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The bones of St Josaphat

A while ago I wrote a post here about the story of St Josaphat, a story which itself had had adventures and travelled through many lands. It began as a story about Buddha, but had crossed into Persia, then the Arab world, then Georgia, then the Greek world, and finally into the Latin world, with Buddha’s Sanskrit name (Bodhisattva) gradually changing as the story passed from language to language, and the religious background also changing from Buddhism to Islam to Christianity, so that Buddha becomes the Christian saint, Josaphat.

I came across a coda to that story in a book review* I read recently in the LRB:

In 1571, the doge of Venice presented a sacred relic to King Sebastian of Portugal: a bone from Josaphat’s spine. It is still in a silver reliquary in the St Andrieskerk in Antwerp.

So a real flesh and blood human being becomes the subject of a legend. The legend travels half-way round the planet, and there it is made real yet again. I find that delightful for some reason.

* The review by Eliot Weinberger was of In Search of the Christian Buddha: How an Asian Sage became a Medieval Saint, by Donald S. Lopez Jr and Peggy McCracken.

Lochboisdale

When I was a student (in the mid-seventies) I once travelled by myself to the Western Isles of Scotland. As the passengers gathered to disembark at Lochboisdale in South Uist, something happened which I hadn’t anticipated at all: I suddenly became aware that no one around me was speaking English. The strange, remote, very Northern place into which I emerged, was utterly foreign to me in almost every way, and its people even spoke a different language. (Not only did the people there speak Gaelic, incidentally, but as I was to discover, they were overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.) But there was just one thing that was familiar: the letterboxes. They were red, just like the ones back home in England, and the ones I’d seen on family holidays in Wales. For some reason I found this touching.

A few days later, I arrived at Lochmaddy in North Uist, equally Gaelic-speaking, but almost entirely Protestant. I was hoping to catch a ferry across to Skye, but it turned out there wasn’t one for two days (for there were no sailings on Sundays). The harbour-master, a stern, dignified man for whom the word ‘dour’ could have been invented, said I could sleep in the little waiting room, and he invited back to his house for tea. His wife was there, his daughter and a baby grandchild. A lavish tea was set out for me in the dining room, and then they left me alone to eat it, while they all adjourned to the living room to chat to each other in Gaelic. This seemed to my English sensibility a strange mixture of aloofness and generosity.

I also remember being introduced to the baby as a Sassanach. The word simply means Saxon, and is one of those fossils from the past that can be found in every language: a reminder that about the same time as Gaels from Ireland (known to the Romans as Scotiae) were busy settling and invading the land of the Picts and making it into Scotland, people from Saxony and Angeln in Northern Germany were equally busy settling and invading the land of the Britons to the south and making it into England. The harbourmaster’s ancestors had arrived in Britain from the opposite direction to mine. No wonder Scotland seemed foreign.

But of course it isn’t really as simple as that. Lowland Scots are also historically Sassanach, for one thing, and we are all a mixture by now anyway. (For instance, my maternal grandfather was Scottish and called McIntosh, clearly a Gaelic name, so presumably some of my ancestors came from the same side as the harbourmaster’s.) And anyway wouldn’t a boy from Edinburgh or Glasgow have found Lochboisdale and Lochmaddy just as foreign as this boy from England had done? The Scottish border isn’t really the boundary between two different cultures and two different origin stories, but a line across an island in which there are many different cultures and stories, almost all of which can be found on both sides of the line.

Nations are arbitrary things. In Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut coined the word granfalloon to describe a entirely arbitrary group of human beings that nevertheless see themselves as belonging together (in contrast to a karass, which was a collection of people who had a real core likeness to one another), and he suggested that nations were the biggest granfalloons of all. But I think this kind of super-rational analysis often misses the point. These arbitrary loyalties, however superficial they seem, are actually pretty deep rooted in human nature (deep enough for people regularly to show their willingness to die for them) and have enormous utility. Like a magnet under a pile of iron filings, or a piece of string dipped into a solution of copper sulphate, they provide a focal point for for the formation of structures, enabling very diverse collections of people to engage collectively in projects which they could never see through as isolated individuals. Saying that the formation of grandfalloons is irrational and arbitrary is a bit like saying sexual desire is irrational and arbitrary: from a certain perspective it is – why the attachment to this particular set of things? – but from another perspective it is simply part of our nature, and serves an important purpose.

