Make oneness.

I/we: Feet belonging to Guardian of North Gate and others who can be, to Raft Farer and Woe who will no longer be, to Many Thoughts, Cave Discoverer, and Master of Songs who can no longer be…

And so on, for five hundred or so impenetrable, poetic, evocative words as Anderson takes us deep into the thoughts of the thoroughly alien race he’ll eventually (and all too briefly) introduce us to. Unfortunately, we’re cheated. The novel we’re actually given is a fairly standard, if entertaining, space opera enlivened by a chastely portrayed love triangle between doomed, heroic figures: Commander Flandry, the swashbuckling, womanising hero of a number of Anderson’s books, the rebel Admiral McCormac and his wife Kathryn, whom Anderson blesses with one of the more bizarrely rendered accents I’ve encountered in a major character. Possibly it’s meant to be Irish. It reads like the speech impediment I had as a child.

“Well, learnin’ does seem to go easier’n for our race, but ’tis not instantaneous…”

Overall, this is classicist stuff – readers of Heinlein and the ‘New SF’ of the late sixties will recognise the push and pull between reactionary libertarianism (men are men and women are…well, we’ll come to that) and counter-cultural mores (“We have the regular assortment of drink and drugs…and would you like a bite to eat?”).

The plot, hinging on the tension between rebellion for short-sighted but well-meanng motives versus long-sighted paternalistic imperialism, is well structured and pacey and the action sequences all you’d expect from the author of Broken Sword. Flandry is a surprisingly complex creation and the aforementioned aliens justify the entire book.

But seldom have I encountered a text so thoroughly (and, occasionally, comically) of its time – 1969.

“Because his object was not to enlighten but to simply to seduce her, he twirled his mustache and leered…”

Oh. My God. The lead character has a mustache. Which he twirls. The mission he’s sent on interrupts his birthday celebrations with “three gorgeous girls, ready and eager…” A page later, he meets another woman dressed in a ‘translucent wisp of rainbow.’ Fortunately, “she was constructed for it…”

Finally, however, Flannery meets his match in the formidable Kathryn. Astonishingly, she looks like his mother! And he promptly gets the hots for her like no other woman he’s ever encountered in his life. Perhaps its because she’s dressed in a “nacreous slip”?

What exactly is going on here? From ‘woman is the recreation of the warrior’ to Oedipus within a few hundred words? She is of course, a red-head. Every ‘strong woman’ in the whole history of 20^th century SF has red hair, from EE ‘Doc’ Smith and his Lensmen onwards. She’s also broad-shouldered, muscular, bronzed and did I mention that she looks like his mother? 

Enough already. The Rebel Worlds is a product of its time and no more or less sexist than most of the rock music or art produced in the late sixties. The question one has to ask is “Shouldn’t science fiction writers of the time have known a little better?” One can make excuses for Dickens – I’m not so sure that ‘it was the times’ holds completely true by the time we were putting a man on the Moon.

Still, there are at least those aliens which provide another Freudian twist to the text. They’re tri-partite beings consisting of a lumbering manual labourer, a flittering bird of prey type thing and a vaguely chimp-like creature. Together, they form a single sentient being. It’s hard not to speculate about ids, egos and superegos, though Anderson’s id seems to take charge of his typewriter every time a woman wanders (slinks, sashays, flirts…) onto the page. 

Overall? Read with gritted teeth or (better) seek out Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand Of Darkness, published in the same year. After that, things would change. Slowly.

On the other hand, I’m equally uneasy about the level of moral smugness and superiority that hovers just beyond any formal attempts to express ‘gratitude’. Also, I’m not talking about charity here. We have the direct debit with ‘Save The Children’, buy the Big Issue (which I feel guilty about not liking very much), recycle, sign petitions and go on the occasional protest march. I write to my MP about things that shock me and give money to beggars. All of this is perfectly Richard Dawkins friendly and doesn’t help. What I’m actually talking about is religion.

