Somnopolis

One of my favourite films is the quirky Jump Tomorrow, a multi-lingual road trip across America. It features a scene with a Frenchman and an Englishman (Gosford Park’s James Whilby) arguing over the relevance of the French language. All the great Gallic thinkers and writers are dead, whereas English thrives thanks to the dominance of America.

You can see a similar smugness with regard to Russian culture. All those tolstoys and dostoyevskys had been buried by fukuyamism, relics of a dead culture, historical artifacts of the conflict between ‘freedom’ and despotism.

Except of course that’s nonsense. Russian letters are alive and well. In fact they are thriving on the fallout from the same conflict that buried the Soviet Empire. In Sergei Lukyanenko’s Nightwatch series the protagonist is caught in a century’s old conflict between the forces of good and evil – but takes the time to list the songs on his walkman as he wanders down a street. Lukyanenko’s novel was adapted into a film, which annihilated the Russian box office, inevitably drawing the attention of Hollywood. Some weighty handshakes later and the Night Watch books have been translated into English and a second sequel to the film set in America is due soon. Headcrusher by Alexander Garros and Aleksi Evdokimov reads like a post-Soviet Fight Club, as a highly educated young Latvian becomes increasingly disillusioned by the free market, realizing he is just another corporate drone. The cathartic diversions of Western culture, violent video games and movies, provide him with the inspiration to escape his fate, with bloody results.

I find it appropriate that the plot of Wanted, directed by Nightwatch’s Timur Bakmambetov, is very similar to Headcrusher. Stripped of the excesses of Mark Millar’s comic, it embraces the decadence of Western cinema violence, while also exploding a bomb beneath the drudgery of corporate neo-feudalism that its audience is subject to.

All of this is prelude to the clown prince Victor Pelevin. Like Slavoj Zizek, I am left unsure after each of his books just where the margin between parody and insight lies. Babylon focuses on the psychological conditioning of modern-day advertising by having its main character entire a state of drug-induced free-association, with commercial logos becoming transformed into ever-present Jungian archetypes. The Helmet of Horror appears to be inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos, though it also appears to be a satire on philosophical wankery.

Just last week I finished The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, which cites its primary source as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The main character is a boyish prostitute, although Pelevin mines Eastern mythology by having her also be a shapeshifting fox named A Hu-Li. After a series of events almost lead to her exposure as an immortal shapeshifter, she encounters an intelligence officer who is also a were-creature named Alexander. The FSB officer is based on yet another literary character from the Russian canon and himself acknowledges this when A Hu-Li mentions Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. The were-foxes it is revealed feed on human desire, whereas the were-wolves are in the service of the Russian government as oil-diviners.  The book is an attempt by A Hu-Li to describe her path to enlightenment, but as foxes are essentially imitative, she may only be imagining that she is experiencing such.

In the end the book is a satire on modern Russia and a pastiche of its literary and philosophical legacy. The fox A Hu-Li is tragic character frustrated that the long winter of the Cold War has not thawed enough, fondly reminiscing upon her former life in Asia. Alexander is plagued by loyalist fervour and machismo. He serves as Pelevin’s critique of Russian men and like the protagonist of Headcrusher finds himself out of place in a post-Communist world. The English translations of his books cannot come soon enough for me. I find it sad that the market sees fit to promote him as a ‘Russian Will Self’, whereas I find he shares little of the Englishman’s detached cynicism. He is to my mind a pop-literate tolstoyan, seeking the traces of the human condition among PSP games and blockbuster movies.

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.