I am a native of Gelderland. Our property consists only of a few acres of briar and brackish water. Pines that rustle with a metallic sound grow on its boundaries. Only a few rare inhabitable rooms remain on the farm, which is dying stone by stone in solitude. We issue from an old family of shepherds, formerly large, now reduced to my parents, my sister, and me.

I was born in Gelderland, where our family holdings had dwindled to a few acres of heath and yellow water. Along the boundary grew pine trees that rustled with a metallic sound. The farmhouse had only a few habitable rooms left and was falling apart stone by stone in the solitude. Ours was an old family of herdsmen, once numerous, now reduced to my parents, my sister, and myself.

Many years ago, when I was first discovering science fiction, I came across a Damon Knight anthology called A Century of Science Fiction. It was one of those defining anthologies for me. It must be 40 years or more since I last read it, but it contained stories that are still vivid in my memory – ‘Sail On! Sail On!’ by Philip José Farmer, a selection from Worlds of the Imperium by Keith Laumer, ‘The Star’ by Arthur C. Clarke, ‘The Crystal Egg’ by H.G. Wells, ‘The First Days of May’ by Claude Veillot – along with one or two that now mean absolutely nothing to me (‘You Are With It!’ by Will Stanton??). But the story that stood out then, and continues to be one of the most fondly remembered stories I have ever read, was a piece called ‘Another World’ by J.-H. Rosny aîné (in a translation by Knight himself).

Recently I had the opportunity to review a new volume, Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind, by J.-H. Rosny aîné, the centrepiece of which was a new translation of ‘Another World’. And it was, indeed, every bit as good as I remember. And yet …

*

J.-H. Rosny was really Joseph-Henri-Honoré Boëx (1856-1940) and his younger brother, Séraphin Justin François Boëx (1859-1948), but around 1907 the pair split, and all the works previously ascribed to J.-H. Rosny were now ascribed to Rosny aîné. Rosny jeune did apparently write one novel on his own, after his brother’s death, but it seems not to have been very good.

So Rosny aîné was the writer in the family. He was born in Brussels, but in 1873 he moved to London to work as a telegrapher and stayed there for 11 years. During his time in London he was exposed to the debates on evolution that were then continuing in lively fashion (the same debates that young H.G. Wells would have been discovering about this time, though it is doubtful that the two would ever have met). Rosny also probably wrote his first novel, Nell Horn, in London before he moved to Paris, since it is a naturalistic novel set in the London slums.

Nell Horn was published, in French, in 1887, as was his first work of sf, the prehistoric adventure Les Xipéhuz. Thereafter he would divide his writing between realist novels and science fiction, and also wrote works of popular science (a career that seems to mirror that of Wells). He was an associate of Edmond de Goncourt and later became president of the Académie Goncourt, and was also highly respected among French scientists (it has been claimed that he knew the Curies and Einstein personally). Like Wells, he wrote prolifically right up to his death, on the eve of the German entry into Paris in 1940.

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His place in the history of French language sf is unassailable, but his work is little known in English. Danièle Chatelain and George Slusser, who translate and introduce Three Science Fiction Novellas, mention only L’étonnant voyage d’Hareton Ironcastle which was loosely translated and effectively re-written by Philip José Farmer, and the Hollywood film of The Quest for Fire. Though they conveniently forget that two of the stories in their collection, The Xipéhuz and Another World, were previously translated by Damon Knight, while the third, The Death of the Earth, has recently been translated by Brian Stableford.

That, to be honest, in not the only questionable statement I found in Chatelain and Slusser’s introduction. Of Les Xipéhuz, they say it clearly drew inspiration from English evolutionary debates because ‘no analogues to the prehistoric extrapolation of this novel exist in the francophone world’. Oddly enough, in Nicholas Ruddick’s masterful account of prehistoric fictions, The Fire in the Stone (2009), he demonstrates that there was a clear tradition of prehistoric fiction that had started as early as 1861 and that was almost entirely French in origin.

They then spend the bulk of their lengthy introduction (over 70 pages, with only 120 pages devoted to Rosny’s fiction) comparing Rosny first with Jules Verne, then with H.G. Wells, to the disadvantage of Verne and Wells of course. The trouble is, given that we have not been given reason to trust them before this point, it is very hard to accept their arguments here. And little inaccuracies keep creeping in (‘Wells wrote at least one prehistoric tale’, they tell us, when he actually wrote two very well known examples of the genre). So when they compare the versions of the end of the world presented by Rosny and by Wells (in The Time Machine) I found myself not at all surprised, but not at all convinced, when they declare: ‘Wells’s treatment of these bold topics, compared with Rosny’s, appears surprisingly conservative.’ Really? They complain that the Time Traveller is confined to Richmond, though of course he has no means of travel in the future but still covers a very extensive territory on foot. They complain that ‘he apparently wore a Victorian day coat and socks … on his travels to the death of the Earth’, though given that he was a Victorian and a man of his era, what else should he wear? Targ happens to wear appropriate clothes for the end times simply because he is a native of those times. And they complain about ‘the dimensions of irony and satire’ in Wells’s novels, as if that is a bad thing.

No, honestly, I hold Rosny in very high regard, nearly as high a regard as I hold Wells, but this special pleading, this distorting of Wells in order to exalt Rosny, actually diminishes the man.

*

But if the scholarship dismays me, the translation disturbs me even more.

I must make it clear, I have not read the original, I can make no judgement on the accuracy of the translation. But there is something in the spirit of the work that falls flat for me.

At the head of this post I quoted the first paragraph of Another World as translated first by Chatelain and Slusser, and second by Damon Knight. Which do you prefer?

There are things wrong with Knight’s translation. The ‘yellow water’ is a mistake, since our narrator cannot see colours in the same spectrum we see, so yellow would be a meaningless term for him. Even so, I think that ‘heath and yellow water’ gets across more of the type of land this is than ‘briar and brackish water’. And Knight is, perhaps, wrong to cast the paragraph in the past tense. Chatelain and Slusser are so literal in their translation that I am sure Rosny used tenses the way they do. Except that the whole of the rest of the story is in the past tense, it is a memoir written some time after the events recounted. Chatelain and Slusser’s translation drifts into the past tense midway through the second paragraph; so I don’t think Knight is doing any damage to Rosny’s story by being that bit more consistent in his use of tenses.

These small quibbles aside, Knight’s translation represents a much more natural-seeming use of language. That ‘once numerous’ surely works much better than the rather stiff ‘formerly large’. And Chatelain and Slusser’s choice of a word like ‘inhabitable’ when Knight opts for the much more informal ‘habitable’ seems to speak volumes for the style of the translation. And when Knight writes that the farmhouse was ‘falling apart stone by stone in the solitude’ he conveys, in ordinary language, a process while setting the farmhouse in its solitary landscape. When Chatelain and Slusser say the farm ‘is dying stone by stone in solitude’, the dying seems to reach for a poetic language without quite reaching it, and ‘in solitude’ suggests to me an abandoned building rather than a solitary landscape, though we know that the farm isn’t abandoned.

