Salem's Lot and Half of a Yellow Sun

Vampires. No radioactive cows. Maybe a ghost and a portal of evil. But mostly vampires. I enjoy a classic vampire story. Let me clarify: I enjoyed Dracula and its queasy Romantic-Gothic sexuality. In a sense, Salem's Lot is a classic vampire movie in that it climbs the same brickwork, but it has dirt on the soles of its shoes and it arrives at the wrong window: that of the servants, who make dull vampires.

The title is promising: Salem's Lot. The witch trials, the drownings, the burnings - and the contemporary knowledge that this is where supposed witches were burnt to death because some fools got syphilis and needed  a scapegoat. We also know that supposed witches are a vengeful bunch who come back to pull out the hair of innocent people. So we begin with that stomach-clenching anticipation. Not only are there no ghosts, there are no witches. No animal familiars, not even an animated broomstick or dancing mice.

I am bored already by this topic. You? Which is My Point (We got here faster than usual. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.) Stephen King is a master of his craft. His plot structure, use of characters, foreshadowing and resolution are precise. Which is, again, My Point. His prose carries you along until you find you are already finished (well, kinda). But the foreshadowing hits you in the face like a hand in a boxer's glove, which is delivered by the characters, who (imaginatively speaking) look like Rocky. In other words (if you are struggling to concentrate, too), the story is predictable. Almost (I can hear you shouting objections already) predictable.

From the 1931 film Dracula

The topic is also promising. Vampires are modelled on Vlad the Impaler, who was a piece of work, easily one of the most evil men of all time. Even a cleaned-up version is sickening: the man literally had people impaled, feet to head, for entertainment. Because he was (let's review this ) evil. More evil than a town of vampires or a squadron of Nazis. A thoroughbred psychopath. Even I would rather believe in supernatural evil, not human evil, so I can begin to understand this level of bad. I crave some moral boundary to shove him behind; I need to know that he and his ilk could be vanquished and sent to suffer for their actions for eternity. Which is perhaps where the vampire legend comes from.

Now you are wishing I had not even written than blurb on Vlad's hobby, right? You are also wishing I would continue. Either way you are still reading. Because holding hands with your horror is your death instinct. You know the drill: that we watch movies like Scream and Saw to confront our own mortality. Because we all subconsciously assume we are immortal (don't argue, you - in a simple, childish argument, even denying it proves it) partly because who could live every day with immediate knowledge that we are dying? When we watch movies like Saw, we spend the first hour or so dancing with the knowledge that we could die any moment, and the second hour calmed because someone perseveres and survives, and that someone is metaphorically us.

(Personally, I don't watch movies like Saw because I can't bear the idea that people would maim each other, nevermind enjoy, nevermind imagine these scenarios. The thought of it literally makes me ill. But zombies... I get that.)

Now here is where the promise of the title is really mangled. (I am trying to restrain myself from making glittery jokes, because they're so easy, but feel free to make your own and not tell me about it.)  Salem's Lot was written in the '80s, roundabout Lost Boys and then Blade. Its vampires are the lost-soul and replaced-by-pure-thirsty-evil sort. They need to be staked, not understood. For all other similarities with Dracula, this lot of vampires lacks the lust of its father figure, which makes this version vapid. Isn't that the point of the vampire legend? Repressed female sexuality? (Read Dracula and get back to me.)

I followed this up with Chimanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, as I promised. It is set during the Nigerian civil war of the 1960s - far more frightening than Dracula but on par with Vlad. For me, it echoes the traumas of the more recent Rwandan crisis, which has always disturbed me. As it should, but perhaps more than it should. My conscience cannot understand - not even if you convinced me that half of the population fell ill with the vampiric illness. Please try. I would much rather believe in supernatural evil, than that there is more than a one per cent chance my neighbours could be convinced that I deserve to die, because someone calls me a cokroach or by virtue of some incidental thing like my dialect or accent or clothing, .

Toni Morrison (I am really cramming everything in to this post) wrote that trauma cannot be transcribed; it is a great bawling absence - see, I am already running short of words. This is how she writes (or doesn't write) about trauma in her novels: by writing 'around' it. EM Forster did the same thing in Passage to India, when the main character suffers a nervous breakdown. Adichie (who is influenced by Morrison's work - she's like the Dickens of modern literature) gives trauma her own spin. She describes elements of the trauma matter-of-factly.

(I am about to get kind of juvenile Vlad here, so read on at your own peril.)

One character is evacuated via a train cart like a cow to slaughter. Next to (leaning on) her is a woman with her daughter's head in a pot - we can only assume it was soldiers with knives not bombs. Adichie describes how ashen the girl's skin in, as if it were dabbed in powder. Adiche refers back to this moment often but never with any overt judgement.

The same character finds her way home to her husband and child, but suddenly cannot walk. Her legs just fail as if a nerve has been severed. She has to be carried everywhere, instead. Again, Adiche presents this to us matter-of-factly, as she might a dinner conversation or visit to the market. Trauma isn't contained in time - it spreads out laterally into innocuous events like shopping for food. It can't be confined to memory, temporal space, even emotion. It is processed in some parts of the brain but not others.

There is also a slight thrill to reading a story with macabre mystery. Our death instinct gleefully steps up again. You are alive and dying, it says. As if death has a quota, you have seen death and been spared. You are human; you are special; you will live for ever.

© Semiotic apocalypse, via http://semioticapocalypse.tumblr.com/: Biafran soldier during Nigerian civil war circa 1967

Full Dark, No Stars

Until now, all I knew of Stephen King were his writings about, well, writing. Specifically, On Writing. Even of that book, I have read only excerpts. So, what I knew about Stephen King was limited to what advice I wanted about my own craft. 'Life's too short,' I thought. But no, it isn't. Life is very long, years long, and 'if not, why not' (a saying I use often because it is technically meaningless but pithy).

First I picked up Full Dark, No Stars. (Well, I opened it on my Kindle app on my phone.) Short stories, for my short attention span. There are four (not so short) stories in the book. What I expected from Mr King was knife-like suspense, punch-like action and trite morals. What I received was mostly dusty foreshadowing, fleshy characters and some of my own, justified anger. You know me, this is neither here nor there (another of my beloved and lovely statements).

For his next birthday, I am going to send Mr King a sock filled with coins. The sock will have a tag saying 'Foreshadowing' and the instructions will say to use it next time he is setting up his stories for us. Then he can spend the remaining 4% of his effort in surprising us. Maybe horror stories aren't meant to be surprising. Maybe the joy of reading a Stephen King is the closure. But no, horror is meant to be surprising. Like when Dracula lives - unlives - even after Buffy stakes him three times.

The first story '1922' reminded me of Freud's Rat Man. This man was tortured by something most people don't think about, until some movie or story prompts them to, and they talk about it over coffee or beer, and then they forget about it while hunting for change to pay for parking. He was obsessed with the idea that something he did or thought would have ramifications for the people he loved. He obsessed over a stone in the road, because it could be the stone that broke the wheel of the wagon his love was travelling in. But if he moved it, he could actually be ensuring that that was what it was. He was stuck between seemingly irrelevant choices, which all seemed fateful.

