The despair of the Inter-Galactic Hitchhiker

I’ve been re-reading Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels over the last week. It’s been an odd sort of ride, pulling me deeply into my past in some ways and highlighting the present in other, surprisingly depressing forms.

Encountering the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy proper for the first in thirty years time-warped me straight back to being fifteen and glued to Radio 4 via my family’s one pair of big, padded headphones, waiting at the dinner table for the expansive FM stereo of (unbelievably) The Eagles ‘Journey of the Sorcerer‘ (the rest of the music was provided by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop). It was 1978. In the outside world, things were about to get seriously unpleasant. Then there’d the announcement of the title in those fruity Radio 4 tones that now seem so cemented to a certain time and set of assumptions.”The story so far…”

And then I’d be gone.

On another planet or spaceship or space-time continuum entirely, wrapped up in this strange little world that only I and a few privileged friends at school had heard of. To my family, it was utterly meaningly and once they’d established that there was no swearing, no readily discernible blasphemy and zero sex references (I was very lucky with the ten minutes they actually listened too), they left me and the luxurious headphones to it.

The show was wonderful. And hilarious. And utterly, magnificently true – the Universe (as I was discovering) really did make no sense. Forty two was as good an answer as any. A gang of white mice who were really extensions of pan-dimensional beings conducting frightfully sophisticated experiments on humans was as credible (and certainly more attractive) an explanation as a God who’d let his only son be flogged, nailed to a tree and stabbed with a spear after days of horrible torture.

I think there were many ways I’ve since forgotten in which it must have helped me survive a pretty grim adolescence*.

The book itself came after the radio series in 1979 and I promptly saved up and bought it, along with the first two sequels – The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe (1979) and Life, The Universe and Everything (1980). After that, I went to university and lost touch with the series. Or did it lose touch with me? Loftier things (the worst relationship in the world, being in dreadful bands, drink etc) got in the way.

Returning to the books, my 49 year old self notices two things. Firstly, I’m now at the age Douglas Adams was when he died (see the extended kvetch on this subject in my last post) and secondly, how astonishing it is in some ways that Adams lasted as long as he did. I can only assume he existed at the same level as some sort of Zen Master, serenely and ironically composed in the face of the singular horror of a universe with no rhyme or reason other than the entirely futile and random rationales that its hapless inhabitants project upon it. These are seriously depressing books if you approach them in the wrong frame of mind. A handful of pages into the first volume, the entire human race is wiped out to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Later, the ‘hero’ (the books don’t really have heroes, actually, except possibly for Trillian), Arthur Dent, finds himself returning to his doomed home planet again and again and each time the horrors and the pathos redouble.

Does anything lighten the existential murk? Well, a few things.

For one thing, the books are funny. Very funny, in the nihilistic, absurdist vein mined by Monty Python or the Goons (especially Spike Milligan). Adams was actually a minor Footlights alumni and had a couple of writing credits for Monty Python. He revels in demented neologisms (“the mattress flurried and glurried. It flolloped, gupped and willioied…” I should mention that we’re dealing with a sentient mattress here), silly names (Slartibartfast? Zaphod Beeblebrox?) and complex puns.

And they’re also bursting with ideas. Like Philip K. Dick, Adams is an ideas man first and a plotter second. One meets SEPs (Someone Else’s Problem) field generators, Infinite Improbability Engines and an altogether convincing general theory of time travel. Doors talk. The mighty marketing machine of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation embeds annoying personalities in every moving part of a space ship. A huge computer and a sentient drinks machine nearly kill everyone trying to solve the problem of how to make tea. And so on. The characters in his books are pretty much identical at the end to the way they are at the beginning. Their lack of progression is almost the whole point.

But as the series goes on (and I’m about to start the fourth volume, So Long And Thanks For All The Fish), it gets darker and darker and the satire shifts its targets from petty bureaucracy and marketing to bigger, less easily laughed away evils – war, genocide, environmental havoc, the entitlement felt by the very rich and the powerlessness of the rest of us to change, well anything. Very little light gets through.

Except for one thing. At the climax of Life, The Universe and Everything, Trillian the closest we get to a sympathetic character in the entire series, notices that the most hideously feared warmongers in the entire history of the universe quite possibly don’t want to kill anyone. They’d rather play ‘krikket’ with them. And for a few pages, a character changes the small, dark space around her through an outpouring of what is, effectively, love. Earlier, one saw her struggle to reach the titanically solipsistic Zaphod Beeblebrox, fail, and quietly walk away. Here, Trillian succeeds, on a planet where a cloud of dust has blocked out any of the light from the surrounding universe from ever reaching it.