In one of the notes that accompany ‘The Xipéhuz’ they say: ‘Sentences like this may seem awkward, but we have rendered Rosny’s austere, almost hieratic style as faithfully as possible, except in cases where it ceases to be English’.  I’m not sure this is doing Rosny any favours (and I’m particularly sure that pointing this out in a footnote is not the done thing). I suspect that Knight’s translation, while less academic, does a better job of rendering Rosny for a modern reader.

Rosny is a superb storyteller. The strange, geometric alien beings that flit obliviously through the pages of ‘Another World’ are one of the great inventions of science fiction. His work survives the rather stilted translation it gets in this new collection. But I am glad I first encountered it in Damon Knight’s translation, because that is how I still remember it.

This superficiality is something I find more and more in reviews in the mainstream press. The latest book to suffer this way is Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru. Take, for example, the anonymous reviewer in The New Yorker, who seems to think that the book is about Jaz and what happens when his autistic son disappears. Well no, the story of Jaz and his wife Lisa is one of the more prominent stories contained in the book, but these several stories collectively illustrate different aspects of the novel’s theme. In other words, the story of Jaz contributes to the theme, but it is not what the book is about.

Of course, the New Yorker review is one of that magazine’s capsule reviews, so there isn’t room to go into any more complex detail. But in reducing the book to this level of simplicity, the New Yorker is only making explicit what has been implicit in most other reviews. (The one honourable exception that I know of is the review by Maureen Kincaid Speller at Strange Horizons; and it is Maureen to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for persuading me to read this novel.) I can see how easy it is to arrive at this reading of Gods Without Men: Jaz and Kunzru are both men of Indian extraction who now live in New York, of course that must be what the book is all about! Because it is easy does not mean it isn’t lazy.

Let us start with the very first chapter of the novel. This is a story that captures the manner of Native American Trickster stories. But in this instance Coyote goes to the desert to brew drugs. Three times his experiments kill him, and three times other creatures revive him and explain where he has gone wrong. This is not just a brilliantly skilful exercise in pastiche, it is also very funny; and it contains, in embryo, the themes and concerns of the novel we are about to read. Read this chapter carefully enough and you understand where the rest of the novel is taking you: I wonder how many reviewers simply skipped it. It is, after all, dressed as a folk tale and implies something magical, oh and it is a Native American story and they can only ever be peripheral to the main story, all reasons that this chapter cannot be taken too seriously. Oh, and much later on we see a minor character called Coyote brewing drugs out in the desert and suffering a series of mishaps not too different from those in the opening tale, so it’s really just foreshadowing this unimportant incident, so we really don’t have to pay attention to it.

But what we get in the profusion of stories and voices that follow is a succession of displaced people, out of kilter with their own worlds, who come to the desert without ever belonging there. They come for a variety of purposes that they never fully understand, yet which could (and in some cases do) kill them. And they come to find other voices, often as damaged as themselves, trying to say where they went wrong. The result is as confused as Coyote’s drugs, by turns raising them up and casting them down.

The characters are displaced not just because they are strangers n a strange land, but because they are at odds with their own culture. Nicky the rising English rock star is feeling lost away from his native London, but he is also falling out with his fellow band members. Deighton the anthropologist doesn’t just fail to understand the Native American tribe he is studying (they laugh at him for using women’s words), but is equally out of place in white society, eventually leading him to become a hermit. Dawn, the young girl from a desert township, cuts herself off from her own family and community when she is drawn to join a hippyish UFO cult, then goes on to cut herself off from this new community. Laila, exiled from her native Baghdad after her father is killed following the US-led invasion, now role-plays an Iraqi villager to help train US special forces, but at the same time her Goth attire and taste in music separates her family. In this company, Jaz is just one among many; he is the child of Sikh parents who try to maintain their traditional ways and beliefs as he becomes more secular and American. He marries a non-observant Jew and has a high-powered and highly-paid job with a Wall Street investment company, but by the time he and Lisa take their troublesome autistic son Raj out to stay in Dawn’s desert motel, where Nicky is also a guest, Jaz is not only alienated from his family, he is uneasy with his job and his marriage is under strain. Indeed the only characters in the novel who seem fully at peace with who and where they are, are the Native Americans, and Kunzru illustrates this by investing them with almost magical abilities which demonstrates the incomprehension with which they are viewed by the uneasy others.

As an aside, it is worth noting that Dawn is at least as prominent and significant a character in this novel as Jaz, but she is hardly mentioned in the reviews. It surely cannot be because she is female? Or because she is not overtly other?

One of Kunzru’s more interesting stylistic tricks is to make a character central to one chapter, but give them a peripheral or walk-on part in the next chapter in which they appear. So that the resolution of something that is of immediate importance to that character may be something that is only hinted at in passing when they are no longer centre stage. I love the way this moves us in and out of what is important to different people, but at the same time it demands that the reader stay alert and keep quite a lot of information in the memory. To my mind this is exactly what a good novel should do, but if you’re not willing to invest that much attention you probably won’t even notice more than two or three of the characters. Dawn, for instance, first appears in chapter three, which brings Nicky to the desert motel. It is another five chapters before we come to the first one that focuses upon Dawn herself, and then we have quite a wait again before we are able to identify the new recruit to the UFO commune with the motel owner.

But if characters shift in and out of focus, there are characteristics that recur, that seem to link the figures in some overarching way. The one that stuck out for me was the repeated motif of the burned man. In the opening Trickster tale, Coyote burns himself to death, and later the character called Coyote burns down the place where he begins his drug-making. In between, the founder of the UFO cult is burned to death, and his acolyte and the man who takes over as leader of the cult, Clark, suffers facial burns in the same incident. Deighton also has facial burns, in his case sustained during World War One. (And as I write this, it occurs to me that Kunzru repeatedly refers to the redness of Deighton’s wounds, which only cover part of his face. Is he, then, symbolically turned into the Red Man he is studying; or, since the wounds are partial, is he both red and white, a visual representation of the two cultures between which he stands?) Even a very minor character, Ellis, the aging lover of Jaz’s immediate boss, Bachman, is described as ‘a plastic surgeon, doing facial reconstructions on burn victims’.

The most significant and most problematic of these recurrent patterns, of course, is the linked motif of disappearance and visitation. Practically every one of the linked stories that proliferate through this book involves disappearance (and sometimes reappearance); many involve an apparent visitation, either by angels or aliens. Kunzru provides rational explanations for some of these, but most are left tantalisingly unexplained. There is no tidying away in this novel, it is left to the reader to accept or reject, to believe or question.

In what is chronologically the earliest story in the book, we meet an 18^th century Spanish monk who was the first white man to visit this part of America, and who may have met an angel. In the 1920s, Deighton sees a glowing boy walking away from the native encampment on the night that his young assistant cuckolds him with a member of the tribe. This leads Deighton to concoct an accusation of his rival kidnapping a white boy, which leads in turn to the formation of a posse. Later, we learn that the conventional white narrative of what happened was that the posse caught and killed their man; the Native Americans tell a very different story of the man escaping the posse and disappearing. In the 1950s, Joanie comes to a UFO convocation in the desert, where her little girl, Judy, is seen playing with a little glowing boy, and then disappears. In the 1960s, when Dawn joins the UFO cult, it is just at the point when a now grown-up Judy reappears as if from nowhere. And then there is the story of Jaz and Lisa and their son Raj, who come to the motel in 2008; the two are getting away from things because of the strains in their marriage, but the strains are due to their son who is autistic and demanding. When they visit the three pinnacles of rock that are the centrepiece of the whole novel, and Raj suddenly disappears from his pushchair, they feel particularly guilty because both know they have secretly wished for something like this. When Raj does reappear later in the novel, he is found by Laila, to whom he first appears as a little glowing boy.

