000 words, which is about 17 days. It sounds like the home stretch, but it isn't, it really isn't.

You can see this coming, can't you? Or you've already checked my profile. Eight days in and I average close to 2 000 words per day. A fist bump and a happy dance. That is more than 15 000 words. In one week. One week, my friends, just over an hour a day. One hour.

What did writing replace? Not gym. I don't do gym. I just make promises I haven't kept yet. Well, I went out on my own, business-wise, and am planning a little sum'ing sum'ing. Stay tuned for me crowdsourcing your wallet. Technically, writing counts as part of my work day. Since my work day is 10 hours, I am just retrieving a couple of them.

While I work, that monster has a seat next to me, but he is on the edge of it, watching the words spill on to the electronic page. Sometimes he helps me find a synonym. He also reminds me to eat lunch.

I think this is the year I am going to win Nanowrimo. I have no illusions that this novel is publishable. The story is going nowhere and comprised mostly of dialogue. I can't think of names for most of the characters and unravelling the pronouns would be a full-time job. But it is giving me more insight into my first (and real) novel. (Which is, oddly, the premise of that novel.) The novel will have six dedications and Sylvia Plath is the first and Nano the last.

The Luminaries

I finished Madaddam. I don't want to talk about it for a while. Which probably means, at the most, four days. Since then, predictably, I have been in a book rut, with reading block and written wordititis (official diagnosis - look it up, after I have created the Wikipedia entry). Granted, this may or may not have something to do with the books themselves. Spoiler alert (post-alert, but you should know better when reading this blog).

Particularly The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. It isn't a trilogy but it feels like one.

It is beautifully written. So beautiful that it may have been written during the late-ish 19th century. Which is the point, because it is set in the 19th century in a gold mining town in New Zealand, which is arbitrary, unless you're a Post-modernist adopting a vintage voice for effect. The effect being full blown reading block.

As I write this, I am conscious that Mr Murakami sits on my dresser, carving a space for itself in the wood using gravity and its density. That's less a block than terror.

In varsity, my least favourite courses were on Romantic and Victorian literature. (Predictably though, I enjoyed Gothic literature - Wuthering Heights and Turn of the Screw. Ghosts as the projections of psychological neuroses and social dysfunctions, notably patriarchy? Strangely, I am iffy about Jane Eyre for the same reasons, but passionate about Wide Sargasso Sea which was a Post-modernist feminist 'prequel' to Jane Eyre. Basically the wife is victimised which is a prerequisite for moral indignation. Go feminism.)

Back my Point, which is a winding, perhaps circular path, and perhaps just me plowing through bush until I hit my toe on something. I am barefoot. Yes, ok, carry on. The prose of The Luminaries is as winding as my posts. I am 17% through my Kindle version. So far:

A man wanders into a hotel bar in a town with one main road and a jail. The men already in the room have gone to great lengths to keep everyone out of the room and they're not very good at disguising this. (When you fake-read a paper, move your eyes. Amateurs.)

Said man is interrogated and brought into their confidence.

So they embark on a story in a story (we're on 12% at this point and I think, thank goodness, the narrator is finally going to introduce the conflict).

But NO! We learn about everyone's business in this town and very little about the important stuff. Or what I presume to be important, because it could turn out the missing dress case is the important stuff. I don't care. Mislead me. Just mislead me with something.

See, what I disliked about Pope, Coleridge and Wordsworth (I never even touched Swift because I could feel it was boring from a distance. Wish I had had the same premonition about Heart of Darkness) was that they padded. Seriously, that's a cloud. Your poetry, like a cloud, drifts over and above the poem without actually having a relationship with the poem, except to the extent that it blocks out the sun sometimes. The sun also being tangential to your existence fyi.

My argument is tenuous, I see that. But equally tenuous is the link between my attention and the author's waffling.

You obviously noticed I said books earlier (take the credit for being observant, you). I never finished V. I never finished it because it was too soon after The Goldfinch; if I didn't read it for one day I forgot what had happened and had to reread the fifty pages before it, and because, I confess, when I reread the synopses, I realised I had no idea what was going on. That disappointment was like thinking you understood a sentence in Ulysses and realising you had transposed two words in your head and it makes no sense now, but with less street cred.

On the up side, I realised I don't just read for themes and characters - insofar as they relate to themes - as I have always believed. I do care about plot. I want an introduction, conflict, exposition, climax and resolution. I want to be tossed around by the tide in addition to being conscious of the chill of the waves, the foam in my nostrils and that I can't feel my toes or fingers.

The Luminaries was nominated for the Mann Booker Prize and V is a classic. So, the books themselves are not bad. I assume. Book people aren't easily bribed, because there's no benefit for the briber. I can see the value of Pope, Coleridge and Wordsworth (not Swift or Conrad - the cartoon version of Gulliver's Travels is creepy (why do people not see this?) and Conrad cannot write (why does no one see this?)), but I just don't value them.

I have always said it's dangerous to review a book before you have read it. Or made it past 20%. But then I wouldn't have anything to blog about. Look forward to my retraction. Or the repetition of certain metaphors, because as a writer, I believe extended metaphors are important. Not more important than plot but more important than spelling (Word can fix that).

Here is my conundrum (not my Point): my novel is almost entirely observations and walking to and from places. Various characters never reappear and others merely haunt the novel. I don't pad, because there is nothing to pad, except my own interests. Is that daring or uninspired? Exposition or just conclusion? Meh, as long as no one finds this blogpost, they will never know and hopefully some misguided professor will assign my novel and pretend she understands it for street cred. I won't believe her unless she compares me with Swift (not Conrad, never Conrad)).

PS. The cover pics won't load so you will have to do without.

Harvest

How did I find this book? Did I download it or did I copy it from somewhere (I'll explain this criminal activity later)? Was it in my Amazon-generated list of recommendations? This is how it feels to read Harvest by Jim Crace. It feels a bit like reading Oryx and Crake (or have you forgotten this quickly?!). It lingers, like overpowering aftershave that wafts into a thin note of something cool and shadowy. Obviously shadowy does not mean happy tralala handstand here, because you know how I feel about happy. Suspicious.

I also don't know why I didn't blog about it when I finished it. I read it a few months ago, in that bleak period when I was too tired even to read. Yet I read Harvest. I couldn't not read Harvest.

Am I the only one whose relationships with books sometimes don't have words? Or is it just the nature of tapping away at a keyword (the 'j' button of which is stuck, I think with something sugary) without human contact? I mean, if it's just me, I don't have to use words, do I? And if I do, well, that's a new problem that requires me leaving my apartment.

Apart from Oryx and Crake, it also characterised my reading of People's Act of Love and Mara and Dann. Which if you read back (although I don't think I used labels back them so you'll just have to stumble blindly through 400 and something posts. Good luck), gutted me. Not only because I missed the characters and narrative style, but because my friends had just kicked me out of their snowy or verdant or dusty lives and I must have hit my head because when I woke up I was here. But here doesn't fit like there did.

