All posts tagged Raymond Chandler

Basket Case by Carl Hiaasen (2002)

The pros and cons of a first person narrator

Well, this is an oddity, a Carl Hiaasen novel told in the first person. His previous eight comedy crime novels were all told in the voice of a gung-ho, whip-smart, third-person narrator. This one is a departure and an experiment and I didn’t like it nearly as much.

At a stroke it makes you realise a big part of the appeal of Hiaasen’s novels is their relatively large cast of the characters, all engaged on half a dozen different storylines, and a lot of the fun and dynamic comes from the way a third-person narrator can cut at will from one scene and storyline to another. This has two obvious results: 1. it means there’s constant change and variety, giving the reader a sense of dynamism and energy; and 2. it means the scenes he cuts to can be at their best and juiciest moments; the less interesting lead-up to them, or aftermath of them, can be dealt with by an overarching narrator with a few sentences of explanation.

By contrast 1. it’s quite surprising to realise just how boring it is to be trapped in the consciousness of one first-person narrator. Instead of flitting from scene and encountering all manner of outrageous characters and improbable events, you are confined to just the one person’s point of view. 2. Being stuck with one person means that, almost by definition, only so much can plausibly happen.

Not only do you quickly get fed up of that person’s voice and restless at being confined to just the one point of view, but, in terms of ‘events’, a lot less happen in a first-person narrative, because the person you’re following only has so many hours in the day, can only be in one place at a time, can only be drinking in one bar, chatting to a girl in his flat, driving his car or sitting at work, at any one moment. Whereas an omniscient narrator can describe half a dozen characters all doing completely different things at any given point in time.

Therefore an author who chooses to tell their story from a first-person narrator’s point of view has to work quite hard to overcome these built-in obstacles – especially if, like Hiaasen, their previous novels have been spectacularly effective examples of how to create multi-character, multi-scene narratives.

Thinking about it, a first-person narrative must compensate for the loss of narrative breadth with an increase of narrative depth. In other words, a first-person narrative needs more psychological interest: if you’re going to be stuck inside one person’s head for 400 pages, it better be a pretty interesting head.

Hiaasen works hard at it but the way he does so graphically exposes his weakness as a writer, because he doesn’t really do psychological depth; what he tends to do instead is psychological quirks and kinks, and that’s precisely what is on florid display here.

Hiaasen gives his narrator a number of quirks and hangups and obsessions (see below) which are very entertaining, but they are no replacement for the greater depth of psychological complexity the reader is used to from first person accounts.

And he makes another big formal decision which is to write the whole thing in the present tense, an obvious bid to give the narrative more immediacy, and yet… as a result of this one central decision (to be a first-person narrative) Basket Case lacks the panoramic vistas, the range of background fact, the variety of incident and the fast pace of his other novels.

That said, it’s still a Carl Hiaasen novel, he writes his usual super-snappy description and dialogue, and his story features the usual variety of scumbags and amoral users, with a host of other characters, large and small and consistently diverting. So it’s still a gripping, easy and very entertaining read. He is a very skillful writer, an arranger of complex plots, an inventor of all manner of interesting characters, a writer of snappy descriptions and pithy dialogue. It’s a very good book. Just not as good as the others.

Jack Tagger

Jack Tagger Junior is a journalist (p.20). He works for the Union-Register newspaper. He’s 46 (p.39) and will turn 47 in a week (p.200). He’s worked for a number of papers in his time, and came to the Union-Register to work on the news desk. But then the Union-Register was sold by its owner, Macarthur Polk, to the Maggad-Feist Publishing Group for $47 million (p.69), and in the press conference to announce the deal, Tagger was foolish enough to insult the new CEO, smooth yuppie Race Maggad III (‘a money-grubbing yupster twit,’ p.214), on the record, in front of numerous TV cameras (p.70).

