The Passage versus The Passage

I used to think re-reading books was a literary sin. (Which is not a sulphur-and-brimstone sin, more a Fahrenheit 451 sin, the underworld hazy with the ashes of not just words, but something more physical and dependable than even the pages themselves.)  It was Against the Rules (or My Rules, or just my rules - I'm not sure). How could you waste time re-reading a book when there are so many unread books waiting (patiently) (and not so patiently) for you to breathe life into their characters and give them refuge in your memory?

But then I re-read The People's Act of Love, because I needed to; I started re-reading the Discworld series in order, because I like symmetry (I'm on book 29 of 41) and because they're dependable - even after 20 or 30 years, the satire still rings true and the characters are endearing or despicable for the same reasons; I re-read Special Topics in Calamity Physics because I wanted to re-read Night Film, but I couldn't re-read Pessl's second book without reading her first (right?); and now I am re-reading The Passage trilogy, not because I need to but because I want to.

My housemate and I watched the TV adaptation of The Passage in two sessions of five episodes each (each episode is 40 minutes). (Disclaimer: He slept through the last two.) He hasn't read the books and doesn't plan to - he reads fantasy almost exclusively and doesn't plan to meander into apocalyptic horror. However, he is a fan of vampire-esque movies and series and the associated 'lore' - think everything from Dracula to Buffy to Blade to Dawn of the Dead. This is important because the author (Justin Cronin) plays fast and loose with the vampire mythology. Meaning he scraps most of it.

So I am re-reading the books to see if what I loved about the books was originally in the books or if it was something I imposed onto them. Whether I wanted to love the books so much that I did the author the (dis)service of mutating his characters. I have now finished the first book (The Passage) and am taking a break before I begin the second book, The Twelve.

In the meantime, the news has come out that the network will not be making a second season of The Passage. Because of this, my housemate doesn't plan to watch the final episodes of the series that he slept through - smartly, he doesn't want to invest in something that doesn't have an obvious reward. I wish I had had that attitude before watching the third season of Twin Peaks or of Westworld. Yes, I'm still bitter.

Returning to my point (I seem to have developed a compass since last I addressed you, dear reader), while reading The Passage, I highlighted every description of the vampires to see whether I had conjured up a private vision of Cronin's vampires (which, if you read back in my posts, I found terrifying - and I find few things in this world terrifying, apart from human nature) or whether the special effects department had just gotten it wrong, whether for logistical or financial reasons. Thank you, Kindle, because it means all my highlights are now stored all in one place.

In the TV series, the vampires (the ones we see in the bunker, at least) are your standard-issue vampires: pale, reddish-amberish eyes, veins throbbing in their faces, but otherwise clothes-wearing humans. They can also pass for human, as Shauna Babcock does at the end of the season, and they have the Dracula-esque ability to seduce human beings and get them to do their bidding. Perhaps the reason for these choices is that they're a kind of shorthand - the viewer knows what kind of nasty we're looking at, leaving us mental space to focus on other elements of the plot.

One of the 'virals'

Because the vampires in the book are not standard issue. To start with, they're called 'virals', rather than 'vampires', because (obviously) the transformation is caused by a virus unearthed from a South American forest (where else?). These vampires are humanoid, but more muscled than humans and 'coiled', always ready to strike; they glow and their eyes are orange; they don't speak - they make ticking sounds; they have claws rather than hands, fangs rather than teeth; "the facial features seemed to have been buffed away, smoothed"; and their bodies are completely hairless. They hunt in 'pods' of three each, controlled by a hierarchy of twelve 'original' telepathic vampires (who do retain the Dracula-esque ability to appear in the thoughts of both humans and virals).

As I type the characteristics of these virals out, I realise how difficult it would have been to try to translate that onto the silver screen. Glowing vampires? They sound like a lumpy child's toy. But I still wish the special effects team had tried. By not trying, they were creating just another vampire TV show and we really don't need another one of those.

The relationship between the orphaned Amy Bellafonte and FBI agent Brad Wolgast sustains the first season

In addition to breathing life into a flogged-to-death genre, Cronin's strength as a writer is telling people's stories. The TV series gets this right in its casting and portrayal of the relationship between Federal Agent Bard Wolgast and a young girl named Amy Bellafonte. Wolgast is tasked with retrieving Bellafonte and bringing her to the facility where they can test the virus on her (you know, the one that turns everyone into vampires; yeah, that one) because she's an orphan and no one will miss her (I'm pretty sure there are laws against this, but ok). The writers tasked with translating the story for the silver screen fudge the details a bit, but the developing, sincere father-daughter relationship between the two characters makes this whole season watchable.