Is the glowing boy a genuine alien visitor? Are the disappearances and visitations somehow magically connected to the location? Are they real or fake? These are the sorts of questions we ask, the questions that keep us reading, but they are never answered. The point is that it is this interconnectedness down the centuries, the sense of experiences echoing and re-echoing, that is at the heart of the novel. This is what the book is about, not some interesting, engaging but relatively mundane story of a well to do New York couple whose son goes missing. That is just one aspect, one iteration of the story the novel is telling.

Though I suppose that is a rather subtle point to get across in a newspaper review.

*

Watergate, the later published but earlier read of the books, recounts the story of the Watergate break-in, or more exactly its aftermath, as seen through the eyes of some half-dozen of the players in the drama. It takes the story from the moment of the break-in to Nixon’s departure. Just about every character in the book is a real person (I suspect one or two might be amalgamations of various minor characters, but I’m not expert enough on 1970s Washington machinations to know for sure), though there are inventions; for instance, Mallon gives Pat Nixon an affaire that I’m pretty sure did not happen. He also goes into secret meetings where the record of exactly what took place clearly owes more to the novelist than the historian. Another example: he offers an explanation for missing minutes on the White House tapes that makes novelistic sense, but I certainly would not assume that this is the actual explanation. Mallon, in other words, is very clear that he is writing a work of fiction and has no hesitation in bringing fiction into his story; yet he sticks very closely to the public record and the actual figures involved in the events.

Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes is the latest in Kennedy’s on-going series of novels about Albany, and the various political machinations in that city throughout the 20^th century. This novel opens with a vignette set in the 1930s, when Bing Crosby sings at a private party, as witnessed by young Daniel Quinn, Kennedy’s avatar in the story. The scene then shifts to Havana just at the point that Castro’s rebellion against Batista was getting under way. Quinn is there trying to start his journalistic career: he meets the aging Hemingway, gets an interview with Castro, and falls in love with a fiery revolutionary called Renata. Then the scene shifts again, and from about one-third of the way through the book everything takes place in Albany on one day, 5 June 1968, between the shooting of Robert Kennedy and the announcement of his death. It was a moment that saw racial tension in many American cities, and Albany was not unaffected. Kennedy himself covered the race riots in Albany as a young journalist, and here those experiences are put on to Daniel Quinn, now home from Cuba with Renata as his wife. What occurs is entirely fictional, in that every character is made up (except for the walk-on parts by Crosby and Hemingway), and the specific events recounted are also fictions, but they are based on, or perhaps it might be better to say constructed from, real characters and events witnessed by Kennedy on that fateful day.

*

What fascinates me about these two books is that they deal with events in living memory (or, at least, within my memory), yet treat something that is almost current as a fit subject for historical fiction. When does history start? And though they are both so close in their chosen subject matter (just over six years separates the death of Robert Kennedy and Richard Nixon’s departure from the White House in August 1974), the authors approach their subjects in radically different ways.

Both Mallon and Kennedy tell their story through several different viewpoint characters. But where Mallon’s voices are cool, rather impersonal, well-educated witnesses to great events reporting what they saw as clearly as possible; Kennedy’s voices are idiosyncratic, impassioned, impressionistic. There is a bravura passage in Kennedy’s novel when Quinn’s father, George, in the early stages of alzheimer’s disease, walks into town and sees the city and characters of his youth overlaid upon the city and characters then around him. It is a stunning passage that lays out the whole personal and political history of Albany, but does so through the eyes of someone who never quite comprehends what he sees. There are no bravura passages in Mallon. At the end of Kennedy’s novel we are left saying: yes, that’s what it must have been like. At the end of Mallon’s novel we are left saying: yes, that’s what happened. The difference is subtle, the difference between history as experience and history as record, but it is what informs the differences between these two great historical novelists.

*

There is an interesting political difference between the two. I’ve read all of Mallon’s novels, (including his hard-to-find first campus novel, Arts and Sciences), and a lot of his reviews and essays in the New Yorker, and I would guess that his political sympathies are more Democrat than Republican (despite the fact that he was the ghost writer of Dan Quayle’s memoirs). And yet, in this and his previous novel, Fellow Travellers, he seems to be engaged in writing a Republican history of post-war America. Fellow Travellers had a cast that was virtually all Republican, except for the poor homosexual whose career was threatened in the febrile atmosphere of McCarthy’s Washington. In Watergate the only Democrats have walk-on parts and virtually no voice. We see everything through the eyes of people working for Nixon (his secretary, a Republican fundraiser, one of the Watergate plumbers) or who otherwise admire him (his wife, Alice Roosevelt). Although a Democrat voice in this story would be necessarily uninformed, this does, at first, feel like it is an unbalanced view of events (the closest we get to an opposing viewpoint is Elliott Richardson ­­ ‘Deep Throat’ is never even mentioned). Yet it makes sense to see everything through Republican eyes, because there we see responsibility, and there we get the sense of things falling apart as the cover-up unravels. It makes for a view of the whole Watergate aftermath as a sequence of escalating disasters, a tidal wave overwhelming the whole way that the world is viewed. It is the Republican viewpoint, therefore, that perhaps most clearly identifies this as a novel rather than a documentary.

I only discovered Kennedy’s writing with The Flaming Corsage, though that was a novel that delighted me from the moment I picked it up, and I have made an effort to accumulate his earlier work. It seems that there is a consistent political thread that runs through all of the Albany novels, which is an attack on the Democrat machine that runs the city. But it seems to be a world in which the differences between Democrat and Republican are irrelevant, this is not party politics but machine politics. Kennedy’s own sympathies are clearly with the underclass, his heroes are always working for the poor or the blacks, while the Democrat bosses are bent on furthering their own power and wealth. In other words, while Mallon examines the minimal differences between party hacks in Washington politics, Kennedy is concerned with a broader left-right political division in which the party represents the right. Here the political is clearly the personal.

And yet, though they take radically different literary approaches, which seem to reflect radically different political approaches, there is something in both novels that makes them work. Perhaps it is the fact that they are both city novels. You cannot imagine Kennedy’s work taking place anywhere other than Albany, a city that shapes the characters, and throughout the novel you constantly see the directions of the streets, the locations of the bars and whorehouses and political offices. Kennedy’s work inhabits Albany like a comfortable overcoat. Similarly, Mallon’s political novels (not just Watergate and Fellow Travellers but also books like Henry and Clara and Two Moons) are inescapably Washington novels. The fogs and the grand public buildings are the settings against which these stories must be played out, this is a place where every hotel and apartment building and office block is suffused with party politics. It is a fiction as inseparably wedded to its setting as Kennedy’s is, but the setting makes for a different approach, and different perspective on the political. And because both Mallon and Kennedy are so adept at evoking their particular settings, so their stories are so vivid in their very distinctive ways.