He didn’t get fired, Maggad was too canny of public relations to cause a fuss. Instead Jack was relegated to the obituary department, stripped of all investigative powers and reduced to churning out an obituary a day, under the watchful eye of the relatively inexperienced editor, Emma Cole (p.235), aged just 27, who he despises for her callow youth. (It is, as soon as you process this, almost inevitable that they end up having an affair.)

One of the quirks Hiaasen gives Tagger is that he is obsessed with the ages the famous have died at. Whoever he meets, he asks their age and instantly knows the names of the great and the good who died at that age: Bob Marley and F. Scott Fitzgerald (dead aged 44), Franz Kafka and Edgar Allen Poe (40) and, from his own age group, George Orwell, John F. Kennedy and Oscar Wilde, all died aged 46 (p.222).

Over and above this oddity, Hiaasen gives Jack a neurosis about the age his birth father died at, which he doesn’t know because his dad walked out on him and his mum when he was 3. Jack endlessly bugs his mom to know what age his dad died (p.88) and his stepfather died (p.151). He has a morbid obsession that he’s fated to die at the same age.

When you write this obsession out in black and white you can see how contrived it is, but it is made into a massive part of Jack’s character. His ex, Anne Candilla, says part of the reason she left him was because of his endless monologues about age, because of his uneasy the dreams, the midnight monologues, the actuarial charts of people’s life expectancies taped to the fridge (p.223).

Jack has a recurring nightmare of his dad turning up looking like he did in an old photo and the exact same age as Jack now, and then Jack sees himself chasing his dad across a golf course, tackling him to the ground and his dad suddenly being dead and rotting before his eyes. This recurring dream which used to wake him up sweating next to ex-girlfriend Anne, is described on pages 348 to 349.

Jack is not, in other words, a bland and neutral narrator, he is quite a fruit loop himself.

I’m not the most reliable authority on who’s normal and who’s well adjusted. (p.244)

The obsession with the dead helps explain why the last woman he slept with was Karen Penski, mainly because she has a job in the local morgue and overflows with details and anecdotes about the dead, in which Tagger is morbidly interested.

The mysterious death of James Bradley Stomarti

Unlike its lead character, the setup of the novel is fairly straightforward. One day Tagger is commissioned to write the obituary of James Bradley Stomarti, who found fame as the songwriter and singer with the ‘legendary’ rock group ‘Jimmy Stoma and the Slut Puppies’.

Stomarti has just drowned on a scuba dive in the Bahamas, so Tagger digs up the address of his widow, ‘Cleo Rio‘, phones to make an interview, drives over to her condo to interview her, she cries, gives a description of the tragic dive (she was sunning herself on the boat, Jimmy went down with his best friend and band keyboardist, Jay Burns, the pair got separated, Jimmy must have gotten confused and his air run out). And Cleo is the main source of the quotes Tagger then uses for the long, competent obituary which he then writes and is published next day in his newspaper, the Union-Register.

But slowly details crop up which indicate all is not as simple as it seems. The dead man’s sister, Janet Thrush, laughs down the phone when he describes his trip to Cleo, as if the whole thing was a setup. Some backing singers he meets when he attends Stomarti’s funeral tell him Jimmy was working on an album when he died, directly contradicting his widow’s claim that he had severed all ties with the music industry (p.75). A few days later national papers publish obituaries of the singer and the description Cleo gives of the fatal dive are significantly different from what she told Tagger.

The sister, Janet, invites Tagger out to the crematorium to look at Jimmy’s embalmed body ahead of the  funeral service and they take the opportunity to unbutton his shirt and discover to their surprise that the body bears no marks of an autopsy (p.46). Why not?

So, it is a murder mystery, with the first-person narrator stumbling into a situation which is much more complex and shady than it first appears and uncovering various dirty secrets. In other words, it is one of Raymond Chandler’s countless descendants.