Make sense? No, I didn't think so. I'm not sure I understood that. But then I did hit my head so I have an excuse.

Most of Harvest is almost unbearably creepy. It reminded me of The Village, except after a little while, you don't have time to worry about the Others - one eye is watching your neighbours in case they set fire to your house and the other is watching the gentlemen of the farm because people are going missing (well, not missing, you know where some of them are: inside the house), your brain is thinking about this idyllic but harsh life on the farm and in the village (where your neighbours are so welcoming) and your heart is bleeding for the trespassers who are now undergoing a punishment that seems like a hanging except you live and people throw squishy tomatoes at you.

Sorry, is that a bit much in one gulp? Well, that's the point, although I'm sure you realised that. Right?

Okay, now, spoilers exiled. Within the first few pages, you meet the narrator, a villager on a late 19th century farm, as he tries to convince us the villagers live autonomously. Feudal system aside, he was not born in the village, but married into it. (No one seems worried about interbreeding and the rather stupid children they seem to be producing.) So his neighbours are wary of him. Who knows what he could do?! Set fire to his own house?

Rather than being wary of him right now, they become wary of a camp of trespassers. Apparently setting a fire in that part of never never land means you are settling there, like a smoke signal (har!). The villagers and gentleman of the farm traipse towards the smoking fire to dissuade its lighters. No one appears to be home so they destroy everything like children unmaking a fort into a mess their mother has to tidy up. But no, there is a beautiful woman. Now the men stand around and gulp.

Then, like the trespassing rats they are, two men step in to help her. Her family, we can assume. One threatens the gentleman on his horse, the woman spits at him and the men are captured but the woman runs away. Some of the men go after her and you know enough to rock on your heels thinking she best run and hide like a deer. One that survives.

There is another gentleman on the farm, not propertied but an artist slash surveyor. Although he may just be an artist wishing he were surveyor because he needs the money. He goes after her too, but instead of feeling relief, you hope he runs and hides like a blerry rabbit.

Some feeling you can't name because it's hiding in the shadows is now tumbling around and making you dizzy. You don't like this situation, which is solved by everyone leaving the forest. Trespassers (minus one) in tow. No wait! There is a gallows-type structure set in some ruins of something, someone pulls out two nooses (neese?), they point the men's heads through until their chins are resting on the ropes and they are forced to stand on tiptoes. Then the villagers walk away. They intend to come back later and throw things at the men but then there is a violent storm and they snuggle up next to fires.

The narrator, not being a real villager, does come out to help them - and there I have to stop recounting that plot line because I almost spoiled it. I can tell you the woman is narry to be found, which is either a good or a bad thing. Obviously. But you don't know which to hope for. The artist is also missing. And all the men are missing the woman and all the women are furrowing their brows.

Plot line B involves the gentleman of the farm's deceased wife having relatives who suddenly decide to become farmers. The farm is technically theirs, but they are complete jerks who act like bouncers at a club where the club is anything that touches the same earth as them. They have now arrived to assess the property, because they would like to evict the villagers and turn the land to grazing. Basically replacing the villagers with cows. Bad joke. It's a metaphor for industrialisation and the disregard for the wellbeing of other humans - well, not a metaphor, it's an example.

The narrator has some suspicions about these men, but it doesn't really matter because the villagers can see the writing on the wall and they are hightailing it anywhere else but there. Well, obviously not anywhere else, but somewhere within a couple of hundred kilometres where they can make a living without being beaten by these specific men.

To recap, my dear readers, we are in the village from The Village, but the red people are hiding in the hearts of the villagers and the nooses and the entire bodies of the men who repossess the farm. Some more red things are hiding in the spaces left by the woman and the artist, who allegedly has led the exodus from the farm, but without taking his stuff.

On the bright side, you learn a lot about subsistence farming. Because the narrator is relatively new to the area (having parents who aren't cousins), he relates the learning curve of trying to fit in among these people who don't trust him (because his parents weren't cousins).

Jokes aside, this part of the story balances (and maybe draws) out the unsettled feelings that do handstands in the corner of your vision. The way the narrator describes the world around him helps you to understand why he lives among these people. There is also his sense of loyalty - he grew up with the gentleman and has never left his side. He is honest about his guilt and failure to stand up for the trespassers, his concern, and his sense of self-preservation - and his lust and jealousy.

Harvest is more than a horror story. It is more than an example: it is a metaphor for the changing times, from the pastoral to the industrial, the sense that no one explains what is going one, but someone keeps switching the signposts around. And just removes some of them. As a result, you too are wary, looking into every shadow of the story, hoping to see the young woman or a matchstick you can use to halt the wrecking ball on the horizon.

Some of the mysteries have answers and others don't - not in the way detective series have led us to understand 'answer'. I suppose even the alleged answers are mysterious. I'll bet that you feel a little unsettled and a little curious based on only a few paragraphs that are mostly facetious jokes, right? What did it for me are the tortures inflicted on those men for silly infringements. You're a vagrant, just like these people are about to become, and these people attack your shelter and wife. What are you, especially as a man in that time, going to do? Threaten their stick-thin and therefore breakable fibula is what.

These jokes are a way of dealing with what I don't understand, which is almost everything in this novel. The extent to which I am trying to deal with it is a verification of how little can be understood (which is tautological, but this seems fitting). Harvest is a beautifully told novel in which the narrator and his voice fit as perfectly as a novelist can write them. You know as much as he does - what he knows is what he has learnt and what he feels he needs to explain, and what he doesn't he still feels he needs to uncover. (And here we are at the beginning again.)

MaddAddam: Part 1 of 2

My introduction to the works of Margaret Atwood was Oryx and Crake. I used to work at a bookshop which hosts a huge sale every quarter. It is a good place to pick up hardcover first editions. (Sorry, peeps, but if you can't find anything good on sale, it's because the staff nabbed them while they unpacked boxes.) Deckle edges (when the page edges are rough and uneven) are a red flag. This habit is mostly for novelty value than for any misplaced hope that this one book of thousands will become valuable. Anyway, I have this book and I have read it.

Let's retreat even further in time and test your patience. Because it is entertaining to imagine anyone is reading this and that you are on tenterhooks to see where I am going with this.

I read Dorothy Lessing's The Golden Notebook in high school (y'know, as normal learners spend their free time) and adored it. It opened up a new world of politicised literature for me, as a natural and nurtured feminist, although I didn't know where to find more of the same or how to exercise it.

Later I would read AS Byatt and fall in love for the same reason - together with her representation of the post-Modern psyche: by definition ultimately and completely apathetic. The last few pages of Possession sealed the deal.

Around this time, a friend was surprised that I hadn't yet read any Margaret Atwood. 'As a feminist of your own devising, I would think you would have devoured her work.' (Or something as cultured.) I am otherwise like that, as you know (as above), so I didn't read any just because he said I should (a reflection on our friendship, too). Until, while rooting around in my collection of books, I found the book and couldn't resist those deckle edges (they get me every time).