What is certainly true about granfalloons, though, is that new ones can be created. Ultimately, it really doesn’t matter much if Scotland secedes from the UK or remains part of it. The map of Europe has been a constantly changing thing throughout history, with nations sometimes combining or being aborbed into bigger ones (Courland, Aragon, Prussia, Brittany, Piedmont…), sometimes breaking down into smaller ones (Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, Austria-Hungary, the United Netherlands…), sometimes shifting the boundaries between one another. Either way, life carries on, economies adjust, people redefine themselves in terms of the new granfalloons available. For this reason apocalyptic predictions of what may happen if Scotland secedes (everything from prices going up in Scottish Asdas, to perpetual Tory rule in the UK) strike me as silly. We will all come out of this as inhabitants of a properous, stable Western European country, either way. If we split, it will be messy for a while, like a divorce (which can also feel like the end of the world), but in the end we will come through and life will go on.

One thing I wasn’t expecting, though. Until recently, I have if anything been slightly in favour of separation, not out of any hostility to Scotland, but simply because it’s fun sometimes to rearrange the furniture and try something new. Oddly, though, now that the day of Scotland’s vote is almost upon us, I find myself feeling quite anxious and unsettled. If it turns out to be Yes, I discover, I will miss an indefinable something represented by that comforting red letterbox in Lochboisdale. Hard to say why, but it will feel like losing a part of me.

But then again, I feel that way about changing my job or moving house: interesting in prospect, but when you get close to it, you are suddenly aware of nice things you will have to leave behind.

Canonical

Another panel I’ll be taking part in at Loncon is called ‘The Canon Is Dead. What Now?’ (Saturday, 16^th Aug, 19:00 – 20:00, Capital Suite 16 (ExCeL)) The other panellists for this one are Kate Nepveu, Connie Willis, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro and Joe Monti. This is the blurb we’ve been given:

On the one hand, initiatives like the SF Gateway are helping to ensure the SF backlist remains accessible to today’s readers, and an increasing number of “classic” SF writers are receiving the establishment seal of approval in series like the Library of America (Philip K. Dick) and the Everyman Library (Isaac Asimov). On the other hand, the SF readership is increasingly diverse, with fewer readers who have come to the field via those “classics”, and many who find little of value in them in any case. In other words the traditional SF canon is no longer tenable — but the history is still out there. So what alternative models and narratives should we be using to understand the field’s past? Should we be working to expand the canon, or to describe multiple overlapping histories — or something else?

And here are a few initial thoughts of mine:

If I was asked to justify the existence of English Literature as a publicly funded academic activity, one of my first answers would be that it creates a canon. That is, it generates for the rest of us a sort of longlist of books from the past which are worth our attention. To be sure, any such list (just like the longlists and shortlists of contemporary literary prizes) will be contentious and subjective – so-and-so has been overlooked; so-and-so is overrated; there are too many dead white men, etc etc – but that’s another useful function of Englit professionals. They revisit the canon, they develop and revise it. The fact that it can’t be set in stone forever is not a reason for dismissing it as of no use.

The same is true of history. Our understanding of the past is constantly being revised, but that doesn’t mean that historians are of no use. Few of us have the time, skills or inclination to go back to the original documents on which history is based, and no one could do so for anything other than a small part of the past. Without historians going back to original sources, the only history we would have left would be mythology and propaganda.

And, in the same way few people will wade, without any guidance, through the entire body of SF to find the stuff that is worth reading (though in this case, fandom plays a key role which may be more influential than professional scholarship.) We like to think we live in an information age in which everything is only a google search away, but useful information doesn’t spring spontaneously into being without human mediation, and without layers and layers of evaluation (evaluation of books, evaluation of evaluators, evaluation of the criteria by which evaluation of books takes place). Leaving aside SF from the past, how does any of us figure out what to read now? We rely on reviews of one kind or another, shortlists and prizes, word of mouth, controversies, recommendations, all of which are really just the beginnings of the centuries-long process that leads ultimately to some works becoming ‘canonical’ at certain points, while others lapse into obscurity.

So I’m not sure the phrase ‘the canon is dead’ makes much sense, in relation to SF, or in relation to any other field. It seems to me ‘the canon’ would only be dead in a world where each individual read everything, and come to his or her own judgement without consulting anyone else. What is true is that the canon is not a fixed thing, but something that grows, changes, and exists in multiple competing forms. But all of these, surely, are characteristics of entities that are alive!

Launch of Marcher (new and improved version)

The new and extensively revised version of Marcher from Newcon Press, with its striking new cover by Ben Baldwin, will be launched at the World SF Convention in London on Friday 15th August 16.30-17.30, Library (Fan Village).

At the same event Newcon will also be launching: Nina Allan’s new novel The Race, Adam Robert’s collection of essays and criticism, Sibilant Fricative, a new edition of Kim Lakin-Smith’s Cyber Circus, and a new anthology, Paradox.