The man's pseudonym came from his primary obsession: that his family would suffer a torture involving rats in a cage  attached somewhere on your body, which would obviously eat their way through you to get out. Obviously. He worried that just thinking it would cause the torture to be inflicted on the ones he loved. The notion itself seems fairly normal to me, folks, especially if you consider 'positive thinking' and 'send this email to 10 people or you will be cursed' messages. Or is truth relative, in which case my point still holds.

The crazy is in the obsession, right? (The thought-provoking torture method aside.) In nit picking every choice in your life, even the innocuous ones. Picking up a stone in the road, to save your loved one, in fact causing their death. Free will versus reality versus morality and intention. I dunno. To me, crazy is in not thinking about this at all.

As I write, my bunny is refashioning my jersey and pants into a shelter, occasionally nipping me in the process. Darnit, she's so cute, I can't stop her. Death, free will, resignation. I call that Sunday lunch.

This theme rings through each of the four stories. In '1922', a man premeditatively kills his wife with the aid of their son. He is haunted not by her but by the rats that are the last thing he sees when he fills in her resting place. 'Big Driver' is about a woman who is raped and left for dead (go, girl). 'Fair Extension' is what I associate with Stephen King: a man 'steals' his best friend's success through voodoo. 'A Good Marriage' is about what a wife does when she finds her husband's guilty pastime.

They are all about choice.

They are also filled with rats. Rats being the foreshadowing - literally, in the first story - like the sock filled with coins. The choices (and choice) are laid out in the first few paragraphs, and if you read between the lines (har!), that's it. That's the story. These characters aren't considering their options, choosing how to shake the hand of fate, choosing what they will be wearing, how they will smile, where they will be. They are justifying a decision they made at the very beginning of the story, asking you to be their alibi.

If I say to you now, oh no, I can hear the rats skittering behind me, literally and metaphorically, what do you think is going to happen? Are we going to play My Little Ponies or are they going to chew through my arm simply to stop me from typing? And if I post it once an hour for three days (with my other arm) on Facebook? That, my friends, is a Stephen King story.

As usual, I didn't hate these stories. The premises were interesting and the moral ambiguities more interesting. But I do not like to be manipulated, especially if I can see the hands moving the strings. Mr King's biggest strength is the empathicness of his characters. Whether or not I like the character or their choices, I understand them. I can even see how those types of choices are ingrained in our natures: survival of the fittest, schadenfreude, vanity, revenge.

Mr King posts signs at every exit, but they are lies - none of them really go anywhere. Our characters have made their choices. The rest of the stories are just the kind of posturing your best friend's new boyfriend or girlfriend makes when meeting you for the first time. They want your vote when it comes down to them or your best friend's ex. Even if they're pulling out that person's hair and groping for a murder weapon.

I am bitter, but I am also reading Salem's Lot. I wrote this post to convince myself something unexpected is going to happen. But no, it's vampires, isn't it? Not a bunch of marrow-sucking pygmies, real-estate agents or radioactive cows? Please be radioactive cows.

The Dresden Files: #7 Dead Beat

The internet is not to be trusted. Not just because it is a Cold-War invention designed to decentralise information, a bit like a guerrilla cell, but because anyone can ‘publish’ anything, like a top five list of their favourite sandwich toppings (cheese (which is assumed as a fundamental ingredient in all food), egg, avo, cucumber and mayo, and chocolate spread) and Google might proclaim them expert in the culinary arts. (This blog does not appear on any search engine lists FYI. Perhaps Google doesn’t like my choice of sandwiches. Perhaps because you should visit my blog more often. #justsaying)

Anyway, when I wanted a light read, and had already read five Terry Pratchett’s in a (chronological) row, I typed in ‘top 10 supernatural apocalyptic horror’ to a search engine that has enough publicity already. Some of the lists were weighted by coming-of-age stories that encourage all sorts of abuse, and fantasies of death – you know what I am talking about. Most of the others I had read. I had to be selective and so I jotted down only the titles of books that appeared in the same lists as the The Road; while lists that included Stranger in a Strange Land and excluded Margaret Atwood were dismissed with a click.

One title I had never heard of reappeared, making it a hit by Google standards. Dead Beat by Jim Butcher, part of the Dresden Files. This title is number 7 in the series (I will get to my opinion of series in general, if not now, then in a post built entirely for it). A site devoted to science fiction (obviously this site will have the answers I am looking for, and none of them are sandwiches) called this particular book ‘a kitchen sink book; Butcher manages to cram in werewolves, wizards, vampires, fairies, demons and zombies, without making it feel crowded’. She forgot the T-Rex.

I can hear you, shifting the cursor indecisively toward the cross at the top of the screen. That would have been my reaction. Until the improbable happened: the security post to my suspension of disbelief malfunctioned. Yep, I read a story about the fleshy ghost of a T-Rex ridden by a wizard without a pointy hat and with a staff, and I believed it (as in I believed this could happen in that fantasy Earth, not now, here, in front of me. Just to clarify). That dinosaur was maybe the coolest character in any story I have recently read, except for Commander Vimes of the Nightswatch.

Again, hear me out. Google Analytics also records how long you spend reading my blog, and have I mentioned I am broke-ass writer, whose career may begin or end with your reading? I finished reading Dead Beat in a couple of hours, including some moonlit hours, and then decided to read the series in order. (I am on Book 3.) Because it was an erudite essay on human nature? Because it made me examine my sacred cows (hock included. I love that word. Hock)? Because it used the supernatural to comment on the ordinary? Kinda, kinda and kinda.

This is not a great book, but it is a very good book. So are books 1 and 2. And not because in number 4 a T-Rex that cuts a swathe of carnage through San Francisco, but because Book 2 includes four different types of werewolf (‘werewolf’ being an ambiguous term, as Mr Butcher shows us), also cutting a swathe of carnage. The most terrifying and rabid of the four is the loup-garou, a man whose family was cursed to turn on full moon. Sounds ordinary but no. This creature is, again, terrifying. It is huge and filled with a blood lust that shreds the man’s conscience when he wakes up.

You may have notice there are no Native Americans pacing in denim shorts. Jim Butcher obviously does a wealth of research, drawing deeply on various myths before painting them with his imagination. When he describes a T-Rex romping down a boulevard, he has contemplated the dimensions of beast and environment, and how one would go about riding it (see, a T-Rex leans forward when moving and leans back but not entirely vertical when standing, so he places the wizard near the neck of the creature, which is also far from the teeth).

The book earns its ‘very’ because it is two tsp detective novel to one tsp supernatural thriller, just without the make-up plastered, body-hugging dress wearing, purring femme fatale. In fact his range of female characters is more balanced than is usual in fantasy literature, which is not to say that he and his wizard don’t like a beautiful woman, because they do. They definitely do. The books are formulaic but in the way that Stephen King’s writing is good. It works. Because they are not predictable. Which seems obvious when the cast includes four type of werewolf, an energy vampire and a dinosaur. But it isn’t. Trust me, I’m an editor.

Harry Dresden is our private investigator and wizard, like in the pointy hat sense but without the pointy hat. (He does however possess a staff covered in runes, a talking skull and a cat.) He investigates the paranormal; he has a legitimate ad in the yellow pages that says ‘wizard’ although most people think he is a charlatan – including to some extent himself. He is employed by a branch of the police department, which thinks he is a charlatan too as well as a scape goat.