Love. Love the people immediately around you. That’s the only meaning the books dare offer, they only way in which they attempt to make any kind of sense whatsoever. As things get bleaker and bleaker (and the books are full of appalling prophecies ranging from Kindles to the deforestation of an entire planet to avoid hyper-inflation of a currency consisting of leaves to a civilisation descended entirely from the survivors of a spaceship full of marketing managers and accountants) it’s as good a message as any.

*Believe me, the Ravenous Blugbatter Beast of Tral** would have been light relief, with or without a towel.

**Read the damn book, ok?

Five books or series my eight year old boy’s devoured in three or four sittings

Eight year old boys are notoriously difficult to find books for. Here are five books or series that dudelet has absolutely raced through.

Billionaire Boy by David Walliams. A boy becomes a billionaire and learns that too  much money brings nothing but trouble and that the love of a father is worth more than, ooh, billions of pounds. It’s actually funny, politically incorrect, unsentimental and dudelet was enthralled from beginning to end. Yes, it is that David Walliams. I had no idea he wrote children’s books.

The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness by Michelle Paver are set in a prehistoric tribal time of shamans, magic and dread. Dudelet’s teacher has been lending him them and he’s deep into the second trilogy. They’re quite stunningly well written but full of action and spectacle. “They’ve got all of the things I like – swords and ancient history and tribes.”

Anything with Horrible Histories on the cover. For the unitiated, Horrible Histories is a cult CBBC children’s programme that provides a thoroughly unvarnished look at the lives of everyday people in the past. It’s revolting, vile, smelly, filthy, full of farts and diseases and much loved by both our children. A new Horrible Histories book will keep dudelet busy for hours, even if one has to consequently put up with being drip fed details of what the Romans used to wipe their bottoms (sponge on a stick if you must know) or exactly what being hung, drawn and quartered involved.

Michael Rosen’s Centrally Heated Knickers. Michael Rosen was children’s laureate from 2007 to 2009 and dudelet loves his poetry. He can quote chunks of Centrally Heated Knickers, which riffs witty, rhythmic verse against short paragraphs outlining the scientific inventions or facts that inspired them.

Diana Wynne Jones‘  The Lives of Christopher Chant. There has to be something by Diana Wynne Jones, of course. At the moment, we tend to read him her books (currently, we’re enjoying Archer’s Goon) and this one in particular captured his imagination. Christopher Chant is an enchanter – and that’s all I’m going to say (more here but spoiler alert)

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, review-type thing

How to write about a monster like 1Q84 (official site) without giving too much away?

I suppose I could start by mentioning the things that it isn’t.

It isn’t, ultimately, the crushing disappointment that I feared after Kafka On The Shore or the insubstantial After Dark (which read more like Banana Yoshimoto* than Murakami). It isn’t short. It isn’t, in many ways, difficult to follow or seemingly random. It isn’t lacking in Murakami’s trademarks (erotic sex**, shadowy organisations menacing the lead characters, powerfully felt senses of fate or destiny, transgressive sex, young-girl-psychopomp figures and so on).

So what’s new? Why did 1Q84 ultimately engage me so powerfully where other of his more recent books have left me cold? Firstly, I use the term ‘ultimately’ quite advisedly. One strand of the book constantly references Proust in a way that comes to seem a little knowing, as if Murakami is sending us a clear message about what he’s doing here. The challenges that I imagine Proust offers – I confess I’ve yet to tackle him – relate to the need for the reader to submit absolutely to the writer’s envisioning of another’s inner life and Murakami is quite thoroughly immersing us in the inner lives of three highly contrasting characters at some length and in great detail. The other hint provided by Proust is the requirement of stamina. 1Q84 takes patience and commitment and probably only works for the reader prepared to be enchanted by its steady, rolling flow.

This isn’t a meandering trek through a world of meditation and madelines, however. It does have its own madelines and the memories and past lives of the two lead characters suffuse the text. But 1Q84 is also a thriller and a mystery story, albeit a rather metaphysical one. The stakes are high – the existence of a world, the persistence and transformation of inner lives, the fulfilment of a destiny possibly set in motion in childhood. It’s also a thoroughly unapologetic love story. There’s redemption, death, sorrow, ruthlessness…It is, after all, a very large book.

1Q84 will take patience. I almost gave up half way through. But it rewards the effort. You might want to take a box of tissues along for the ride but I put my Kindle down (it is, after all, a rather heavy book) with a sigh of, well, fulfilment. And more than that, I’m not saying.