Now I’ve always seen my parent’s brand of Catholicism as something horrible and oppressive but as I’ve got older, I’ve begun to appreciate the stable centre it gave to lives which would otherwise have been very uncentred indeed. But returning to the church isn’t an option. For one thing, I don’t believe in an ‘interventionist God’ (I quote that line from Nick Cave an awful lot). For another, I don’t accept the bigotry, paedophilia and regressive politics that seems to go with mainstream Christianity. And I’ve zero interest in hair-shirted Presbyterianism. Quakers offer a reasonably attractive form of Christianity but there’s still that barrier of being personally redeemed by Christ. No thank you. Islam suffers from most of the issues that Christianity is dogged by (see bigotry, regressive politics etc) and I really would need a complete cultural refit to deal with Hinduism.

Meanwhile, full-on engagement with other religions that interest me has is complicated by the lack of any real scope for engaging with the family. Zen Buddhism isn’t really kid-focused and Richard and Linda Thomson have probably put me off Sufism for life. Also, supermum doesn’t do religion. It’s one of those blank spots in our relationship. Her family never had any religious involvement and she literally cannot comprehend an inner life as moulded by religion as mine has been. On the other hand, she gardens. She pays attention to the seasons. She wants to acknowledge that life is passing and things happen to us, good and bad.

This, then, leads us towards paganism. Being me, I’ve thrown myself headlong into exploring Anglo-Saxon heathenry. As a family, we’ve been poking gently at Goddess strands of paganism and encountered Starhawk, Diane Baker’s and Anne Hill’s source book for children and goddess traditions, Circle Round, which has many wonderful things in it but a fair leavening of material which makes me cringe. I’ve also been reading the rather more critical Ronald Hutton whose book Triumph of the Moon respectfully but thoroughly debunks much of the ‘ancient’ tradition surrounding Wicca and its ideologies (which has made trying to find anything we can do relating to Easter a bit of of trial, given the lack of substantial historical provenance of the goddess Eostre).

Now hang on a minute, you’re probably saying. If you’re so dead set against religion and don’t believe in God, how on earth can you so easily charge off into a world of irrational pantheism and animism?

Fair point. I suppose it comes down to seeing engaging with the sacred as a creative act. I don’t need the divine to have a concrete, verifiable existence to invite it into my life. As a writer, I do this every day with things that I evidently make up. Examining or reconstructing or recreating older/extinct/modern traditions provides a means of carving a space for stepping outside our everyday place in the world and thinking about it. Making sense of it. Or making sense of the lack of sense. We’re born, we live and we die, and the year round cycle paganism explores offers a way of creatively engaging with the mystery at the heart of this.

Hmm. That’s probably enough for now. Meanwhile, the Korean poet Ko Un notes:

Bitten by a mosquito

Thanks.

Wow, I’m still alive.

Scratch, scratch

“You know how I’m not supposed to swear?”

“Yes.”

“So how come this children’s book has so much swearing in it?”

“No it hasn’t.”

“This character says ‘Damned key!’”

“Ah. Well. That isn’t really swearing.”

“Can I say Damn? Damn!”

“No you can’t.”

“What about ‘bloody’?”

“Can we talk about something else?”

“It’s not my fault – you gave me the book!”

“Yes – but…”

Yes, but what?

Actually, the swearing in the Skulduggery books doesn’t go any further than the occasional ‘bloody’ and only ever by the bad guys. Mostly. The violence, though, is another thing entirely. My God, but Skulduggery Pleasant and his friends are pretty bloody violent individuals. But according to the discreet little note on the back, the novels are suitable for children of “9+”.

One swipe of the sword took the fingers on his left hand and he howled in pain and staggered back and she jumped. She planted her feet on his chest and swung, the blade flashing in the bridge’s lights as it took his head.