Can you focus, please? In Book 7 (I can hear you bleating about reading the books in order, but then please explain Star Wars), three sets of warlocks (or something) want to call on the brutish but sinister Elfking to chomp his way through the human race, making them kings and queens (or something). Of course, this can only happen at a specific time and place, because otherwise it would be difficult to get everyone together and string a plot across between them. Have I mentioned the zombies yet?

If you have reached this point and are thinking, ‘I don’t like science fiction’, I do not know why you are still reading. Either peg your disbelief over a clothesline or go away. You are breaking my train of thought.

Dresden is a more likeable Sherlock Holmes, with the wit of the Holmes (Robert Downey Jnr (who, FYI, I disliked in that role very much)) of the modern retellings. The wizard surprises even himself when he says something that isn’t sarcastic – some comments making me laugh loudly enough to frighten myself, the cats and my bunny. Like any good likeable hero, he tends to trip face-down into dangerous situations, stopping mid-step to (sometimes accidentally) smite someone.

But essentially our guy is ordinary. Apart from his magical powers – that make electrical items of any sort explode – a staff and a cat. But otherwise ordinary – except for the regular appearance of demons, fairies, vampires and zombies. Dresden is the good guy that we can all relate to. The guy trying to make a difference. Trying to live his life, without being impaled, scalped or set on fire over a misunderstanding.  

According to the head honchos of wizards and a chorus of supernatural beings, Dresden’s fatal flaw is his attachment to humanity. An attachment to people being and (this part’s important) staying alive. An attachment so strong he is always shielding people from supernatural crazies. He is always trying to keep carnage down a minimum, but that means the rules have to bend to his will. Terrible, just terrible, right? No. His real flaw is giving other people benefit of the doubt that he often doesn’t give himself. He is strong, in most ways except physically, but not impervious to pain (Book 2 was a close one).  

Another site devoted to the fans of science fiction says, ‘If it ain't broke, don't fix it, and Butcher has had half a dozen books to figure out his formula is working for him. Yet he's deft enough to avoid repeating himself. He allows each volume to add a little something to the mythology that's been built up.’ You needn’t have read my waffle because this sums all My Point in a paragraph. Still, read it anyway.

In conclusion, this is a list of and recipes to make myfavourite sandwiches. *Psych* for those who skipped to the end – I even heaped on a trite introductory phrase for you. Do you still need a reason to read The Dresden Files? Here’s one for dorks like me: the books are also available as comics and audio books read by – wait for it – James Marsters aka Spike of Buffy and Spike. Indeed, fellow dorks. Indeed. 

Long past time

Folks, it has been some time since I have posted. It's not you, it's me. I have a condition more serious than treating books as people but less serious than, well, war. The chemicals in my brain are like married couples in sitcoms: forever bickering but hand-in-hand in a comfort zone. Yes, my brain is Married with Children and the chemicals are Al and Bundy, just with less filth.

I recognise that few people would consciously subject themselves to the maskless workings of my brain, so this remains my book blog, where musings on my emotional turmoil are sidenotes. So the seething of my soul has its own home where said musings . Be warned: I am not exaggerating about the seething or turmoil.

History and fiction - and dinosaurs

When I was pre-teen, I wanted to be an archaeologist. I would have been content curating a museum, because long excavations without access to proper showers wearing clothes chosen because they showed the dirt the least and brushing dirt away from a metatarsal would have tested my love even for custard croissants. Then a teacher - as they do - crushed my hopes by pointing out I wasn't very good at, like, school. Jokes on her because I then vaulted the scholarly alphabet, but sans my dreams.

What they fail to tell you in school - among many things - is that a job title hides many variations of task. Even though I lacked fundamental logical skills, as it turns out, I could have risen through the corporate landscape, perhaps in funding, by bemoaning the inadequacies of the previous job-holder and then revising everything because Steve Jobs did it (in a competitive and innovative technological environment that is completely different to most companies).

I especially love dinosaurs. Now, I understand that this discipline is a bit of a joke because it requires ignoring the amazing range of animals we have now. But, they are giant reptile-like creatures, people. And this is also a treasure hunt. We don't even really know what they look like or sound like, just where they died, really. We don't have complete skeletons, people. We're throwing a party if we find an intact femur. And like with Pluto, we're notching creatures off roll call all the time.

When I was still living in the clouds like scarecrow looking for my brain, I had collections of magazines, trading cards and posters of my favorite dinos. I drew a cartoon of a dinosaur family that I realise now was improbable because different species can't breed, and I'm pretty sure a T-Rex and brontosaurus do not a stegosaurus make. Most kids grow out of this and into, I dunno, cars and making dinner like adults.

Did you know there is actually an internet discussion about who would win: T-Rex or Allosaurus? Your answer? It's a trick question. They lived in different eras. But should time and space collapse, my money's on the Allosaurus. The T-Rex is bulky and wins mostly by rushing at its prey, and Allosauris is lithe and fights like a boxer. Another anticipated show-down is Allosaurus versus Stegosaurus. I leave that to your imagination.

A stegosaurus staring down an Allosaurus.

There is a type of dinosaur that would beat them both. A saurupod (four-legged herbivore) so big nothing could kill an adult, except maybe worms, gangrene and flu. Oh, and humans. First they were known as gigantosaurs (yes, I know, I would have called it Bowbeforemedwarves-aurus) and then titanosaurs (I call it Fiveminutesoffame-saurus). A single femur is about one and a half times the height of a person.

A herbivore at the centre of the food chain.

According to reputable sources, a velociraptor was captured last year alive in Congo. There are some people who take this seriously because some fossils of extinct dinosaurs that were not wiped out in the mass extinction have been found in the area. Unfortunately space and time has not collapsed, and a few million years is a long time for anything to hibernate. Also, if they were real, I would be there reenacting the scene in Jurassic Park where the kids are hiding in the kitchen.

Some of my favourites have always been (until they check it off roll call) a species of duck-billed dinosaurs, which is a description not a nickname. They grazed in the same way as cattle, with their lips. Do I need to state the obvious? That their lips looked like bills. Well now I have. They ate on four legs but ran away on two, smart buggers.

Bird beak rather than bill, maybe.

This was not where My Point was meant to be (this never happens. Never). I was actually going to write about a popular science book I am reading that I am sceptical about. (The author claims he wrote a paper that founded string theory. Which is interesting given that the theory predates his birth.) But, you know, then dinosaurs. Perhaps I like history because if it were going to affect us, it already has. Like a  novel, you can close the book or skip the chapter on mass sacrifice or how that fossil came to be dead in the first place. You squint at your mortality, shift your head so that it looks like immortality and leave to get lunch.

I would be good at curating a museum. Far away from other people. With only the past and fiction for company. (I meant or: past or fiction. Definitely.) Can someone translate Bowbeforemedwarves-aurus into Latin?

PS. I realise a person who hunts dinosaurs is a paleontologist. But I was 12.

Trying to be Nietzsche

For those lucky enough to be my friends on Facebook (which is a whole new level of friendship discovered only in the last ten years), you may know I am in a slump. A book slump. That right there is shame. I am not slumped beneath the pile of books I am reading or will read. Not slumped in a fort made of books or with the weight (well, technically mass) of weighty words or against my newest fictional friend or in awe of a conclusion. I am slumped against the altar of books that is my only sense of meaning.