In the course of his investigations Tagger meets:

  • Janet Thrush (p.40), Stomarti’s sister who makes a living dressing up in sexy outfits on webcam and slowly stripping while male customers pay (p.82)
  • Cynthia Jane, 23, Stomarti’s wife who goes by the stage name of Cleo Rio (backstory p.123) and outrages everyone who attends the funeral by taking the opportunity to strum an acoustic guitar and sing her latest single, very badly (p.76). Tagger quickly realises she is having an affair with a tall, handsome guy who uses a strong cologne, who he later finds out is a record producer named Loréal
  • Jerry, Cleo Rio’s tough skinhead minder
  • Emma Cole, 27, Jack’s editor at the Union-Register, who he resents for being young, inexperienced and not a good writer, who he has some ill-defined mission to ‘rescue’ from the newspaper business (pages 214, 304), but who he, rather inevitably, ends up sleeping with
  • the paper’s tough managing editor, Abkazion
  • Juan, Jack’s best friend at the Union-Register, a sports journalist who tried to prevent Jack getting demoted from the investigative team, who now jokily calls him ‘Obituary boy’ and regularly drops round to Jack’s fourth floor apartment after work for beer and TV. Juan has his own florid backstory in that he and his family escaped from Cuba along with thirty others on a shrimp boat; when some criminals on the boat took his older sister aside to rape her, Juan stabbed two of them to death, something which still gives him bad dreams (p.255)
  • Anne Candilla, Jack’s most recent girlfriend who dumped him leaving him really, really upset about her
  • Carla Candilla (p.153) grown-up daughter of Anne who works in a photo shop where she makes illegal copies of any sexy photos the customers have included in their rolls, and adds them to a portfolio. Carla likes Jack and enjoys shocking him with her sexual candour and colourful language about blowjobs and tongue studs and bondage (‘Who’s polishing your knob, Jack?’), and so is a useful contact with yoof culture, which is important in a novel which is about a rock star and his would-be rock star wife
  • Jack regularly talks to his mom on the phone. She is now married to Dave, an out and out racist who goes ballistic when a black man is proposed for membership of his golf club (p.258)
  • Macarthur Polk, son of the founder of the Union-Register, who sold it to a big corporation, thus earning the enmity of the paper’s staff. Emma assigns Tagger to go and interview the old man (aged 88) who is wasting away in hospital, preparatory for writing his obituary, but Jack and the ornery old dude ended up getting along pretty well, and they end up making a Big Deal, see below (chapter 11)
  • Jay Burns, keyboard player with the Slut Puppies, the last man to see Jimmy alive, who Tagger approaches at the funeral and agrees to do an interview. But when Tagger looks him up on Jimmy’s old yacht, the Rio Rio, a very stoned and drunk Burns unaccountably attacks him and they have a real fight, whacking each other in the face, until Tagger more or less comes out on top, and the pair stagger up on deck to get some air (chapter 12). Burns’s body later turns up, he’s been murdered and the cops, as in all these American noir-style thrillers, initially think Tagger had something to do with it

As you might expect, sooner or later someone breaks into Jack’s apartment, that always happens in novels, movies, TV programmes like this. He and the masked intruder have an epic fight, rolling round on the floor till Jack grabs the three-foot iguana lizard he keeps in his freezer and so is hard as a rock  (obviously, this has its own little backstory) and whacks the (masked) burglar with it, who staggers to his feet and runs off, but not before swiping Tagger’s laptop.

The fight means that Jack appears throughout the rest of the narrative with a ripe collection of cuts and bruises on his face and legs. The narrators of all thrillers since Raymond Chandler are required to be beaten up and appear next morning to their womenfolk who gasp, ‘Jack, you look awful! What happened?’ which is the hero’s cue to play the whole thing down in a bluff, manly way. ‘Shucks, honey, just guy stuff, you wouldn’t understand.’ All these clichés of the genre are present and correct in this novel.