Thinking about this has made me realise how long Cronin's books are, how tedious they become in places, and how much better he is at telling people's stories than at navigating plot. The relationship between Wolgast and Bellafonte being one example. Another example is the story of Anthony Carter, who becomes one of the original virals and whose story binds the books together. The Passage alone is 760 pages long and it's only the first of three books. It covers the beginning of the outbreak, a time jump of 100 years, and a group of character's journey halfway across America, which could easily have been portioned out into two books. I'd ask: "What's left to tell?" except that I've already read the other two books, so I know the answer.

I am conflicted that there's no second season of The Passage. It would have picked up 100 years in the future (so, halfway through the first book) at a small outpost community that has lost all contact with the outside world (which, from its perspective and in typical American fashion, may no longer exist). The trailer depicts Amy as a kind of post-apocalyptic warrior princess, rather than a girl trying to survive the apocalypse, which is how she's depicted in the books and which I suppose is less appealing. If another network picks up this series, here's my compromise: I'll let you get away with warrior Amy (as opposed to survivor Amy) if I get my glowing, smooth, coiled, ticking virals.

Lookee

Subtitled: I should not be allowed into a bookshop unattended.

Lost: A reading list

I was going to open this post with one of two desperate leads: a quote or a joke. Except the quote was more of an accusation and the joke is still not funny, and even I could smell the desperation like the tang of my own unbrushed breath at five in the afternoon. Instead, I am beginning with this slightly less desperate (but not quite minty fresh) self-reflexive apology. I am just out of practice. Be glad I didn't sink to starting with "The dictionary defines...".

So, how is Lost (the TV series) like a TS Eliot poem? (See, I warned you the joke isn't funny.)

With its very first word, Eliot's epic The Wasteland introduces itself as a friend of the great-grandfather of English poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer. The poem ends with guttural syllables that sound like a baby's first swings at speaking or the phonics of Chaucer's early English, but are to those in the know Buddhist principles laid out in the text Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.

Like The Wasteland, Lost is a catalogue of our times and texts that conspire to make the average viewer feel somewhat below average.

To start with, many of the characters in Lost are named after philosophers. For example, there is Danielle Rousseau, a French women driven mad by her isolation on the island, who is named after Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he of the 'noble savage'. Desmond Hume, a Scotsman trying to prove his love for a woman he dumped in an act of inexplicable cowardice, is named after David Hume, the philosopher who wrestled causality away from God himself.

These characters act out their brands of social philosophy and metaphysics against plots, ideas and symbols dragged from stories as varied (but still mostly predictable) as Alice in Wonderland, Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies and the Bible.

But most of this background belongs to other blogposts (suppress your joy at learning the extent of my obsession with this very obsession-worthy series). This post is about the books that the characters are seen reading in different episodes, specifically those read by the character Sawyer, himself named after the tween adventurer written by Mark Twain. The director and camera-man go to great lengths to show the covers and titles of the books, so we might as well make these lengths worthwhile by reading some of them. Or, at least, planning to.

However, this list constitutes a promise to read these books, which is why it is not a quintessential list. I left off the books I don't want to read.

• The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. The idea for this list started when Desmond Hume puts aside the copy he is reading to discover the madness that is the character named John Locke. I noticed because, instead of using a bookmark like a civilised reader, he sits it down spreadeagled, thereby damaging the spine as well as bending the pages. The author was contemporary and countryman of James Joyce, which bodes both well and ill for this book.
• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. Sawyer is reading this book when he starts to have severe migraines and Jack diagnoses him as hyperopic - as a result of reading so much. As the title suggests, the novel is an adventure in time travel, in which a young girl and her brother have to rescue their scientist father.
• Lancelot by Walter Percy. Kate interrupts Sawyer as he is reading this book to ask for a gun. The book is about a man who blows up his house and murders his wife, much like Kate did her father.
• Bad Twin by Gary Troup. This book was written for Lost: it is the unpublished manuscript of one of the casualties of Oceanic 815.
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. Sawyer is reading this novel in a flashback to his time spent in prison, proving that Sawyer was a closet bibliophile before being stranded on a tropical island with excess time on his hands. You know, when he isn't struggling to survive.
• Watership Down by Richard Adams. Sawyer is reading this when the former owner of the copy accuses him of hiding his sister's asthma pumps, which were in the same suitcase. Sawyer doesn't have them, but only reveals this after a beating and a kiss. The novel is also an animated movie, mere stills from which bring tears to my eyes and a lump to my throat. Which is the same reaction I have to the last two episodes of Lost.
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. This novel appears twice, in two separate episodes, suggesting it takes some time to finish even if you have all the time in the world. I just know this book is going to rile me up. I can feel it like a static force field surrounding the book.
• An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce. This novel is one of a shelf of books in the hatch that Locke is alphabetising. In it, a man time travels just before he dies. Sounds like a sure winner. 

