Back to the Golden Age...

What, in these difficult times, could be more cost-effective than reading second hand books?* This month I have been using second hand books to return to the “Golden Age” of science fiction, the 40s and 50s, when stories were relentlessly optimistic and everyone was looking forward to a shiny new world of spaceships, robot slaves and scantily-clad alien princesses. Unfortunately, I’ve been reading Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury, who rather bucked the trend for mindless optimism.

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

I bought my copy of The Sirens of Titan from a shelf of second hand books in Lillypool cafe in the Mendips for 10p. What a bargain! You don’t half get a lot of satire for your money.

Winston Niles Rumfoord is an aristocratic space adventurer who, together with his dog, Kazak, was sucked into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum in between earth and Mars. This means that he now exists as a waveform, rather than a person (appearing in human form only where the orbit of a planet intersects an antinode of his wave) and has knowledge of past and future. At first it appears that he has used this knowledge to toy with the lives of other people, including his wife and the rather reprehensible millionaire playboy Malachi Constant. Rumfoord engineers a war between Mars (whose population he builds from kidnapped Earthlings) and uses the resulting soul-searching to found The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent with the strap line “Take care of each other and the Almighty will take care of himself”.

When the action moves to Titan, we learn that the master manipulator is himself a puppet of aliens from the planet Tralfamadore: A Tralfamadorean robot called Salo has crashed there while taking a message from one side of the universe to another and his spacecraft requires a spare part. The whole evolution of life and intelligence on Earth was engineered by his home world just in order to provide him with a specially-shaped piece of metal to continue his journey. After being goaded by Rumfoord, Salo peeks at the message he’s being carrying to find that it is... a single dot.

Although funny and wittily told, this has to be one of the blackest comedies I’ve ever read: no one has any free will, millions die for a faked-up religion and the ultimate reason for human existence turns out to be completely feeble! A fine book, but if you only read one Vonnegut book in your life, make it "Slaughterhouse Five".

The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

The Illustrated Man is a collection of short stories. Bradbury seems to me to write at the intersection of SF, fantasy and horror, but these stories are pretty much traditional science fiction. What makes Ray different from many of his contemporaries (and therefore more readable to the Bookclub of One) is that he has a realistically low opinion of human nature. This means he is unable to subscribe to a gleaming, hi-tec utopia; he knows what we'd really do with technology.

Two of my favourite stories were "The Velt" and "Zero Hour". In "The Velt" a couple use a sort of virtual reality theatre to educate and entertain their children and are subsequently murdered by the selfish, empathy-free brats they have spawned. In "Zero Hour" all the children in a small town become obsessed with a make-believe game called "invasion", which turns out not to be make-believe at all. The kids are being used as a fifth column for aliens and they've sold out humanity in return for being allowed to stay up an extra hour. I think I like these stories because I find children spooky and unfinished. You might think yours are cute, but when I look at them, I see those twins from The Shining or the little girl from F.E.A.R.

The absolute stand-out story for me, though, was The Concrete Mixer. A Martian invasion fleet arrives on Earth to a rapturous welcome. While the Martians thought they were conquerors, the Earth men see new consumers and new markets. The invaders are soon addicted to a life of booze, cars, pointless sex, indolence and useless spending. Their culture is plundered to make crappy Hollywood films which Earth sells back to them, their bodies are poisoned and their spirits are crushed. O God, I'm living in that particuar distopia right now!

*Other than going to the library. Or stealing books. Or reading over other people’s shoulders on public transport. Or downloading free ebooks and giving yourself a headache trying to read them. Or just shamelessly standing there in Waterstones, reading the whole thing in spite of the tutting (particularly effective for graphic novels, that method, as they are both pricey and quick to read). Now that I think about it, there are quite a few better sources of cheap books than the second hand market, but let’s celebrate it anyway. We’ll cover stealing another time.

Molesworth Books by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle

I complained so bitterly about how long and slow-moving "The Dream of Scipio" was that E (you remember E, disapproves of Derren Brown, that one) loaned me her two Molesworth books "Whizz for Atomms" and "Back in the Jug Agane" to cheer me up.

Molesworth is a pupil in the 3rd form at St Custards boarding school (you can use the magic of the Interweb to take a virtual tour round St Custards here ) and the books are not so much stories as short vignettes of school life. In common with "Transpotting", "A Clockwork Orange" and I can haz cheezburger, the Molesworth books are spelled phonetically and written in dialect. By someone who can't spell. This means that it takes a while to get into them. And I'm still not sure what some of the 1950s slang means. The trade mark style of these books makes it tempting to have a punt at mimicry so here are my school days at St Custards Grammar School For Girls:

The scene is the form room of 10b. The gurls are engayged in activities befitting yung wimmen cosmo quizzis, makeup, finding the bits abowt (HEM-HEM) in Shirley Conran books and givving each other annerreksya, ect, ect. But soft! (posh prose) here come their form teacher. Miss Batley teech ART and kno nothing. She woud not recognise the gerund if it started nesting in the art cupboard and drinking the poster paint. (Mrs Roebuck the latin teacher kno all about the gerund and gerundives. She also make us stand by our desks and sa "Salway magistra" like we were at Mallory Towers chiz chiz chiz! ). "Hullo clouds, hullo sky," sa Miss Batley, "Hullo Personal and soshal education worksheets, hullo anti smoeking leaflets ect ect". Miss Batley's antismoeking leaflets do more for the tabacco industry than smoeking beegles. 10b adopt the 1000 yard stair of trormatised veterans when will the torment end ect ect. And still it continue! Now we must do roll pla and try to sell each other drugs but hav scientist found a drug which fry the mind like personal and sowshal edukation? They hav not.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's a work of moral philosophy which reads like a spy story. It's set in Vietnam when the war was still between the French and Vietnamese Communists. Fowler, a burnt-out British journalist comes into conflict with Pyle, an ideologically-motivated CIA agent as they are both in love with the beautiful Vietnamese girl, Phoung and they both see the war around them in completely different ways. The story is told in flashback; we start with Fowler and Phoung waiting for a visit from Pyle... but he never arrives. (Stop reading here if you don't want to know what happens!)