Steve Erickson writes stories of aftermath also. But it is not an immediate aftermath, he deals in the long view. His novels invariably range across years, usually decades, sometimes centuries. However, it is not the ‘years later’ that makes the opening words of These Dreams of You so typical of Erickson’s work; it is the very first word: ‘But’. ‘But’ negates the later, doubts the aftermath, makes us question and hesitate. Erickson’s stories take us into an aftermath of guilt and uncertainty, a morally certain situation that is open to moral doubt.

Throughout this new novel, characters repeatedly tell us that a white man cannot speak for the black experience; and yet this novel is a white man speaking for the black experience. Erickson’s moral world appears confident, but we are obliged as readers never to accept the morality with any confidence of our own.

*

These Dreams of You is a story that emerges from the Obama victory. It opens with novelist turned radio DJ Alexander ‘Zan’ Nordhoc, his wife, Viv, 12-year-old son, Parker, and four-year-old adopted daughter, Sheba, watching the Obama victory rally on TV from their home in Los Angeles. What follows, follows, in a sense, because of that victory; because a black man has secured the White House, and with it gave hope to liberal dreams that had been soured by the previous administration. In that sense it is a novel that could only have been written at this time.

Yet it is a novel that echoes, returns to, and amplifies issues and concerns that have flowed through everything Erickson has written since his first novel, Days Between Stations nearly 30 years ago. In that sense it is a book that could have been written at just about any time since 1985.

That hesitation between the quotidian and the eternal, between the journalistic and the philosophical, is, to my mind, what is distinctive and important in Erickson’s work. His theme, proclaimed long and loud in just about everything he has written, is the soul of America. But his subject is the inevitable failure of daily experience, of fallible humanity, to match what the idealised state supposedly represents. Those characters in his novels (and in his non-fiction, which is itself novelistic in intent and structure) who most closely aspire to achieve the moral goal of America are generally the most flawed (one thinks of Thomas Jefferson in Leap Year and Arc d’X). Those who strive to live up to the moral demand that is America are invariably going to be knocked back, if not actually destroyed, by the contradictions.

*

The story, at least as we might try to summarise it, seems rather straightforward.

Zan is a one-time novelist who hasn’t written fiction since a lightly-disguised character in one of his books lost his job as a result of it. Zan has now lost his own job as a lecturer at a small college and as a result the family finances are in freefall just as the financial crisis starts to bite, and it looks increasingly likely that they will lose their home. Lack of money is a thread that runs right through the novel, but it is only one of several losses that make up the story. In this novel, at least, America is an idea that takes more than it gives.

Sheba was adopted from an Ethiopian orphanage when she was two years old. She is brash, precocious, demanding, and the scenes of family life in this novel are among the funniest that Erickson has written; she is also the catalyst for the novel. She is not actually an orphan, but her mother has disappeared and her grandmother cannot cope, which is how she has ended up in the orphanage. But Viv has got a journalist in Addis Ababa to research the mother, and meanwhile has been sending what little bits of money they could spare to the grandmother. Now, it seems, there is some mystery about the mother, and the financial support for the grandmother has roused some unwelcome official interest.

When Zan is invited to make an all-expenses-paid trip to London to deliver a lecture, Viv decides she’ll fly on to Addis Ababa to try and sort things out. Zan, alone in London with two unruly children, has difficulty coping until Molly shows up. She first appears as an unknown black woman who stares at the family in the street, but the next day she turns up at their hotel to take on the role of nanny. There is a mystery about Molly right from the start: Zan thinks his university contact found her, the contact thinks Zan hired her, she eventually claims Viv hired her. But she has a strange affinity with Sheba. Ever since the blue glowing eyes in Days Between Stations, Erickson has had a habit of characterising people by odd, often supernatural aspects. In this instance, Sheba gives off music, and so does Molly.

Then, Viv disappears in Ethiopia. At almost the same moment, Molly and Sheba disappear. Zan and Parker are frantic, until a photograph on the internet seems to suggest that Viv might be in Berlin. Unthinkingly, they race off there, where Parker runs away and Zan is beaten up. For a moment, before the unwound thread of story begins to be drawn in again, Zan has lost everything. It is the moral cost, we are led to understand, of being a white liberal in contemporary America.

*

But if that is the story of the novel, it is not the whole story. In among many other things, it is the story of Jasmine, a black woman in London in the mid-60s who meets Robert Kennedy two years before he decides to run for president. She works on his campaign, at one riotous rally in California she rescues a teenaged Zan from the unruly mob. After Kennedy is assassinated, she goes back to working in the music industry, becoming in time an assistant to David Bowie and ‘Jim’ (Iggy Pop) during their stay in Berlin. Here she gives birth to a daughter, Molly, who may be the child of Bowie or Jim or ‘The Professor’ (Brian Eno?).

Later (oh such a slippery Ericksonian word), the teenage Molly returns to Berlin, where she helps a middle-aged man beaten up in the street, in the process dropping an edition of Joyce’s Ulysses in which Bowie had sketched a portrait of her mother on the flyleaf. This incident we already recognise, because it is the starting point for the new novel that Zan is trying to write. In Zan’s novel, which we visit fleetingly throughout this book, the victim of the attack, known only as ‘X’, is then transported back in time with the lost edition of Ulysses to Berlin in 1919, where he proceeds to publish his own revised version of the novel two years before Joyce actually produced the original.

Oh and there’s more than this. There’s a rather delicious little cameo by Reg Presley of the Troggs, for instance. But to try to note briefly all the different strands of story that occur throughout this novel would be to make it sound far more chaotic than it actually is.

*

And to those of you who know Steve Erickson’s work (and if you don’t, why not?), does all of this sound familiar? Because all the way through the novel you keep coming up against things that resonate with earlier works.

Viv, for instance, is already known to us from Amnesiascope.

The beating up in Berlin that is a recurring motif in this novel, happening to Zan near the end of the story, witnessed by Molly, and triggering the story of X, surely recalls Arc d’X, in which a character called ‘Steve Erickson’ is killed in Berlin. (One is tempted to wonder if our author has bad personal memories of that city.)

Above all, there is the fascination with Robert Kennedy, which first became explicit in Rubicon Beach but which seems to act as an underlying moral touchstone for Erickson. It is even more central to this novel, the first one in which Kennedy himself has appeared as a significant actor. More than John F. Kennedy (the rather grudging asides about him by Bob in this novel are, I think, the first mentions of him in any of Erickson’s books), more than Martin Luther King (who does get mentioned elsewhere), Robert Kennedy seems to represent the hope for the American soul, and its ultimate fall. (As an aside, which I might return to in a later post, I note that the assassination of Robert Kennedy also plays a major part in William Kennedy’s Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, is Bobby now being recognised as a cardinal point on America’s moral compass?)