Apocalyptic

I’m taking part in several panels at the World SF Convention in London this August (details here). Below are a few thoughts for the panel ‘Not with a Bang, but with a Metaphor’ (Thursday, 14th August, 12:00 – 13:30 Capital Suite 2 (ExCeL)). The other panellists will be Jacob Weisman, David Hebblethwaite, Paul Weimer and Noa Menhaim.

From Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ to McCarthy’s ‘The Road’, apocalyptic and dystopian futures are a perennial favourite with writers who might be labelled ‘mainstream’ or ‘literary’. Why do such scenarios have an appeal that goes beyond a genre readership? What does a non-genre apocalypse have to offer that a science fictional one might not, and vice versa? Do we all share broadly similar nightmares, regardless of what ratio of science to sensibility we prefer?

Apocalypse is indeed a perennial theme, and to say that its appeal extends beyond an SF readership, is a fairly massive understatement. Look at the story of Noah’s Ark. The whole of civilisation is wiped out except for one man and his family, who have to start all over again, alongside the few animals they’ve saved from the flood. What is that if not a classic apocalyptic story? And the familiar Biblical story, old in itself, is based on a much older story which can be found in written form on a Sumerian tablet some 3600 years old. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is equally apocalyptic : two cities completely consumed by fire .

In fact the use of word ‘apocalypse’ to describe such scenarios is itself Biblical in origin. The word means ‘revelation’ in Greek, and has come to mean global destruction because of its association with the Book of Revelation, the final book of the Bible, which prophesies the end of the world. Not that the concept is unique to Judeo-Christian tradition and its Middle Eastern forebears. Flood stories are found in divese cultures all around the planet, including Native American cultures isolated from the rest of humanity for tens for thousands of years. Norse mythology imagined the destruction of the world in a cosmic battle called Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods.

So, yes, apocalypse is hardly a specialist SF interest, though SF certainly provides some excellent tools to tell apocalyptic stories in the context of the modern world.

As to their appeal. Well, we humans are aware not only of our own vulnerability and mortality but of the vulnerability and mortality of our civilisation, our species, the universe itself. It’s quite a thing to know about. And for tens of thousands at least, we have made pictures of things that are important to us, things that we long for, things that we dread, perhaps in the hope that by containing things in this way, reducing them to something we can shape and control, we will be better able to get hold of the things we want and stave off the things that threaten us. I guess those two things go some way to explaining why we keep coming back to apocalyptic scenarios?

An interesting question, though, is which category the apocalypse story really belongs in, the things we dread or the things we long for? Millions of years of evolution have ensured that all our basic drives make us struggle against death, fiercely defend the fantastic complexity that makes us alive against the forces of disintegration. Yet at the same time we know, because a capacity for reason also part of our evolutionary inheritance, that death is the end of all longing and fear. The story of the Flood, the Book of Revelation, and the myth of Ragnarok all envisage a purified new world arising from the ruins of the old one, and it seems to me that apocalyptic fiction, while ostensibly about disaster is often rather appealing, to its readers at least and sometimes (as in Ballard’s Drowned and Crystal worlds, for instance), even to its characters. Perhaps the sweetest state of all is to be alive in the world, but freed by a time limit from the burden entailed in living?

Dickian

I’m taking part in several panels at the World SF Convention in London this August (details here).

Below are some preliminary thoughts for the panel on Philip K. Dick. (Through a Hollywood Adaptation, Darkly: Thursday, August 14th, 18:00 -19:00). The other panellists will be Christi Scarborough, Grania Davis and Malcolm Edwards, and the blurb for the panel is as follows:

Thanks largely to the ever-increasing number of film adaptations of his work, Philip K Dick is one of the small number of genre authors whose names have been commoditised: “Dickian” is now a shorthand for paranoia, shifting realities and unstable identities, or even for the condition of twenty-first century life in general. But to what extent is this cliché precis an accurate reflection of the breadth of Dick’s work? What other themes and preoccupations can we see in his novels and stories? How far does his influence on modern SF really extend — and what rewards does his work offer to new readers today?

No one could deny that paranoia, shifting realities and unstable identities are major themes in Dick’s work, and Dick is indeed sometimes hailed as a kind of uniquely prophetic voice on ‘the condition of twenty-first century life’, a post-modernist ahead of his time. But yes, this is a cliché precis. Not only is there a lot more to Philip Dick than it suggests, but, even as a summary, it is somewhat misleading.

