Orbis Biblios

With opened mind

2012-01-18T13:43:00.000-08:00

Eye in the Sky, by Philip K. Dick. Ace Books, 1957.
The provisional tile of this novel was "With Opened Mind." I have read the book many times and confess to preferring the published title. The subject is the varieties of paranoia 1950s-style; there are no opened minds here really, just subsets of a bastardized collective reality that the characters inhabit--that we all inhabited back then, if we were around in 1957.

The plot concerns a group of people who together are acting out a kind of waking dream while lying unconscious following an accident. This image of the eye, as so memorably shown here, might represent an individual ego run amok. But it's actually more like an id, a destructive force that dominates others just because it can.
What intrigued me about the book when I first read it at age 12 is the scene where two men clutching an umbrella are pulled up into the heavens. There they behold a giant, disembodied, cyclopean spying eye, which at that point in the story represents the lord of the universe of a fanatical war veteran. His petty god is one of wrath, and downright dangerous.
Control of the group consciousness passes from person to person, each displaying a different form of insanity, until finally normalcy is restored...or is it? For the world into which the characters finally awake, familiar as it is, looks like just another version of the craziness. Which of course it is.
Despite appearances, this novel is not a fantasy; it is pure science fiction. It takes place in the "real" world (I use the term advisedly) and the fantastic events are generated from explicable circumstances, not magic. It requires a bit of understanding of the mechanics of consciousness, however.
Eye in the Sky is a little less complex than some of Dick's subsequent works on the same theme--The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964) and Ubik (1968) for example--but this is the one where I first learned to love PKD, with opened mind.

Shock jock mocks hawks

2011-11-26T23:01:00.000-08:00

Dead Air, by Iain Banks. London: Little, Brown, 2002.
In the large novelistic oeuvre of Iain Banks, this book resembles The Business (2001), another topical novel with a somewhat slapdash style, fun to read, fast moving, full of satire, political rants, and intrigue. I don't believe that this novel, alone among all of Banks' books, was ever published in the U.S., perhaps because it adopts an anti-American tone in the wake of the post-9/11 Twin Towers Bush atrocities. Intemperate invective against conservatives, anyone? Why not! You can now pick up used copies of this insufficiently published book very cheaply online.
The main character makes me think of a latter-day Lucky Jim, hilariously inept. A controversial radio talk-show host, he falls in love with the wife of a gangster and proceeds to get both himself and her into mortal danger due to a drunken phone call. This allows the author to indulge in a major nerve-wracking set piece involving a burglary of the gangster's headquarters.
I like Banks, would read anything by him, but don't particularly recommend this title before reading quite a number, really, of his other books which have a little more substance to them. Start with The Crow Road if you haven't read it and then try one of his science-fiction novels about The Culture.
Actually, read whatever you want in whatever order you want, whether it be by Iain Banks or anybody else, okay?

No worm left unturned

2011-10-01T17:09:00.000-07:00

The Ganymede Takeover, by Philip K. Dick and Ray Nelson, Ace, 1967. I recently reread this novel although it ranks somewhere in the lower echelons of Philip K. Dick's 45 novels in terms of literary quality. A friend had mentioned it as his favorite PKD work and took me to task for having underrated it in my 1988 study Philip K. Dick. I can't say it impressed me very much this time either, though my friend is right, the book is quite funny, and in that respect it does recall some of the more humorous Dick titles such as Clans of the Alphane Moon. That said, Clans is a much better book, but the point is that all of PKD's novels of the 1960s do in a way constitute one meganovel, which includes everything from The Man in the High Castle (1962) through Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974). See this link for the complete list of PKD books published between those dates; they can be read in any order. (Lies, Inc. sits toward the bottom of this listing but should be included as part of the meganovel.)
In The Ganymede Takeover the Earth has been taken over by giant intelligent worms from Ganymede who share a group mind. One of the rulers, called Mekkis, is given Tennessee to govern, which is considered a pretty terrible assignment. He has to deal with an internal war between the racists and a black power group. Mekkis cannot focus much on politics, however, because he becomes so obsessed with the topic of human psychiatry that he eventually causes the whole Ganymedan race to self-destruct by infecting its group mind with his visions of an existential hell.
There is also a telepathic radical, Percy X, who is leading a revolution but becomes so unbalanced that he almost destroys the world with a "hell weapon." This is an apocalyptic scenario that the human race ends up narrowly avoiding in the end. It's a real 60s novel; one could imagine a version directed by Stanley Kubrick, with maybe Godfrey Cambridge as Percy X?
This book was a collaboration with Ray Nelson, who was also a cartoonist and inventor of the propeller beanie. Again, it does not represent Dick's best work when considered in isolation, but if you're reading the other PKD novels of the 60s, which are extremely addictive, by all means add it to your list. These books sometimes tend more towards the sociopolitical, as in the case of The Penultimate Truth, The Game Players of Titan, and this one, while others like Ubik are more ontological, or gnostic like A Maze of Death, or concerned with the relationship of empathy to human consciousness as in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? To me, this meganovel ( consisting of 22 novels in all) is Dick's greatest work, and one of the landmarks of twentieth century literature.

Holy warrior of writing

2011-03-23T18:40:00.000-07:00

Crusader's Cross, by James Lee Burke, 2005.