And it is, of course, the American soul that Erickson keeps writing about. In Tours of the Black Clock, which is, I think, the work that holds the key to everything he has produced since, the soul is lost on a mist-shrouded river island and also to be found in a secret room to be revealed by the blueprint of the century. In the strange calendar at the centre of The Sea Came in at Midnight, a novel that seems consciously designed as an echo and re-evaluation of Tours of the Black Clock, we see the soul again hidden, but now as a point in time rather than in space. In These Dreams of You the soul becomes both more nebulous and more definite, it occupies a point in time (the assassination of Robert Kennedy) but is also timeless, it occupies a point in space (California) but is more evanescent than that, and it truly belongs in a person, Robert Kennedy perhaps, Barack Obama possibly, Sheba the Ethiopian almost certainly. But what the soul mostly is, is a liberal dream. And it is the liberals who have betrayed that dream. In Leap Year and again in Arc d’X we are told that it was slave-holding Thomas Jefferson who killed the American soul, but it is not so simple as that. But blackness, the long legacy of slavery, the relations between the races are where the American soul is to be found and what has tainted that soul. Which is why the election of a black president has both brought hope and new damage; which is what this wonderful book is all about.

In February 1967 ‘Armchair Theatre’ aired one such pilot under the title ‘A Magnum for Schneider’. It was written by James Mitchell, the author of a number of potboiler spy and crime novels, who would go on to have his greatest success with a nostalgic and romantic TV series called When the Boat Comes In about life in Tyneside during the 20s and 30s. But it was his spy fiction background he put into ‘A Magnum for Schneider’. Its central character was a professional assassin who had just resigned from a shadowy department of British intelligence, but who was just too good at his job for them to let him go.

The TV company must have been fairly confident of the success of this pilot, because the first six-part series of Callan was aired later the same year. It was followed by a second series of 15 episodes in 1969, with two further series of 9 and 13 episodes respectively (the only ones in colour) following in 1970 and 1972. I remember being glued to the series from the moment it first aired. The opening credits, a bare light swings at the end of a fraying cord, behind it we see only a bare brick wall and a ceiling from which the plaster is flaking. There is a shot, the light shatters, and the word CALLAN appears in stark white letters on a black screen. (The original header image for Big Other always used to remind me of this, it was one of the reasons I was attracted to the blog.)

Edward Woodward as Callan

It was the height of cold war angst, the great age of the anti-hero, when we were learning to distrust our own side as much as the others, and Callan matched the mood of the times perfectly. We were cheering for a cold-blooded killer, for heaven’s sake! It was a dark, bleak view of the world, betrayal was everywhere, Hunter, the head of the section, might be removed at any time and replaced with a new Hunter. Callan’s closest ally was Lonely, a petty crook whose chronic fear made him smell atrociously (hence his name). Callan used Lonely to break into places or provide illegal guns, and if Lonely was attacked then Callan would exact revenge; but it was not a friendly relationship, Lonely was justifiably afraid of Callan because Callan would regularly threaten to kill him. No one could be trusted, that was the whole point. And the one associate of Callan’s in the Section that we saw regularly, Toby Meres, repeatedly told us how much he despised Callan even while respecting his abilities. If the situation arose, neither would have any hesitation in killing the other. It was a view of the murky world of espionage closer to the so-called ‘Harry Palmer’ novels of Len Deighton than, say, James Bond or Patrick McGoohan’s Danger Man (though it shared some of the fashionable paranoia of McGoohan’s The Prisoner, which first appeared at roughly the same time, even though Callan’s black and white was a stark contrast to the vivid colours of The Prisoner).

Callan and Lonely

What I was probably oblivious of at the time, though it is screamingly obvious now I’m re-watching them on DVD, is the class consciousness that runs through the work. David Callan, as played by Edward Woodward, is working class who might just aspire to the lower middle class. He has served time in prison, and was in the army (though he probably never got above sergeant, the rank he unconsciously adopts whenever he takes on a quasi-official role); the job he tends to take on when under cover is bookkeeper (at which he seems to be very good), and though he always wears suit and tie, these tend to be creased and untidy. Lonely, incomparably played by Russell Hunter, first appears in ‘A Magnum for Schneider’ in a jacket and tie also, though he looks uncomfortable in them; by the start of the series he is in the shabby raincoat and flat cap that is almost his uniform. He is working class, will often put on a show of being bolshie, but is generally cowed and bullied by those above him, and everyone is above him. Within the Section, however, all is upper class confidence and disdain. Hunter, variously played by Ronald Radd, Michael Goodliffe, Derek Bond and William Squire, is effectively a senior civil servant, always impeccably turned out, always in control. Meres, played by Peter Bowles in the pilot before he left for a career in light comedy, and far better played by Anthony Valentine in the series, is slick, public school educated, speaks with that upper class drawl, and despises Callan for what he is while recognising his abilities. Callan is matter-of-factly good at killing people but he is morally sickened by what he does, which is why he tried to quit; Hunter and Meres have no moral qualms, for them everything is justified by the idea of duty. The implication is that moral sensibility is something only the working class can afford, the higher up the social scale you climb the more morality is squashed by one’s class role. Lonely, of course, is even more morally disturbed than Callan, but of course nobody pays any attention to him.

Anthony Valentine as Toby Meres

By 1972 a whole era of cold war unease was passing. We didn’t want a stark, morally compromised world any more. Callan ended after just four series. James Mitchell produced a novel version of the original play, ‘A Magnum for Schneider’, which was itself turned into a film in 1974. Then, in 1981, Callan was brought out of retirement for another one-off play, Callan: Wet Job, but this was mostly about changing times, even the malodorous Lonely had become respectable. It ended well, but it ended.

But there was a period when Callan was an indelible part of my adolescence. Watching it again today (or, at least, all of it that survives: the original play, 11 out of 21 black and white episodes, all 22 colour episodes, plus Wet Job) it is surprising how well it holds up. The technology is dated, and things like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy have made our knowledge of spycraft far more sophisticated, yet the morality, the characterisation, seem perfectly suited to the modern moment. Or maybe times have just moved around once more.

Parts PLURAL NOUN 1. Personal abilities or talents: a man of many parts. 2. short for private parts.

Both of these readings are clearly sustained throughout the novel. Wells is clearly a man of talents, which are varied if not always compatible. He is also a man driven by his private parts, a priapic adventurer whose sexual conquests often undid much of what his talents might have achieved. But having read much by and about Wells over the last few years, I am inclined to a third reading: that he was a man in parts, a man whose life was in bits that in a sense even he could not put together. He was not whole.

Ever since the postscript to his Experiment in Autobiography was published under the title H.G. Wells in Love in 1984, our focus on Wells’s life has been as much sexual as literary or political or scientific. The problem, I think, with all writing about Wells, this novel as much as the biographies or the critical texts, is that they tend to concentrate on one or other of the four. But you cannot think about his gadfly involvement with the Fabian Society, for instance, without also bringing in the sexual scandals that undermined his efforts to reform that Society. And those scandals, in turn, fed into and just as often emerged from his fictions. And his scandalous ideas about sex emerged not just from his priapic nature but from his scientific, and especially evolutionary, ideas. In other words, the different aspects of his life all interacted, you cannot separate them. So in writing about Wells you really need to balance all of the aspects of his life.

Yet I get a very strong sense, reinforced by every new thing I read about the man (although none of the critics, biographers or novelists actually make this point), that Wells himself did compartmentalise them. And, indeed, was constantly surprised and undermined by the fact that they would not stay within their separate compartments.

Jane with HG just after the publication of The Time Machine.