Hiaasen knows he’s channeling Raymond Chandler (just like William Gibson knows he’s channeling James Bond in his novels) so much so that even the characters realise they’re in a Chandler novel. At one point Jack’s friend, Juan, tells him to ‘quit playing [Philip] Marlow’ (p.199) i.e. Raymond Chandler’s famous private eye.

This plot synopsis takes us up to a little over a third the way through this 30-chapter, 400-page-long book. As you can imagine, there continues to be a steady drip-drip of clues throughout the book, but there are also two big recurring themes.

The newspaper business

One is a number of descriptions of the offices of a modern newspaper, at various hours of day and night and over the weekend, about the hard realities of modern newspapers, how they are being gutted by corporate owners more interested in advertising revenue than journalism, and yet what an important social function journalism performs (pages 186, 267, 300, 328, 410, 416).

Obviously these atmospheric descriptions are based on Hiaasen’s own first-hand experience as an award-winning journalist and they are interesting bits of social history or sociological observation in their own right. But they are also an important part of the storyline about the newspaper’s owner handing Tagger a controlling interest in its future (see below). Out of this storyline spin numerous thoughts and reflections about the role and current state of newspaper journalism (as of 2002).

The big snore: rock music in 50-something men’s fiction

The second theme is rock music, not surprisingly as the suspected murder victim is a rock musician.

As anyone who’s read my reviews of William Gibson knows, I went right off his novels as they became increasingly obsessed with crappy-sounding fictional rock bands and the worlds of contemporary fashion and advertising. The older Gibson got, the more he got addicted to making references to Jimi Hendrix and the Doors, managing to turn himself from a really cool pioneer of cyberpunk into an old dad droning on about the Doors and the Rolling Stones.

Well, same here. Hiaasen was turning 50 as this book was published and it displays all the symptoms of Dad Rock. His hero, Jack, still adulates the Rolling Stones as if it’s 1972 not 2002. He admires the district attorney because he’s got a photo of the Stones on his wall signed by Keith Richards (p.310). He has an argument with a woman he’s just stripped to have sex with because he wants to hear the Stones track ‘Ventilator Blues’ off Exile on Main Street (1972) while they have sex and she really doesn’t want to (p.251).

I put a Stones record on the stereo because you can’t go wrong with the Stones. (p.63)

Oh yes you can. By the 1980s and certainly by the 1990s the Rolling Stones were the soundtrack of choice for bankers and oligarchs, driving round in their Porsches, twanging their red braces, blagging $1,000 a seat corporate boxes at stadium concerts, and somehow managing to persuade themselves they were still ‘street fighting men’.

On page 74, when Hiaasen starts describing the different members of his fictional band, the Slut Puppies. When he came to ‘the band’s notoriously moody lead guitarist, Peter P. Proust’, who was stabbed to death a few years earlier, it felt almost identical to the half dozen times I read in William Gibson’s tediously flashy, corporate ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy, about the ‘legendary’ rock band The Curfew (which features in all three of those novels) whose ‘legendary’ bassist, Jimmy Carlyle, died of a fatal heroin overdose.

The way these fictional bands consist of the super-traditional fourpiece, and the way one of these four has died an untimely end, is identical in both novels. And both writers were writing about traditional four-piece rock bands in the 2000s, as if rap, rave, drum and bass, hip hop, techno, trance, garage and grunge and grime had never happened. These are the kind of people who iron their jeans, fret about their pensions… but still think they are in some way ‘streetfighting men’.

It’s in this rather tiresome spirit that the title of the book, Basket Case, is itself one of the ‘tracks’ of Jimmy and the Slut Puppies’ hit album, Floating Hospice (p.347).

Music references litter to the book, including mention of Little Richard, Billy Preston, Led Zeppelin and Bob Seger (p.207), James Taylor (p.261), Derek and the Dominoes (p.345), Neil Young (p.380) and Paul McCartney (p.391). Jack’s laptop (which gets stolen) has a Grateful Dead decal on it (p.271), Jack gives his district attorney contact tickets to a Bruce Springsteen gig (p.311).

