Painting Fakes

I know I'm about seven years late, but I've finally got around to reading the first Twilight book. Not being a teenage girl, or a girl of any age, I'm a long way from the intended audience for these books.  Still, I wasn't in the target audience for the Harry Potter books either, and I read all of them pretty much as they came out.  Of course I had kids of the right age, and it was nice to share something with them.  But the early books themselves were a lot of fun, full of spells, potions, magical creatures and objects, odd characters and childish high-jinks, plus a villain dangerous enough to be scary but ultimately weak enough to be beaten by well-intentioned children.  It's a shame the later books got bloated with badly written teenage angst and clumsy attempts to darken the atmosphere, but even then there was enough fun to keep me reading.  No doubt many of the young readers who got hooked on the early books were less critical of the later ones than I was,

It's been said that to us an alien of sufficient power and complexity would be indistinguishable from a god.  It's also been said that if we had enough knowledge we would be able to prove, one way or another, the truth of religion.  However, if we could do that its character would change completely.  It would no longer involve faith and belief, it would simply be another branch of science, the gods other beings who could be studied and communicated with, heaven and hell realms of exploration and even conquest.   I'm not sure what Iain Banks' religious views are.  From his novels I would be surprised if he was not an atheist, or at least an agnostic.  Yet he has arguably the most fertile imagination of any living speculative fiction writer and he is certainly more than capable of imagining heaven, hell and all manner of gods or demons to inhabit them.   Many of his science fiction novels are set in a Galactic-scale civilisation known as the Culture, a kind of extr

In the years after the Second World War, science fiction was essentially a pulp genre.  Magazines and niche publishers put out small print runs of short stories and slim novels.  Most of the writing was clunky, the stories strong on technological marvels and weak on plot and characterisation.  This all started to change in the 1960s.  Not all at once and not everywhere - there is still plenty of pulp science fiction written even now - but a new breed of writers started to focus more on the fiction and less on the science.  Philip K Dick's best novels are masterpieces of imagination, beautifully characterised and exploring issues of drug use, mental health, religion and the meaning of being human.  His school-mate Ursula Le Guin wrote stories of lyrical beauty and moral depth. Some legacies of the pulp era remained.  Circulations were still small, and if they wanted to make a living from their writing they had to keep churning it out.  Novels were short, and frequent.  Expandi

Reading and thinking about Tom Waits and the art of being someone else made me think of Helen Demidenko. Demidenko burst onto the Australian literary scene at the age of 22 in 1994 with her novel The Hand That Signed The Paper.  Prior to its publication the novel won the Australian/Vogel award for a manuscript by a young author.  After publication in 1995 it won the Miles Franklin, Australia's most prestigious literary gong. The novel, purporting to be drawn from stories told to the author by her Ukrainian refugee family, dealt with the cycle of violence between Ukrainians and Jews  It blamed Jews for the Ukrainian famine of the late 1930s (for which, incidentally, the Russian Communist Party was actually responsible) and subsequent Ukrainian involvement in the holocaust was portrayed as a consequence of this prior crime. The book's reception at the hands of Australia's literary establishment can't have been hindered by its charismatic author.  A ta

Anyhow, onto something really important - Love.  If you've never heard the story of Tristan and Isolde, you've really missed out on something.  You could start by reading it in a children's version, perhaps one of the ones I read as a child.  Following Thomas Malory's 15th century lead, they wove it in between that more famous love triangle involving Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot.  You could attempt to listen to Wagner's operatic treatment of it, if you understand German and can stand opera.  Or you could read this most beautiful version, written in the 13th century by the German poet Gottfried von Strassburg and translated into English prose by AT Hatto. The heart of the story is simple and well-known.  Yes, there is a love potion, a dragon, a giant, a fairy dog and a magic lovers' cave, but these are just entertaining diversions from the all too recognisable humanity of the tale.  Tristan is commissioned by his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, to travel to

I'm not sure how I've managed to get through more than 250 posts on this blog without raving about Ian McDonald .  McDonald is a British science fiction writer based in Belfast in Northern Ireland, but his writing reveals a true world citizen. I've previously commented how much better current speculative fiction writers are than their counterparts in the 1960s and 1970s.  Of course there's still plenty of trash, but the sprawling space operas of Iain M Banks and the taut, adventurous cyberpunk of William Gibson are as good as any literary writing you will read.  McDonald is the equal of these and perhaps even superior to them.  He has a lot more in common with Gibson than Banks, his writing set in the near future, and his settings defined by where our current technologies might take us within our own lifetimes.  Yet where Gibson's novels are almost claustrophobic with their small casts of characters, secret rooms and secretive plots, McDonald's palette is