Let us take sex, since that is what Lodge and most others now concentrate on. Wells married twice. His first wife, a distant relation, Isabel, was very conventional not to say provincial in her attitudes (this was, we must remember, the height of Victorian sensibility). Wells himself says that they were sexually incompatible, and there is no reason to doubt this, but I think it is probably more significant that they were intellectually incompatible. When he left her for one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins whom he called ‘Jane’, I think he was as much looking for an intellectual equal as a sexual partner. After all, he said of Jane also that they were sexually incompatible, but he never divorced her. She was his match in most things: Jane like HG served on the executive of the Fabian Society; she typed and helped to edit all his writing (and if Lodge is correct in the number of times she warns him that, for instance, Ann Veronica will be controversial or that Boon should not be published, her judgement seems to have been far better than his); she wrote herself (Wells arranged to have a collection of her stories published after her death); she kept up with him on the cycling trips and Alpine walks that he so loved; and she provided the steady, secure centre in a life that was constantly flying off in every direction out of control. The more I read, the more convinced I am that Jane must have been a remarkable woman.

So, Wells says that both of his wives were sexually incompatible. And I begin to wonder if they were not sexually incompatible because they were wives; if Wells saw being a wife as an intellectual and a social role, and sex belonged in a different compartment altogether.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Jane was that she knew of, and seemingly condoned, most of HG’s sexual adventures. She advised him when a relationship was likely to be dangerous, and she maintained friendly relationships with most of the women. And when, for instance, Rebecca West tried on numerous occasions to persuade him to leave Jane for her, he flat out refused. In the compartment of marriage, Jane clearly provided something far more important than sexual incompatibility. And it wasn’t just a Victorian loyalty to the mother of his children, since both Amber Reeves (later, after her marriage, the wonderful colour combination of Amber Blanco White) and Rebecca West bore him children, and HG felt equally fatherly towards the children without for a moment thinking that he should ‘make an honest woman’ of their mothers.

Amber Blanco White with Ann Jane, HG's daughter

In this separate sexual compartment, therefore, we find Rosamund Bland (the daughter, or perhaps more accurately step-daughter, of Edith Nesbit and her husband Hubert Bland), Amber Reeves, Rebecca West, Elisabeth von Arnim, Odette Keun, Moura Budberg and any number of others. Of these, Lodge suggests that Rosamund, Amber, Rebecca and Odette threw themselves at HG, and all brought trouble for him. The relationship (Lodge uses the word passade  throughout for these sexual affairs) with Elisabeth was one of mutual convenience, and she seems to have been the only long-term mistress who tired of him first. And Moura, the presumed Russian spy (so far as I know, it has never been proved, but it seems likely), was the woman HG wanted to marry after Jane died, but Moura refused. Significantly, both Elisabeth and Moura were mature and experienced women when they began their relationships with HG, these were relationships of sexual equals, which certainly wasn’t true of any of the others.

Moura Budberg

Rosamund, Amber and Rebecca were all in their late-teens or early 20s when they began their relationships with Wells, who was at least 20 years older. All three seem to have deliberately targeted Wells to end their virginities. And though Lodge portrays Wells as something of a sexual predator, which is dressed up by Wells’s oft-stated political belief in the equality of the sexes, in each of these relationships we get a distinct impression of the woman being the predator and Wells being rather ignominiously unable to say no whenever sex was offered. I think the fact that HG saw his life as compartmentalised, was indeed unable to envisage that things from one compartment might overflow into another, is clearly shown in his relationships with Rosamund, Amber and Rebecca.

Rosamund and Amber were both the daughters of prominent Fabians, and he began these affairs just at the point when he was leading a campaign to radically change the nature of the society. He put details of these affairs, only very slightly fictionalised, into such novels as In the Days of the Comet and Ann Veronica. The central figure in Ann Veronica is an unmistakeable portrait of Amber Reeves, and he was surprised when she was affronted by this. This was all during the first decade of the 20^th century, well before women even got the vote in Britain, yet he was astounded when these books were denounced from the pulpit and the newspaper editorial as immoral. He had presented, in In the Days of the Comet, a subtle argument that in a truly rational society (one of the early versions of the world government he wrote so often about) where men and women were fully equal, each would be free to take their sexual pleasure where they wished; the book ends with a group marriage. He seems to have been incapable of seeing that this argument is too subtle for his audience, and all they will see is free love. Yet, having expected the reading public to pick up on a very subtle argument in In the Days of the Comet, he assumed they would not be subtle enough readers to see through the light fictionalisation with which he disguised himself and Amber Reeves in Ann Veronica. He was, in effect, carrying on a secret affair in one compartment and publicising it in another, while at the same time utterly failing to understand that the fall out from the relationships in one compartment and the outcry caused by the books in the other compartment might also affect his political ambitions in the third compartment of his Fabian ambitions. (One of the best passages in Lodge’s book is his account of this complicated interplay of sex, fiction and politics leading to the multiple humiliation of his exposure as a philanderer, the complete failure of his attempts to reform the Fabian Society, and the public denunciation of his work.)

Rebecca West

Yet many of the same public and personal catastrophes that attended his affairs with Rosamund and Amber would be echoed during his affair with Rebecca. The way Lodge writes it, Jane warned him repeatedly, but he seems to have been unable to learn the lessons of his own past.

There is a similar sense of the compartmentalisation of his life in the rather sad Boon affair. Wells and Henry James had been friends ever since Wells moved down to Sandgate, just a bicycle ride away from James in Rye. During his brief time as a theatre reviewer, Wells had been one of the few critics to write favourably about James’s theatrical disaster, Guy Domville. The two regularly sent each other copies of their new books, and exchanged many letters over the years. But there were always disagreements. Although James was older and more established, Wells was more successful, more popular, and considerably richer. James believed that the focus of any fiction should be on the art with which it is presented; Wells believed that fiction served a political function. James’s letters praising each new work by Wells would always contain a nugget of dislike; Wells’s letters in response would, over the years, come to parody (perhaps unconsciously) his friend’s increasingly convoluted sentence structure. Then, in 1914, James wrote a two-part essay on ‘The Younger Generation’ of novelists for the TLS, which included a very pointed attack on Wells and Arnold Bennett. Any writer taking them as a model, James warned, would produce work that was lamentably heavy on content and light on form. I don’t imagine James intended this to sting as much as it did, but it really hurt Wells. He retaliated by returning to a literary satire he had been writing, off and on, for 10 years already. Now he added a vicious satire on James, and Boon was published the following year, despite Jane strongly advising against it. It ended their friendship for good; in many ways, I think, it also ended Wells’s critical reputation. His great years as a writer were already behind him. He would produce one or two more decent novels (Mr Britling Sees it Through in 1916, for instance), but the ones that would stay in print and which are still read today had all been published before this point. His biggest success after this, indeed the biggest commercial success of his career, was his Outline of History. But serious critical and academic attention was already the preserve of the modernists and their followers, and from that moment on Wells was denied this sort of attention. His reputation suffered as a result. But Wells had been unable to tell what belonged in one compartment might do irreparable harm in another compartment. He always regretted the severing of his relationship with James, but he could do nothing about it.

