Richard (K) Morgan

Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy

Following my introduction to McCarthy via the stripped but impressive No Country for Old Men (see Read and Rec’d July ’07) I thought I’d chase down some of the man’s earlier (and, it seems, better regarded by sniffy critics) work. It didn’t hurt that following the Coen Brother’s transfer of the book to the silver screen, McCarthy’s full oeuvre has now been given a very handsome paperback re-jacket here in the UK. Blood Meridian is generally spoken of as the author’s masterpiece, so I started there. And… fuck me!!! If you thought No Country for Old Men was bleak, you ain’t read nothing yet. Blood Meridian makes it look like a Rom Com. Here we have a brutally poetic but utterly uncompromising (and apparently minutely researched) account of filibustering, mercenary scalp-hunting and other general savagery in the US/Mexican borderlands circa 1850, all told through the eyes of an unnamed “kid” with whom the narrative begins and (more or less) ends. The novel is daunting in its portrayal of the violence and injustice common to the era, and ought to act as a pretty emetic antidote for anyone with any remaining illusions about How the West was Won. It’s also pretty overwhelming in its generally misanthropic view of human nature, specifically male human nature — and the charges are pretty much impossible to refute. So if you have or value any quaint notions about the essential goodness of mankind, you’re probably better avoiding this book. If on the other hand you can face harsh human truths, told in superbly evocative language and laden with powerful naturalistic imagery, then rest assured it’s hard to imagine a better contender for the Great American Novel.

Shooting War – Anthony Lappe & Dan Goldman

Of late, I’ve had a hard time finding much in the graphic novel market that doesn’t feel derivative, simplistic or just plain stale — Mike Carey’s magnificent Lucifer is done, Azzarello and Risso’s Hundred Bullets is treading weary recycled water, Alan Moore appears to have gone into franchised semi-retirement, and Frank Miller has apparently settled for writing Bush-war propaganda. Superheroes — cavernous yawn — continue to reign supreme everywhere you look.

Then, just when I’d lost pretty much all hope, a friend handed me Shooting War. I’m late to this one, having missed the original web comic a couple of years back (which fact gives me hope I might have missed some other genuinely good comic-book stuff as well), so the whole thing hit me with the intensity of Spanish coffee first thing in the morning. It felt like picking up Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan for the first time, all over again. Except that where Ellis’s vision is of a deranged and decades-distant future, Shooting War offers a scarily plausible ten-minutes-from-now take on current reality. The year is 2011, the place is Iraq, and absolutely nothing that matters has changed. Anthony Lappe draws on his own very genuine journalist’s experience in the Middle East to tell the compelling story of an idealistic blogger caught up in the brutal mess of war and religious mania. The whole thing has that “ripped from tomorrow’s headlines” feel about it and provides, in sharply innovative art and panel-work, as efficient a critique of the Bush administration’s foreign policy failures as any non-fiction I’ve read to date. It’s also some of the best welding of SF and contemporary political comment I’ve come across in any medium — you literally cannot see the join.

I’m Not There – Todd Haynes

I don’t usually do movie reviews here — not sure exactly why; maybe because I figure movies already get a huge amount of exposure when compared to books, maybe just because it would be a whole other set of pages to keep up with on the site. Whatever — I don’t do them. But, just as every now and then a video game comes along that aspires to the level of literature, so occasionally you get a piece of cinematic art so fresh and textured that it also deserves comparison at a literary level. Todd Haynes’s kaleidoscopic meditation on the life and musical career of Bob Dylan is that movie.

As with any decent literary novel, it’s hard to encapsulate exactly what I’m Not There is about, or quite what makes it so compelling; on the face of it, thinking it through, it ought to be barely interesting at all — I like Dylan’s music well enough, some of it very much indeed, but I don’t generally go for music bio-pics, and I’m very far from fascinated by the celebrity details of any musician’s life. But somehow, fascinating (and deeply moving) is exactly what this movie is, and along the way, effortlessly it makes every other music bio-pic I’ve ever seen look clunky, crude and pretty much beside the point. Some of that can be laid at Cate Blanchett’s door — her performance as Jude Quinn, Dylan’s “electric” incarnation, is pretty much the central underpinning of the movie, and it’s a stunning piece of work fully deserving of the awards and nominations it garnered. But beyond that, the power of I’m Not There is that like any really great piece of narrative art, it refuses to conform or be categorised. As befits a director who cut his teeth on music videos, Haynes makes the music do the heavy lifting for you, and alongside this, his story-telling is impressionistic, multi-layered, at times surreal, self referential and incomplete. The journey he takes you on is immediate and impossible to clearly define; as with music itself, you can’t intellectualise it, you have to simply give in and let it carry you. And carry you it will.