Eek. Or is it different because it’s happening to a troll? And am I a hypocrite because I’ll let him watch this or Avengers Assemble but I won’t let him see Skyfall? Supermum’s puzzled about the last one. She thinks the Marvel films are too violent (but I’d argue her tolerance of little elf’s Barbie fixation ceded the moral high ground long ago) and she used to worry about Doctor Who. So what’s the difference? Why is Skullduggery acceptable? Why are The Hulk and Thor positive role models? And why does the idea of my nine year old watching James Bond make me queasy?

Supermum asked me this in the car once, with dudelet listening attentively (we’re pretty open about these discussions).

“It’s because it’s too sexy, isn’t it?” dudelet said.

“What’s ‘sexy’?” asked little elf.

As it happens, I do have an answer (though not about what sexy is) and it’s to do with that old fashioned fall guy, the Moral Compass. Skulduggery Pleasant has one. The Mighty Thor has one. Even Ironman has one.

James Bond doesn’t.

Bond might as well be Loki. He likes killing. He enjoys watching his enemies suffer. He treats women with contempt and uses them as toys. He stumbles through the kind of ambiguously grey moral universe that only adults should be asked to navigate. For all of the cartoon dismemberments, beheadings, eviscerations, zombifications and sundry other horrors, there is never any doubt about right and wrong in Skullduggery’s universe, even if the characters themselves struggle to orientate themselves along the compass points they know they ought to follow. And, compared to The Hunger Games or the horrors of Garner’s Red Shift, it’s fairly knockabout stuff.

Barbie, though. That’s plain unforgivable.

Do you draw the line at particular books or films? I suppose we all have a limit. What’s yours?

One of my more commented on posts (not that that this is saying much) is Eight is a difficult age, an agonised cri de couer about the whining (him) and yelling (us) that dudelet, then eight, was putting us through. He’s now nine. Time to check in.

Back in last February, we were experiencing meltdowns and tantrums that could go on for an hour then flare up again if you looked at him funny. Literally anything could be a trigger. We ultimately put it down to a long list of age related circumstances with ‘tiredness’ at the top of the list. A year later, Dudelet still gets up at 5:30 most days and reads then stomps downstairs to (clunk) unlock the downstairs rooms (and wake us all up) and get himself breakfast, watch television or otherwise amuse himself. By 7:30pm in the evening, only the matchsticks are keeping his eyes open.

His sleeping schedule dominates the whole household in that the rest of us stagger through the morning feeling grumpy, hard-done-by and liable to snap.

Not surprisingly, he sees this as grotesquely unfair – he can’t help waking up early, he says, and once he’s awake, he can’t get back to sleep.

“But you don’t even try? Look at you, you’ve got huge bags under your eyes!”

“STOP HAVING A GO AT ME!”

(Slams upstairs. Sound of sobs.)

And so on and on. 

He’s also hyper-aware of any distinction in the treatment that his little sister gets. She’s five so, as you can imagine, that happens a lot. It wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t have a mother who, pre-children, regarded getting up before 8:30am on a workday as an act of barbarism and getting up before noon at the weekends as something you after a really exceptionally long lie-in. Supermum isn’t just grumpy in the mornings – she’s the original Mamma Grizzly.

So mornings are all too often a perfect storm of bad temper. If we could only get him to sleep in even half an hour…

On the other hand, a screaming fit is ten times more likely to be followed by a teary apology and cuddle than a year ago and it’s even possible to send him up to his room to calm down (“This isn’t a punishment – you just need to take some quiet time then you can come down when you’re ready”). He’ll generally be up there for five minutes then will rejoin the rest of us in a reasonably civilized state of mind. 

My own shouting is more under control. I think this relates to dudelet and I at least trying to discuss issues reasonably, even when he’s utterly furious with me over some inadvertent slight. At nine, he’s much more capable of – eventually – taking on board the other person’s point of view.