Of course, much of this is taken from Wells’s fiction, which leads us to the inevitable problem with fiction and biography. At one point, Lodge has Wells say that a novelist has nothing else to draw on but his own life. Which is true. But how close are the two? How much can the biographer draw from the fiction in a recreation of the life? To an extent, Lodge has it easy. His book is avowedly fiction, so he is free to imaginatively expand from the fiction into the life. But at the same time, the novel follows the biography pretty closely, to the extent that for large portions of the book it reads more as a lightly fictionalised biography than as out and out fiction. And then, of course, we have the extent to which Wells really did put his own life into his fiction. In the social comedies of the first years of the 20^th century and in the so-called ‘prig’ novels that followed over the next half decade or so, in Love and Mr Lewisham, Kipps, Tono-Bungay, Ann Veronica, The History of Mr Polly, The New Machiavelli and so many others of that period, Wells was very consciously putting his own life into his books. In this period, which is the major focus of Lodge’s novel, you almost cannot help but read the biography in the fiction. What is almost harder is reading the fiction out of this biography. Lodge pays almost no attention to the early scientific romances (some of what he presents as the genesis of The Time Machine is plain wrong), and, except for the postscript to the Experiment in Autobiography and Mind at the End of its Tether, covers nothing written after 1915. And the novels written during that period of his most extravagant sexual affairs are mentioned only to the extent that they cast light on the character. So, although we know that Wells is a writer, this novel doesn’t actually tell us much about what sort of writer he is. Indeed we learn more about the size of his penis than we do about 90% of his literary output. Wells is compartmentalised again, we see only parts of him, but maybe that is the only way to write about Wells.

Still, A Man of Parts is an excellent novel, I read all of its nearly 600 pages in just two days, which is an almost unheard of rate for me. And what is interesting, in an oddly Jamesian way, is the form as much as the content. It is clear that Lodge is aching for the chance to interview Wells himself, so he has cast the large part of this novel as an interview. Wells, in the last years of his life, in the home on the edge of Regents Park that he has refused to leave throughout the Blitz, effectively interviews himself (his sons, Gip and Anthony West, and Gip’s wife, who look after him, see him constantly mumbling to himself). It is a constant refrain of ‘why did you do that?’, with Wells regularly going to his bookshelves or digging out a letter as a way of reminding himself of what really happened. There is, therefore, an air of self-justification, offset by self-recrimination. Neither are guaranteed to lead to the truth, of course, and this is always Wells’s own version of his own story. Somehow it works as a portrait of one of the most singular and most fascinating characters in British literary history.

Russell Hoban has died.

I first discovered his work, as I suspect so many others have done, through Riddley Walker. It is a book that looks off-putting, the broken language that reflects the broken society, but read it aloud and it is perfectly plain. There are other novels that have played with language in a similar way (Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Banks’s Feersum Endjinn), but none of them have quite the grace of Riddley Walker.

And when it came out I had not long moved down to Folkestone, and here was a novel set in the landscape I now knew. The Warren, an area of wilderness and fallen cliffs here in Folkestone, is one of the key settings in the book. And, of course, the legend of St Eusa that provides so much of the narrative structure of the book, is based on the medieval painting of the legend of St Eustace that is on display in Canterbury Cathedral. I could follow the novel. I had yet to discover how firmly all of Hoban’s work is tied to the actual landscape in which it is set, so this discovery was a delight.

And having read Riddley Walker I had to rush out and read his previous novels, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, Kleinzeit in which inanimate objects talk to the narrator, a device that he continued to use in most of his novels, and Turtle Diary in which the narrative shifts between the two central characters, again a device that he continued to use.

And not so long after Riddley Walker came out I was involved in organising the first Mexicon, and at least partly on my instigation we invited Hoban to be one of our guests, along with Alasdair Gray. It was an inspired choice that set the tone for how we wanted these conventions to be. We decided that I would interview Hoban on the convention programme, so he suggested I come round for lunch so we could prepare. Which is how I came to visit him at his home overlooking that stretch of the District Line that runs overground, a home that has subsequently featured in several of his novels.

The kitchen, where we ate, was clean and bright and tidy and clearly the domain of his wife. The ground floor lounge that served as his study was anything but. It was cramped and crowded and piled high with tapes and books and LPs, there was what seemed like a solid wall of radio equipment on which he listened to short wave radio all through the night while he wrote. It was the sort of room where you feel you have to breathe in in order to move around, the sort of room where you are convinced that piles of something or other are going to topple over at any moment. He talked to me about writing his first novel, when he didn’t know how to write a novel or what it was supposed to look like. So he laid all the pages diagonally across the floor and ran up and down the lines trying to get a sense of the rhythm of the thing. I suspect that is the reason all his books are made up of such short chapters.

And then came the interview. It was the first interview I had ever done, and I’d prepared carefully, written out a list of questions. The room was crowded and I was nervous and I turned to the first question in my notebook and said: ‘Okay, can we begin by talking about your first novel, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz?’ And he said, ‘No, let’s talk about the one that was really my first novel, The Mouse and his Child.’ And he proceeded to talk for half an hour about a book I hadn’t even heard of at that time. He’d brought along the original mouse and its child, which he played with along the front of the desk where we were sitting, and he’d brought a head of Mr Punch from Riddley Walker, and every single one of the questions I’d prepared was now useless. And it didn’t matter because he was just so wonderfully, effortlessly entertaining.

And after Pilgermann, which was sort of an historical novel and sort of a ghost story, there was a long silence, broken only by The Medusa Frequency and that odd collection The Moment Under the Moment. Then came Fremder, a clunkingly awful little sf novel, but that was followed by Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer and then Angelica’s Grotto and he was away on a whole string of seemingly linked novels in which characters and settings (usually London) kept recurring. There was an awful lot of sex, usually rather perverse, which seemed rather creepy coming from an author who was already well over 70; but there was also a mass of pop-culture references (Linger Awhile, which is one of the worst of this series, is all about bringing a black and white movie actress back to life), there were endless references to the ghost stories of Oliver Onions, the songs of Dory Previn, the paintings of Odilon Redon, and more. I’ve written about all this before at the New York Review of Science Fiction and here at Big Other, so there’s not much point in me repeating it all again.

But I’ll miss him. I’ll miss the round face with the impish grin. I’ll miss the uncategorisable novels. I understand there’s a new young adult novel to be published early in 2012, but after that, how the silence stretches out.

 In 1927, Dorothy L. Sayers published the third of her Lord Peter Whimsey novels, Unnatural Death, which introduced the character of Miss Climpson, who would re-appear in later novels. Miss Climpson is a spinster who helps Whimsey solve crime by her ability to talk to anyone, by being the sort of person no-one pays attention to, by her insights into normal human behaviour.

There are big differences between the characters, but they have a lot in common as well. I suspect Sayers must have been writing her novel at the same time that Christie’s story appeared. I do not suspect that one influenced the other. I think it is pure coincidence. But it is the coincidence that is interesting.

Sayers would often write insightful novels about social conditions disguised as crime novels. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (which came out just a year after Unnatural Death) is a telling account of the long-term social and psychological effects of the First World War; Murder Must Advertise is not just one of the best novels about advertising that I know, it is also very sharp on the profession’s ethics. And Unnatural Death fits into this model; without making any fuss about it, it is a novel about the position of women in post-First World War England. It is a novel crowded with women, and with very few men; there are at least two lesbian relationships within the novel though nothing much is made of either of them. We see a social world that is almost entirely made up of women, there are spinsters everywhere, there are independent women (including both the victim and the murderer), there are women faced with new freedoms and not at all sure what to do with them.