I mean, technically, do I even exist?

That is only half facetious. Those of you who know me via my blog (a new type of acquaintance-ship) and those of you who know me in the real world and some of you who know me via Facebook, know how caught up in my literature my identity is. Oh, I know the difference between characters and real people, although the line between fantasy and reality is (thankfully) more like the boundaries between countries: a line on a piece of paper, a steady stream of stolen cars, firearms, poachers dodging the law and refugees dodging lions, and officers who take the blame from every politician who has never stood in the sun (although they'd be familiar with accepting bribes) but really have no power so they exert what power they convince us they have.

(I speak from limited but very thorough experience. I once presented myself at the South African side of the Lesotho border post. I walked in past what looked like a schooldesk and two women talking. They ignored me, so they could start yelling at me ten seconds later. I have flown to other SADC countries ten times and been interrogated every since time: oh, and my luggage searched. Every time. Another time I was stopped by an officer who had been waiting for me. While I was on the plane, they phoned my place of work to verify I worked there.)

What I am talking about is boundaries, however, not border posts. Although sometimes the line between those two is thin, too. 

I have lived at least hundreds of lives - yes, you non-believer, this saying is true. Holden of Catcher in the Rye: I ran away with him when I was fifteen. Sula of Sula: not my favourite of Toni Morrison's books, but a brutality that doesn't need fists or words. Adam of We are Now Beginning our Descent: I heard the alarms and explosions and quiet senselessness when he broke those glasses against the wall. Nancy Drew, of course (you didn't see that coming): she taught me never to accept answers.

In hundreds of places. In Midnight's Children: India's break from British rule and - instead of the joy of freedom - the conflict that is blithely described as between Muslims and Hindus. In The Road, the bleakness of pure existence that made the fantastically possible world of Oryx and Crake feel like a romantic comedy. The stream of conscious of The Waves that was a sea of voices telling a story of loss. A New York that Audrey Hepburne (however epic) could never embody in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

"It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end." That quote is painted across the top of the altar made of all these lives that are to me tangible. Sometimes it reminds me of the stupidity of people, I have to be honest, for the exact same reason that it is startling. We cannot survive alone (although I plan to prove Faulkner wrong when I find some hidey-hole and then pay people to deliver my manuscripts without explanation). Although  the first meaning seems to me to be the blandness of life - a kind of existential determinism (hah! I coined that).

If you threw one of these books at my head and did the border officer thing, first I would demonstrate the correct way to handle books (with reverence) and then I would read a few pages and remember about a quarter of what I had read, place it on my nightstand (opposite the stack of bookmarked books on my dresser (which is the same thing as my nightstand, just not next to my bed)), baby bunny would chew the cover and eventually I would  move it to the stack of books I am not slumped under.

Yes, I am being melodramatic (not about the bunny - she chowed two covers and a sticky note with a reminder on). It would not be a first - shush you. But what if I made you watch The Matrix and then led you into a room where Laurence Fishburne is waiting with two colored pills? Your mind would shut down, right? Now reverse that. I have been coughed up into the world made of binary code and I can see it but I'm too tired to read it. Yip, my life without books is exactly like that. Without, you know, all of those characters and settings.

FYI the plot of The Matrix is loosely based on a thought experiment devised by some philosopher as part of the metaphysical and existential debates. There is an amusingly vehement argument between the two camps, mostly because after a thousand years we're still just yelling at each other without concrete evidence either way. He said, what if you are dreaming, right now? One day you wake up and find that every experience, belief, emotion (you get it, and so on) is a fiction. Not one of those people you loved exists. What then? Which life is meaningful? What does that mean? And so on.

Also FYI, the movie was partly based on Neuromancer, which was based on the thought experiment. And also also FYI, there is no way to prove one way or the other. Don't bother. People much smarter than us have tried.

Neo and Morpheus (and that annoying Trinity) just assume one is better than the other and most people would react the same way. But apart from being a traitorous creep, Cypher may have been right about ignorance being bliss. I was very happy living two lives and I am not thrilled about now living my own without any distraction. 

Granted, perhaps it is the material that is the problem. My last read was A Canticle for Leibowitz, which if you have read this blog before, I did not love. It was like going for a blood test. I get anxious, not because of the sting, but because I do not like the thought of intentionally breaching my skin. I don't try to get papercuts, they just happen. (Like, daily. I can get a papercut just holding a book or opening a cereal box.) In other words, because I lost myself, so I think I lost you, it was bad because I struggled to pay attention, which made the rest of it awful, because I knew I was going to finish a book I didn't like and it was going to take a long time.

For now, I am going to continue to read magazine articles a page at a time, flick through books I know I won't finish, listen to podcasts, and do crossword puzzles and Sudoku (I have a timed app - at the moment I veer between less than one star and more than three stars (I award myself these points) - it's fantastic). I will think about the books I have read with longing, like the longing Neo would have felt for his life if he had lived in a lovely apartment like mine with three bizarre animals and shelves of books that are here when I get my life back.

Also also also FYI, while I was trying to be Descartes, Sartre and Nietszche, just without the famous part, I forgot to tell you my next attempt (you should know I never give up). Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie. I read Purple Hibiscus about six years ago and was thrown around in her character's emotions like dead leaves - the pretty yellow kind that kids make terrible and very unimaginative art with. My theory is that if I throw enough emotion at the part of my brain that is slumped over, I may push it right over. Either I'll then leap to my feet, view literature from a different angle, or close my eyes and pretend Morpheus isn't there.

A Canticle for Leibowitz: Part 2 of 2

What is the attention span of a gnat? I am figuring that we find out its life span and divide that into something objective, like the attention span of a fly, or by the amount of time they can spend on a single task. Then we could wander through a few academic halls and land up considering the consciousness of tiny flying animals or fall through the moldy hall that is when a baby becomes a person. As you may have surmised (and as intended) you may have noticed I have a short attention span, which I would compare with that of a gnat's - no, I will compare it and tell you it is two minutes and 3.2 seconds, because I can and I did.

I have also realised that I have said 'would have' a few times today. There are three 'have's in that sentence alone. What the heck is the point of that word? (And before you get snarky, you, I am well aware there is a linguistic answer, but my point still holds because this is my blog and if I say a gnat can only focus on a single task (as defined by me) for two minutes, that is valid.)

So, I finished A Canticle for Leibowitz by sheer force of will. My opinion hasn't changed. Although the structure is interesting, the symbols are heavy-handed. I could not empathise with a single character until the last 2% of the book, but by then I could also not subjugate my lack of suspension of disbelief. (I am really trying here. Whenever I want to point out how illogical something is and that it is a result of laziness not plot, I hear the 'eh' of Dwight from The Office every time he wants to point out something illogical - usually to do with bears. It builds up at the back of the throat and pops from the nasal cavity like a buzzer in a game show.)

This isn't a spoiler, unless you are inclined to belief: the book is set over centuries upon centuries, where humans build up their technology over and over to a point when they can create nuclear bombs. How? How could this happen?

Geologists tell us (although this may be a fringe group of rogue scientists who do not believe in pollution) that the poles are overdue for a shift, whereupon north becomes south, confusing swallows, polar bears and brown bears, as well as pirates and hopefully radar linked to bombs. It may or may not kill us (dust storms, rampaging polar bears and swallows, bombs). Also, (and FYI) a certain degree of climate change is normal, judging by the ice age and the fact that Europe was a desert. (Interesting point: the size of dinosaurs was only possible because the density of the air was lower than it is now.)