Just a question of where you wash up by the end.

The Terror Dream – Susan Faludi

Susan Faludi is one of the few non-fiction writers on my automatic-buy list these days, so I scooped the trade edition of The Terror Dream as soon as I saw it in an airport exclusive bookshop pile. I was not disappointed. Here is the same painstakingly accurate research and cross-reference that made the author’s previous books, Backlash and Stiffed, such powerful pieces of work. And, as with Backlash, there is the same meticulous excavation of forgotten historical detail to demonstrate that far from this being a whole new ball-game, the truth is that “we have been here before”. Oh yeah. For all those of us on this side of the Atlantic who still can’t really get our heads around all the post-9/11 hysteria from a nation that is the world’s sole hyperpower, has never been invaded, and hasn’t seen warfare on its own soil for almost a century and a half — Faludi provides us a compelling analysis of the American psyche and where its barely-acknowledged cultural nightmares lie. And for those who actually have to live inside the Bush administration’s play station — here is a blistering psychoanalytical wake-up call from someone living and working on the same front line.

The Shotgun Rule – Charlie Huston

I’ve already sung Charlie Huston’s praises for Six Bad Things and the other two novels of the Hank Thompson trilogy — well, here’s another verse and the same chorus. Huston’s economy of style is beautifully honed in this standalone tale of four teenage friends getting themselves into potentially lethal trouble on the streets of a small southern California town. Thematically, there’s something of Stephen King’s The Body (later filmed and more famous as Stand by Me) to the way this novel is built — but that’s a baseline comparison at most, because King’s poignant small town nostalgia has here morphed into something savagely streetwise and suburban. There’s very little to The Shotgun Rule in terms of material, Huston’s set-up is as bleakly economical as his prose, and the book comes in at less than two hundred and fifty hardback pages. But out of this minimal assemblage, the plot delivers twist after twist until you’re dizzy from trying to guess what’s coming next (and usually wrong in your guesses), and the emotional punch the book delivers is canny and understated throughout. Charlie has upped his game considerably since Hank Thompson, and I can’t wait to see what he does next.

Mason & Dixon – Thomas Pynchon

As with most Pynchon, it’s tough to define this one in any meaningful fashion. It’s another massive chunk of post-modern humanistic (and pretty undeniably F&SFnal) narrative from the reigning champion of the form, this time in, uhm, painstakingly rendered mock-eighteenth century prose. Yep, that’s right — but don’t let it put you off. Mason & Dixon is a challenge, no question about it, but along the way, Pynchon deploys his usual master’s array of literary tools and technique, and creates a vivid, impressionistic portrait of a pivotal time and place in human history that you don’t want to miss.

So what’s it about? At the simplest narrative level, this is the story of the complex and bumpy friendship between the two men who drew the Mason-Dixon line and in so doing separated the United States into North and South. You would not expect such subject matter to yield much of a harvest, but the text is rich, and riddled with mind-blowing arcane detail and event. The time is the mid-seventeen hundreds, the place is variously Britain, South Africa, the mid-Atlantic, and the embryonic USA, and, as usual with Pynchon, anything which the people and period under examination believed to be real or possible is here portrayed as both possible and real — meaning that at various points you’ll be dealing with golems, ghosts, goblins and were-beasts (of various types), talking dogs, witches and flights along ley-lines, global Jesuit conspiracy and its instantaneous communication net, a hollow earth, ancient unhuman races and the demands of feng-shui, to name only the most memorable components. Alongside which we’re also given ample observation of the human condition in all its poignant joy and sorrow, sharp political commentary as applicable to our own age as Mason and Dixon’s, and an endless array of literary jokes ranging from the ultra-sophisticated to the hilariously childish. Popeye jokes, Bill Clinton jokes, French accent jokes — you name it, there’s something in here for everyone.