First of all, while Dick’s shifting realities may seem post-modern, Dick wasn’t really a post-modernist at all. Post-modernists emphasise plurality and flux: there isn’t one reality, but many different realities. Dick’s work may superficially seem to conform to this view of the world, but in fact what he depicts again and again are people dealing, not with many different equally valid realities, but rather with falsehoods and illusions which seem real, but are actually fake. Dick’s characters are always searching for authenticity, for reality in the singular. They may never find it, they may fear that it can’t be found, but they never stop looking for it. This isn’t post-modern, it’s positively pre-modern, and the more so in Dick’s later works where he is increasingly drawn to Christian theology, albeit in a particularly dark, scary and Dickian form. (No one ever describes as Dickian the belief that the world is a battleground between the followers of Christ and the servants of darkness – it doesn’t chime so well with a vision of Dick as edgy, contemporary, prescient – but it’s very much part of the vision of his later work.)

Secondly, I think the conventional precis of Dick’s work overemphasises the extent to which his work can be read as a social commentary. I would argue on the one hand that his work operates much more at the psychological level (as opposed to the sociological one), and, on the other, that he is at least as preoccupied with things that he sees as timeless, as he is with the condition of society at a particular point in history. (One of the appeals of writing SF, it’s always seemed to me, is that it does allow one to step outside the parochial concerns of the present moment.) Of course Dick’s work reflects the time it was written in – a time which was simultaneously one of great optimism and one of terrible darkness and violence – but the two deepest roots of his writing, it seems to me, extend outwards on either side of the ‘social’. On one side, many of his preoccupations are very personal ones: for instance the figure of the dead female twin, which appears again and again in his work (Valis, Flow my Tears, Dr Bloodmoney…) comes directly from Dick’s own biography: his own twin sister Jane died in infancy. On the other side it is metaphysical, concerned with the place of the human soul in the universe (which is where Dick’s quirky version of Christian theology comes in). His greatness lies in the way he linked up the personal with the universal.

Here are some recurring themes I’ve noticed in Dick’s work:

A sense of loss.

This, I imagine, had very personal origins for Dick. Parents grieving a dead child are not best placed to welcome a baby into the world, and I would guess his life felt very lonely indeed from the start. (Look at the dark, lonely and guilt-ridden childhood depicted in the brilliant short story ‘I Hope I shall Arrive Soon.’) Dick’s experience wasn’t unique though. A feeling of loss, of absence, of insufficiency, is part of the human condition. Hence the Biblical legend of the Fall. Valis is a particularly terrifying vision of a fallen world, a world in the sway of darkness, but the same vision is to be found in Flow my Tears and Palmer Eldritch among many others. And the figure of the dead twin sister (elevated in Valis to a dead female demiurge), which so clearly comes from Dick’s own biography, is turned into a powerful metaphor for the feeling of loss and absence which we all know.

Even those famous ‘shifting realities’ are also in a way representations of loss. That’s what loss is like. We think something is real and then it is snatched away from us. Ragle Gumm in Time out of Joint (surely the prototype for the film The Truman Show?) imagines the world he’s in is real, but it turns out to be a crude set of stage props, Rick Deckard in Do Androids Dream finds what seems to be a real animal, and then finds the tell-tale battery compartment.

In the story ‘I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon’, we find another take on ‘shifting realities’ and their relationship to loss. The main character Victor Kemmings is starting out on a ten year journey to another planet, during which he is supposed to be in a state of cryogenic suspension. Something has gone wrong. He is still conscious and faces the prospect of spending the next ten years lying all alone in a kind of coffin. Realising that he will go completely mad, the intelligent spaceship tries to ease the situation by feeding him his own memories, but Kemmings’ past is so painful to him that this only makes things worse. Finally the ship hits on the idea of feeding him, over and over, the illusion of arrival. Again and again, Kemmings reaches his destination and disembarks, only for the illusion to unravel and the ship have to run it all over again. It keeps Kemmings sane for ten years, but at a cost. When he really does arrive, he still can’t believe it’s real.

If we have to retreat into illusion to keep ourselves sane, the story suggests, the price we will pay in the long run is that nothing will ever seem quite real. This is very much a psychological explanation for those famous paranoid scenarios – and one consistent with the work of object relations psychologists such as Bowlbly, Klein or Winnicott – as opposed to a sociological, political or cultural one.