And last week he made us all tea. By himself. He even let me help with the kettle without an outburst of “I can do it myself” moodiness. I suspect the last is a key milestone – he’s starting to learn to accept help and risk failure (that’s another post, I suspect – dealing with children who are afraid of failing).

Meanwhile, I’ve kept up Three Things (three things he’s done that day that I’ve appreciated, regardless of how small or trivial  night after night – no matter how difficult it is to remember at times. It still seems to matter to him. And it certainly matters to me.

My step-mother-in-law, a wonderful if slightly unreconstructed ex-colonial and serial petitioner against cruelty to elephants, pointed me at his Parting Shots: Undiplomatic Diplomats – the ambassadors’ letters you were never meant to see (Matthew Parris, Andrew Bryson Penguin Books Ltd, 2010). It’s a book of ‘valedictory’ despatches from UK ambassadors and consuls stretching out over 50 years of de-colonialization. They range from the insightful to the out-and-out offensive. At their worst, one shudders at the thought of these racist, snobbish, chauvinistic people being sent out to represent us. On other occasions, one groans with despair at the extent to which some of the timely and insightful advice these (invariably) men set down was ignored by the governments of the time. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating and alternative ‘oral history’ of modern times and conflicts from a unique set of perspectives.

It isn’t the content of the book that really annoyed me, though. This sentence did.

Discussed briefly in the Introduction is the 2006 decision by the FCO so to curtail the impact within the Office of a valedictory despatch that (diplomats have told us) the whole tradition has effectively been ended.

I regard myself as a broadly literate person. But I’ve tried and tried in vain to parse this sentence. I’ve read it out loud, split it into individual and dependent clauses, translated it into Latin and back again in the hope that it was some strange echo of public school classical grammar (no, not really), but the sense of it continues to elude me. It’s ugly. Where was their editor? They did have an editor, right? I mean, this book was put together by a Times journalist and a radio 4 producer. How could they let this slip through?

Trivial, I know. But it’s Friday.

P.S. Fact of the week – did you know that one of the girls on the cover of Roxy Music’s country life was the sister of Can’s guitar player, Michael Karoli?

Red Shift confronts that wildness and connectedness head on, without recourse to fantasy but through the interlocked stories of three couples dominated by the myths of their own times. The first couple, a Roman deserter in early Roman Britain and a tribal ‘corn goddess’ survive through capitulation to the mythic discourse shaping their world. At the time of the civil war, conflicting political myths bring nothing but death to a village in the same part of Cheshire and the couple there are nearly destroyed in the process. In the ‘modern’ Cheshire of the early seventies, two teenagers struggle with discourses of science and class – contributing myths of our own time – and ultimately break up. All of this is held together by a sacred axe passed from age to age and a mysteriously sacred landscape.

As was becoming typical of Garner, all this is communicated through intense, elliptical dialog and starkly visionary evocations of time and place (and the reality is that he’s always thought this way). It’s hard to believe Red Shift was written for a teenage audience and it suggests that YA fiction hasn’t exactly progressed in the last few years in comparison. Mind you, most fiction suffers in comparison with Garner.

Some things about Red Shift sting a lot more today than they did then. The smothering nature of modern-day Tom’s family  is both poignant and horrifying and uncomfortably reminiscent of my own awkward relationships with my father and mother. The incessant jargon and in-jokes and the atrocities committed by the gang of deserting Roman squaddies (survivors of the lost Ninth legion?) are a little too obviously paralleled on American actions in Vietnam but the violence is economically and brutally evoked.

It’s not an easy read but those of you who remembered Garner from your childhoods and felt bemused by Boneland‘s challenging ‘completion’ of the Brisingamen trilogy may find it a bridging work that helps you make a little more sense of his most recent novel (which I loved, by the way).

My sister and I are having one of our rare conversations. Our mother (natural for my sister and adoptive for me) is in hospital after a suspected heart attack at her day centre. She’s been living with my sister for about six years and Sister is showing the strain.