You could argue that these are all the interests of a fictional character. a) Same difference. Still feels very Dad Rock (or, by now, in 2021, Grandad Rock). b) all Hiaasen’s other heroes have the same taste, popping a Neil Young of Creedance Clearwater Revival song on their record decks as if the past 50 years of music never happened.

The rest of the plot (spoilers)

Jack follows the man he saw at Cleo Rio’s apartment to a nightclub (named Jizz; Hiaasen likes taking the mickey out of nightclubs; the one in Sick Puppy is named Pubes).

Jack approaches him as a journalist and gets his name, Loréal, and the fact that he’s a record producer, claiming to be producing Cleo’s album although, when Jack does some research, he discovers he’s never produced an album in his life.

After being beaten up by the guy who broke into his apartment, Jack makes it round to Emma’s apartment and she puts him up on the sofa, applies ice to his cuts and bruises and, to both their surprise, gives him a soft kiss goodnight. Ah. Shagging on the horizon.

He and Emma then learn that Guy Burns, who he had the fight on the boat with, has been found dead, apparently so drugged up that he laid down behind a garbage truck which promptly rolled over his head. Hmm. It’s possible, but Emma and Jack think it sounds suspicious.

Next day, Jack calls in on young gutter-mouthed Carla and is gutted to hear that her mother (his former lover, Anne) is about to marry a British spy novelist named Derek Grenoble. (Is this some obscure joke about John le Carré? Is it a sly reference to the fact that le Carré’s most famous character, Smiley, is separated from a wife named Anne, for whom he still carries a torch?)

Back in the newspaper office, Tagger has an aggressive confrontation with Race Maggad III, reprising the argument which got him relegated to the obituaries desk.

Jack takes Emma to the Rio Rio boat, now sealed off by police tape following Guy Burns’s death, but they climbed through that and gave the boat a thorough search. Hidden in the fake bottom of an oxygen diving cylinder they discover a portable hard drive. So we all now come round to suspecting that the burglars are after the hard drive.

What is on the hard drive?

My guess is it’s the tapes of James Stomarti’s final album and his ‘wife’, Cleo Rio a) had him bumped off and b) now wants the tapes and has hired goons to get hold of them. Her motive is simple: to dub her voice over Jimmy’s tapes and claim they’re all hers and be a big star and make lots of money. That’s my theory as of half way through the book.

When Tagger takes Emma to meet Janet Thrush he is upset to discover her front door has been forced open and the studio room where she strips for pervey webcammers has been completely trashed. She is nowhere to be seen and there’s a pool of dried blood on the front carpet. They call 911 then leave quickly, but both are traumatised.

Tagger meets with Polk’s lawyer, Charles Chickle (p.229) who confirms what Polk told him in the hospital, namely that he hates Race Maggad III even worse than Tagger does and, having heard that Tagger publicly insulted him, has decided to make Tagger administrator of the shares he still owns in the Register’s parent company. Tagger’s sole job will be not to sell them to Maggad but to stymie everything the Maggad-run board proposes, and to generally piss Maggad off for the rest of his life. For this task, he will be paid $100,000 a year. Tagger is amazed at the offer.

Juan takes Tagger to meet a young 12-year-old black kid computer whizzkid named Dominic Dominguez who opens up the hard drive and, lo and behold, it is music, it’s a whole load of studio recordings, each instrument with a separate track, some of them final mixes, some still being assembled (chapter 12).

Emma Cole drops by with her toothbrush. She’s decided she wants sex. What a woman wants, a woman gets. So they have sex. In fact they have sex three times through the course of the evening and early hours. Life is great in novels. They are now an investigative team and an item.

Next thing we know Jack’n’Emma learn that the Slut Puppies bassist, Tito Negraponte has been shot, though not fatally, at his Los Angeles home.