The cherished possession

Another figure I have noticed many times in Dick’s work is what I call ‘the cherished possession’. This is some treasured object which has huge significance for the character. In Do Androids Dream, for instance, Deckard longs to possess a real animal. He keeps an electric sheep as an affordable substitute, but what his heart is set on is a real one, and he spends a lot of time hanging around outside pet shops and thumbing through his catalogue. In High Castle, Mr Tagomi possesses a jewel which somehow exists of itself, and not simply as a human projection. In Flow my Tears both the powerful policeman Felix Buckman and his sister-lover Alys are assiduous collectors of objects of many kinds and Buckman secures his sister’s co-operation at one point by making a present to her of a particularly fine postage stamp for her to ‘put it away in your album in your safe forever’. In the short story, ‘I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon’ (about which I once wrote an MA dissertation: hence my particular emphasis!), the cherished object is a poster of ‘Fat Freddy’ from the Furry Freak Brothers comics called ‘Speed Kills’, signed by the artist Don Shelton. (Both the poster and the artist are real, incidentally. The poster in question is below.)

These cherished possessions are, of course, subject to the same anxious doubts as other aspects of Dick’s world. Supposedly real animals may turn out to be electric ones, a supposedly authentic object may turn out to be a fake. In High Castle there is a debate about the authenticity of a cigarette lighter alleged to have belonged to Franklin Roosevelt. Yes, there are letters of authenticity, but how do we know that they themselves aren’t fake? Exactly the same debate takes place about the Gilbert Shelton poster in ‘I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon.’

Hope

One other thing that isn’t so often commented on in Dick’s work is that, however dark the scenario, however terrifying the forces against which they are pitted, the characters themselves are never completely devoid of good humour or hope. ‘I mean, after all,’ says the indefatigable Leo Bulero in Palmer Eldritch, ‘you have to consider we’re only made out of dust… But even considering, I mean it’s a sort of bad beginning, we’re not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we’re faced with we can make it.’

In the poisoned Earth of Do Androids Dream millions of people subscribe to the stoical religion of Mercerism, using devices known as ‘empathy boxes’ to connect themselves to the vision of their prophet, Wilbur Mercer, as he struggles eternally up the slopes of a bare mountain in spite of rocks and stones that are constantly being cast at him. At a certain point in the novel a TV programme exposes this central scene of Mercerism to be a forgery, faked up in a film studio with an actor playing Mercer against a crude painted backdrop (close examination reveals the actual brush-strokes). And yet somehow in spite of this the truth of Mercerism – its utility in enabling people to engage with one another and with their harsh existence – remains undimmed while those who exposed the artifice turn out to be artefacts themselves. (They are androids, famously distinguishable from human beings by their inability to experience empathy).

In suggesting that it is the would-be debunkers, not the Mercerists, who are missing the point, Dick cuts through all the paranoid doubts about reality and authenticity which are such a constant theme of his work, and challenges his own definition of reality (in Valis) as ‘that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away’. If we are to have a shared reality with other people then this has to be able to include things that are sustained only by belief. After all empathy itself depends on our belief in something that can never actually be proven to be true: that other creatures have feelings which are in some way equivalent to our own.

My Loncon schedule

I’ll be taking part in several panels at the World SF Convention in London in August (Loncon 3), and my schedule is below.

Not with a Bang, but with a Metaphor: Panel, Thursday (14th August) 12:00 – 13:30 Capital Suite 2 (ExCeL)

Blurb: From Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ to McCarthy’s ‘The Road’, apocalyptic and dystopian futures are a perennial favourite with writers who might be labelled ‘mainstream’ or ‘literary’. Why do such scenarios have an appeal that goes beyond a genre readership? What does a non-genre apocalypse have to offer that a science fictional one might not, and vice versa? Do we all share broadly similar nightmares, regardless of what ratio of science to sensibility we prefer?

Other panellists: Jacob Weisman, David Hebblethwaite, Paul Weimer, Noa Menhaim.

(A few thoughts about apocalyptic stories and their appeal here.)

Through a Hollywood Adaptation, Darkly: Panel, Thursday (14th August) 18:00 – 19:00. Capital Suite 8 (ExCeL)

Blurb: Thanks largely to the ever-increasing number of film adaptations of his work, Philip K Dick is one of the small number of genre authors whose names have been commodotised: “Dickian” is now a shorthand for paranoia, shifting realities and unstable identities, or even for the condition of twenty-first century life in general. But to what extent is this cliché precis an accurate reflection of the breadth of Dick’s work? What other themes and preoccupations can we see in his novels and stories? How far does his influence on modern SF really extend — and what rewards does his work offer to new readers today?

Other panellists: Christi Scarborough, Grania Davis, Malcolm Edwards.

(Some thoughts of mine on this topic here.)

Autographing 3 – Chris Beckett. Friday 12:00 – 13:30, Autographing Space (ExCeL)

Kaffeeklatsch. Friday 14:00 – 15:00, London Suite 4 (ExCeL). With Kim Stanley Robinson.