It turns out that it isn’t so much a heart attack as a consequence of the extreme levels of calcification of her already battered heart valves. They can put in stents or replacements but there may be side effects for someone of her age (89 next week – as usual, I’ve forgotten her imminent birthday) and poor health.

“What kind of side effects?” I ask.

“Oh, you know. A stroke. Death. That kind of side effect.”

From anyone else, that would be a joke. It’s possible Sister’s developing a black sense of humour. She once answered the door to a man who asked her what her crutches were for (no longer needed, thankfully). He had a broad Liverpool accent so the conversation went something like this.

“Are you alright, love? What are the crutches for, la?”

“I have chronic continuous pain syndrome.”

“That’s too bad, chick – what does that mean, then?”

My sister fixes the man with a dead-eyed glare worthy of Charles Bronson in his prime.

“It means I’m in continuous pain.”

(Two beat pause.)

“That sounds really bad, love – can you sign here?”

“That was funny,” I said when the man had departed, quite quickly. She looked at me blankly.

“But I am in chronic continuous pain?”

Anyway. She isn’t now. She is, however, an Anglican deacon studying for the priesthood and is professionally determined that our mother is going to a better place. We agree that I’ll take a day trip up North and see our mother with Sister as an escort. For my sake, not our mother’s.

Our mother is upright and perky.

“There was a lovely chaplain. He came in during rest time and sat with me for ages.”

“That’s nice.,” says Sister.

“The heart man was very good. He says they could give me an operation that’ll give me years more life.”

Sister rolls her eyes.

“But the other two consultants both say that the risks are two high and that your quality of life afterwards wouldn’t be very good.”

“But why shouldn’t I live a little longer if I can?”

“But aren’t you going to heaven?”

“Well, yes. I hope so.

“So does it matter when you go, then?”

“But if I could have a bit more…?”

It’s uncomfortably like a patient mother remonstrating with a young child about the dangers of too much cake. Mum changes the subject.

“There was a lovely chaplain. He came in during rest time and sat with me for ages…”

“Yes, mum,” my sister says. “You’ve told us that.”

“”The heart man was very nice. But I think he’s too old to do the operation.”

Unwisely, I try and explain that there’s a whole team that makes the decision. It gets complicated. We hear about the chaplain again. A nurse provides us with a fistful of booklets about the particular technique this consultant has been trying to sell our mother.

“I suspect an enthusiast,” I tell my sister, and she agrees. The stats suggest an 80% survival rate after one year. They don’t tell us a) how ancient or otherwise these survivors are and b) how likely they were to carry on living anyway. We aren’t encouraged. We try to explain the stats and procedures we’ve just learned about to our mother and decide to leave it till the full patient conference next week which Sister will make sure she attends.

Then I prattle bravely about my children (whom mum barely remembers) and my job for an hour. At one point, she points behind us.

“Do you think those things on that trolley are for sale? They look very nice.”

We both swivel in our seats. She’s pointing at the coronary emergency ward crash wagon. It does have quite an attractive set of little IKEA-style red drawers.

Later, I reach St Pancras and buy a bottle of moderately posh red wine. That would be the ‘vine’ bit.

Lazy link stuff, mostly on writing

Writing Scenes: Cooking at the Right Temperature by Lorin Oberweger (a useful nudge as I trudge through scene after scene asking myself “What exactly is it I’m trying to accomplish here? And are there any more words I could use to describe ‘snow’?”)

The Tyranny of the Word Count by Sally Zigmond (Because word counts tyrannize me.)

Utopian for Beginners: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (A long piece from the New Yorker via @lillithsaintcrow. The very definition of life imitating Borges)

The Nature of Fun: David Foster Wallace on Why Writers Write (The statutory link culled from Brain Pickings)

*Must Try Harder*

Attempts at “What do you think of this?” or “Do you want to choose anything?” met with a shrug or a “Whatever.” Meanwhile, Minecraft seemed to be colonising most of the conversations we were having.