‘Somebody’s killing off the Slut Puppies!’ (p.281)

Emma gets funds for Jack to fly to Los Angeles to interview Tito in his hospital bed, tells him everything he knows, and in return Tito, stoned on painkillers, confirms Jack’s hunch that it’s Cleo behind everything. She wants one particular track off the album, Shipwrecked Heart, which she’s going to put her vocals on and issue as a single. And she needs to get the master tapes a) to learn the song b) to remix it c) to make sure no-one else has it or can release it to prove she’s ripping off her dead husband.

That, in a nutshell, is the motor for the plot.

Jack breaks back into Janet’s house and cuts a swatch from the blood-stained carpet and swipes a used tampax from the bin, takes them to a forensics guy who owes him a favour and who rings back a few days later with the result. Yes, the blood on the carpet matches the blood on the tampon. It’s Janet’s blood. Jack is crushed. He didn’t have any designs on her but he really liked her. Now looks like she’s been murdered.

But then someone calls the cops on a bad line claiming to be Janet and that the wreckage was caused by an ex-boyfriend who went postal. Jack fears it’s a fake call and the reader is left to stew for 30 or 40 pages, fearing, like Jack, that nice Janet has been wasted.

And this causes deliberate confusion when Jerry, Cleo Rio’s hitman, phones up and tells Jack they’ve got her and want to do an exchange, to exchange her for the hard drive. Jack’s obsession with Janet means it takes stupid Jack a score of pages to realise that who ‘they’ have kidnapped is not Janet but Emma!!

Meanwhile Janet has not been murdered. Turns out she had rung and left messages on Jack’s answer-machine a couple of times stating that it was her who called the cops and the story is true: a jealous boyfriend really did trash her place and hit her. She ran off and is staying with friends in the south, bit bruised but basically OK. But Jack didn’t pick up these answerphone messages till a lot later.

Meanwhile – the bad guys have got Emma and they contact Jack with the details of how to get her back.

He is told to take a call at a payphone at the end of a pier by the sea (where Jack gets chatting to a 92-year-old who’s out there fishing and explains his strategy for avoiding death!).

The pier-end call tells him to go that evening to the nightclub named ‘Jizz’ (which keeps being the setting for meetings throughout the novel).

Here Jack meets with Cleo, Jerry and Loréal, is typically aggressive and insulting, is slapped upside his head a few times, but makes every effort to a) make it clear Janet knows nothing and is not a danger to the bad guys, b) emphasise that quite a few people know the truth including Tito, the backing singers and so on, and will put pieces together if he goes missing. So they oughtn’t to bump him off.

But he promises to bring the hard drive wherever they want and they part.

That night Jack can’t sleep, stays up all night tinkering with an old guitar he played in college, drags his ass to work the next day. The bad guys eventually call and give Jack a long set of instructions for hiring a boat, a GPS system and meeting them smack bang in the middle of the huge Lake Okeechobee.

Juan calls by his desk and Jack tells him the terrible news (Emma has been kidnapped by the guys he’s been investigating; he’s got to hand over the hard drive in exchange for her; he’s been told to do so in the middle of Lake Okeechobee) so Juan says he’ll come along and help out.

Then there’s a kicker. Just as he’s about to  leave, the Managing Editor of the paper, Abkazion, comes up to him, tells him old man Polk just passed away this morning. Magad wants Jack to write the obituary, Polk wanted Jack to write the obituary, Abkazion now demands that he write the obituary, and Jack knows the offer of the job as Polk’s executor and manager of the decisive shares, along with the $100,000 salary are dependent on him writing the obituary, that evening, to make the next day’s front page (p.355).

But he can’t. He has to drive to Lake Okeechobee and save Emma. Right away. And he can’t tell Abkazion the real reason or it will endanger Emma’s life.

Abkazion rants and raves and then is dumbstruck when Jack doesn’t relent. Jack gathers up all his notes and dumps them on the desk of timid Evan, a lowly intern, who’s helped out with a few other details of the plot. ‘This is your big change, kid,’ Jack tells Evan, like Harrison Ford in a movie, then runs off.