Launch of Marcher. Friday 16.30-17.30, Library (Fan Village). Launch of the new and revised edition of my 2nd novel Marcher, from Newcon Press, along with Nina Allan’s new novel The Race, Adam Robert’s collection of sssays and criticism, Sibilant Fricative, a new edition of Kim Lakin-Smith’s Cyber Circus, and the new Newcon anthology, Paradox.

The Canon is Dead. What Now? Panel, Saturday (August 16th) 19:00 – 20:00. Capital Suite 16 (ExCeL)

Blurb: On the one hand, initiatives like the SF Gateway are helping to ensure the SF backlist remains accessible to today’s readers, and an increasing number of “classic” SF writers are receiving the establishment seal of approval in series like the Library of America (Philip K. Dick) and the Everyman Library (Isaac Asimov). On the other hand, the SF readership is increasingly diverse, with fewer readers who have come to the field via those “classics”, and many who find little of value in them in any case. In other words the traditional SF canon is no longer tenable — but the history is still out there. So what alternative models and narratives should we be using to understand the field’s past? Should we be working to expand the canon, or to describe multiple overlapping histories — or something else?

Other panellists: Kate Nepveu, Connie Willis, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Joe Monti

(Some thoughts on this topic here.)

Interzone and Beyond: British SF magazines of the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s: Panel, Sunday (August 17th) 15:00 – 16:30. Capital Suite 3 (ExCeL)

Blurb: Interzone has been a stalwart of the British genre scene since it first launched in 1982, publishing early stories by Charlie Stross and Stephen Baxter, as well as authors from outside Britain like Aliette de Bodard and Eugie Foster. But the past thirty years have seen a number of genre magazines launched in the UK, including Postscripts, Black Static, Infinity Plus, and The Third Alternative. How have they influenced the British genre scene? How did they find their own niches in the UK SF market, and which careers have been launched in their pages? And what is the importance of British SF magazines in an increasingly global and online market?

Other panellists: Wendy Bradley, Malcolm Edwards, David Pringle, Gareth L. Powell.

The Tour de France

We went over to see the Tour de France as it headed out of Cambridge along Trumpington Street past the end of Brooklands Avenue. Streets had been closed, and special trains organised to bring in people who wanted to watch, and the street was packed with people in both directions. It was just after midday, and warm and sunny. Behind us was the greenery of the Botanic Gardens.

A few motorbikes came by, and everyone cheered. Then more motorbikes arrived, followed by the cyclists themselves, all together in a tight pack with the guy in yellow at the front. We all clapped and cheered as they went past. It took less than a minute for the entire pack to go by, and then they were heading out towards Shelford. A calvacade of vehicles followed: ambulances, bikes carrying cameramen, official Tour vans, liveried cars from the various cycle companies with roofracks full of bikes…

And then it was over. We headed back up Brooklands Avenue with a big crowd of other onlookers which filled the whole street. What had we seen? A bunch of cyclists in lycra, glimpsed (for most of us) between other people’s heads, passing very briefly in front of us.

But everyone seemed quite cheerful and content.

I love the human capacity to make something satisfying and meaningful out of nothing much at all.

A time for every purpose…

I spend a week every summer on my own on the North Norfolk coast – on this occasion I rented a place in Wells-Next-the-Sea – writing, thinking and reading, with beautiful North Norfolk itself to wander around in when I feel like it, and no internet, no company, no dogs, no nothing. It’s one of my highlights of the year. This time I took Karl O. Knausgaard’s strange novel, A Time to Every Purpose under Heaven, which proved to be fit in well with my state of mind.

I say novel, but it’s not a novel in the conventional sense. It begins with an account of a 17th century Italian child’s encounter with real life angels. His name is Antinous Bellori and he stumbles on them in the mountains. Skull-faced creatures with cold eyes, bloodless lips, and green and black wings, they are hunting for fish in a river with spears, and eating them raw. Bellori becomes obsessed with angels and goes on to write a lengthy scholarly treatise on them.

The book then moves on into a lengthy discussion about angels and their nature and then, by way of the fiery cherubim that guarded the gates of Eden, it revisits in some detail the story of Cain and Abel. This is very different from the biblical account. The two brothers, while very different, are both tortured characters, neither of them wholly bad or good, with complex interior lives. They still live in a place so near to Eden that the fiery light of the cherubim can still be seen in the sky, but this place is distinctly Scandinavian. (In a nice touch, the narrator suggests that the story acquired its Middle Eastern details as a result of cultural assimilation, so that the fjords and glaciers of the original setting were gradually lost and forgotten, just as the characters were gradually simplified.)