I keep returning to James Lee Burke, whose many novels overflow one of my bookshelves, and whose genius for resonant titles entice me to pick up yet another unread volume. His prose is carved out of compassion, disillusion, and a longing for manifestation of true spirit in an evil world. Particularly the world of his most famous character, police detective Dave Robicheaux. This is a typical Robicheaux tale: the seedy and splendid rural Louisiana setting, the conscienceless low-lifes and ordinary saints, the hero flawed to a fault, battling his demons while trying to put down the depraved bad guys. Burke weaves his skein of vivid descriptions and terse dialogue to portray a world, not merely deliver a plot. The narrative is not airless. There are moments of peace, of beauty, where Robichaux is able to lift his head out of the swampy soupy miasma of criminal undergrowth and look at the sunrise. I think we all can identify with Dave, whether or not we share his alcoholism or penchant for violence. And so I call Jim Burke, Dave's emissary and apologist, a holy warrior for good writing, preserving the integrity of American literature amidst the general degradation of language, as well as hoisting the standard for the neglected human values that Dave defends at no little cost to his own safety. The past, in the form of crimes against blacks, women, and the disenfranchised, is constantly casting its shadows across the bayou in this series of books. It is these shadows that form the real opposition, and menace and theaten to drag down the good man. Thus memory does make martyrs of us all.

Tough men, tougher country

2010-03-05T05:36:00.000-08:00

Rain Gods, by James Lee Burke. Simon & Schuster, 2009.
Like the searing heat of his south Texas setting, James Lee Burke's incandescent prose burns into your brain. The aging battle-hardened world-weary sheriff Hackberry Holland that serves as his protagonist in this epic crime story is a principled man ill-fitting in his time who must match wits with an uncommon criminal, the mass murderer and Biblically megalomaniacal man known as Preacher. The narrative moves at crackling pace and the characters are drawn as carefully and sharply as a master craftsman etches burnished metal. Like all of Burke's books, this one is hard to put down, and perhaps is even more powerful than usual in an oeuvre replete with classic American writing that recalls Hemingway and Chandler in stylistic intensity, outshining the best genre contemporaries such as Elmore Leonard and Charles Willeford.
If one is familiar with Burke's best-selling series of novels chronicling the adventures of a Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux, this book will be of great interest because it shares all of the author's usual qualities in a new setting and with compelling characters. Hackberry (great name) is the brother of Billy Bob Holland, featured in another series of Burke's. He appeared one other time in a younger version, in Burke's early novel Lay Down My Sword and Shield. This guy is even more rough-hewn, hard-bitten and haunted than Burke's usual cop/detective main characters.
The immediacy of the descriptions of this barren border landscape create an existential flavor similar to No Country for Old Men, which this book recalls in some ways. But Burke's vision is much more redemptive. With this author, there is a strong moral center in the main character and a focus and power in the writing that carries an inspirational charge. At the same time, there is no victory in a James Lee Burke novel that is not extremely hard won, and Rain Gods is no exception. Reaching the end of this book one wants nothing so much than to kick back with a cold Mexican beer and rinse the parching dust out of one's lungs while waiting for the ultimate cleansing that the novel's title prophesies.

Past imperfect

2009-10-10T12:44:00.000-07:00

The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick (1962)
This novel was the first major success for Philip K. Dick, although it was far from the first novel he wrote or published. It was his ninth published sf novel, and it also appeared after he had written 11 mainstream novels, most of which were posthumously published (a few were lost). The Man in the High Castle displays both mainstream realistic skill in description, characterization, and evocation of place, as well as supreme science-fictional sensibility. It won the 1962 Hugo Award for Best SF novel. However, the only sf premise is that of the existence of a parallel time track, one in which Germany and Japan won World War II. Rereading this for probably fourth or fifth time, I was struck this time by the metafictional quality of the oft-criticized ending, which seems to peter out unsatisfactorily. In this ending, we get to meet Hawthorne Abendsen, the author of a novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which portrays a world in which Germany and Japan lost the war. (It's not quite ours, but a lot closer than that of The Man in the High Castle.) He confesses that the I Ching helped him write his book, just as in real life it helped Philip K. Dick write the book that contains the fictional novel. So Abendsen (whose name sounds like a composite of German and Japanese words, and is a kind of shadowy character befitting the German word abend, evening) is a thinly disguised version of Dick himself. It is as if we are suddenly raised above the story to have a chat with the author, and what we find is that the author has no special knowledge about the reality behind his story. He is sort of like the Wizard of Oz. This somewhat self-abnegating posture on the part of the author, an act of self-diminishment, is only disappointing if we are looking for a more conventional ending to a most unconventional story. I find it fascinating, and for me it works.

A Scottish blackbird pie

2009-05-29T12:44:00.000-07:00

THE CROW ROAD, by Iain Banks (1992). This is by turns a mystery, a family saga, a contemporary love story, a coming of age novel, and a celebration of the soul of Scotland. All baked together under the author's withering, relentless satiric eye for exposing hypocrisy and telling the truth, whatever difficulties that poses for oneself and others. "Crow Road" is both the residence of Rory, uncle of the book's narrator Prentice McHoan, who serves as a role model to the young man as someone who lives relatively free from society's constraints. Prentice's growth throughout the book is in integrating those values with the necessity to work, love, and live in the world. Crow Road is also a symbol of death, as family members one by one succumb to their various fates, to the consternation of Prentice, and the imaginal figure of Rory after his death continues to mediate for Prentice, reminding him of the frailties and glories of the transient present.
This is perhaps the best of Banks' realist novels that I have read, although Whit still may be my favorite. In any case, it is highly recommended. I also liked the BBC miniseries with the same title. It is a worthy adaptation and is well worth checking out on Netflix.