Don’t get me wrong – we were talking a lot. But it was 40% Bin Weevils, 40% Minecraft and 10% whining about being required to get off whichever screen he was accessing either of them through. (The remaining 10% tended to be me commiserating with him about the latest bout of appallingness from his little sister. But that’s another story).

Anyway, there seems to have been a sea change. Possibly he’s humouring his rapidly aging father but he caught me the day before yesterday listening to Led Zepellin 2. He paused, then sat, nodding along to the first few bars of ‘Ramble On’.

“I really like that,” he said.

“Uh huh,” I said. I felt like a caveman (well, we were listening to Led Zep) keeping a hungry wild dog in my peripheral vision as it edged cautiously towards the firelight and a scrap of left-over reindeer meat.

“It’s really…it’s got a good tune.”

“I’ve had that record for 32 years.”

“And it still plays?”

Little elf bounced in and sat down to listen too. A few minutes later, supermum stuck her head into the lounge, probably to find out what all the lack of noise was about (apart from the very loud music) and found little elf on my lap, dudelet leaning on my shoulder and John Bonham pounding through a slightly surplus-to-requirements drum solo (‘Moby Dick’ hasn’t aged well). She backed out again, quite quickly.

Yesterday, dudelet asked me to put on “that pretty song” again and gave us a full-on demonstration of virtuoso air guitar. Then I played him the guitar solo in ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and he wanted me to start the record again so he could hear it twice.

Perhaps tomorrow, I’ll see how he gets on with Baroness…

*I feel I should add that there are a million and one things he could be doing that are less worthwhile than the admittedly creative pursuit of Minecraft. But there’s only so many brick-by-brick descriptions a dad can take.

From the cab, Manhattan Island was a Polaroid of skyscrapers with the World Trade Center dominating one end. I could pick out other icons but the two towers structured the entire skyline.

It was 2000.

The following night, I found myself in the Windows of the World. It was loud and crowded and we didn’t stay too long. A few weeks later, I went up to the observation deck on top of the South Tower. The queue was huge but the staff marshaled us all through efficiently and politely. I don’t know where New York got this reputation for rudeness from. I never found New Yorkers to be anything other than helpful and courteous. The elevator was an express that left my ears popping and the view and the height were vertiginous. The Tower seemed to sway and the view went on forever in all directions. I had never been in such an explicitly high place in all of my life.

As the months went by, I got used to travelling through the subway under the Center and changing trains or walking back and forth along the streets in its shadow. The canyons (you don’t really need sunglasses in much of Manhattan – there are places where I swear the light never reaches the bottom), Broadway, Shakespeare and Co – all became part of the landscape of my working day.

On one of my last trips, a colleague invited me for dinner. They had a brownstone in Brooklyn with a view of the Towers across the river. A year later they saw the second plane crash into the south tower from the same deck.

By then, I was working for another agency in London. Still, pretty much all of us had either worked with or for companies based in and around the financial district and we watched the horror unfold that afternoon knowing that colleagues, acquaintances  and friends of friends were right in the middle of it. I think I felt numb. People I knew were suddenly in the middle of a war zone. People they knew were dying. Most of us dropped any pretense at working and spent that day hovering over instant messaging and email waiting for news of people, ticking off mutual acquaintances one by one as they managed to get news out.

There are people who ushered me into the lift, who served me a drink in Windows on the World, who worked security, who went to work in the financial and media companies there, who attended briefings, stood on the top of the observation deck having their picture taken, men, women, children of all nationalities, who were murdered that day. They did not deserve to die any more than the hundreds of thousands murdered since in Iraq, Afghanistan, London, Libya and so many other places where a multitude of interchangeable hatreds continue to take the lives of innocents each and every day.

I don’t really know what else to say except that I’m thinking about these things here, at this moment and I’m again promising myself that somehow, I’ll try to do the least harm I can in this life. And to not hate. Most of all, not to hate.