I was ambivalent. I was also confused. I was ambivalent because I was confused. The ideas of Oryx and Crake rooted around in the recesses of my brain and unravelled things I did not want to see in the dark of an alley or in the light of day. (An older me is more comfortable in alleys than sunlight.) So I ravelled those things up again while Oryx, Crake and Snowman-the-Jimmy weren't looking, and packed those three characters along with them.

Burying them didn't help. They kept popping up in my mind, while I was thinking about genetically modified anything (not often), overgrown grass (more often than you'd think), apocalypse (very often), the destructiveness of the human species (very, very often) and things that have little to do with the book, like apples. Each time, I would wander down one of the many paths in that greenhouse and whisk myself out when I realised what half of me was doing while the other half wasn't looking.

Excuse the pun but it grew on me (actually, don't excuse me - that's a pretty good one). One day I realised that other half have shoved my dislike over onto the 'like' side and closer to 'craving'. Muttering under my breath, I read others, like The Blind Assassin and The Handmaid's Tale. To be honest, I can't remember what any of them are about. They weren't Oryx and Crake. They were too packed with ideas and my brain kept overheating (it does that. Even a bibliophile has limits).

Lucky me, Oryx and Crake was about to become... wait for it... a trilogy. Even an author needs to make money. Thank you, JRR Tolkien. Again, I was ambivalent. I don't like being coerced into spending my money (although, let's be honest, that's how capitalism works). But I craved more.

I caved and read The Year of the Flood, fairly recently, although it had been out for several years. Hammer - nail - head. Down to the squirming ambivalence. Except, as I mentioned, the older me is far more comfortable with squirming and finds it more comforting than the safety of ignorance. Oryx, Crake and Snowman-the-Jimmy didn't play as crucial a role, appearing mostly as backstory. While Oryx and Crake was set after the pandemic that wipes out a very destructive human race, The Year of the Flood is set around it.

Now came MaddAddam! I waited and waited for the Kindle version but eventually couldn't handle the suspense and went with the hardcopy. Which poses a problem because I have two of the three in hardcopy and other as .mobi. Hmmm I also object to the waste of paying for something twice. Hmmm

Conundrum aside, I am halfway through. This book knits together the two stories, in a different narrative style: one character takes centre stage. His story is told as a story to his lover who turns it into a (almost Biblical) story for a species of not-but-almost-human beings, who are depicted as childlike in their ignorance but are probably better suited to the world, honestly.

All of these stories tell the story of how pre-pandemic society became further divided than ours (pre-pre-pandemic) into haves and have-nots, both brainwashed (sometimes violently) into maintaining the status quo. Except, as we all know, sometimes wolves make their way into the herd and these wolves were called the MaddAddamites, and named themselves after animals we have made extinct. Whatever, because the pandemic happened and now they're telling stories in the aftermath.

No spoilers there, I promise.

I haven't finished the book so cart - horse, y'know, but based on The Year of the Flood, there is none of the same crypticness and magic of Oryx and Crake. That book punched me in my stomach, because Snowman-the-Jimmy's story was impossible to fully untangle. It also ended with another punch that physically made me blink and try to block the memory out. Although there have been moments of unveiling, where clues have fitted together, there hasn't been the same kind of (almost Biblical) revelation.

That said, I can't get enough of Zeb's story in MaddAddam, where he (so far) plays an incidental role in the pandemic, although we already know he is critical after it. (It's always the people prepared to hit under the belt that survive in a pandemic. Remember this, peeps, when you play guns and crossbows in your minds.) This is exactly the reason I am slowplaying my reading. (No, not to learn how to use a crossbow, because I am comfortable with the under-the-belt people doing it for me.) Because, based on my experience of Oryx and Crake, I will have to manage the craving after I have put it down.

Forget the apocalypse, this is a far more important (and imminent) problem.

All of the books are narratives within narratives: told first by the character (almost self-consciously because they are pretty much telling their stories to themselves, old loud, which is not considered crazy in an apocalypse), and then revised for an audience, even if we aren't always privy to the telling. Although AS Byatt hits - nail - head with Possession about post-Modern society, universally people enjoy stories. In a story, you are the maker of your own destiny.

Stories lead you into the garage of your mind, to topple the piles of things you prefer to ignore. That may be as damaging in the lead-up to a pandemic than how it is executed. With stories, and in the toppling, we imagine the means of our destruction into being.

Zero History

Zero History. The perfect blanket for the novels of William Gibson (well, all two that I have read, upon which it is feasible to develop a seasoned opinion. Shush). Less out-there than Philip K Dick (and perhaps more sensical), but more cryptic than Margaret Atwood, with worse dialogue than Robert Heinlein. (These being the authors of the canon I have read, with a few sidekicks - and no, I'm not including Hugh Howey here, because obviously success, even when unedited, is to be scorned.)

(I did read all nine, fyi, and didn't hate the ending. Did hate the editing.)

Corralling mind back to point. It's not thrilled. (Ok, I'll stop interrupting.)

Book first. You may remember that I am one of the few people I know who rate Neuromancer highly. Or not. I do. I suspect this is partly because success is to be scorned, as aforementioned. We love an underdog precisely because he is not top dog (notice how the movie always cuts off before the dog reaps his rewards). It doesn't help that they made a movie tenuously linked to the book which itself is within arm's reach of a philosopher's thought experiment.

I rate it (not because others don't, although I am otherwise like that) because it had a wider lens than the Matrix - it didn't depend on the premise that we are all slaves to 'the machines' (get it? Very subtle) and need to sign up to fight a war that requires shooting surprisingly unintellegent artificial intelligences (that always surprises me). In fact, that felt like a B or C plot. An A plot in my books, but D plot in others', is that question I don't have the answer to and am beginning to suspect won't ever be answered.

In Zero History, there are so many moments like these, forming an undercurrent (ridden by red herrings) of suspicion. For example, I am still waiting for the fruition of an exchange where a hotel receptionist takes one of the protagonists'  (Milgrim - again, very subtle, my man Gibson) passport into the back to photocopy. To justify my paranoia, American passports are microchipped and can be read by devices in the vicinity, so Milgrim keeps it in a pouch designed to tangle those signals.

Maybe I'm missing something? Maybe I'm not. As a person, I don't like surprises. As a reader, I do, but I prefer to have the satisfaction of figuring it out first. (I'm just otherwise like that.)

And here we have Gibson's skill: of immersing you in paranoia, until you're paranoid about being paranoid. Which is incidentally crucial to the plot. The two main characters, Milgrim and Hollis (really), are being manipulated by two or three (it's very confusing) deeply dodgy and steeply wealthy conmen, who are fighting against one another to get a military contract. Or sell adspace. Or clothes. Surveillance technology is built into everything, including a figurine of an ant and a phone, but not laptops apparently.