Given this was written in the 60s, this would take us way into the 5000s, when (hopefully for the planet) we are extinct, because, entropy. More than a few of the surviving populations would have some kind of mutation (not the X-men kind, but if I could choose, something that gives me the ability to sprint and climb like a mountain goat, because, zombies) from the recurring nuclear bombs, which they would need anyway for the fittest, which no offence, cannot be almost exclusive to monks!

Here's another meaty one for the academics: technological determinism. This book assumes a single pinnacle of human discovery and creation. Bombs, intercoms, phones, planes etc. But a) I can imagine oh so many alternatives, like, what if we discovered the more eco-friendly (and therefore smarter) solutions to electricity, fuel and, errr, general human habitation, first? And b) does this 'pinnacle' really make society 'better'?

This a controversial topic and my gnat brain has moved on. Name of the Rose depicted a monk and a monastery in Italy that captivated my imagination. In this book I met three monks I did not like or only learnt to like in the very last pages of their chapter. It is one thing to kill off characters like a gnat flaps its wings and another thing to just move me to another monastery and then tell me they died of old age while I wasn't looking. It, in fact, makes me care less about your very stupid because they are very human characters. I have compared my brain to a gnat more than once today, therefore your argument is invalid.

Initially my foray in the world of insects was intended to justify A List. First, I did not want to talk about that book of invalidities as it shall be known from now on. Second, I am already bored, so I figured that bullet points would be more my speed. Since this argument is so very compelling, I shall add A List now, in the same blogpost, because I do not feel like writing out more than one tweet.

In the spirit of the above review (don't groan, you) I am going to pick five of the least dis-believable books I have read. I will however use short phrases instead of full, therefore very boring sentences.

1. A Canticle to Liebowitz
2. A Stranger in a Strange Land: life on Mars, general 60s-like (and spirited) shenanigans, a human taking on the physical abilities of another species as if sprinting like a cheetah were a combination of will and absence of will
3. Heart of Darkness and Atomised: more a lack of liking and an abundance of hatred than of disbelief
4. Zoo City: animal familiars that appear when you commit a crime, the final scene
5. Her Fearful Symmetry: ghosts, the characters' complete absence of character, other characters, plot - all of it, narrator (and all this from the writer who made me believe in time travel!)

While we're at it, let's add Gulliver's Travels

I always feel the need to point out that magic is meant to be compatible with physical laws, like gravity and the conservation of mass. Even zombies have an (albeit loose) explanation! So if something that didn't exist before is magicked into existence and it is made of atoms, where were those atoms before? Because so many other tricks rely on the existence of atoms - and I do not mean an interpretation of quantum laws, because *insert game-show sound effect*. Oh, I'm overthinking? Well - ok, the gnat has flown off.

In other words, if an animal familiar appears, was it lurking around waiting for you to do something awful? Is it missing from a zoo somewhere? Is it a manifestation of some communal judgement? Someone, somewhere, must have a clue - must have noticed a trend of disappearing animals - even if it isn't yet verified. And what trend is there regarding the type of crime considered worthy of a (really awesome - and if you're handing them out I'll take one) animal? Legal, societal, religious? Just one real clue, please. (I also want the awesome inseparable animal. Imagine walking down the street with a tiger, a polar bear, a tortoise, a wolf - do they come in extinct too and if so, hello, black rhino.)

Impressive - my attention is holding more like a fly battering itself against a window. (As I typed that, my bunny sat on my stomach, so maybe I am sorted. Still, a polar bear? I adore polar bears.)

What a meandering post. I think the most meandering I have ever written. Perhaps this is a good thing, because it gives me more wiggle room in future. To sum up: every book mentioned in this post, except for the Umberto Eco, is ridiculous. According to the woman with her gnat in her skull. The unconscious doesn't restrict itself to dreams. Do you see it? I asked for a polar bear when I had already been given a gnat. Does the extent of the crime affect the size of the animal? Could an insect be a familiar? That seems a bit of an anticlimax. Like this conclusion. (I walked right into that one.)

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Why do I find A Canticle for Leibowitz so annoying? Stranger in a Strange Land type of annoying. This is partly a rhetorical question, so hold on to your answers until I've found mine. It could be the style, which darts off and convinces you treasure is sure to be found at the end of only a hint of a track. A track trampled by buck or badgers, or my cats. Then he is gone and waiting for you when you find your way back to the starting point. 'Nah,' he says, leaving you to deduce what the hell is going on.

See, you would think I would only fall for it once. What's that saying? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times... well, you are a writer and I am a reader, and this is our eternal (well, not really, because neither of us or our work is eternally immortal, but you know what I mean) struggle.

Anti-climaxes have their place: roughly two-thirds of the way into the novel. Then feel free to clump as may as will fit there. I can attribute enough meaning to anything you can deliver, and still have room for, like The History of the Solar System, with an in-depth look at the planets, moons, dwarf planets and miscellany. The only thing that can halt my desire to find meaning were there is none is irritation. And you, Walter M Miller, Jr, have irritated me more than someone who denies the universe is infinite, by your pretentious name alone. (Can you continue to call yourself 'Jr' after your parent has passed? This is a serious question.)

The book is divided into chapters. And this is where the problem begins. There is no indication that you are embarking on a new plot-line that has only place and broad era in common. Not like Cloud Atlas or The Passage. So, the author says, orientate yourself in a new society, with no characters to identify with (well, there was that one). Then he just pushes you into the room and you feel like you are having that dream where you forgot to wear clothes.

In a sense I am exaggerating. In a very broad sense that is aware that this book is regarded as one of the best apocalyptic, science-fiction novels of its time (I would stop at year, maybe decade, but ok). May I refer you back to Stranger in a Strange Land? Please, read it and get back to me about how it is better than The Road or Brave New World.

Also, I may have mentioned this is a pirated copy. I know, I know. There is an economic reasoning behind this, although I am also assuaging my conscience. Ever wondered why publishers, agents etc do not try harder to make their products impossible to copy? Because advertisers care about audience and not how said audience gets the product. In this line of reasoning, pirated products actually increase the distribution of the audience, some of whom become loyal fans and buy merchandise - and are more likely to pay for the product in future. It's a game of chance, but I am a fan of The Walking Dead and the other day I did buy a branded product and I am also well aware that Hyundai is a sponsor and that I have my very broke eye on the ix35.

It seems to have been OCR'd - 'nr' becomes 'm' and 'rl' becomes 'd'. Any normal person would this annoying. To an editor, this is a criminal act and must be rectified, like, now. But I have no one to complain to, and so I stew and plot revenge. My revenge being this post, which not even the internet cares about, but the internet allows us all a voice blah blah. At this point, my irritation is taking over, like an alterego.

Back to where we were: we are standing a room with no clothes on. Which is a metaphor for not understanding the social nuances or being able to situate ourselves in fictional space. Let's start with the last point ('start,' you wonder, startled. 'But we are 7 paragraphs in!' To which I reply, 'if you ask nicely, I may send your lazy-ass the bullet points, but then I am also going to quiz you.') Where are we? It seems we are fated to blow ourselves up or at least make the planet uninhabitable - in kind of a if we can't have it, neither can you gesture. Ka-bloowie but we can't even get this right, because some people survive and live in what is still a habitable planet.

