Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

Young [A] passes his undergraduate career drinking with his friends, lying in bed, and working on his novel. The novel-within-the-novel is a work of meta-fiction: its protagonist, [B], another indolent writer, devises characters who spring to life to do as the writer’s pen commands — though they don’t always do so willingly. The characters include a fetching young woman whom B writes as a lust object and whom he then cannot resist. He has his way with her, notwithstanding that she is the product of his imagination.

Following?

Their coupling produces a half-fictitious/half-corporeal (-but-still-fictitious, remember) bastard son, [C]. He is an angry young man, with a talent for writing inherited from his father. He uses this skill to help his fellow fictional characters have their revenge on their progenitor, [B]. Meanwhile, the original protagonist has managed to snooze his way to the top of his class and all is well.

Then the camera cuts away before the top topples.

I want to preserve this forever

Robert Fulford, Toronto: Accidental City (1995)

Robert Fulford is an essayist and mainstay of Toronto’s journalism community. As is expected of Canadian essayists not named Stuart McLean, he is something of a ruffled old malcontent. In Toronto: Accidental City, Fulford takes the reader on a tour of Hogtown’s physical and civic geography (somewhat dated after 14 prosperous years), along the way decrying every architectural, cultural and technological development in Toronto since the end of the nineteenth century. His only affection is reserved for the Red Tories (has anyone ever used the phrase “Red Tory” who is not an affluent white man with a guilty conscience?) who attempted to safeguard the city’s cultural landmarks in the 70s. Fulford supports the attempt, even if he thinks they too fouled up everything they touched and sullied the achievements of their Victorian forbears. It’s a good read if you agree that everyone since Goldwyn Smith (and maybe him too) has been a grasping, shortsighted bureaucrat.

On the whole, I recommend it highly. Unless you’re not from Toronto — in which case, Robert Fulford has no time for you and neither do I.

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

Thoroughly lovely!

A friend recently reported that her Creative Writing professor discouraged writing about children because “children don’t have sex or agency”. Charles Dickens gave the lie to this claim 160 years ago (though not the sex part, thank God — we don’t need that kind of blog traffic around here). It’s true, for the first part of his life (and half the book) young Davie isn’t the engine of his own fate. Rather he is buffeted to and fro by the rising and falling fortunes of his family and acquaintances. No matter what happens to him in this period, he maintains an aspect of perfect, childlike guilelessness. As he gets older, David gets better at judging character but always remains earnest in his dealings with people. Over nine hundred pages (or about thirty years) he only thinks ill of maybe four people, fleetingly, and only speaks his mind to one of them. By and large, fate/karma delivers to the villains of the book their just deserts, without David having to sully his hands by interfering.

Dickens acknowledged that David Copperfield was semi-autobiographical, and the writing sparkles where the author drops any pretense to the contrary and the description might be ascribed to either author or character:

“I have been very fortunate in wordly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men amount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness.”

The book also sparkles when David is in love (often), when David is admiring of a peer (often), and whenever Wilkins Micawber embarks on a speech or letter.

According to Wikipedia, a big screen adaptation of David Copperfield is in the works, featuring Simon Pegg as Uriah Heep. IMDb, however, discloses no such plan.

Warren Ellis, Crooked Little Vein (2007)

This is an exercise in hardboiled detective fiction by an author best known for his graphic novels. The book is far removed from the specific time and place in American history that gave rise to the genre — namely, postwar L.A., where racial fears prompted white flight on a massive scale, which precipitated the city’s economic decline and the ghettoization of the urban centre and made a perceived threat into a real one.

In order to overcome the difference between McCarthy-era-L.A. and contemporary New York, where Crooked Little Vein is set, Ellis describes a city full of degenerates with truly astounding sexual proclivities — another hallmark of urban decay. Those hallmarks feature more prominently in the short work than perhaps they ought: instead of undergirding a detective story with sexual preoccupations, Ellis makes contemporary American sexual deviance the central driving force. The square-jawed private dick (hardboiled? check) is conscripted by forces beyond his understanding (led by a man who may or may not be John Ashcroft with a heroin addiction — still hardboiled? check) to recover a mysterious McGuffin document bartered for sexual favours by President Nixon (hardb — what?).

Here the book departs the realm of the hardboiled and becomes something like a Dan Brown book with naughty bits: the missing document is an alternate Constitution which, when read aloud, would cleanse the country of sexual deviance and restore it to its Puritan beginnings. The author has a great time peopling his underworld with villains both in favour of and opposed to such a cleanse and is relatively successful at obfuscating his anti-hero’s stance on the subject until the end. The detective can either rail against the putrification of America or he can throw in with its corruptors. You can guess the outcome by the fact that America is still, happily, awash in filth and depravity. The fact that it’s not the 50s anymore and the degenerates have won, is both the problem with contemporary pulp fiction and its solution.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)

Readers of English novelists (even Japanese English novelists) of the last two or three centuries can count on a class sub-text. It’s inevitable, at least until the Windsors themselves start publishing. Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the ultimate treatise on the nuances of English social behaviour (less sub-text than simply -text), The Remains of the Day, in the form (mostly) of an aging butler’s ruminations on the proper etiquette and philosophy to be adhered to by servants such as himself.

In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro takes a less direct, more allegorical approach, crafting a world just like ours in all but one major respect: that world’s solution to illness and disease. [Spoiler] Generation after generation of clones (never explicitly identified as such) are bred, raised and educated in pastoral seclusion until each is of the appropriate age to fulfill the purpose for which he or she was created — namely, to “donate” his or her organs to normal people. The clones’ “guardians” don’t really come out and tell the young replicants that this is their sole function until it’s necessary that they know, which occurs some time around puberty. In the mean-time, they’re taught to excel in art, academe and sport. The guardians are mindful that the outside world should view the “donors” as equals, as human beings with souls; but even they can never wholly accept the notion. They walk a fine line, telling their charges enough that they might harbour the delusion of some day leading normal lives, but not so much that the clones ever actually rebel against their lot or seek out such a life for themselves.

Instead of eliminating the pain and grief associated with ill-health, the advent of cloning burdens one group with it at the expense of the other. The practice has created a dual society; master and servant, Eloi and Morlock — only in this case the inhabitants are indistinguishable.

After twenty pages or so, a curious parallel reveals itself. It is an injustice of our age that a reader (this reader, at least) approaching Never Let Me Go might find it reminiscent of Michael Bay’s big-budget sci fi flop The Island, minus the chases and with a great deal more pathos and character (apologies to Michael Clarke Duncan). If Ishiguro weren’t already established as a master at capturing mortality and Englishness, this book might have been pigeonholed as speculative fiction and its human elements overlooked. Never Let Me Go is sci fi the way P.D. James’ Children of Men is sci fi: its strengths lie not in imagining the technology of the future but in fully realizing the regular people who will have to live with that future. It’s more notably a coming-of-age novel and a reflection on aging, death, and a life lived with an expiry date.