A government agent (of some underground agency, for which y'all are paying taxes, congrats) has also taken personal leave to jump into the fray. She's mostly interested in... Clothing piracy, I think.

One of the main characters (let's keep some surprises in our relationship) seems to be morphing into an autonomous being. Which is disturbing pretty much every involved who should be disturbed by their own behaviour. Like a dog chewing its tail. Maybe an hyaena. Except their tails are short. The other main character has pretty much been spared the drama, except as tales over breakfast and that bug in her ant figurine.

As mentioned, the dialogue is like cardboard. Every character uses one of two modes: one-word answers or staccato but meandering sentences. Usually the response does not tie in with the previous utterance, so people often have to ask one another to explain what they just said, to which they usually get a feint. But this works nicely to raise the paranoia up like the baboon raising the cub in The Lion King, forehead marking and all. It's not clear whether they're being evasive or just distracted, or in the case of the dodgy dealers (I couldn't resist the alliteration) are setting up situations in which to test others.

Love it. You can't pick at a single characteristic of this book that doesn't unwind into pure mind effortness. Technology, autonomy, power, lack of power, progress... All themes that have and will continue to keep philosophers busy (and out of politics), wrung up but not released. Sometimes, these themes are really flung in your face (hence the marking), but usually while you're distracted by something else, maybe a something that has flown into your eye to keep the metaphor afloat.

I'd bet money on the author laying these wrung-up themes down in a pattern locked in his mind. And I don't gamble. Perhaps he is really good at poker and keeping a straight face, his 'tells' under control, but I hope not because then I've just lost some cash. Which is why I don't gamble. (The house always wins. Always. And when it doesn't, it phones your parents, pretends to be the government and says he's going to break your legs. True story.)

Neuromancer told a similar story: a character or two controlled by some dodgy conmen with some cash, squished in with a drug addiction, motorbikes and leather. In that one, though, the story is set in an unrealised future. Zero History was published in 2010 and features iPhones (no mention of Samsung, Sony, Huawei or HTC), as well as other surveillance technologies that are plausible. Except for a floating silver mercurial penguin. As a result, there is much the narrative doesn't need to explain, leaving room for the undercurrent with the flying red herrings.

Oeuvre next. Beginning each book requires a reset, to make space for whatever world awaits you, futuristic or modern. It is a bit like having no history, which incidentally, now that I think about it, is how Milgrim appears at the beginning of the book, acquiring memory by memory. You have to keep resetting as you read, to take in new information but also anticipate it. You can't take anything for granted, which takes up a lot of trunk space.

The word 'zero' is loaded - thanks philosophers. It's completely abstract, since what isn't there, well, isn't there. There are languages that don't have a word for it (English being one of those that names everything, including the things that aren't there). It occurs meaningfully in Descartian geometry, where it gets a partner, and where it fits so well within a flat world and you can draw its portrait.

But meaningful it is not when it describes human experience. Swapping philosophers for English lit students, everything has an history, even stories. Some of the paranoia of Zero History is that there are allusions to events that have bearing on the story but are omitted. Everyone knows some of the story but not all (except the author, who I am betting writes like he might put a jigsaw puzzle together). And as all good lit students know, absence is where the juicy stuff is (not meaty, because I am a vegetarian).

This Point is disappointing in its focus - I apologise. My mind is settled with a clump of carrots and a horse blanket. Perhaps it is just worn out.

Zero History is part of a trilogy, which will probably bend to include more, if the publishers have anything to do with it. I haven't read the other two, so perhaps I will have to put this post down to an erratum and write you a new one. Regardless, and regardless of Gibson's success and un-underdog-ness, and considering no one has made a movie of this (yet and I think), I'm betting a set of handmade how-to origami diagrams hang above the author's desk: an ant, an hyaena and a baboon, and a horde of dodgy conmen and confused protagonists.

The War of the Worlds

I know you have heard this story before, but every good piece of writing should lay out its premise in an attempt at inclusivity, no matter how so-so. Back when various countries felt that wars that targeted the world they too inhabited made sense (yes, I know, now they just call their forces the UN and their weapons sanctions) and when the radio (a transistor-type thing with an aerial) was a key source of information, not just top-20 music shows and public-interest debates...

I ran out of space. No one is going to read a 20-line introduction. Assuming you read this five-line one.

Orson Welles, author of the book and the radio play

A radio drama broadcast of War of the Worlds caused widespread panic (this was also when Britain and the US were the only worthwhile parts of the world, before Britain kindly withdrew from countries like Africa - sorry, continents - all continents look the same). War of the Worlds being an invasion of Earth (only the important parts) by Martians whose intelligence ranks off the MENSA charts. Not that there were was time to check, but one can only assume.

Again, I ran out of space.

The drama was an abridged version of Orson Welles' novel (even then we had remakes and probably complained that the narration was not as we had imagined), a blatant critique of war and the desperate flailings of human beings to save themselves, updated to time and place. Unfortunately, the scenario was a little too realistic: the play included a weather report, the music and conversations of a dance hall (like a club slash hoe-down with ginger beer) interrupted by the report of an astronomer, followed by news broadcast about the touch-down of a meteorite.

While Curiosity happily pokes holes into Mars (I don't mention the Japanese attempt to sweep up intergalactic dust because I doubt they want that #epicfail mentioned), in this 1930s version we don't have a chance because Cyclops slash snake things wiggle their way out of the meteor and begin firing at anything that moves (thus destroying a lot of the land they hope to inhabit, double #epicfail). And so on and so on.

The actors and sound effects are so good that people believed that Earth was being attacked by sophisticated unanthropomorphic beings and it was every man, woman and child for themselves. The story was then picked up by another broadcaster - which, of course, according to the two-source rule means the story is legit. Apparently, people legged it out of the city, their favourite donkey, wife and cutlery set in tow. Pregnant women went into premature labour. Ostensibly because of the fright. The mind boggles.

This story took way longer to tell than I thought. If you had heard it before, I hope you had the sense to scan, in which case, YOU CAN START READING AGAIN HERE. If not, sorry for you.

Facetiousness aside (in arm's reach because I will need it again), people had just been through a war of epic proportions (hence why it was called a 'world' war) and the Great Depression, and a second war was brewing. Governments already had access to atomic bombs, which they would shortly drop on Japan. That is crazier than believing in an alien invasion, from my perspective.

Hats off to Orson Welles for creating a critique of war so realistic it created panic (although perhaps he should have peppered it with disclaimers like 'this is only a critique; all resemblance to people or nations is intended, but only in so far as they are the weakest link in the survival of humanity'). Unfortunately, the wrong people listened.

Assuming that your only knowledge is this story and the Tom Cruise version, please reset said knowledge now.

The book is thin, more of a novella, and usually sold together with The Invisible Man and Journey to the Centre of the Earth. They all derive from the same time period and are loosely considered fantasy. I read it a few years ago but I have the memory of a coffee filter (by which I mean it contains coffee grounds). But (from what I do or don't remember) it is more different to the movie you know than even the two versions of World War Z.

