Fantastic Metropolis

When I began to read in deadly earnest, it was always with the unknown in mind: Alice in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Last Unicorn, James and the Giant Peach. Always, I see with the benefit of hindsight, I loved most those authors who gave generously of their imagination, who let fly with the most outrageous, absurd, sublime characters and situations; they literally had devoured the world and remade it in their image.

Time has not changed this quality in me: I demand BIG imaginations from the novelists I read and I demand that quality of the bittersweet which permeates our world like the beautiful red blossoms that so tormented me with allergies when I was a child. And if I now also demand thematic resonance, perfect attention to detail, intellectual stimulation, and emotional depth, well, these are merely the accoutrements that life acquires in our gliding journey across its luminous, lacerated, smirking face.

What genre of books do I read? A genre without a king, without a country, without maps or roads, so that I am at once wandering through all of the strange lands of fiction and yet belong to none of them. And yet, if forced to apply a name, a label, what could better suit what I read than “literature of the fantastic?” All of the books I love change the way we view the world, and all have an element of the fantastical, the transcendent, the unknown.

Italo Calvino, that greatest of book lovers, once wrote a wonderful tome entitled If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, in which a reader buys a book only to find the first chapter doesn’t match the rest of the text—that the rest of the book he wanted to read hasn’t been printed inside the book he has bought. Thus begins a quixotic quest to find the rest of that original book, spanning a hilarious and strange continuum in which books hide and change before our eyes.

The books I recommend below are elusive books—out of print, only available overseas, or published in the mainstream and thus often lost to readers of the fantastic. Forgotten, under-appreciated, or only appreciated by a select group.

I give no clues on where to find these books—you will have to find them for yourself, after diligent search, until that moment, in the back room of a used bookstore on some neglected alley in Trafalgar Square or the French Quarter or somewhere more prosaic, when you experience that tell-tale double-thrill. First it is the thrill of discovery, followed quickly by a second, more permanent sensation: the knowledge that the real discovery still awaits you, between the covers of the book you hold in your hands.

The New York Trilogy (1985) by Paul Auster

Composed of three short novels—The City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room—The New York Trilogy marked the debut of one of the United States’ most talented novelists, Paul Auster. Disguised as detective stories, the three novels actually turn the process of detection inward, until the detective investigates himself. Auster’s approach is pleasurably post-modern, for the novels all preserve the page-turning narrative thrust of the detective novel while dealing with the most introspective of subjects: the loss of self, the search for self, the alienation from self. The reader is hooked from page one of the first novel, which begins:

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone [Quinn] was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning, there was simply the event and its consequences. Whether it might have turned out differently, or whether it was all predetermined with the first word that came from the stranger’s mouth, is not the question. The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell.

Quinn, a writer of detective novels, has been mistaken for a detective and, rather than disillusion the caller, he takes the case. In so doing, he opens up a whole world of the surreal, including the pursuit of a man whose path of daily walks repeatedly spells out his name across entire city blocks. Among the great pleasures of The New York Trilogy are Auster’s spare yet luminous prose, the sheer brilliance of his pacing, and the strangeness of his observations about the human condition. Auster adeptly fools the reader in the service of his story, and the first two books must be revisited in light of the revelations contained in the third book.

The Passion of New Eve (1977) by Angela Carter

The Passion of New Eve is a crude, ugly book, by measures erudite and pompous, angry and profane. The plot has a streamlined single-mindedness dedicated to feminist satirizing of the image of the United States promulgated by the United States through its movies: the most obvious and potent of the tactics employed by the agents of cultural/gender imperialism.

Evelyn, an Englishman who has been offered a job teaching at a U.S. university, arrives in New York City only to find that the country has gone belly up. Harlem is a walled fortress defended by black extremists, and tanks rumble down streets of broken glass, while radical feminists fight it out with the National Guard. Remember Watts? The level of breakdown described by Carter is only a few steps beyond the L.A. riots; it is, however, leavened by black humor, especially as regards the feminists:

They blew up wedding shops and scoured the newspapers for marriage announcements so that they could send brides gifts of well-honed razors… there were rumors of a kamikaze squad of syphilitic whores who donated spirochetal enlightenment for free to their customers out of dedication to the cause.

Evelyn soons finds that his university position has been liquidated and, penniless, takes up with a black woman whom he gets pregnant; when she almost dies from a botched abortion, Evelyn flees the scene of his own cruelty. In the deserts of the southwest, he is forceably given a sex change operation by a tribe of lost Amazonians and then taught what it means to be a woman by a host of male stereotypes. By the time Eve/Evelyn reaches the West Coast, s/he has undergone more than a physical transformation.