*Banana Yoshimoto’s most recently translated book, Hard Boiled, is actually rather good, by the way. But one’s expectations are different.

** Look, most sex in literary fiction takes a positive pride in being unerotic, okay?

Quick Monday Improvised Podcast #1

Notes on Suzanne Collins’ Catching Fire and hammered dulcimer black metal.

Oh, and here’s a link to some sample tracks by Botanist, the musician I mention.

Does anyone ever actually listen to this sort of thing?

The Borrowers

I’ve just finished Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, a children’s novel about a family of tiny people who live in the holes and cracks and under the floorboards of a great country mansion near Leighton Buzzard. The mansion and the people in it have seen better times and the Borrowers themselves may be the last of their kind. Like so many things in the book, this is left unresolved. WARNING: If you don’t know the story, there are spoilers ahead.

Mary Norton grew up at a time when women were first entering the workplace in large numbers, when the world was exploding in war and when class divisions were being, if not breached, at least challenged and exposed. She was a (failed) secretary, actress, housewife, war-worker and writer. She’d earlier published The Magic Bedknob (1943, later made famous by Disney as Bedknobs and Broomsticks). The Borrowers (1952) was an enormous popular success, leading to several sequels, TV adaptations and films. Studio Ghilbli have just released Arrietty, which I’m looking forward to seeing immensely and a live action BBC adaptation is due later this year.

I never read The Borrowers as a child. If I had, I probably would loved the realism she poured into the lives of rebellious teen Arrietty, her aging father Pod and her anxious, house-proud mother, Homily. I would have (as I did earlier today) devoured the last forty pages at one sitting as their lives are literally torn apart. I might have missed how sensitively she handles the the friendship between the Boy in the story and Arrietty but I still would have ached for both of them.

As an adult and a would-be writer other things struck me, like Homily’s desperate, neurotic need to ‘better’ herself, rooted in her long-standing envy of another, vanished, Borrower family. Ultimately, it’s a mixture of her greed or longing or insecurity, combined with the Boy’s well-meaning kindness which leads to the catastrophe that destroys their home. They get ideas above their station in life. In the case of Arrietty, the only one who can read and write, this is physically embodied in the relationship she forms with one of the giant ‘human-beans’. Through him, she discovers the true, devastatingly minor status of the Borrowers in a world which turns out to be a human world, not a Borrower world.

I could go on about this at length and Mary Norton is not unusual in exploring these themes. But there are tougher, more important things going on here.

In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, an anonymous narrator relates a story told by the old East Africa hand, Marlowe. In The Borrowers, Norton’s narrator is equally anonymous (though decides to call herself ‘Kate’) whilst the Marlowe figure is an old woman called Mrs May whose brother – the Boy – told her the story of his encounter with the Borrowers. Little hints of unravelling Empire lap around the edges of the story. Her brother (“he was our little brother”, Mrs May says, in a heart-breaking aside) eventually dies a hero’s death on the North West Frontier. But perhaps he’d already seen the worst humanity has to offer as a child in witnessing the savagery the grown-ups gleefully unleash on their tiny house-guests. Towards the end of the story, the hideous housekeeper Mrs Driver, having uncovered the Borrowers, harangues him:

“Once you’ve found the nest,” she went on, her voice dropping to a vicious whisper as they passed Aunt Sophy’s room, “the rest is easy.”

To her, the Borrowers are less than human – mice, rats, vermin to be exterminated – “Nasty, crafty, scampy, scurvy, squeaking little…”.

But there’s worse to come. “Exterminate the brutes,” was one of Kurtz’s last diary entries. But ‘extermination’ had a different resonance for writers in the late forties.

In a horrible (but understated and painstakingly described scene) the ratcatcher, a man who makes his living out of the killing sub-contracted to him by others, meticulously seals up every hole and escape route in the house and pumps gas into their hiding places as the village policeman, the gardener and Mrs Driver watch and joke. For a writer who’d lived through World War II this could only have one terrible parallel and in other places Mary Norton makes it clear that Mrs Driver knows she’s killing sentient beings. “She’ll change her tune when I take them up afterwards, laid out in sizes on a clean piece of newspaper…” The parallel to the photographs, widely published at the time, of bodies of human beings stacked like wood in the death camps is unmistakable.

But this is a children’s book and it’s possible – only possible, mind you – that the Borrowers escaped. Mrs May is not the most reliable of narrators and she keeps us guessing. But, really, the Borrowers were real, real enough for her to go on and write four sequels, though its hard to see how they could have the sheer force, magic and darkness of the first.