In some ways I felt 'underwhelmed' by the book (since 10 Things I Hate About You this is now a valid word), because it had none of the action we have come to expect since Star Wars (4-6, to clarify). The basics of the book match up with the display of Tom Cruise's machismo, but the main character is an astronomer who plays a much more important and intellectual role - the explanations for what is happening being more important than the shooting at special effects. There is none of the thundering intrusion that sparks off alleged machismo, although there are many thundering explosions and crashing buildings. More important than all this is the sense of helplessness (i.e. negative machismo) the characters fall deeper and deeper into as they realise that one of humanity's usual tactics work - even an atom bomb (we resort to this quickly).

Spoiler alert: it is Mother Nature that triumphs. Now, I am no great fan of casting processes as thinking feeling entities, but in this instance even I got goosebumps from the sense that the world is far greater than us - that even intelligent beings are subject to the law of survival. The more we prod at Mother, the more we discover there are processes beyond our imagining happening under our noses. Literally. We act like a runny nose is the harbinger of doom, but scientists keep discovering new bacteria we couldn't function without. And isn't it (facetiousness buried) amazing that our bodies are so finely attuned to this 'other world', too?

A week ago, I watched the first movie adaptation from the 1950s. I confess I didn't expect much - I was really just boosting my movie cred. I watched it after Terminator II - don't judge - that series of movies is a seething mass of debates about what qualifies as life, what cost are you prepared to incur in search of greatness... Mind running away; trip mind with rope.

The movie begins with a short narrative, in this booming voice that might convince me of anything, even that politicians don't hand over their hearts at the first session of Parliament. The scene is a town that our astronomer hero happens to be visiting. (What a coincidence in a world of coincidences.) One night a meteor crashes into the national park nearby. Nonplussed, some police and other officials trudge out to look, thinking they might start a theme park around it (not a joke).

But our scientist is suspicious because he can work out how fast a meteor of that size should have been travelling in his head and works out that it should have made more of a mess. However, he is equally oblivious to the danger. At the site, he meets the heroine, who kicks ass. She lectures at a nearby university but smoothly switches roles to wartime nurse when needed, and near the end organises their retreat and even drives the bus to safety. Ok, she breaks down into an hysterical mess sometimes, but us women, y'know, just can't avoid having normal emotions.

Out comes Cyclops, who starts setting fire to the things that move, so the army does the same. Well, tries to. Mostly they set fire to inanimate things like trees. Unlike us modern viewers, no one is prepared for the force field that protects Cyclops and his siblings so it takes them a while to catch on. Long enough to waste an atomic bomb. In the meantime, Cyclops' extended siblings have touched down all over the world (except the country - I mean continent - of Africa) and are destroying cities en masse.

People flee the city, at the behest of civil authorities, because the alien can't tell you're moving if you're parked among fields of vegetables, preferably corn, right? Because, if I moved into a place with fleas, I would only exterminate the spots I meant to sit in. (The others I would train into a flea circus.) Anyway, as every apocalyptic fiction writer drills home, we are a species of survivors, where surviving means bullying everyone who has something you want. Survival of the fittest, right? The ones who don't bully, pray, because then life and death is out of their hands.

(What would I do, since I'm so glib? Find a way to hide right under their noses, preferably in a group because my chances of dying are less. Sorry, I can't help it. I would think. And more people means more thinking. I think. So I would double-back to the parts of the city they'd destroyed and find shelter underground, preferably with smart people. In this case, the best thing to do would be to wait them out.)

The scientist also does a clever thing: he chops off an eye and analyses it. (I couldn't do that, because I didn't even understand his description of how it worked or why his girlfriend shows up differently on the scan.) Anyway, then they are attacked (by human bullies), they find a church (which unfortunately is attacked - hide underground, I tell you. Or in a tree) and then the alien buggers did. Just drop out of the sky. Not one of them could adapt fast enough to survive our bacteria and so are overcome. (Knowing humans and our survival ranking, at least one of us would have made it, busters.)

Then comes the bit about Mother Nature (an entity that is really a coincidental process). I have goosebumps thinking about it. About how we are blithely stomping around, discovering something whose evolution we played absolutely no part in, not realising how indebted we are to our ecosystem.

Yerp, here are our heroine and hero, with an alien eyeball

What I enjoyed about the movie though (what bumped it up past the recent one and perhaps past the book - shock horror) was the focus on the people and not the action. I find this often with older movies. Part of this is the casting (who could ever match the charisma of Humphrey Bogart or Natalie Wood?) The movie stars Gene Barry and Ann Robinson. Barry plays our scientist as ever so slightly arrogant, witty and ultimately open-hearted. Robinson is enthusiastic but not embarrassingly so, level headed and open-hearted.

They fall for each other quickly (partly because there isn't my time to take it slowly and also because they are, remember, open-hearted) but he is oblivious to her break with stereotype because he's not the sort to be vaguely aware of stereotypes. I am not one for sentimentalism, you may remember. I don't like epigrams unless they are funny because I can't resist finding a logical frame to them. (There usually isn't one.) Then everyone thinks I'm overthinking it, but really, I think everyone is underthinking it.

But the scene where he has tried to leave town but is beaten up as people hijack his car, and then realises the same thing may have happened to her, is touching. He follows the trail she would have taken, probably reenacting what has just happened to him and could have happened to her over and over in his head. He acts within his nature, with bravery that does not require him to beat up people in his way, even when they try to beat him, or with one manly hand destroy alien ship after ship and the other while clutching a catatonic woman to his chest.

When he finds his love in a church, there is a crowd between them and the two of them do the required swimming against the current to get each other thing. Apologising to people as they do. They hug and then just stand there leaning against each other for a while. An alien ship is crashing into a stained glass window and they just stand there, happy to be with each other. Nor is there any smooching. Ok, maybe one, but more a kiss than a smooch.

Ok, so maybe I am sentimental. I just usually keep the emotion safe and warm within a blanket of facetiousness.

So, My Point? My Point is obviously that the 1953 movie is much better than the recent one, that radio is a dangerous weapon, that everyone except the Russians should leave space expeditions to Nasa, that underwhelming is a new word, and that aliens are not as intelligent as we think, because a recon team would have warned its siblings to not bother with Earth because it is governed by a (female) entity that is really just a process who is just otherwise like that.

While those are all good Points, the best is that I am usually surprised when I pick up a classic work, whether DVD or book, and especially when I have seen an updated version. The characters are sympathetic because they don't imagine they can take on monsters singlehandedly but that doesn't mean they are less brave. It isn't even part of their frame of reference. I usually expect to seethe at a woman forced into the dichotomy of mother and whore, but what I get is usually more complicated, something I am actually proud of (a forced connection, so perhaps what I mean is hopeful).