We then shift to the story of Noah. The setting is again Scandinavian, but in the forests now there are strange giant creatures born out of sexual unions (actually mentioned in the book of Genesis but never explained) between ‘the sons of God’ and humans. (It is suggested that the sons of God must have been angels.) Noah himself is a strange unworldly man, an albino who can only come out at night, and something of a geek. The story follows him for a while, but then shifts to his sister Anna, her marriage, the birth of her children and grandchildren, and it is from her viewpoint that we see the rising waters. The Ark appears when all but the mountaintops have been covered, but Noah and his sons refuse to take anyone on board, killing with cudgels anyone who tries to climb up, as they would have to have done, of course, if the ship was not to be completely overrun by desperate people. Anna and her family all drown, along with the rest of humanity. It’s not clear what purpose drowning them served, and God himself repents of his decision to flood the Earth.

Now we come to the story of Lot who survived the destruction of Sodom with his two daughters, after offering food and hospitality to two angels. It is Lot who offered his daughters to the lustful crowd who gathered outside his house, demanding to… well, sodomise… the angels, Lot whose wife was changed by an angel into a pillar of salt when she looked back at the ruined city. What strange stories these are. How little there is in them which chimes with our own sense of what is either meaningful or just. But as Knausgaard points out, this will one day be the case with the values and ideas that now seem to us to be self-evidently true. And for this reason, he wisely takes older ways of seeing, whether they are Old Testament stories or seventeenth century theological speculation, quite seriously. (If we just laugh at old ideas, we are really saying that how we see the world now, our current idea of what is real, is also worthy of nothing but ridicule.)

The tour of the Old Testament continues with the prophet Ezekiel, who had his own encounter with angels. According to the Bible, they had four faces, the front face like a man’s, the side faces like an ox and a lion, and the backwards-looking face like an eagle. They had four wings each, completely covered with eyes, and each angel was accompanied by a rolling wheel which was also covered with eyes. Strange, strange, strange.

After the birth of Christ, though, angels change. They become less divine, less majestic. Bellori has his own explanation for this, based on the heretical idea (which he has to recant to avoid the stake) that the divine itself is not constant but constantly changed its form, until it eventually became human and died. After all, the Old Testament, as Knausgaard shows, contains instances of God being caught by surprise, and changing his mind, and regretting an action he has taken: very different from the eternal, all-knowing and omnipresent being of later theology.

Having lost their original status and purpose, angels roam the earth like vagabonds – Bellori has another encounter with them, and takes the recently-dead corpse of the Archangel Michael back to his house for dissection – but they continue to diminish, gradually becoming the little cuddly cherubs that we see in eighteenth century paintings. (There is a nice moment where three of these cherubs make a nuisance of themselves in a country house and have to be chased out by servants with brooms.) And even that’s not the end of it, because then they grow feathers and beaks until at last these cold-eyed servants of God become cold-eyed seagulls, which, in this book at least, still have tiny vestigial arms and hands dangling beneath their wings.

Seagulls take us to modern Norway, and finally to the book’s narrator, Henrik Vankel. He is an odd man, emotionally disturbed, physically clumsy, haunted by guilt and self-loathing, and he has exiled himself to a remote island because of some unspecified thing he’s done that makes him feel defiled and ashamed. At first he projects his own negative feelings onto his surroundings, but gradually they change him:

Shame is a social mechanism, it requires a tight set of relationships to function, without that it withers, and this was exactly what happened after a few weeks on the island. The sun of today pushed the shadows of yesterday further and further back, it’s the only way I can describe it, because it was as if more and more light came into my life, while at the same time I moved further and further towards the front of my consciousness, until one day I stood right on the edge and stared out, filled with an enormous ecstasy: I was here! I could see this! It took less and less to kindle the joy of life in me.

* * *

That’s actually a pretty accurate description of what invariably happens when I spend my week on the coast: I move towards the front of my consciousness. It doesn’t happen straight away, and it even when it does happen, it comes and goes (as is also the case with Vankel’s experience, for he descends again into self-loathing and violent self-harm), but always at some point I realise that I’m at home in the world, and no longer distanced from it, to the point where even the knowledge that this state won’t last forever is something that I feel entirely calm about.

It isn’t my normal state. Often I feel far from the world, tied up inside myself, like Vankel in knots of fear, shame, doubt, worry, and with the various activities, many of them meaningless, with which I fill up my life, as if stuffing my face with junk food. Typically, even when I’m in a place which pleases me, I have a sense that I am in some way cut off from it, so that I feel kind of nostalgic ache, even when the object of that nostalgia is physically present. I’ve always assumed that this sense of separation was the common state of humanity – we only exist, after, because, over millions of years, our ancestors have successfully guarded their separateness, as lumps of highly organised matter, from the much less highly organised surroundings into which entropy is constantly tugging them – and I’ve always assumed that the legend of Eden and the Fall was in part a way of describing it.

