Fantastic Metropolis

To be honest I can’t remember whether I read all these books this year or last year, but it must have been fairly recently since I’ve been able to lay hands on most of them. Here’s my recommendations from recently published work:

Beowulf, tr. by Seamus Heaney: I was suspicious of this, a bit. But it’s brilliant and sounds good on CD, too.

Le Morte D’Arthur, ed. John Matthews. Nicely illustrated with updated revisions to text, though nothing dramatic. If you don’t have a copy, I’d recommend this one.

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, which I’ve already reviewed on this site as I have Landor’s Tower (on the New Worlds’ site) which I also recommend, though if you haven’t read Sinclair try Downriver and Lights Out first. Harrison’s Travel Arrangements. Peter Ackroyd’s London is a wonderful piece of visionary semi-fiction. He is to history what Jung is to psychology. Great stuff. I read Elizabeth Taylor and John Cowper Powys on my holidays. Upset Eudora Welty died. I had the privilege to know her and she was as sound as a bell. Great, gracious woman. If you don’t know her work check out her short stories.

Poetry—Alice Notley’s new poetry collection must be out soon from Penguin. I read it in proof and it’s wonderful. One of her best. My friend Bill Butler died tragically of a drug overdose having completed his book The Myth of the Hero. His poems Static of the Star-Filled Wind, Selected Poems 1959-1977, edited by Mike Hughes (Limited 500 copies—ISBN 0-9541070-0-4) came out recently. While I had some arguments with Andrea Dworkin’s Scapegoat, she remains one of the most original and eloquent of feminist writers. Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay deserves its Pulitzer and is of interest to anyone interested in recent American history and popular fiction. Irresistible as far as I’m concerned.

I saw a great Iranian film whose name I forget, an imaginative film more or less featuring a nomad family. Another film I saw about Iran made me realise it might actually be possible to have a liberal Moslem democracy, which takes its own path to popular democracy within its own value systems.

Outstanding books include at least three by members of this editorial board and since we have agonised over the rights and wrongs of this for far too long I said whathehell I would normally be recommending Witcover, VanderMeer and Živković in these circumstances, so here I am doing it. I suggest you sashay over to the articles on these writers if I haven’t convinced you I can still pick ‘em.

Which reminds me that John Sladek is being reprinted decently at last by Orion/Gollancz and since I am always moaning about publishers I would like to recommend the work of Malcolm Edwards and Jo Fletcher at Orion. They have produced the VG yellowback reprints and the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series which have done so much to remind the world of an adult tradition.

If you like what you’ve read of Rhys Hughes you might want to take a look at one of his Tarturus titles, such as The Smell of Telescopes and while you were with them you might also be interested in the series of Sarban reprints that excellent press is putting out. Please remember to watch out for the new John Sladek collection Maps, edited by Dave Langford (also mentioned elsewhere on this site). I’ll again recommend Steve Aylett and his new Shamanspace, which Codex recently published.

I listened to a brilliant modern rendering of The Faerie Queene on BBC Radio 4 but was too lazy to find out who did it. Anyone interested will find a long list of other recommendations at multiverse.org.

Hitler and Geli is a very good account, though not as well researched as it claims, of what I believe to be a focal point in the rise of Hitler. And, sadly, most of my other reading has been on similar subjects, with a bit of a break to read The Song of Hiawatha again and to read a bunch of books on native Americans and Vikings. Great little fantasy epic, Hiawatha. I bet someone has done it into prose. If not, there’s an easy bit of plagiarism just waiting for a writer not too fussy where the stuff comes from.

Happy reading, pards,
Michael Moorcock.

Some more suggestions

1. Pirates of the Drowned World

While it is difficult to know how much input Ballard himself put into this sequence, which promises to be a ten book series, John Norman’s clever explanation as to why Kerans changed his mind at the last minute and went East is brilliant. Norman has found his metier at last. In a recent interview he described his forthcoming sequel to other Ballard novels. These will include The Knout, The Atrocity Exhibitionist, Concrete Whipping Post, Bash, Slash, The Voices of Pain and Why I Want To Whip Ronald Reagan.

2. The Adventures of Felix Krull Vol. 2

Even funnier and sharper than Vol. 1. I have waited over fifty years for this novel and I must say the resolution is the finest thing Mann has written to date.

3. Return to the Castle

Although some people think Kafka’s long-awaited sequel only further confuses the issue, I found the character of Maisie Doyle, the loveable barmaid who reveals the plan of the castle, one of the best he has painted.

4. Only Connect, Please!

E.M.Forster’s other science fiction story, which takes a somewhat modernist slant on early computer problems is nonetheless far superior to his last novel, Maurice.

5. The Furry Wold

Morthven Pegasus’s thousand pager is a sequel to her lovely The Fuzzy Cuddles is remarkable for the fact that it it consists of a single sentence without a subject. The book now knocks Dennis Wheatley from Guinness Book of Records.

6. Fun with Your Hobbit

This excellent guide book, written by orcs for orcs, has some tremendous tips for extending your hobbit’s life as well as its legs, arms, toes, fingers and neck.

7. Titus Abroad

Peake had written this relatively short novel between projects and then decided he would write Titus Alone first, in order to make the transition from the closed world of Gormenghast to the whole Peakian planet. Mislaid, the manuscript came to light last year. Written at the height of his poetic powers, this is Titus in a stranger London than any you’ve previously read about.

8. My Life with the Squids

Lady Oona von Bek’s extraordinary account of how she learned to communicate with members of the encephalapod family in their native habitat. To give a flavour of the book I can only quote: “I cannot be the only person, swimming in warm waters, who has met with a member of the squid family and exchanged greetings, shaping my arms and hands into the familiar lyre posture of greeting and enquiry. I have not the range of vocabulary, of course, to change my colours subtly enough to qualify every statement of body language. To the loquacious cuttlefish I must seem almost mute. But his poers of communication do not make him a liberal humanist. His realities are not changed, as our sometimes are, by his desires.”

9. West

V. S. Naipaul’s life amongst the cowboys is as hilarious a satire as his wonderful ‘South’ in which he journeyed about the Southern states of America ‘getting to the truth’ by writing down all the stories the good old boys were willing to hand out to him and then offering it to his London audience as an authentic account of how people are down there. Here, I was particularly delighted by his straight-faced retailing of the story told him by a Texas cowboy. “The roping of the giant horned jackabuck is still a matter of a man and his rope, for this terrain is too rugged for even the most efficient four-wheel drive vehicle, so the ‘jackaroo’ as he is known is something of a hero in his own world.” He pulled it off once with South and my guess is that he’ll do it again with this one. I think this guy got the Nobel Comedy Prize this year and it’s well deserved.

10. Rabbit Enpied

The resolved resolution, a kind of reduction or perhaps re-invention, of the quintessential restatement in which a lait of poisoned, perhaps artificial, flowers garland the reader’s attention while deftly Updike puts his rabbit back in the (Hawaian) hat so that upon cutting the pie, we find it merely crust. This is genius.