What makes Pynchon stand out among other post-modern novelists is the way in which he steadfastly refuses to use his fiction as a tool for keeping you at clinical arm’s length. Where other writers in the same stream (stand up Kundera, Auster, Amis, yes, you, laddies) delight in condescending to the reader and demonstrating their own lofty detachment and superiority — look how much I know that you don’t, look what I’ve tricked you into feeling, haha, this is fiction and you fell for it et tedious cetera — Pynchon is all about inviting you to come and play with him in a shared garden of imagined delights. He wears his remarkable levels of erudition lightly, hands examples of his learning to you as gifts, and shows every sign that he wants you to have as much fun reading this stuff as he has had writing it. You may not get it all, you may sometimes get lost (I certainly did), and you may at times find yourself all but drowning in his painstakingly researched period detail and authentic scientific knowledge — but it’s never long before he throws you a line and takes you off to show you something else. If writing is an act of communication, then Pynchon stands apart from the crowd in high-end contemporary literature simply by virtue of his desire to carry out that act between perceived equals. Whatever he puts his readers through, he treats them with affection and respect, and whatever brutal or perplexing things may actually happen in the narrative, nothing ever eclipses the human warmth that suffuses the whole text from snowball-fight beginning to fishing-trip melancholy end. You come away from a book like this simultaneously chastened, energised and entranced with how much bigger, more complex and more apt for wonder the world really is.

Blindsight – Peter Watts

Creative Commons — now there’s a weird fucking idea. But hey, don’t knock it, it means I just got to read, completely for free, what must be one of the finest hard SF novels written this decade. Peter Watts takes that hoary old trope, the first contact novel, and turns it massively inside out with this simple conceit: what if, by the time we get to meet aliens, the people we send to make the diplomatic overtures aren’t much more human than the creatures they’ve gone out to meet? Blindsight is by turns hi-tech space adventure, druggy cyberpunk schmooze, haunted house horror, character-based novel of relationships, moral fable and pure speculative walk on the wild side of human consciousness. It features genetically engineered vampires brought back from prehistoric extinction — and one of the coolest explanations for the whole vampire myth that I’ve ever seen — the politics of virtual reality and the end of labour, chemical relationship engineering chic, and super-intelligent alien life forms whose interest in the human race remains, for most of the book, queasily undefined. Hard SF doesn’t often work for me, mainly because it tends to neglect so many of the human emotional salients I need before I feel I’m being told a decent story – but Watts has really nailed some kind of balance here; there’s no compromise on the density and intelligence of the narrative at any point, no dumbing down of the ideas, but at the same time Blindsight brings the human (and plus-human) elements of this future completely to life. Visceral and cerebral by turns, brutal and headlong and tragic at one and the same time, Blindsight is a taste of what the hard end of the genre can deliver when it’s really at the top of its game.

Must go out and buy a hardcopy immediately. It’s the least I can do.

The Power of the Dog – Don Winslow

I read Winslow’s Death and Life of Bobby Z a few years back in a hostel in Peru — it was a lightweight disposable drug crime caper, a fun, fast read, laugh-out-loud funny in places, but not ultimately a book that made any major impression on me. I put it down and pretty much forgot about it.

You don’t put The Power of the Dog down and forget about it. You carry it around with you afterwards like a wound. It puts an angry sickness in the pit of your stomach and leaves it there. It wakes you up.

The nearest fair comparison for what Winslow’s done here is probably James Ellroy’s masterwork American Tabloid, or the slightly disappointing follow up The Cold Six Thousand. It has that level of impact, it paints that brutal a picture, and it leaves you shaken the same way. The canvas is America’s criminally insane “War on Drugs”, and the book covers the debacle for its full thirty years (so far). Winslow doesn’t quite have Ellroy’s intensity, and his style is a little less assured overall — some of that disposable Bobby Z fun creeps into The Power of the Dog here and there, and it’s not really appropriate to the material, plus there are times when the sheer scale of the undertaking seems to beat the author down; the narrative turns sketchy and movie-treatment-like in places, and in the latter half, the protagonists start to show some improbable behaviour as the needs of plot get elevated above character integrity. But for all that, there is a crystal clear political dimension here that Ellroy tends to elide or bury beneath close-focus blanket misanthropy. Winslow has cogent, coherent and very specific things to say about the US’s crimes in Latin America, he is not afraid to point fingers, and his analysis is savagely accurate. The Power of the Dog may not quite have Ellroy’s underbelly narrative genius but it uses the same basic dynamics to create a passionately moral novel and a furious demand that we face the unpalatable truth of what has been and is still being done in our name.