In the fifth season of Lost, Jack asks why Sawyer is sitting and reading a book instead of making decisions and taking action. Sawyer says what we all want to say, just more succinctly: that he is thinking, rather than reacting, as Jack did when he was in charge. That, my friends, is why we should all be readers.

PS. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens gets its own list. Our dear Des plans to read this book before he dies - as in just before he dies, rather than at some point before he dies - because obviously these things can be planned. This is also one of the few books that I have started and never finished. A list that is growing longer and longer, I'm afraid.

Except my copy has been chewed by my bunny.

I have abandoned The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe midway to read Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. Thoughts pending.

1Q84

Two moons, the one paper-like, a cheap lantern, lit from behind and green with dust. Together the moons are a signpost of an alternate reality that the protagonist of Haruki Murakami's novel calls 1Q84. Get it? I'm not sure I do, but it is best to embrace your weaknesses when reading anything written by the master of relativity, Murakami.

I am back, dear reader, albeit not in one piece and not without a few scars. One is a pretty star shape and positioned like a gangster tat. There is only one moon here, but it is anaemic-pink with pollution and on sale.

So it is fitting that 1Q84 is my first review in a few months. It is the codex to my present. It is my white rabbit. It is a post-modern Ulysses sitting next to said tome on my bedside table. It is 1000-and-something pages light, and I read the first 100 pages three times and each time it was a different novel.

The novel is actually a trilogy, but what isn't in the aftermath of Peter Jackson's assault on Mordor? It was first published in three parts in Japanese in 2009 before being translated and published in English in 2011. Since then Murakami has written one more novel: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, which is news to me too.

My books travel with me. I never know when I may find an opportunity - and an almost physical need - to read, from doctors' waiting rooms to coffee breaks to shop queues. I have been (interrupted and) asked to describe this book many many times in many many contexts and each time I flapped my cheeks a few times before sighing, hoping this would suffice. When it didn't, I squinted at the back cover:

The year is 1Q84.

This is the real world,
there is no doubt about that.

But, in this world, there are
two moons in the sky.

In this world, the fates of two people
Tengo and Aomame, are closely intertwined.
They are each, in their own way,
doing something dangerous.
And in this world, there seems
no way to save them both.

Something extraordinary is starting.

"So," I would start. "This 1321-page book is set in an alternate universe, where everything is the same as ours except that there are two moons." I would look up from the blurb then, hoping this would have answered the question. "Um, ok. The story is told from the perspectives of two characters: an assassin-cum-gym-instructor and a writer-cum-maths-teacher. They are separately part of a conspiracy that is loosely bound to a cult that believes in faeries. The Old World kind of faerie. The nasty kind.

"I haven't finished reading it, yet," I would apologise. Still, my audience would stare.

Stop staring.

This standoff reminds me of a mistake I made once of asking an elderly sculptor what one of his pieces 'meant' - I was chewed out in Italian before being given the cold shoulder for the afternoon. Yes, meaning is relative - but meaning is also democratic, sir, and you are responsible for mowing the grass along your stretch of road whether you vote or not. Or something.

I imagine Murakami chewing me out for turning to the blurb for meaning.

In a previous novel, Kafka on the Shore, loose ends flip around like live electrical wires in the street after a violent storm. (The same street whose sidewalks you mow.) In 1Q84, the street is not only triple the length, with triple the number of sparking wires, but it also inhabits all 26 possible dimensions and then some. In other words, the novel is too long to safely sustain relativity.

The problem with the author scrapping his name from the voting ballot and setting fire to all evidence that he was ever there is that, the longer the novel, the more frayed plot points spark in the street and many of these streets are cul de sacs, each with kaleidoscopes of authors hightailing it in all sorts of directions, possibly dimensions, and while I don't mind singing for my supper, I would prefer it if we could stick to one metaphor. Right?

1321 pages is too long for the author to leave me to my own devices.

As if to punctuate this, my pet bunny ate the last 6 pages of the novel before I could finish reading. So, technically, I have not finished the novel. But neither do I have the urge to acquire those 6 pages and read them (imagine me curled up behind a bookshop bookshelf, listening for the footsteps of a bookseller who will politely ask me to buy the book if I want to know how it ends - they don't believe the story about Munroe the paper-munching rabbit).

This review is like one of those puzzles where you have to count how many shapes you see and you are supposed to count shapes in the shapes and shapes made of shapes and the shapes these shapes make. There are multiple blurbs in this post and not all of them belong to the same union. I was going to count them out for you and then I thought, nah, you could do with some exercise after your six-month break from my meanderings.

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.