* * *

But I digress from Knausgaard’s book. I enjoyed this novel and was sorry to reach the end of it. It is a very rich book, both in terms of earthy sensory experience, and in terms of ideas: the fact it is rich in both these ways is appropriate in a book that challenges abstraction and makes ‘spiritual’ beings like God and angels into physical entities. One of the things I liked best about it was that it doesn’t have a plot to hold it all together, and yet it hung together aesthetically and thematically, like a painting or a piece of music. Plot is such an artificial thing, and so prone to take over from everything else.

Three things I don’t write about…

Neil Williamson, author of the excellent Moon King, kindly invited me to follow him in another of those writer blog chains. In this one we’re supposed to name three things we don’t write about and three things we do. Neil’s own answers are here. And here, belatedly, are mine:

Things I don’t write about:

Galactic empires: I know most science fictional ‘futures’ are futures which, even at time of writing, we know won’t really happen. But this particular impossible future strikes me as having been somewhat done to death.

Ordinary life: I’d like to think what I write is relevant to everyday life, but I can’t ever see myself writing a book which is simply about ordinary people doing ordinary stuff, in much the same way that, if I was a visual artist, I can’t imagine I’d want (once I’d mastered the skills) to simply reproduce what I saw in front of me.

Action heroes: I was surprised when a recent New York Times reviewer criticised John Redlantern in Dark Eden for being a stereotypical 50s action hero, because I’ve never liked those kind of ultra-competent, super-brave characters at all. If John Redlantern does fall into that mould then it’s a case of parallel evolution. I wanted to write a male protagonist who made stuff happen, unlike the somewhat passive, introverted and (in those respects at least) somewhat Chris Beckett-like protagonists of both previous novels. Trying to figure out something different about his mental make-up, that would drive John Redlantern to act and bring about change, I had him impose on himself at the beginning of the book the puritanical rule that every time he made a decision he would always think about the long-term benefits of the alternatives, rather than what he actually felt like doing at the time. But what drives him deep down, as Tina Spiketree observes, is actually a kind of fear.

Things I do write about:

Mothers: I didn’t set out deliberately to do this, but the main male protagonists of The Holy Machine, Marcher and Dark Eden all have what I can only call mother issues, as does the tortured poet in ‘Monsters’, which I sometimes think is my favourite of all my short stories. And then of course my next book is called Mother of Eden… Well, just think of the therapy bills I’m saving.

Transgression: My characters are always crossing boundaries, both literal and metaphorical. In the Holy Machine, George and Lucy escape from Illyria into the Outlands. In Dark Eden, John deliberately breaks something that almost everyone holds dear, and then heads off over Snowy Dark in defiance of his own community. In Mother of Eden, Starlight Brooking crosses Worldpool, and breaks a centuries-old rule which she’d promised always to keep. As to Marcher, well, the word itself means a frontier-dweller, and the main character is a schizoid figure who obsessively guards a kind of metaphysical frontier while simultaneously longing to cross it himself. Again: massive therapy bill savings here, I suspect.

Charisma: Not quite such an obvious theme of mine, but the Holy Machine is a robot saint, preaching to huge adoring crowds, John Redlantern is able to get others to follow him through his steely certainty that he’s right, and Starlight Brooking, also finding herself venerated as a kind of saint, becomes a powerful and radical leader.

Neil passed on this baton to three other writers including myself. (The other two were Keith Brooke and James Everington). However a quick calculation tells me that if I were to pass this on to three authors, and they were each to pass it on to three and so on, in six months time we’d need more than two trillion authors, which would of course entail a vast emergency cloning programme between now and then, to be followed by catastrophic ecological collapse. In order to avoid such an outcome, I’m just going to pass this on to just one person.

That said, I’ve often suspected Ian Whates of secretly being a set of identical triplets, simply on the basis of how much he manages to get done. Not only is he a far more prolific writer than me, but he also publishes other people’s books in his capacity as proprietor, editor, sales director and administrator of Newcon Press, which publishes Neil’s Moon King mentioned above, as well as my own Peacock Cloak, and the forthcoming new edition of Marcher, amongst many other things. He’s also an active member of the British science fiction community, maintains a vast network of contacts and friends that seems to include practically everyone, and still managed to find time to be a Clarke Award judge this year, which entailed reading more than 100 books. Suspicious, I think you’ll agree.