Carter is not so much concerned with an accurate picture of the day-to-day reality of the United States’ future as she is with symbolic, poetic, and cinematic truth. Only Carter could, by the tenacity of her imagination and drive, hold such a macrocosm of bastard throw-aways together so that the book becomes something more than the sum of its parts: a chemical, rather than physical, reaction. The mixture of mythologies together with the bleak and barren landscapes, the evocation of the Mother Goddess, inhabit a land where J.G. Ballard and Joanna Russ collide, and presages both the myth-science of Ian MacDonald’s Out on Blue Six and the surreal America on display in Steve Erickson’s visionary novels.

Carter’s less obscure works include the brilliant The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and Nights At The Circus.

And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989) by Nick Cave

Nick Cave is better known as the front man for the raucous, avant-garde rock band Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, but with the publication of And the Ass Saw the Angel (a line taken from the Bible), he staked a legitimate claim to inclusion among the first or second rank of stylists in his native Australia. The novel is told in a strange style that conjures up comparisons to William Faulkner, heavily influenced by Joseph Conrad, the Old Testament, Edgar Allen Poe, and Mervyn Peake. Such cluttered, supersaturated prose at times threatens to sink the book, but each time thus endangered, Cave rights himself with the aid of some wholly new and incredible characterization or insight.

And the Ass Saw the Angel tells the life story of Euchrid Eucrow, a poor mute with imagined telepathic powers who has from birth had an awareness of his own existence. Or rather, Euchrid tells his own story—from a plot of marshy quicksand where he has been chased by vengeful, brutish townfolk:

Ah calculate thus: That by the time the moon comes shining over the top of yonder trees—that is to say, in approximately sixty minutes—mah soul will have departed from, and in no way will have remained in, this here world. And mah body which for some time has been and at present continues to be, even as ah speak, under repossession, will have departed from this world and deeply sunken will its flesh and bones be…

There follows an absurd series of calculations concerning rate of sinkage that are composed of one-fourth pathos and three-fourths black humor: “Suffice it to say, though, and say not at all unhappily, after long and probing ruminations and having drawn no hasty conclusions, that ah, Euchrid Eucrow, have a snowball’s chance in hell of seeing the sun come up tomorrow.”

One of the book’s great strengths as it follows Euchrid’s tragic life is this element of gallows humor which, expertly placed, relieves the intense gloom. Although the final two chapters of And the Ass Saw the Angel collapse under the weight of the language (or, perhaps, it is the reader collapsing under the weight of the book), the book remains a triumph of “gothic noir,” truly original and framed by a rough genius.

Arc D’X (1993) by Steve Erickson

Steven Erickson’s Arc D’X may be the most important novel about America published in the last 10 years. The novel provides a fully-rounded view of Thomas Jefferson and his ambivalence toward slavery, an ambivalence documented in his righteous public stance versus his inability to free the slaves on his own plantation. The battle between Jefferson the upholder of liberty and Jefferson the man are set out early in the book when a slave woman is burned for killing her master:

...the squire’s five-year-old son watched the smoke too. Into the night the little boy smelled it. He smelled it in his food and his bath. In the air outside his bedroom window that should have been ripe with the scent of spring rain, he smelled nothing but the burning body of the black female slave. He woke in the middle of the night vomiting; and lying in bed the next day, depleted and delirious, his five-year-old head was filled with excruciating visions: staring into the nothingness above him, he waited for the woman’s ashes to fall from the sky, to clot the branches of the trees and hang from the rafters of the house like black snow.

In particular, Arc D’X explores Jefferson’s treatment of his slave lover Sally. Jefferson’s rape of Sally reverberates throughout the novel. Erickson’s depiction of a Jefferson torn between ideals and his brute nature is magnificent:

It thrilled him, the possession of her. He only wished she was so black as to not have a face at all. It thrilled him, not to be a saint for once, not to be a champion. Not to bear, for once, the responsibility of something noble or good. Didn’t he believe that one must pursue his happiness? Such a pursuit is as ruthless as any other.

At the end of this crucial scene, Jefferson sees the ashes of the dead slave woman from his youth finally falling outside his Paris window.

History diverges at this point, the rogue history of Jefferson leading a slave revolt intertwined with various images of the future: a totalitarian regime and an apocalyptic Berlin in the year 1999. The culminating scenes of this extraordinary novel contain the tragedy not only of individuals but of history itself.

Erickson can be compared to Thomas Pynchon for his use of time and the surrealism of his writing, but Erickson is a more complete novelist and, while Pynchon’s vision has apparently failed him (witness the tepid Vineland), Erickson has forged his way into uncharted territory. The book plays such sophisticated and daring tricks with time that a simple summary cannot convey the sheer reckless beauty of Erickson’s writing, nor the sadness, the elegance, and the complexity of the plot. More than any other book on this list, with the possible exception of The Seven Who Fled, Arc D’X is an experience that could never be duplicated by a medium other than the novel form.

Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) by Alasdair Gray

Often compared to Dante’s Divine Comedy and the work of William Blake, Lanark chronicles the journeys of Duncan Thaw from life into death, from Glasgow to the disintegrating afterworld city of Unthank. It is in Unthank that Thaw, his memories wiped clean, takes the name of Lanark. As Lanark, Thaw has become nothing so simple as a ghost; as with the other inhabitants of this sunless afterworld, he is flesh-and-blood, and the actions he takes have serious repercussions. Unthank is a hell in which all the worst elements of life-on-earth are magnified and intensified: corruption, crime, political and environmental irresponsibility. This magnification provides Gray with opportunities for satire not so skillfully exploited since Voltaire’s Candide. Gray, a socialist, does not believe that politics and business can be separated from the human animal and Lanark is as much a book about the fascist tendencies of both as it is a probing psychological profile of Thaw and a marvelous, deeply humane fantasy. In fact, the book can be called a “masterpiece” precisely because it intertwines satire, deep characterization, and a mind-blowing imagination. The sections on Thaw’s life in Glasgow read like a less experimental Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, while the surreal element, firmly grounded in the practical, possesses a breathtaking beauty: gravestones speak with toothy mouths; mouths flap like wings through the sky; men and women encased in thick “dragon hide” because their souls are sick burn up, or crack open to emerge naked, pale, cleansed and reborn:

[Lanark] felt a wave of heat go through the cool metal under him then the beak shut with a crack like a gunshot. There was a second crack then a clang. The cloud of steam began clearing, yet he was unable for a moment to see the great beak, for the head had fallen off. There was a black hole between the shoulders from which poured a pale shining stream. It was hair. There was another clang as the thorax split. He fell sideways onto a wing and lay listening to sounds like buckets and kettles falling downstairs. The silver body and limbs cracked and fell apart until they covered the floor like ornate scrap metal. A naked girl crouched weeping in the middle, rubbing her cheeks with her hands…

There is also a gritty humor to the book, accentuated by Gray’s playful organization of his material. Who can resist a book that begins with Part III, doubles back to Prologue, before going ahead with Part I? This playfulness also has a purpose since the book can be read “out of order” by following it from prologue through Part IV for a coherent but totally different effect. Gray includes a chapter that lists all of the authors and philosophers he has stolen from to create Lanark, and the book is lovingly illustrated by Gray as well.

Gray’s 1982 Janine and Poor Things also come highly recommended.

Viriconium (1982) by M. John Harrison

Viriconium is a city of the far future—so far future that Harrison’s works concerning the city more properly resemble fantasy. Viriconium is, the reader gleans from the text, the last outpost of a high civilization in a world where most everywhere else barbarism is mitigated only slightly by high tech weapons and vehicles not properly understood by those who now operate them. The citizens of Viriconium may not understand these technologies either, but as a city of poets and painters and astronomers, they use these gifts to different ends.

Viriconium contains Harrison’s marvelous short novel “In Viriconium” and several short stories set in the city or its environs. The novel follows the portrait painter Ashlyme’s disasterous attempts to rescue fellow painter Audsley King from the plague zone of the city. The plague is

...difficult to describe. It had begun some months before. It was not a plague in the ordinary sense of the word. It was a kind of thin-ness, a transparency. Within it people aged quickly, or succumbed to debilitating illness—pthisis, influenza, galloping consumption. The very buildings fell apart and began to look unkempt, ill-kept. Businesses failed. All projects dragged out indefinitely and in the end came to nothing.

The style of “In Viriconium” is elegant, the city itself as sophisticated as Paris, but twice as strange, ruled over intermittently by the Barley Brothers, two brawling siblings who may or may not be gods.

In his attempts to rescue King, Ashlyme becomes an intriguing mixture of honesty and amorality who finds himself confronted with ethical questions that he can never quite resolve to his own satisfaction.

Few imaginary cities in literature are as compelling and original as Viriconium, with the possible exception of Angela Carter’s South American city in The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman or Italo Calvino’s cities in Invisible Cities. But what really makes Viriconium an extraordinary book are the fascinating characters and plots that unfold with breathtaking effortlessness.

The Seven Who Fled (1937) by Frederic Prokosch

Some novels contain no overt element of the fantastic and, yet, in their sensibilities, the hallucinagenic surface of the prose, qualify as literature of the fantastic. The Seven Who Fled fits this most general of definitions. It tells the story of seven foreigners who, traveling near Kashgar, find that their path through China is blocked by intrigues:

There had recently been, all over Sinkiang, considerable disturbances. General Ma’s army had swept blood-thirstily through the desert; the Tungans were still waging a truculent guerilla warfare against the provincial government; the Soviet government had sent down its agents to Urumchi and Kashgar to support the Governor’s forces. The cities, the town, the tent-sprinkled plains, all rustled with distrust and detestation.