Fowler refuses to back one side or the other in the war and sees himself as an impartial observer. He uses opium until he doesn't care whether he lives or dies. He has been living for several years with Phoung, but has now been recalled to the UK and doesn't have the backbone to tell her he'll be leaving.

Plye, despite having no direct knowledge of Vietnam, has complete confidence in his book-learned theories that what the situation calls for is a "Third Force" which would fight for democracy against the communist Vietmihn and the colonialist French. He therefore supplies explosives to the opportunistic General The.

When the General's guerrillas use these to attack civilian targets, Fowler is on hand to witness the resulting death and mutilation first hand. Pyle himself is soon at the scene too but views the deaths of innocents as a necessary sacrifice and seems more disturbed b the fact that he has blood on his shoes. This event is too much for Fowler's policy of impartiality. He tells one of his journalistic contacts in the Communist militia that he knows who supplied the explosives and between them they agree that Fowler will invite Pyle out for dinner and the Communists will intercept him and kill him.

Fowler tells himself that his reasons for having Pyle killed was political, and that he simply couldn't allow Pyle to set up further civilian massacres. However, he gets Phoung back as a direct result of Pyle's death and by the end of the book he has secured a divorce from his estranged wife allowing him to bring Phoung back to Britain.

If you have been taking the pretentious pills (or drinking wine) it is possible to see Phoung as a metaphor for Vietnam: She is fought over by two men who don't really understand her (Fowler thinks she's “wonderfully ignorant” because she doesn't know who Hitler is – how much does he know about her country's history? Pyle cannot even speak either of the languages she does!). Fowler has a pragmatic view of their relationship and sees it as a transaction: Phoung needs money, security and a ticket out of Vietnam and he wants a pretty young companion so he doesn't have to face a lonely old age. Pyle has a soft-headed, romantic, chivalrous desire to “rescue” through marriage a woman he can't even communicate with. Phoung herself has almost no character at all as we only see her through their eyes.

I thought that many passages in the book were dramatic irony about the brutality and inefficiency of the American War in Vietnam. But this turned out not to be the case – the book was written in '55 and the Americans didn't join in officially until '59. However, much of the material about the danger of letting naïve Americans who've never been abroad before out to bring democracy to the rest of the world through force of arms is particularly pertinent at the moment with the current situation in Iraq. While I don't side with the racists who believe that Arab countries don't need democracy as they have their “own culture” of gold bath taps for some and dirty drinking water for most, I do think it's something people have to work out for themselves rather than have it brought in by force from outside.

Apparently, the Americans were very offended by this book and its depiction of their national character when it first came out. I'm not sure the British fare any better, though, with Fowler representing us: an opium addicted, murdering snob!

The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman by Bruce Robinson

A coming-of-age tale by the writer of "Withnail and I" set in the 1950s. And what a strange decade the 1950s were: beating your children was acceptable while masturbation was beyond the pale.

Thomas Penman is 15 and lives with his godawful parents who hate him and each other. His father actively beats and bullies him while his limp and useless mother spends all her time boiling up cheap, nasty meat for her dogs which she allows to shit in the house. By the end of the book you can practically smell the shit and dogmeat. Also living with them is Thomas' beloved grandfather who is dying of cancer. Being 15, Thomas is not so much concerned with the gaping hole that the old man's death will leave in his life, but with what will happen to his grandfather's prodigious collection of pornography on his demise. Grandfather is not a loveable, white-haired, Werther's-toting old gent! Following the trauma of serving in the First World War, he went a bit strange and devoted himself to creating rather eccentric porn - such as erotic stories about boys at public school and pictures of naked women whose bums he has replaced with a second pair of breasts. The jewel in this porno crown turns out to be a picture of a woman with who seems to have a duck up her arse, with just its head sticking out. If Grandad dies, Mum and Dad will go through his things and this priceless collection will be thrown away. And so the young, gonad-driven Thomas begins the sneaky rumaging through his grandad's stuff that will eventually expose all his family's secrets.

I really enjoyed this book, mostly because it is filled with lurid descriptions of rather disgusting things, whether they are old, incontinent dogs, the contents of teenage boys' minds, the hypocrisy of nearly all the adults or the grisly deaths of crabs exploded by Thomas and his best friend as a hobby. All of life is here and looking pretty unwholesome. Here's a taste taken from a description of how Thomas lurks about his home:

"More often than not he located in the hall, wedged between the wall and a piece of furniture called a tallboy. When there was no one around this was his favourite spot. It was a dark, secret place, with bland wallpaper covered in dots. No one else ever got in here. (The only other person who ever got in here was his grandfather who had been known to exploit the isolation to hang his testicles over the banisters.)"

From now on whenever some old timer tries to tell me that things were better in the 50s when children weren't cheeky, women knew their place and gays could probably be burned at the stake, I shall be thinking of the woman with a duck up her arse...