You can probably guess this was written during the Cold War by a conscientious objector. I concede, there is a nice paragraph in which a character glibly describes how illogical it is to blow someone up before they blow you up and vice versa until every nuke, mustard gas bomb and grenade either side has is exhausted. It reminded me of the idiocy of North Korea and the US.

The 99% coordinating news feeds

But the end of the world wasn't just a pissing contest between states: the 99% rose up and instead of sitting in parks with tents and pickets (I bet you a homeless person would have appreciated a tent and the picket to make a fire out of). No, they decided that knowledge and technology were dangerous, if not actively homicidal. They smashed anything and anyone they could find, and chose to become nomadic hunter-gatherers (highly unlikely. I like having hot running water and I doubt anyone is going to say they don't). Within a generation no one remembers what half the technology left is for, which leads to a funny scene in which a monk interested in the writings of Darwin is laughed out of the room by someone intent on creating protoplasm from six elements.

The first chapter was more boring than this post - I could not identify with the character, because the plot was as slow as he was. I have just finished the second chapter. Each chapter is a jump in time and this chapter does cast some light on the first one. The abbot in this chapter is interesting - you set out with this conventional mindset that a monastery is going to ignore science that does not match their faith. Perhaps it does, but the arguments the abbot makes are convincing - in fact the opposite argument cannot hold up.

That one character is the 1% of the novel I liked (that was obvious, but I like it). He scrubs away some of the film that coats the rest of the plot. He gives us some clothes to wear. Fiction is metaphor, it is a conversation between the reader, writer and context, it is what we make of it. Fantastic. But it's not much of a conversation when you make random broad statements in a world that fails a test by logic (like, how far does human settlement extend? Is there any communication? Why, in the whole novel, is there no evidence of nuclear war? Who are people who were once children born to?!)

What this post tells me (shoosh you, I am not here to get your opinion) is that I would rather write about anything other than this book and I would rather discuss social philosophy than most things. Perhaps there is one criterion missing from most discussions about literature: logic. Does a book make logical sense? Now I know I struggle to suspend my disbelief under normal circumstances, but I need more detail to understand a nuclear war that leaves no evidence other than polarising people, just like I needed to understand how the Martian in Stranger in a Strange Land was born on Mars with all the boxes for a human being checked, but superhuman powers gleaned from the Martians.

The moral of these stories is that Brave New World is a better book and solves both these problems while still providing a setting, plot and protagonist we identify with. Peace out.

'Et vu' and other translations

Sooner than expected and probably more meandering than I intend, here is my post (not the first, I see, because there is a label in my selection of labels labelled 'translations') on, yes, translations. Translations of books, to clarify, for the semantically minded. Bear in mind that I only have a first language (yes, smarty-pants, English); a smattering of a second language and a smatter of a third language, Zulu. To further convince you of my qualifications, I studied linguistics, briefly. Although I have no interest in learning languages, I am interested the idea of language, like any good graduate with a useless degree.

First, let me explore my credentials. English is my home language. My mother grew up in Durban, which was a British port - before war upon war of someone against an other, which is how rational people and not playground bullies solve their problems - and her mother was some degree of Jane-Eyre Victorian. So, like all good mothers, she insisted we say 'hair' as in 'air' with a silent 'h' and 'r', instead of 'ghe'. A 'kid' was a goat not a child, 'mom' just sounded bad and 'ja' (Afrikaans for 'yes') was not English.

I am an editor with a degree in English (and the slightly less meaningless Media Studies). I have read Chaucer and understood it, have a firm stance on Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe's review (Conrad is always wrong, always) and adore AS Byatt. So, instead of taking time to learn other languages, I have explored the redundantly spelled and bastard language that is English. And, to add another 'so' to this conversation, my knowledge of translations is limited to the, well, translations.

Taal Monument, which is dedicated to the 11 South African languages

My second language (and I use the term so loosely that we should insert spaces between the letters) is Afrikaans. We started studying Afrikaans in Grade 2 and followed it (albeit loosely) to Grade 12. The teachers declared there was no hope for us - one of them ran out crying, but that had more to do with a difference in political opinion (FYI, Mrs Botha, I was on your side: I would divorce myself from my parents if they were top-level management of a mining company. Any level really).

By the end of matric, I could write complex sentences (by which I mean with conjunctions) in very boring paragraphs and when I spoke no one could understand anything beneath my English accent (FYI, if you care, my sister and I bizarrely have British-sounding accents, and I am often asked where I come from). I started waitressing the day after my last exam in an Afrikaans-populated area and then moved up in the world to bookseller.

When people spoke Afrikaans to me, I shook my head but only because I needed to adjust my language setting. Occasionally, I tried to speak to them in Afrikaans, but it took me two minutes to sound out a sentence, with the customer helping. Usually I asked and then pleaded with them to speak Afrikaans because despite my muteness, I understand Afrikaans. The same has been true of friends who say they need to practise English, or some such tripe.

Let me interrupt myself to explain that my dialect of English has an even more dodgy heritage because it has pilfered words and phrases from local languages. There's 'ja' for 'yes', 'skelm' for someone between a 'petty criminal' to 'naughty person (even child)' and you can add '-tjie' to the end of pretty much any noun to create the diminutive. Personally, I pilfered 'dankie tog', which does not actually mean anything, 'jok' instead of 'grap' to mean 'joke.' This is a joke that is only funny in my head, but I think my Afrikaans friends feel sorry for me and do not correct me.

Then there's Zulu. We started studying it as a third language in Grade 8 and could choose to study it from Grade 10. Our teacher was a very enthusiastic white woman whose husband was rich which is why she could afford a BMW while teaching. There are different dialects of Zulu (and in fact it and another language are pretty much the same Nguni language, but the colonialists conquered by setting groups against each other and general bloodshed - but this could get me assassinated, so moving on) and I think we learnt the wrong one because no one understands me.

Zulu is interesting. Most of the languages I have been exposed to (I can also say 'et vu' which is French for 'and you') are European. They developed alongside, over, below and within English, so the sentence forms are similar, even when they are mixed around. English is noun and then verb, for example. The parts of speech are often distinct words with distinct functions. In Zulu, a single word can be sentence. 'Ngiyabona' means I (ngi), ya (you) and bonga (thank). 'Siyabonga' is we thank you.

But - and here is when it sets fire to the linguistic part of your brain - the tense of the sentence is continuous present: I am thanking you. This explains why Nguni-language speakers often use this tense seemingly at random. I, however, do not, because that is as far as my knowledge of the language extends. No, that's not true, I can say 'water', 'it is hot/cold', 'hello' and 'boy'. I also know that 'ama-' indicates the plural. Other than that, our Zulu dictionary was a mostly useless waste of 128 pages with a pastel green cover. I hope the publishers have addressed that, what with Zulu and Xhosa being the most widely spoken languages in South Africa.

It looks like I am running out of time, so I will introduce The Point for the next post now. You express your thoughts in language and so your language reflects some of your cognitive structures, and vice versa. I have a case study here: me. We use 'he' as a general pronoun, right? There is no more meaning than this? Even though when I say 'doctor', you assume he is a he and then are surprised he is a she but you think 'you go, girl' or something equally patronising, and applaud her for, you know, studying.

