From the Bookshelf

Back in my grammar and high school days, I read a lot of fiction. The Great Gatsby was an early favorite as was The Hobbit. And I'll never forget that fateful day in the sixth grade when I was handed a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In college I read mostly non-fiction for my classes so, when I had time to read for pleasure, I read a goodly amount of sci-fi. The year I moved in with my then girlfriend, I felt fairly accomplished and mature which, for some unknown reason, impelled me to churn through some classic sci-fi series. The adventures of Lije Baley had captured my imagination as a kid and now it was time to tackle the Foundation series just as my old man had. I was so bound and determined that I ended up reading all five books. Yes, even the lousy later books written in the 1980s. The same went for the Rama series which was next in my reading diet. The first book, Rendezvous With Rama was published in 1972 and is great but the quality declined with each of the Gentry Lee-penned sequels.

Some people never listen and others never learn and I carried on with James P. Hogan's Giant series which chronicled the discovery of man's origin beginning with the discovery of a weird corpse on the moon. It was a fun read and didn't get dramatically worse as it wore on no doubt due to the fact that Hogan didn't wait millennia between volumes. After this burst, my sci-fi reading petered out and I turned towards non-fiction. I still read the odd narrative but they tended to be classics such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Dante's Inferno.

Then about a year ago I began to feel the pangs of guilt for having abandoned fiction. Memories of living with my friend Pete a few years previously came back. Amongst other tomes, he had plowed through Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander series – all 20 volumes. He'd have me translate the Latin for him. My buddy Dogger had recently come off his Neal Stephenson jag beginning with Cryptonomicon followed by the entirety of The Baroque Series, raving to me all the while how good it was.

During these years I tried to read some fantasy but it didn’t work. Considering that I'm a Dungeons & Dragons player, you'd think I'd be a fantasy reader but I just can't stomach the stuff. With Lord of the Rings films in theatres, I tried reading the books. I stumbled through The Fellowship of the Ring and got about a third of the way through The Two Towers before giving up on Tolkien's dense prose. At least I'd gotten further than I did with Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant Chronicles. After reading 40 words describing just how dark a particular room was, I decided that a page and a half was plenty for me. (There are qualified exceptions though, such as Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series which I'm surprised to have never seen on LOST. I've always thought the show could decently be described as Riverworld + Philip K. Dick.) Frankly this whole situation is a bit embarrassing as most of friends know Middle Earth inside & out from multiple readings of Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. Additionally, a handful, most notably Pete, are intricately familiar with the Star Wars universe and will gleefully tell any passerby the tale of how Han Solo met Chewbacca. Even worse are James and Marv who devour more R.A. Salvatore than is safe for human consumption.

With the guilt weighing on my shoulders, I set out to get some fiction. But what to read? Christopher Hitchens to the rescue! Regardless of what you may think of his politics, the man is well-read and is familiar with a good deal of contemporary (English) literature. I found an interview with him in which he recommended some authors and I was off to the bookstore. The tomes languished on a bookshelf until just recently when I felt the time was right.



The first to have the dust blown off was Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child. The edition I had procured was a classic example of why cover blurbs are best avoided. It was a "horror story" according to the New York Times and Time magazine proclaimed it "hair-raising". From these comments prospective readers would think it's Stephen King-like affair but it's anything but. For one thing, King divides his books in chapters which Lessing eschews here. A leap of years in the story is but the space between a period and the first letter of the succeeding sentence. The style kept me a bit off-guard which works well for the tale.

It concerns Harriet and David Lovatt who meet an at office party in 1960s England. They marry and adopt a traditional stance towards children – they wants lots of them – owing to their less than ideal childhoods. As the title gives away, they end up with five kids. The first four are all lovely and fine, but the fifth, Ben, is something else. Eleven pounds at birth, he's a monster. Ben "was not pretty…He had a heavy-shouldered hunched look…His forehead sloped from his eyebrows to his crown." While it may sound like The Omen is about to play out, the book never turns into that kind of horror story. Any hair-raising comes from reading how the family rejects the brutish Ben with his Neanderthal looks and slowness of the brain box. The first part of the story relates the happiness surrounding the first four children and the large Easter gatherings of the extended family. But the advent of Ben changes all that.