Discworld

Generally (except for the writings of a good friend, which is why I say 'generally'), I do not enjoy satire. I am easily riled, upset, impassioned. "Silly women drivers" is enough for me to train the beady little eyes on you like the laser beads of a sniper rifle. So you can imagine what happens when someone is turning my pet issue into a seeming joke. Even if they are unpacking an argument using humour as a kind of common ground.

I care not. By the time I see an empty suitcase, I am already peeved, anywhere in a range from sniper rifle to air attack.

See, I am facetious; which is like being satirical except the satire is a prank (a stapler set in jelly being a favourite), intended to give the writer room to explore the cupboard drawers of the position while everyone else is looking in the other direction. Which is not the same thing. A satirer knows what her position is.

Generally... Remember that disclaimer? Yep, I have packed away the rifle and begun being facetious.

Terry Pratchett gets away with it because his novels double as fantasy, which I have always been a fan of. Meaning that like any child I dreamed of a dragon who was more friend than pet - he hangs around because we enjoy each other's company. He is not a fan of other people though, and my instruction to generally not burn people into shadows is the only thing he doesn't like about me. I prefer not to think about how he feeds himself.

The world is divided into People Who Have Read Pratchett and Those Who Haven't. We each feel sorry for the other, but my side has a dragon, so...

Pratchett, for those of you on the side of Haven't (pitying look), has created a world called Discworld. Even the name is satirical. The world is literally a disc, but as per some legend or other, the disc sits on four elephants who stand on the shell of a giant turtle who is swimming through space (according to Book 2, there are may be a few turtlettes swimming alongside the erm adult (gender is indeterminate here)).

The joke is layered: Most obviously, this is a dig at people who used to think the world was flat. Less obviously, it is a dig at the mentality of the people who thought the world was flat. Because human nature isn't many things but (contrary to popular opinion) it is stuck in juvenilia. Those people still exist (not literally, maybe as atoms) but now they voraciously argue against global warming (FYI, a natural occurrence, peeps, else we would be (not) breathing nitrogen right now) and believe in democracy (that is a long story).

And that's just the name!

My favourite characters are the Patrician and Captain Vimes of the Watch. The Patrician is the for-all-intents-and-purposes the Prime Minister of Ankh Morpork (a city, not a state, because maintaining just the city is enough of a job). He never seems exhausted though. Or surprised. He is mildly amused sometimes, but usually that means someone is about to regret being amusing. Vimes is sometimes amusing, and often exhausted, but seems to be protected by rubber tyres, like a go-cart track.

Why am I reminiscing? For your edification. No. It's my blog, so unless I am educating you (another pitying look) on civil rights and recycling, I am not really interested in your edification, you.

No, I am reading my way from Book 1 all the way through to wherever in the 30s we will be when I get there. No, this is not a case of a trilogy with 30 books or 10 trilogies. Discworld had solidified from the giggles of the readers long before this trilogy fad set in. Pratchett writes one book a year (sometimes two) and releases them round about Christmas. Clever bugger.

Why am I rereading these books? Full of questions today (whatever day it is that you are reading this), aren't you?

I hadn't read a Discworld novel in yonks (which is a year or two). Then I picked up Making Money, as sorbet (which will (perhaps) mean something to you if you have read this blog before or understand words). What surprised me was the simple way he picks up an idea and turns it inside out, so it's still the same shape but it looks different. (Mostly all the threads are poking out and there's fluff along some of the hems. I am picturing a fleese-lined onesie.)

In this case, the gold standard. The protagonist points out, in a matter-of-fact way, that gold doesn't really play any large part in our daily lives or in the grander life of society, unless you are a jeweller. It is meaningless when compared with, say, iron. Genius. (He then goes on to apply that concept to bank notes, but let's not quibble.)

I enjoyed the satire (which is not as high-brow as that in the quality daily publication of your choice, perhaps, but definitely funnier), so naturally I thought, let's read all of them. Again. In order. Of course. This was about two months ago. I am on number 4, Mort, which is generally agreed to be a favourite (I'd put the odds at 1:8, so place your bets now folks, before it slips down). The reason being my third favourite character: DEATH. (That's how he speaks, WITH EMPHASIS.)

DEATH in Discworld is a pragmatic man - he isn't fussed about whether you are a good or a bad person, because he has seen the (very dull) infinity through which the turtle swims and lost that sense of morality like a coat. On the other hand, he named his horse 'Binky' (lower caps intentional). So he's not entirely lost to the dark side.

In this particular installment, DEATH has an apprentice (who seems, like the deceased, unsurprised to be visited by a skeleton in a black coat who SPEAKS WITH EMPHASIS). Like most of Pratchett's protagonists, poor Mort is insecure and trying to come off as a James Dean, but his tongue keeps giving him away. Also his shaking hands.

As with all Pratchett novels, the author sets up a moral or social quandary, and then shows you there is another, more natural way to approach it. (It usually helps if you are a bit dense but a good person, or have a suitcase made of sapient pearwood (perhaps the most terrifying... thing in Discworld).) Rather than let the apple of his eye be killed, Mort does away with the assassin trying to kill her and upsetting Fate. No, actually, Fate carries on as if nothing has changed, which is a whole other problem.

What now? Does he kill his apple and let her disappear into the afterlife? (This is one of those relationships where he was struck dumb by her presence and has now spent five minutes talking to her. Obviously they are meant to be together...) Does he carry on while Fate carries on and she is stuck in limbo? Well, I'm not going to spoil it for you!

And this is what I enjoy about Pratchett's satire: Him. He is an eternal optimist, in a world where it is healthier to be a cynic. He believes in good and bad, evolution, and people. He is genuinely indignant about people who exercise power over others, about decision making and about ignorance. Not in order of indignance - ignorance probably comes first.

So expect regular updates as I plow through 30-odd books and guffaw a lung (I find myself lightly snorting at the jokes before actually laughing). If you haven't read them yet, hopefully I can bully you into trying one, and if you have, hopefully I can bully you into reading another one. We could prove Pratchett right by guffawing the world until it rocks on the backs of four elephants standing on top of a turtle swimming through space with turtlettes swimming alongside.

The Elephant Keepers' Children

Peter Høeg gives away the plot of The Elephant Keepers' Children fairly quickly. In the first chapter. Which is ten pages long. Our protagonist (who is all of fourteen) and his sister (sixteen) have discovered the secret to zen, which is a mishmash of aphorisms such as living in the moment and pursuing your dreams, all mostly alluded to through the character's strained silences after epiphanic moments, which are, to be honest, about two pages apart.

Now would you be surprised if I said I enjoyed the book? No, because you are used to me being facetious and recognise the greater potential for humour (you say sarcasm; I say wit) in a negative review. And because my really negative reviews are often less humourous than just plain negative, maybe even mean (if you can't do, criticise!).

