Somnopolis

You can keep your James Bonds and Jason Bournes…my favourite secret agent is Harry Palmer. A dry, deadpan public servant, who is just as likely to conduct a top secret briefing with his superior officer while pushing a shopping trolley down an aisle looking for a can of soup. His ordinariness, his failures and class makes him more recognizable to me. Michael Caine’s glasses even give Palmer the appearance of a bookish clerk, who deals with Cold War espionage from 9am until clocking out time, in the finest tradition of the British public service.

Which brings us to Charles Stross. Some months ago on Facebook I was moaning about not having read a decent sf/fantasy series that explored new ideas. Tom and Pol Rua both recommended I try out Stross. I started with The Family Trade, which amused by setting a fable about a woman from our world travelling to an alternate earth against the backdrop of cut-throat free market capitalism.

This mercantile Narnia showed how Stross can perform a decent enough literary mash-up, but I was hoping for more. The Atrocity Archives, an early science fiction novel by him, manages by catapulting a low-level public servant with proficient IT skills into the world of Lovecraftian counter-espionage. Cthulu dimensions bordering our own have been discovered decades ago and a secret Cold War is still underway between rogue states and the British government to take advantage of these eldritch powers. Our hero Bob Howard is pitted against Nazi dark mages and demons disguised as office receptionists, but at the end of the day he still needs to maintain his flexi time-sheets.

It’s a fantastic updating of Lovecraftian ideas, sidestepping the urban fantasies of Gaiman or Charles de Lint, by setting the conflict between flawed humankind and creatures from the dungeon dimensions in a white-collar world of bureaucratic procedure and IT speak.

I like that Stross takes this further than similar attempts from other creators, such as Chris Carter’s X-Files, Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, or Sergei Lukyanenko’s Night Watch. The essential Britishness of the setting, with its Harry Palmer-like understated heroism, makes it more interesting. It also neatly ties in with the fatalism of Lovecraft, whose heroes rarely escape with their lives, or sanity. Here Stross pulls the rug from beneath us by preferring anticlimactic resolutions to Howard’s missions. The theme is retained that humans are in the end incapable of comprehending anything outside of our own world. The Cthulu Elder Gods are beyond our understanding and so the procedural manner in which these incursions into reality are treated is an effective way of avoiding the existential nihilism that would often destroy Lovecraft’s scholarly adventurers.

I also like how Bob Howard is an unrepentant geek and know-it-all. What could potentially be a painful exposition-filled briefing scene between the hero and his spy-masters instead becomes an acronym filled info-dump of techno-babble. It’s not often clear exactly what Howard is talking about, but then he is in the end a bureaucrat and jargon is his first language. The reader is challenged to try to keep up, as there is no condescending narrative voice on offer to explain what is going on (although it is generally clear regardless).

Harry Palmer versus Cthulu Elder Gods and CCTV deathrays. Charles Stross, I thank you.

From a very young age I carried a great affection for J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books. So much so that I was very defensive of it. Ralph Bakshi’s animated feature was beyond reproach and the early childish chapters of Fellowship of the Ring were excused on the basis that “it’ll get better!”

In fact having read the Hobbit first, LOTR felt like graduation for me. Here were descriptions of warfare that built on tragedy and suffering; an ambient sense of loss with the passages describing the departure of the Elves; genuine fear at the corruption and sinister nature of the Nazgul. Then “the eagles are coming, the eagles are coming” – well I remember breaking down in tears in the back of my dad’s car after reading that.

LOTR was a very private concern as a result and I became wary of discussing it with others as few were aware of it and those that were tended to make fun. I felt powerless in the face of this mockery and thought there was little I could do about it. When other writers made fun of Tolkien though – then I had a choice. I could refuse to read their books!

I was a vindictive child.

Which brings me to Michael Moorcock.