The tone of the book is a bit stoic with the characters veering towards caricatures. Events run together and people settle into their routines. Things change after Ben's birth and especially after Harriet retrieves the boy from the asylum to which she and David had consigned him. (That is one harrowing scene.) The parents are revealed as less than perfect with less than perfect children leading less than picture perfect lives.

I enjoyed how Harriet's change of heart tugged on my own heart strings and how Lessing kept me wondering about Ben's fate until the end. It's a horror story but in an old-timey Gothic way with its demon seed instead of a child possessed by a demon. While I don't know what Lessing had in mind when she wrote The Fifth Child, I was reminded of all the mentally retarded people at work. The way they're led about by someone else and how they generally stand apart from the rest of us.

As I read, I couldn’t help but feel that I was missing something. Perhaps if I knew more of English middle class life in the 1970s I would have gotten more out of it. The book was published in 1988 and I must wonder why Lessing chose to set it more than a decade earlier. And I'm sure that if I had children of my own, I would have found more layers to the story. I've never known the worry and anxiousness of being an expectant parent and no doubt that if I had, the book would have resonated with me more strongly. Still, it was a good read.



With that being done, I launched into Martin Amis' Time's Arrow which recounts the life of one man backwards. Dr. Tod T. Friendly wakes up surrounded by doctors only to find himself feeling better and better. Actually, the narrator is sort of Friendly's doppelgänger who can feel his emotions but not influence his actions and so the narrative is a mix of first and third person. Friendly walks backwards into buildings and his relationships with women always begin tempestuously and end in the most romantic way before the woman is suddenly out of his life.

Every year Friendly receives a letter born from flames. It is first ashes and then it reassembles and flies into his hands. And it says the same thing year after year:

Dear Tod Friendly: I hope you are well, as we are. It pleases me to inform you that the weather here continues to be temperate!

This is the first clue we get as to Friendly's past or origin, if you like. We eventually find out he is really Odilo Unverdorben, a doctor who assisted a Josef Mengele-like character nicknamed "Uncle Pepi" at Auschwitz. He escaped the Russians and took on a series of new identities to avoid prosecution at Nuremburg. When told backwards, the Holocaust has a different ending. Odilo helps them get better: a swollen eye has a needle stuck into it and it becomes normal again; the Jews board trains and go back from whence they came. I presume that Amis is trying to make a certain kind of sense of the Holocaust. But, since I've never read anything else by him, it's difficult to pinpoint much as I don't know what themes he deals with in his other work.

As it is, Time's Arrow was a good, challenging read. There's some very dry humor as the narrator proves to be unreliable by his constant misinterpretation of events. For example, there's a conversation with a lover that is bookended by some funny observations. Firstly the narrator intones, "Because here's the weird thing about these relationships with women: you get everything on the first date." After their conversation which ends with the woman walking out on Tod, our narrator observes, "I have noticed in the past, of course, that most conversations would make much better sense if you ran them backward. But with man-woman stuff, you could run them any way you liked – and still get no further forward."

Having finished the book, I tend to think of it as sort of a perverted Inferno. The alter-consciousness of Tod Friendly is a bit like Virgil in Dante's tale and our protagonists each begin in darkness; one in a "dark wood", the other in the darkness of death. They each go on a journey; Dante to the inner sanctum of Hell while Friendly is off on a return trip to the womb. Not a perfect comparison, I know, but what's the point of reading the classics if you can't call on them occasionally?

Currently I'm one chapter into Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden. While there's no demon seeds and time travels forward here, I have already been caught off-guard. McEwan's tale is about children and he begins by diving head first into their psychology. Three pages in and siblings Julie, Sue, and Jack are playing a game of Examine the Alien. Sue takes off her clothes so that Julie and Tom can pretend to be German scientists examining the body of an alien. It should prove to be an interesting read.