The first novel of Høeg's that I read was Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. Chances are you have watched the similarly laboured and Nordically dark movie, although that is pretty much all they have in common, if I remember the movie correctly, which it is entirely possible I do not. 'Laboured' here is a compliment. The book is intense, as is living in the confines of the darkness and then the sunlight of a northern country. So intense and brooding that my restless soul felt soothed.

Miss Smilla begins with the death of a young boy who lived in the same housing complex as the main character, which is ruled accidental but she reveals was not. The mystery story that follows is also (perhaps more so) an untangling of Miss Smilla's own fractured past and her acceptance of another loner into her life. The last few pages are a confrontation of intense meaning and brooding life (did you catch that?) that soothed this restless soul.

This is a good thing, unless you perhaps are happy-go-lucky, and believe good people deserve good things and bad people deserve bad things, or if you are on good terms with the universe. In which case I should like to meet you, hand you a glass of wine and interrogate you. For example, what should one do to pursue a meaningful career in books and make dollops of cash and give back to the community while maintaining a life?

Anyway, Miss Smilla goes down in my notes (I don't really keep notes, except this blog) as one of the most intense (intense in the sense of a plaster being ripped off) books I have ever read. Alice in Wonderland perhaps being the first because of the chapter where she has been welcomed into someone's house and then grows and grows until she rips the entire thing up, nevermind when she is being chased by cards because the queen says they must chop off her head. 

The second book of his I read was Borderliners, which is about an experiment in the 60s in a boarding school. Children with social and behavioural issues are being integrated with 'normal' children in a 'normal' school. The protagonist is one of the former, but he frames the story as a conspiracy of his own making (as opposed to the one really unveiling). Again the last few pages are so intense, partly because we finally realise the full scope of the real story, but also partly because of the boy's own realisations.

I suppose it is a bit like Alice realising the queen is her mother as she is being pursued by her brothers.

The Elephant Keepers' Children is Høeg's latest book. I was waiting for the paperback to come out (see above re the dollops of cash I do not earn as I suffer for my art blah blah schmak) but stumbled across a trade paperback in a local bargain book store. Yay!

The cover is simply drawn, probably digitally: a series of walls receding into the distance, ladders leaned against them, and on the foremost wall, a boy sitting on top of the wall and a girl climbing. If I were the publisher I may have asked for the perspective of the children and ladders to be reviewed, because the angles are not realistic: the ladders should poke through the walls at those angles and that boy should slide straight off. But maybe that is the point and I am looking past it.

It is about a family, set in the same darkly intense country as the other novels. It too is a mystery, but the story is (seemingly) lighter, almost dreamlike and the mystery is being explored more than discovered.

The family includes three long-suffering children; long-suffering because their parents seem to be uninhibited, autistic delinquents, despite being the curators of a local parish. The children, specially the younger children (Peter and Tilda), are tasked with keeping their parents in line and routinely project this on to other people, including a local entrepreneur who runs a fetish sex hotline and the local camp drug dealer, who is also a count. Their parents disappear and the authorities swoop in to lock them up in a rehab clinic - err, what?

Ok, not almost dreamlike; mostly, perhaps entirely dreamlike. I avoided this because I was afraid you would get the wrong idea. You have the wrong idea. The fantasy is made of symbols set on a real landscape. The boy describes his school, the local tourist trade, the mainland and a sponsored cruise, which are all realistic, except that he and his sister are resilient super-heroes, talking their way through adult conversations and donning disguises, with a pet dog in tow.

He also seems to understand his parents' behaviour (and all human behaviour, in fact) in a way that I all (all 30-odd years of me) could not. I will not disclose the rest of the mystery but this one is proffered up front: the elephant is your ego and super-ego, the parts of you that are grandiose, instinctive, uninhibited by social mores - in the parents' case, conniving. An elephant can be a couple of tons of destruction, plowing through thorn trees and rolling over cars. The keeper is the id, or the conscious part of you. The part that inhibits - that drowns the part of you eyeing dollops of cash being handed over at the teller next to you.

And that is nowadays generally reviled by the part of society that does not rely on the animals for an income, as cruel. Which includes me. But I am conflicted. About everything.

The boy perceives the parents to be uninhibited, autistic delinquents (that's not just a projection) but also reasons that his parents have their own elephants that he doesn't understand and that they are the keepers. He and his sister need to protect them from themselves. In this case the keeper is holding on for dear life, or playing along because he sees something here to his own benefit (no one ever said the keeper isn't conniving too).

Perhaps the parents represent his own elephant and his portrayal of himself his own keeper. After all, who doesn't harbour some kind of fantasy at the expense of their parents? Apparently this is what drives Disney movies: the cute and furry orphaned animal, which matches a dream of ourselves as brave orphaned children, free of the shackles of society. If you don't dream it now, deny you did when you were shorter than the counter in the kitchen. Even Alice is abandoned by her family in her own dream.

I confess (don't worry, not that kind of confession, although a blog is a good place for such things) I did not enjoy this book as much as I did Høeg's others. I confess (again!) that is an understatement. See, I enjoy tortured, intense, brooding, navel-gazing literature. See above. That is what I have come to expect from the author, in the same way that romance watchers expect to a happily ever after - or at least a smooch - imagine Eat, Pray, Love, without any romance (which was what I expected, actually).

I enjoyed the approach until mid-way, when the fantasy began to swing upwards and I lost track of the plot between all the slashes and diacritics (awful but true). It reminded me of Borderliners, suspended on the free living and loving of the same time period. But without the nihilism. Or romance. Were romance expected. Which it wasn't.

This isn't a negative review (truly) but it isn't a positive one. It is a halfhearted and a little confused one. I want to recommend this book to the stars (hyperbole), like I would any other f Høeg's (to the Northern Lights) (not hyperbole), but if you're reading this, you expect existential crisis as other people would expect romance. Well, not as, but you know what I mean. So read Miss Smilla and Borderliners, and if you enjoy them, don't read The Elephant Keepers' Children.

Saying something doesn't make it true

Pinterest feeds off sentimental sayings of ten words or less set on a pretty textured backgrounds or stock photos. Saying something doesn't make it true, my friend, any less than believing the sun will rise in the south tomorrow will make it so. Nor will grouping ten words, like singles around the bar, guarantee they make sense. In fact, you could argue that there is an ideal number of words in a concise but accurate description. But ten words is not it.

Think about it: Big Bang Theory. Err firecrackers? Popping balloons (shudder)? Sheldon? Explain that in ten words or less.

In fact, most of these memes make less sense than the cliches and housewives' myths handed down through the generations (like the perfect way to make tea), which usually only inadvertently make sense (there is no perfect way to make tea, because coffee. You heard me. Coffee). "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." Aaaaaand sometimes it doesn't. "Haste makes waste." Not in the movies. You're not exactly going to sit down to think when an alarm starts running its mouth off in a nuclear reactor.

Here are some clangers.