Twice in every 100-odd years, Venus passes directly between the earth and the sun.  For a few hours, if there are no clouds, earth-bound mortals can see her shadow as it crosses the face of the sun and then disappears.  It happened today amidst much fanfare and astronomical excitement. This means it's a good day for a post on Shirley Hazzard's wonderful novel, The Transit of Venus .  Expatriate Aussie novelist Hazzard is not prolific by any means but what her work lacks in quantity it makes up in quality and The Transit of Venus is her masterwork. Published in 1980, it follows the lives and loves of Australian sisters Caroline and Grace Bell from their arrival in the UK after World War 2.  It is a lyrical, elliptical novel, moments of sly humour mingled with an all-pervading sense of tragedy.  Her characterisation is beautifully nuanced, you feel passionate love or scorn for each of her creations. Venus remains hidden for long, dreary years, reveals herself in a blinding

My daughter recently introduced me to Elfriede Jelinek .  It was not so much a recommendation as a complaint.  Having run out of subjects that interested her she was forced to study postmodern literature to complete her major.  Jelinek's Women as Lovers was on the reading list.  I said it sounded interesting.  She handed it to me and said "it's all yours". It was interesting, too.  Jelinek is a Viennese novelist and plawright, largely unknown outside the German-speaking world until the 2004 Nobel Literature Prize thrust her reluctantly into the global spotlight.  The Nobel judges cited her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power." I suppose that's one way of putting it.  Women as Lovers, written in 1974 but not translated into English until 20 years later, is a parody of the romance novel.  It traces the courtshi

Lois and I went to see the new movie version of Jane Eyre for my birthday.  I don't need to provide a spoiler alert, do I? What a good movie adaptation will do for a classic story - and this is a good one - is to strip away a lot of the incidental details and show the skeleton of the story in sharp relief.  What we see is a story that, while never losing its focus on Jane as its heart, is structured around two interlocking love triangles. If there is a more spiritually charged set of love triangles in English literature then I can't recall it.  What is at stake here is not mere romance, or fortune, but people's souls. Jane lives through hard times before finally arriving at Thornfield House as a governess and falling in love with her master, Edward Rochester.  Although strange, and set against the background of creaky gothic horror, the romance seems set to end happily until the inevitable romance-tale hiatus.  Edward is already married to poor mad Bertha, the s

I'm in the middle of reading Iain M Banks' latest Culture novel, Surface Detail.   As usual its a wonderful piece of space opera, with action that sprawls across planetary systems, species and real and virtual worlds.  There are wheels within wheels, nothing is necessarily as it seems, and the technology is incredible. Much of the action takes place in what is called the Tsungarial Disk, a ring of supposedly abandoned ancient machines surrounding a gas giant planet.  Two of the main characters approach the disk, intent on skullduggery. Veppers smiled thinly at the alien.... "Why did they build all these? Why so many? What was the point?" "Insurance, possibly," Bettlescroy said. "Defence. You build the means to build the fleets rather than build the fleets themselves, the means of production being inherently less threatening to one's neighbours than the means of destruction. It still makes people think twice about tangling with you." The l

Writing about what it means to be human made me think of Philip K Dick's lovely science fiction novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.   The title alone has got to be worth the price of the book. It poses a tricky, if hypothetical, problem which is not that different from the problem of post-humanism. The story centres on two humans.  Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter whose job is to destroy escaped androids.  The intellectually disabled JR Isidore is a delivery boy for a company that repairs electronic animals.  They live on an Earth that is a virtual wasteland, where almost nothing survives except humans and even these in rapidly decreasing numbers through mass emigration to the outer planets.  In this lifeless world, every human dreams of owning a real animal, but these are such rare and expensive items that most have to settle for incredibly lifelike electronic substitutes.  These dreams provide a deep emotional core to the novel.  Deckard, already the owner of a elect