A while ago, I consciously adopted 'she' as my general pronoun. I am a woman, after all, why should my go-to word not be female? I slipped, often, at first, so my endeavour looked like just that: a liberal attempt at who-cares. After a while, though, it became natural. The other day I caught myself assuming a doctor was a woman and being surprised when he wasn't. And if you don't think that reflects the way you think: when I assume a person or animal is a 'she', people ask me how I know or why. When I explain, they widen their eyes, nod slowly and turn around as I were sprouting green air on my cheek. If they are honest they say 'Do you really believe that?' and then turn away.

Not all of this is the next Point, so you can let out the breath you are holding. I withhold my rants for when you're not expecting them, because then I can remind you that I am the sheriff here. At the least, I am holding the keys. I am not sure what relationship this mishmash of languages has with my brain, except in reflecting it is a mishmash. I suppose you also know that I am not a polyglot, because I would rather study sentence trees than learn how to say something that I can already say in English.

For those of you who enjoyed the hiking trail of my brain, perhaps you want some closure. But if you are looking for the cognitive implications of the tense in Zulu, what do you think I am, a savant?

Show pigeons are walking existential crises, if you think about it

I am suffering a dry streak, my friends. Dry as all those rivers that were dammed to make dams because some committee wanted a dam and be damned the ecosystem. Dry as the absence of vowels in the word. I can't find anything good to read. And I don't mean 'good' as is literature, but I don't mean cult classic either. I have been abandoned by books I actually want to read.

In the not-too-distant past there has been The Passage and Night Film and Mara and Dann. But search back through these archives (maybe you will find something more interesting back there) and see that they are segregated by months. Years, maybe? Possibly. Probably. Perhaps - no, definitely - I am being melodramatic, but see, this is how I count my days, months and years. This is how I catalogue my memories.

A show pigeon

I don't think: "In February last year, I sat outside on a bench and watched a show pigeon trying to be a dove while I wrote." I think "A hardcover Kurt Vonnegut was on the table and I was listening to Ben Howard. It was windy, a cold wind, but I liked being outside." Before this, I had read Fahrenheit 451, which although I don't talk about it much is one of my favourites. It is a lonely book, as any book set in a policed dystopia must be. I had read it sitting on my bed between naps.

Some of my collection of must-I-finishes? includes A Widow for a Year by John Irving, The Luminaries by Elenor Catton and 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Even before I finish the first sentence, I am on the tracks of my own stories, the book held in front of me like a disguise - rendered useless by the fact I am alone. Since I am being picky now, the author needs to go big or go home. I want a plot that knocks on my breastbone and yells that he will huff and puff if I don't give him my heart to chow on.

Metaphorically. Of course. Definitely. I mean, who doesn't love the bolschy character who is a bit of a bully but who also has a heart that tells him when to use it?

I had to think for a moment to remember what I am technically theoretically and painfully reading now. A Canticle for Leibowitz. One of the big bloopers in The Passage was that nothing had decayed much 100 years later. The ragtag team ate dented cans of peaches. Electricity grids still ran, albeit failingly. Did you know that the acid in modern paper actually makes it less durable? Books made of paper from the last century or so will crumble sooner.

Did you also know that in 1000 years, men in habits will be finding receipts and to-do lists hoarded in a time capsule where nothing else has survived time? And - oh this is my favourite - that all of human knowledge will disappear into warring factions of Neanderthals, in which women are once again just wet nurses. And that we will be forced to walk with a silly man in a brown habit who we cannot love even as a baby brother who likes to recite poetry he doesn't understand.

It would make sense if you read it. But don't. Let me finish and tell you at length how awful it is. My version will be a better read.

But this is not a dystopian novel and so there is light. A flickering solar light, maybe, or the slow beam of a long-dead star. I borrowed and started reading The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco. Not a recommended read, unless you enjoy pirouetting on a pinhead that is an idea with far too many rust spots to be appealing.

You know (yes, you know) that in my roving mind, ideas are important. Critical in fact. Stories of what we might do when the ties of society are loosened are vital, because that is who are, isn't it? How else can we understand ourselves as moral beings? How else can I understand myself? (That is hypothetical, because I don't and I am not sure I believe people who say they do.) Right now, steam is exploding from my nose and ears like a cartoon bull, at the frustration of being and of knowing. These are the kinds of stories I tell myself when I am pretending to read.

Umberto Eco is a true polymath, like Noam Chomsky: he is an expert in so many specialised areas of study that to call him a generalist is also inaccurate. I am in awe and jealous of the man, who by my age had probably already written two books and disproved a host of flawed ideas. I am also embarrassed (as if he were standing in front of me) by how little I have achieved. 

To take another hammer to my street cred, I only read Name of the Rose after my literature degree. Just before this, I had read My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk.

Aside, because now I know I must write a post on translations: Pamuk's writing is beautiful and made more beautiful by the strangeness (in the literal sense) of the culture, history and language. In this book, the culture is the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Marat III and a murder mystery than circles the scribes in his employ.  The novel binds itself around notions of representation and art. For example, is it art if it is mimicry? It posits that a piece of work is a form of immortality - but is it? What about those sculptures sitting in museums that we can't identify? Is that a legacy?

Name of the Rose touches on so many of the same themes, extending my experience of both novels so that they seem sort of magical (and you know I am not one to use these words lightly. Except when I am making fun. Which is often, but not now). The novel is set in a monastery in Italy, about 150 years before My Name is Red, there is also a murder mystery and the monks are also scribes. While the Ottoman scribes are also working in service of their faith, they enjoy beauty and their craft for craft's sake. Both sets of works are decadent, but the Italians are more repressed and conflicted. Probably not as repressed as the British.

In Eco's world, art does not exist for art's sake. In Pamuk's world, art for art's sake is still a form of worship. When I think of the latter, I think of rich reds and blues. When I think of the former, I think of cool golds and greens.

This venture off-the-beaten-track was not meant to be The Point, but is somehow still is The Point. (Despite what people tell you, haphazard meetings are usually more useful than laid-out plans.) The Island of the Day Before reminds me why I love to read. Why I am mostly Reader, some Writer and a fraction of other stuff that I lost years ago and am still looking for. (If you find it, keep it - I clearly don't need it.)

Books are my religion. I mean that in a quasi-blasphemy way. Most people believe in the things that they can see and touch, and that they exist, which leads to a comfortable belief that the world exists as a place with meaning. I however am an extra in The Matrix but I am very conscious of all the set pieces. Metaphorically. Where the set pieces form a dangerous a chain of existential corkscrews. Which means the 'I' that is me is usually very confused and a confused animal is an edgy one.

Books are the antidote. A novel is made-up - the story finds a way to exist in a candyland of wirly-girglies without having to touchdown. (That is just how confusing life feels to me.) It is made of words that never promise they are real but can be content in being this in-between thing. Ideas, too, are multi-coloured strands that can be strung out further, tied up and then untied. They make space and time in which to be examined, and don't hassle me to make a decision every time I put a key in my front door to unlock it.