The words are very pretty and, in these cases, make some superficial sense and give us a warm feeling that would otherwise be a symptom of internal bleeding. Although this may surprise you, I am a book person, a reader, a literate. I am also a creative who fits into the box of stereotypical characters of writers quite nicely, with some shuffling. So I can tell you that the imagination is mostly escapism and creating is more a by-product. I've lived the thousand lives The Man of One Thousand Books is alluding to. Many are independent of books and live like moss in the damper parts of my brain.

Let's take a breather here. What is The Point of this post? a) The Big Bang Theory b) Memes c) Game of Thrones d) Coffee e) None of the Above.

The Point is always coffee but you get points for trying if you went with e). Now, we're rounding a hairpin bend, so stay with me, you.

Reading turns you into a know-it-all. I am a false measure, because I was this way to start with. I once tried to convince my mother than one million was actually one thousand thousand. My clincher was "my teacher told me". This is like Maths in school - most of your marks were for working out, even if your numbers were wrong. So my logic was wandering in the right direction, but it could have hit the million between the eyes if I had listened.

A reader can, and will, tell you about Emperor butterflies (all my knowledge about these creatures comes from the books of Enid Blyton so it could, for all I know, be a strictly fictitious thing. Although, who would make up a butterfly?), the aftermath of World War I and where Anastacia's body is. Replace these facts with whatever fact the reader in your life is currently spouting.

This occurred to me because, in lieu of being able to give anything my attention for more than five minutes right now, I am devouring magazines as if they were episodes of The Office (fyi my favourite two series. Like, ever). Mostly techie or cultural things (fashion magazines, by comparison, are just recycled and often contradictory tidbits, like whether ripped denim looks trashy and whether yellow lipstick ever suits anyone. Like, ever).

Ok, I confess. I just wanted to regale you with some annoying facts about the world. Anticipating it would be annoying, I tried to ride in on the back of a Lipizzaner - donkey - mule deer - camel. Basically, I tried to hide my intention in plain sight. Since we've come all this way, I am just going to go ahead as if I had not confessed anything at all. Which, honestly, is the way most Catholics go about it.

So, did you know that nuclear reactors are being phased out, by not being upgraded, the output slowed and the plants shut, because they are not efficient sources of power? Although it is an efficient source of death and general suffering. Did you know that a team of countries hacked into the nuclear facilities of another country and shut the whole thing down? Did you know that the most complete skeleton of a T-Rex was found in 1977 and is the only one to have arms (that sounds like a meme in the making)? And that T-Rex could not live in today's world because the air isn't dense enough?

Facts are like crosswords: they are addictive. In fact, both are like reading fiction, which is addictive. Don't take my word for this though; nothing accurate can be said in ten words, other than: My favourite dinosaur is the stegosaurus. The cat crossed the road. The tree is tall. While true, they don't have quite the same ring as "A rolling stone gathers no moss" (you spotted it, right, the blatant problem here? A rolling stone probably has crevices that gather moss, because to gather does not mean to grow).

We have inadvertently (phew, this post has meaning) stumbled onto questions about language, truth and culture. None of this can be summed up in ten words, or even in this post, or probably in a lifetime. So, I will distract you with another fact: Eskom (our electricity provider) built a pumped storage site that can power up in five minutes to support the national grid. It is built underground because the site it's built in is home to a rare bird that no one has ever heard sing. Or something.

That was more than ten words, you.

V: on hold

The real world has me in its claws but I promise not to let this become a habit. Granted, a mole can't do much against the eagle attached to the claws except become a very unpleasant meal. All this really proves is that this metaphor has limits. The real world has me surrounded but the Law of Cowboy Films says that the fewer the men, the craftier they have to be to survive. In this case, I intend to go down in a blaze of words and few inappropriate pranks.

For instance, is it safe to put a goldfish in a bowl in the fridge for long enough for someone to find it?

I haven't abandoned words in this stake-out - that would be just ridiculous. At the moment, all I really have brain real estate for is crosswords. Yep. You, stop sniggering. Quit - lay off - end - halt - cease - terminate - desist from snickering - simpering - sneering - laughing.

Really, I rarely finish a crossword without cheating: using dictionaries, thesauruses, and an app that allows you to match words and reveal blocks. But I can live with this because I get bored when I reach an impasse and rules are flexible.

Before my two-week hiatus from blogging, I was still ploughing my way through V and 1Q84. Ok, don't look at me like that - that's not exactly true because the latter has been kicked under my bed, behind my hairdryer. I had reached the point where one character's married girlfriend is pregnant and the other is recovering (in uncomfortable detail) from a night of debauchery she doesn't remember. I stepped on it as I got up out of bed and slipped.

V is on my Kindle, which is less slippery. However, it does not have a solution to being distracted. Every time I pick it up to read it, I have to flip back to find something I recognise. The novel is made up of stories that branch off from the main story. These branches usually handstand back in time, pulling certain characters with it. The point being that you have to pay attention otherwise you may find yourself unwittingly a soldier without a past on Namibia's Skeleton Coast.

The chapter set in Namibia is gruelling, as is another set close by, in an estate that houses one continuous party a la The Great Gatsby. Not only do events depict the brutal violations of human rights that were colonialism, but the protagonists experience a flux of emotions, from bravery to insipidness, activism to self-preservation, care to the need for care.

The main story is set in post-World War II America and follows an ex-naval officer. Although Wikipedia says he was discharged, I remember vividly that he went AWOL, although perhaps this insert is the reverse of my loss of memory. He is part of the Whole Sick Crew, an incestuous bunch of naval officers and some women. He describes himself as the most popular man among the women but also the most virginal, even though he and Rachel have something destructive going on.

Now we reach My Point - congratulations, pick up 50 000 Air Miles when next you visit your local bookshop.

V reminds me of Cloud Atlas, but only in the sense that Mercury and Jupiter orbit the same star. Cloud Atlas depicts several stories set in several genres, with no main narrative except that forced on it by the movie. Instead, it is the themes that bind them - themes that range from esoteric (producers of the movie) to literary and semiotic (me).

Having said this, certain elements recur, just as they occur in other novels written by the same author. Mostly, these elements are characters. They recur as actual characters, or just references or blurry pasts.

In V, the stories are more interbred, with a single protagonist, and more consistent voice and genre. I am twisting myself into contradictions now, which is fitting, because the author also experiments with genre, particularly historical drama. His prose is consistently highbrow, even when he is slinging slang between the Sick Crew and rival gangs.

Am I recommending fans of Cloud Atlas to read V? a) I can't because I haven't finished and who knows what asteroid could be hiding in the last few pages. b) These are two different but similar books, and it depends on whether you enjoyed the games the first played with genre (different) or that they played games with genre (similar).

Don't quote me on it. My opinion can only be trustworthy once I have finished the book and I haven't. I also cannot promise to finish anytime soon, since isolated synonyms and antonyms comprise the sum total of my attention right now, as I figurre out how to twist myself to bite the claws that hold me, or crawl out of the frontier cottage I am crouched in, in the hopes that my attackers will wait there until their toes chafe.