Moorcock’s career started when he was still a teenager, editing a short fantasy magazine. His grasp of language is ecstatic, with tremendous detail and a joy taken in conveying a rush of ideas. If writers are craftsmen Moorcock’s writing is free from joins. I of course hated him. For Moorcock had created the cardinal sin of criticising Tolkien in his essay Epic Pooh. He positions himself as an upstart to the donnish Inklings, whose members included C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, cornering the market in British Fantasy. In Moorcock’s eyes they also represent the values of their age sustained through fantasy literature and are therefore obstacles to the development of the form. Whereas Tolkien would typify the Lord of the Rings as a Romance, Moorcock saw it as an anti-romance, lacking in vitality and deadened by the restrictive social mores of Little Britain.

This irked me. See this quote for example:

The Lord of the Rings is a pernicious confirmation of the values of a declining nation with a morally bankrupt class whose cowardly self-protection is primarily responsible for the problems England answered with the ruthless logic of Thatcherism. Humanity was derided and marginalised. Sentimentality became the acceptable subsitute. So few people seem to be able to tell the difference. (Epic Pooh)

Moorcock identifies in Tolkien a fear of death, as represented by the fantasy of the Elves. Interestingly the Oxford professor was intrigued by Darwin’s student Huxley’s lectures on evolution and included a note in his writings on Elvish reincarnation as a response (somehow I suspect college debates on evolution were still lacking if that was his reaction).

He also sees in it an overly sentimental recollection of England’s bucolic past, pre-Industrial revolution. In essence the Shire in particular and to a larger extent the refined Elven havens of Rivendell and Lothlorien, represent a world free from change, were time is frozen and death kept at bay, for a time at least. Mordor and Isenguard are identified by industry run amok and the destruction of the landscape.

Whereas Peter Jackson and his writers lauded Tolkien for what is seen as prescient environmentalism (helping to sell it to contemporary audiences), Moorcock perceives it as an extremist fear of the new. A manifesto for the New Worlds writers he led could probably be stated in the sentence ‘embrace the new’. The current crop of writers emerging in this 21st century have a new slogan – embrace the new weird. But I digress.

The main gist of Moorcock’s aggressive stance is that Tolkien is in fact a populist. His writing appeals to those seeking reassurance in fantasy and not a challenge. Writers such as Baum, Pullman, Peake, LeGuin and Garner are cited as examples of having produced books that require further thought on the part of the reader. Tolkien and Lewis use their writings as vehicles for their own dogmatic view and in Moorcock’s apostate opinion this weakens the quality of their work. It becomes propaganda in drag, aping the cliches of romantic fantasy.

Epic Pooh as an essay becomes an assessment of a number of children’s writers, with Moorcock selecting those he favours and denouncing the bewigged ‘Tories’, in their midst. The Lord of the Rings also inspired the creation of ‘Fantasy’, as a literary genre. Typically a young hero encounters an elderly mentor who leads them on a quest with several other fellows through foreign lands. Dark robed menacing figures are also a predominant feature. Dismal fare from Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan (and yes George Lucas’ Star Wars as well) can be traced backwards through a genealogical line to Big Daddy Tolkien. Christopher Paolini is another writer who has recently emerged with the same disappointing features in his writing. Tolkien marks the point – and I can no longer dispute this with Moorcock – when fantasy fiction became a commercial concern, defined by its repetitive character and narrow themes. Fantasy for fantasy’s sake, one might say.

I feel I have a lot of catching up to do. Fantasy as literature is not an absurd goal. Voyage to Arcturus remains one of the most fascinating and disturbing books I have ever read. Clive Barker wishes he could write as well as David Lindsay. Moorcock’s own books including the Elric saga and that of Coram serve as moral investigations rather than the dogma of Lewis. His Dancers at the End of Time also eulogised the ideas of that other iconoclast H. G. Wells. Ursula LeGuin is someone I’ve wanted to read for a long time. Charles de Lint’s Onion Girl was great fun and George R. R. Martin makes those years of tortuous prose by Robert Jordan evaporate from my memory.

I want to be challenged, what’s more I want to be entertained by new ideas instead of being embraced by nostalgia. Fantasy should not reassure, it should be an exploration of the limits of our imagination.

As it happens my favourite work of fantasy literature predates the Lord of the Rings by more than a decade. Hope Mirlees’ Lud in the Mist. I cannot think of a more beautiful book that is also quite dangerous.