Thus, they abandon their caravan and split up, the bulk of the novel telling the story of each of the seven as they endeavor, by stealth and guile, to make the journey to Shanghai, and from there to safety.

The themes of The Seven Who Fled are much more existential than the question—who will survive and who will not?—that drives the narrative. There is a silence and a distance between the characters, within the characters, and between the characters and the forbidding landscapes that creates a corresponding space within the reader. Throughout the novel, the seven who have fled battle first and foremost their environment, and then, in their isolation, their own thoughts and repressed emotions. Some rediscover themselves and others, lost, destroy themselves.

Few books attempt to use the setting as a character, but The Seven Who Fled does so with brutal effectiveness–the reader feels this book in his or her bones; it is a gut-wrenching, fatiguing work of art. The place descriptions are among the most harshly beautiful in the English language:

An empty world. No more hills, no insect, no life at all, not even any colors now, no shapes except the accidental curves of the centuries, no sound, no smell. The utter desert this was indeed, far more lonely than a sea of pure sand, just as a limitless bog is more lonely than the Pacific. A yellow naked body, grotesque and charred; yet possessing, cuppled in its hollows, the unspeakable years; on intimate terms with the sun and nothing but the sun, giving its shrunken secrecies daily to the sun, smelling of nothing at all except the sun, each stone palpably adoring the sun and indifferent to everything except the sun.

At times, the mood is too oppressive, and Prokosch has an annoying habit of setting characters in front of a mirror, where they suddenly reminisce about their past, but overall this novel works a magic that cannot easily be dispelled.

Prokosch wrote a number of fine novels in addition to The Seven Who Fled, including A Ballad of Love and The Missolonghi Manuscript.

Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989) by Mordechai Richler

A huge, multi-generational saga, Solomon Gursky Was Here follows Moses Berger in his quest to discover the mysterious particulars of the life of Solomon Gursky, scion of the powerful Gursky family. Berger’s journey takes him across continents, from the Great White North to London, and through painful segments of his own life. Ravens, creators and tricksters, appear frequently in this garulous, big-hearted book; they hover over Solomon Gursky’s life like a black-feathered question mark, and, ultimately, the myth of Gursky’s life overwhelms Berger: whenever he approaches the truth, it flies farther away. Berger, the heart of the novel, is a complex man aware of his own failings:

Responding to the brotherly call of another dipso [bird] in trouble, Moses yanked on his trousers and hurried outside. He had turned fifty-two a few months earlier and was not yet troubled by a paunch. It wasn’t that he exercised but rather that he ate so sparingly. He was not, as he had once hoped, even unconventionally handsome. A reticent man of medium height, with receding brown hair running to gray and large, slightly protuberant brown eyes, their pouches purply. His nose bulbous, his lips thick. But even now some women seemed to find what he sadly acknowledged as his physical ugliness oddly compelling. Not so much attractive as a case to answer.

Richler has assembled a huge cast of characters and renders each in loving detail. The mythical elements of Berger’s quest, however, and the fantastical speculations about Gursky’s life are what raise this novel to the first rank. The prose, level and spare, allows Richler to both satirize with efficiency and transcend his satire. Like A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Solomon Gursky Was Here is an opulent search for truth, complete with stories within stories and a bittersweet resolution.

The Jerusalem Quartet (1979-1986) by Edward Whittemore

The Jerusalem Quartet consists of four novels of unparalleled scope and invention: Sinai Tapestry, Jerusalem Poker, Nile Shadows, and Jericho Mosaic. Please visit Jerusalem Dreaming for the full text of this section.

In conclusion…

We read to learn about ourselves, but we also read to reach beyond ourselves, to experience that which is blessedly and profanely other. Literature of the fantastic deals in the other with a generocity of vision, of spirit, that more realistic fiction cannot hope to match. The contemporary realistic novel is often a drab and sad affair. By contrast, each of the books recommended above contains an entire world within its pages; each book demonstrates a reverence for the imagination. Isn’t this, then, that is at the heart of any great fiction? Stories that take us farther than we want to go, so that, all at once, we are far from shore, the lights of civilization distant, and, before us, through the night, our faint flashlights can just make out the wine-dark reflection of something new, different, and wonderful.

Notes: Other books could have been discussed above but, because they are too well-known or too recent or for reasons of space, have not been included in this article. Among such works are:

• Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita
• Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs
• Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love
• Timothy Findley’s Headhunter
• Toni Morrison’s Beloved
• Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels
• Brooke Stevens’ The Circus of the Earth and the Air
• Lawrence Thornton’s Imagining Argentina
• Brooks Hansen’s The Chess Garden

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Parts of this article appeared in the CLF Newsletter.