If you are the kind of person who reads the conclusion first, this post is not about a single novel at all. But intention is nine-tenths of meaning, so know that I meant to and then got carried away. By which I mean I meant to do that, but you need not read it. I don't think this post was meant to be read; I just needed to write it.

The Last Policeman

I was not drawn to the book by the title, clearly. The title puts me in mind of an I am Legend-Rick Grimes-Deadwood mash-up. The apocalyptic surviver/cowboy thing has been done - although not to death. Those who have watched the entire Space Odyssey and can still talk about it without PTS breakdowns call the detective story, cowboy epic and science-fiction culture siblings. It makes sense, really. Yes, really. Trap activated and now you shall listen to my theories even though I have only watched five minutes of Space Odyssey before genuinely wanting to inflict physical harm upon myself.

Five minutes of my life I lost: Space Odyssey

Then again, if I were an expert, I wouldn't be putting all this down on a blog for fickle readers. Yes, again. That's you.

The Last Policeman is a detective novel. The mystery is staid: a 'hanger' has been found dead in a McDonald's bathroom and our intrepid detective believes he was murdered. The evidence being a black belt. Oh you're waiting for more? There is none. Justifiably, his colleagues think he is young and overzealous and way too committed to the whole justice thing (they have a point).

Did you notice it? The tide of silver-grey herrings? A 'hanger' is a suicide by noose. Why would one have slang for types of suicide? (I have been drawing this one out.)

An asteroid is flaming through space aimed like a stone in a slingshot slung by Hercules for Earth. And everyone is offing themselves - hanging being a popular method. (Not smart, peeps. Like, at all. It is incredibly difficult to successfully hang yourself, for reasons I shall not explore.) When the novel begins, the asteroid (sentimentally named Maia) is seven months away and 103% on course to hit Earth.

Now, I am not against a natural disaster wiping out the destructive toddler that is the human race. In fact, if I were somehow given the choice, I would choose to resurrect the dinosaurs. Partly because I have always wanted to see a dinosaur, from a secure hiding place obviously. This reminds me of the meme that if human beings had to fight for survival against the dinosaurs, the egg-laying creatures would win.

I also never understand the reactions to the apocalypse. You know we aren't immortal, right? As someone once said, we are pretty much hamburger meat. We make it until we don't. And there are lots of places on Earth where the apocalypse is pretty much every day. "Kill the cockroaches", Russian gulags and Ebola being good examples.

But while we're - I'm - discussing this, our unconscious delusions of immortality counter our death drives, like the self-correcting nervous system and Gaia. Freud said that we have to believe we are immortal in order to face our mortality and lots of psychologists whose names I don't know agree that the popularity of horror movies and apocalyptic fiction is in seeing someone else die so we can feel relief at still being alive and reinforce the idea that we are immortal.

True as Bob.

Ok, so by the time Maia gets here, she won't have many people to irradiate, and if she doesn't, there won't be anyone to say 'I told you' to. But believe it or not, some really sadistic people are still doing their jobs, including this very naive detective (I actually think he has a mild form of autism or Asberger's). Well, not doing their jobs, which is why they don't believe - or care about - the murder. Perhaps this is how he deals with his imminent demise: by obsessing over someone else's death. Oh Freud, you could write a trilogy of books about this.

 As the narrator repeatedly reminds us, the fallible scientists slid down a slide of probability until they reached the mud of almost certainly (because never say never - or just anything unequivocal. Always leave room for retraction). Our socially stilted detective seems stuck on this, probably because he likes a long shot. Which is a criterion of a good but definitely not romantic hero. These heroes are perpetually - or almost perpetually - dissatisfied.

Think of the many John Wayne or Clint Eastward characters (let's be honest, they are all just one guy with different ponchos). To be a cowboy, the hero needs to be isolated from society, even ostracised, with some trauma in his past that he assumes some guilt for. He is self-reliant in his isolation and eternally awkward in society. He is cruel, but he shows that humanity is cruel. The cowboy always faces the march of civilisation and the extinction of his little corner of desert. He is the last outpost of the old ways, in which people have one-on-one relationships with the environment. Dang society. Where is that asteroid when you need it?

Sigourney Weaver kicking some gross alien ass

Now consider Sigourney Weaver's character in Alien 2. She travelled through time when she travelled through space in the wake of blowing up a really horrid, slimy flock of flies.  Her daughter may as well be dead because she is old and crabby. No one believes her about the flies so they think she is a murderer - an insane one. She is lost in this new world and stuck in the one before having to kill things. In the end, she displays some epic gunpower (she straps two guns together - why has no one ever thought of this?!) in an epic fight wearing a robot suit. Cowboy much?

Back to the apocalypse (to my mind, facing those fracking aliens would be far worse than an instantaneous death). In I am Legend (the book), Robert Neville is all of these things, except he really is utterly alone. You could argue the zombies are a metaphor for society, being a much better catalyst than sheep, but you could also argue that without a society as backdrop, he cannot be a hero. Neville is not your Will Smith martyr; he can only be selfish to survive.

Hank Palace is definitely isolated: he uses boxes as furniture, his sister is a drug addict, and his colleagues are waiting for the day the penny drops and he realises the world is already disaster. One trait I didn't mention: honour. These men all have a code of honour (which is not justice. And I am ok with that). In Detective Palace's case, his code is logic and rules and that takes the form of justice when we meet him. He reads every amendment to the laws (now coming in and heavy), views everyone as equals (except the criminals), and writes down every clue in a blue notebook so he can put them together.

He seems to be in some denial about Maia. I will leave you to figure that one out, because you need something to do other than read blogs.

The asteroid, like bad guys, aliens and zombies is a reminder and fear of society's fallibility. The inevitability of its destruction. And perhaps the isolation that comes of knowing this. Of being unable to stop knowing this. We are attracted to these stories to roll around in their foreignness and convince ourselves they cannot happen. Except I always wonder at this fear. My degree (let's milk it for the tiny ounce of value it has) taught me that 'civilisation' is a fantasy, as is any sort of social Darwinism (I am thinking of technological Darwinism here). Change is as constant as death.

I would prefer to be murdered by an asteroid though.

There's more! I have mislead you twice about this. The detective genre. Cowboy much? One or two people deep in a conspiracy theory who pursue the 'truth' even when faced with physical harm. Look, they yell, way to loudly in a dark warehouse while they are being hunted. Society is fraught with red herrings, but we have found the truth. The world has order, friends! Phew. Joke's on you, buddy, but let's take the win. In an impressive flip, in the end they are welcomed into society, having found a friend or the love of his life or just acceptance. 'Told ya so,' he thinks and sometimes actually yells.

Society is not unequivocally screwed. Not as long as this hero(ine) brings order to the world. Like the movie named whatchamacallit, you do something good for a person, who does good, who does good. But this isn't Carthage and so our land is not about to be sown with salt and we aren't about to be taken slave. Society just is because we are and we are mortal. Good breeds good, but trauma begets trauma.

I seem to be playing both sides of the fence here. But look! There is no fence. (An asteroid took it out after a dinosaur stomped on it.) These works of the imagination conjur up our worst fears, which are part of being human and therefore inevitable, and then sings us a lullaby about our own agency. We can save ourselves, they say. Even in the face of the apocalypse, we can still make meaning of a mystery. And therefore we are immortal. Or something. Maybe just immune to death for the immediate future.