The First World War destroyed a generation; that has been a cliché of British history, probably since the end of the war itself. It is only recently, it seems, that historians have started to look at what that meant for the women of Britain. But that meaning, that effect, was there in the novels of the time, and it is overt in this novel by Sayers. I suspect that Unnatural Death and The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club can be read as a dyptich on the consequences of the war, but it is the women who come first.

Christie was always more mechanistic, less socially astute, than Sayers. Her plots are well-oiled machines, but the world around those plots is a never-never land, unreal and uninteresting. But she was still living in the world, she cannot have been totally unaware of how things were, and I suspect that Miss Marple grew out of the fact that the 1920s was a world of women not of men. Miss Marple and Miss Climpson may both have been gifts to crime fiction, but they were both victims of the First World War.

Not because his prose is dense or complex or difficult. Quite the opposite, his prose is usually quite simple, reliant more on familiar words than strange or unexpected ones. Sometimes the rhythms of his writing are unexpected in written prose, hesitating, repeating, dodging back and forth through the thought; but since this echoes the relatively unstructured character of our thought and speech this does not make it difficult to follow.

No, we read him slowly because we sense there is something going on behind the prose. His stories are not crystal clear but rather frosted, translucent; through them we discern shapes that are slightly blurry. Rather like Gerhard Richter’s image of Ulrika Meinhof that lies at the heart of the story ‘Baader-Meinhof’.

We get this idea of something behind the words from Delillo himself, of course. In the stories that make up this new collection, The Angel Esmeralda, he is forever harping on about the power of words. ‘I want words to be secretive, to cling to a darkness in the deepest interior’ (30) his narrator says in ‘Human Moments in World War III’, in a voice that sounds suspiciously like Delillo’s own. And again, in ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’, the Delilloesque narrator says: ‘Let the words be the facts. This was the nature of our walks – to register what was out there, all the scattered rhythms of circumstance and occurrence, and to reconstruct it as human noise.’ (122)

Part of this registering of what was out there comes in the form of lists, of knowing the names of things. But there are always words missing. In ‘Human Moments in World War III’ he notes that ‘there ought to be a term for this ironic condition: primitive fear of the weapons we are advanced enough to design and produce.’ (35) Something like this lament for a lost or non-existent word recurs in just about every one of these stories. In ‘The Starveling’, for instance, ‘He also thought there had to be another word, beyond anorexic, that would help him see her clearly.’ (202) The right word, control of language, brings everything into focus, lets us see clearly, it is what brings with it control of the world. As old Sister Edgar complains of the street kids she deals with in ‘The Angel Esmeralda’, ‘They spoke an unfinished English, soft and muffled, insufficiently suffixed, and she wanted to drum some hard g’s into the ends of their gerunds.’ (80) And we know, because their language is incomplete, that their lives are incomplete also. But we don’t see clearly in these stories because words are missing, key words, the clue to what is behind the frosted glass.

At least, that is what Delillo is telling us. But is there really anything there, is that blurry image on the frosted glass really anything more than a flaw in the glass itself, a trick of the light? Sometimes.

Again and again, the words in these stories are used to create the world. In ‘Hammer and Sickle’, for instance, the global financial crisis is created by the curiously incantatory reports of two young girls on television. Or at least, so it seems to their father, watching them from the minimum security prison where he is serving a sentence for financial crime, alongside a bunch of other men convicted of various types of fraud. The world is no longer real to them, so they conjure it out of the words of children. ‘Hammer and Sickle’ is, for my money, one of the better stories in the collection, but the whole book is filled with characters for whom the world is no longer real. Usually, they use words to create another person. In ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’, two students tell themselves elaborate stories about an old man they see in the street; in ‘The Starveling’ a fat man who spends his days hanging around in cinemas creates an elaborate story about a thin girl he follows from one cinema to another. In both these works, it is when story and reality collide that the fictions stutter to a somewhat inconclusive halt.

One of the characteristics of Delillo’s stories is that they are never whole. Every single one of them starts after the beginning of the story, and Delillo does not use flashbacks to fill in the gaps. We are left forever unsure of how these particular events were actually set in motion. And more often than not, the story closes before the end. Real life has no neat beginnings and endings, when we look around us, when we interact with any other person, we can be aware only of part of the middle of the story. I think that is an effect Delillo is striving for in this collection. It can work. In ‘The Runner’ a jogger running laps around a small lake in a park, sees a car drive onto the grass beside a woman who is picnicking there; moments later, the car drives away, taking the woman’s child. Why? Who? How will this drama be resolved? We never know, but then, this is the sort of little everyday tragedy whose resolution we never do know. The story works precisely because of that irresolution. In contrast, ‘The Ivory Acrobat’, about a foreign teacher in Athens and the tentative relationship she begins in the wake of an earthquake, feels too incomplete, as if we need  to go back earlier in time to properly understand the woman, and go on later in time to properly understand the relationship.

Meanwhile the title story, ‘The Angel Esmeralda’, was incorporated wholesale into Delillo’s finest novel, Underworld, so it is as if it has belatedly acquired a before and after, making it hard to read now in the ascetic isolation that this collection would demand.

One other recurring aspect of the work that I won’t go into at any length here is art. ‘Baader-Meinhof’ begins and ends at an actual exhibition, of Gerhard Richter’s pictures, in exactly the same way that Point Omega begins and ends at an actual exhibition, the 24-hour Psycho. Delillo engages with these artworks in a way that he doesn’t engage, for instance, with the films in ‘The Starveling’ (indeed, we never actually register a single thing that is on screen). I wonder about this, but I don’t want to pursue the idea at this point.

In the end, though, the archetypal Delillo characters are the two we encounter in the archetypal Delillo story, ‘Human Moments in World War III’, in orbit around Earth while, it would seem, a war rages below. We learn nothing about the war, not even whether it is actually happening; we learn nothing about what brought the characters to this situation, nor what might become of them. They float above everything, disengaged, playing with words. If it ever came down to earth, there would be no story.

But I’ve just come to a passage which suddenly makes me think that Kermode’s book is, at least in part, a response to Frye. It is not explicit, Frye’s name is not mentioned either in the text or anywhere in the endnotes, but …

Kermode is talking about myth and fiction. Frye is very careful to see these as part of the same project, one feeding into the other, serious literature partaking of the sense of myth. Kermode takes a determinedly opposite view:

We have to distinguish between myths and fictions. … Myth operates within the diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures. Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change. Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change. Myths call for absolute, fictions for conditional assent. Myths make sense in terms of a lost order of time, illud tempus as Eliade calls it; fictions, if successful, make sense of the here and now, hoc tempus. It may be that treating literary fictions as myths sounds good just now, but as Marianne Moore so rightly said of poems, ‘these things are important not because a / high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are / useful.’

It is that sense of myths as radically unchanging, as doing something that fiction is not designed to do, that I was reaching towards in my review of Gregory Feeley’s Kentauros at Requited. But I wrote that before I had read the Kermode. I might have found the task slightly easier if I’d come to the review now.