Post-humanism is one of the favourite themes of speculative fiction, and the world is not short of futurists like Cory Doctorow who believe it could one day be fact.  The basic idea is that through technology humans will one day transform ourselves into something different to what we are now.  Greg Bear (among many others) imagines that humans will be able to upload their consciousness into a huge database in which they will potentially live forever, divorced from any physical existence but preserving their individual consciousness in the company of other disembodied "elders".  Doctorow imagines that our memories and thoughts might be recorded at a remote back-up location, to be refreshed and revived in the event of a catastrophic local breakdown.  Iain M Banks describes a society where medical technology enables people to become whatever they want.  They can change gender, physical appearance, even species with the essence of their personalities preserved through a

I've read a few of Neil Gaiman's fantasy novels now as well as watching the film Mirrormask , for which he wrote the script.  I've enjoyed all of them in that "I just want to keep reading this" way that good genre novels should have.  However, I've started realise that he has a template.  All the stories he tells are variations on the one story which goes roughly like this.  A well-intentioned but hapless young man is trapped in a rather unsatisfactory life.  He works in a dead-end job, is in a relationship with a woman who is wrong for him, and is stumbling down the slope to a sub-optimal life.  Then some apparently chance encounter or freak event tips him into a completely bizarre parrallel world, in which he must achieve (or help someone achieve) some great and incredibly dangerous task in order to get back to his old life.  In other words, these are quest stories. My most recent (but Gaiman's first) is Neverwhere , in which Richard Mayhew, mild-m

Even though their courtship makes an absorbing story, I fear the marriage of Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy will be a rocky one.  A marriage across class barriers might seem romantic, but there will be a lot of learning to do on both sides.  Fitzwilliam will not find it as easy to shed his arrogance as he thinks, and Elizabeth will not suffer it meekly.  He will sulk after an argument and they will not speak for days.  In those times especially, but at other times too, she will be lonely.  She is used to a small house filled with five other noisy, combative women and a father whose wit cuts the air.  Here she inhabits a cavernous mansion with a taciturn husband, his timid young sister and so many servants that she struggles to remember their names.  Yet if she invites her mother or sisters to visit her husband becomes even more difficult, because he despises them.  Of course they will eventually make up, passionately and with a great show of repentence, after each argument, and perh

This book has been sitting on my shelf for years, brought home from some second hand book stall or other and then left to gather dust with the other classics of Australian literature which I feel I ought to read and occasionally do. Stead is not for the fainthearted.  Living in various American and European cities in between bookending her life in Australia, she wrote amidst the horrors of the Great Depression and World War 2   Her books are depressing, dense and difficult.  You have to be determined. Have I sold it to you yet?  Well, perhaps I should try a little harder.  Mediocre writing can be easy to read, great writing always requires an effort.  The reward for that effort is a rich reading experience and a different way of seeing the world.  That's what you get from A Little Tea, A Little Chat.   Not a way of viewing the world you would like to adopt, but one that, at least for me, gives me an extra point of reference. The central character in this rather strange modern

In betweeen reading all these Lives of Jesus  I managed to find time to read George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life .   I remember my first year literature tutor telling us Eliot's Middlemarch was the greatest novel ever written in English.  That's a big call but once I read it, particularly after the first 100 pages, I had to agree that she had a point. Eliot (real name Marian Evans) was a minister's daughter but as a young adult she abandoned the established church, "converting" to the ideas of German theological scholar David Freidrich Strauss, whose rationalist Life of Jesus  she translated in 1846.  By the mid 1850s when she started writing fiction she was living openly with a married man and one of the reasons she used a pseudonym was to avoid her writings being rejected because of her rather notorious personal life. Scenes of Clerical Life contains her first published works of fiction - three novellas which appeared seperately in one of John Bl

For my last birthday my daughter gave me a selection  of booklets from the Penguin "Great Ideas" series.  They're extended extracts (100 or so pages each) from great works of literature or philosophy.  In my little pile are extracts from Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Fyodor Dostoevsky and this selection of essays by George Orwell.  Both Penguin and my daughter know me well - a full volume of Kant would wait on my shelf for years, but I can promise you the 100 page version will be read pretty soon.  They're also good for plane flights.  I read about half the Orwell on a flight to Sydney last week.   Orwell would have been a great blogger - he doesn't waste words, he draws you into the world he describes, he is prepared to live his art not just read about it, and he is interested in a wide range of things.   Here's something I thought was especially clever.  One of the essays is called The Art of Donald McGill.   McGill was a designer of comic postcards and the