Jack and Juan do the 3 hour drive up to Lake Okeechobee at record speed (listening, inevitably, to the Rolling Stones), hire a boat from a sceptical rental guy (from Ernie Bo Tump’s Bass Camp), use the GPS to motor out into the dead middle of the lake, and then wait around being bitten by mosquitoes. It is night-time, it is pitch black.

They hear the enormous whacking sound of a huge airboat. Soon it comes within sight of Jack and Juan, steered by Jerry while Loréal minds Emma who has a sack over head sitting passively in a chair. It’s important to understand what an airboat is in order to  follow what happens next.

An airboat (Credit: Wikipedia)

From the description it sounds like a bigger version of the above. What follows is: Jerry demands the hard drive; Jack says, ‘Not till you throw away your gun’ and holds the hard drive over the side of their hire boat and starts counting down. Reluctantly Jerry tosses his gun which Jack hears splash in the lake. Jack insists they hand Emma down into the hire boat. Once she’s safe he throws the hard drive up at Jerry and Juan hits the motor and they speed off.

However, the bad guys’ airboat can go many times faster than them and their outboard is clogging up with weeds bringing them almost to a standstill, certainly unable to escape. They hear the airboat approaching from the side as if to ram over their boat, aiming to smash it to matchsticks.

Juan advises everyone to jump off but Jack stands up in the stern, ramrod straight and fires off every bullet in the little .38 handgun he was loaned by Carla last time he saw her. It’s unlikely the bullets hit anyone but it’s enough to scare Jerry into taking evasive action. They hear a great swash as the airboat passes close to them, but then… a crash and a scream!

Once they’ve got the outboard working again, our guys putter over towards the noise to discover the cause of the crash and scream. What happened is the airboat, in making its abrupt swerve to avoid Jack’s shooting, hit reeds, ground to a halt and upended.

Juan and Jack use the little spotlight fixed to the hire boat to make out that Jerry was thrown backwards and, when the airboat upended, the huge spinning propeller which drives these things cut his head off, which went flying with a splash into the lake. Loréal managed to keep his place at the front  of the boat but his long stylish ponytail dangled down into the fast-moving propeller, got tangled round  it, dragging him down down down until the machine’s torque ripped his scalp off. Yuk.

Our guys size all this up, then turn and putter calmly back south, back to the boat hire place and their car, and slowly carefully drive traumatised Emma back to safety.

Epilogue

They make it back to Jack’s apartment in the early hours. Emma sleeps like a log then rises and cooks Jack a lumberjack breakfast. Over brekkie they check out that morning’s edition of the Union-Register and Jack is astonished to find that the Polk obituary did get written in the end, is front page and, most surprising of all, appears under his byline, even though obviously written by young Evan.

He and Emma feel bad about this because of their journalistic scruples, but I hardly think the reader gives a monkey’s. Anyway, they ring up Evan and he sheepishly admits that, given the Big Opportunity, he froze with fear and it was the seasoned editor, Abkazion, who knocked it out in 20 minutes. Their consciences are absolved.

By the way, a running thread has been that his ex is not only marrying this cheap spy novelist, Derek Grenoble, but is doing so on Jack’s birthday. Now cheeky young Carla phones up to tell them what a lame pukefest the wedding was, featuring a terrible 3-page poem which Derek wrote Anne.

And Jack gets a birthday card from his mother which finally includes the obituary of his dad who a) died aged 46 – it is Jack’s birthday, he is 47, so he has outlived the jinx – and b) the obituary describes him as a penniless waterfront entertainer who made tips from crowds by being able to juggle anything, even pets, and died after drunkenly climbing up a tree to retrieve a raccoon and falling to his death when a branch broke. So not some big shot mystery man; a drunk street entertainer. Oh well.

Next day Jack meets up with Janet, who has rung him to tell him she’s back, for muffins and coffee.

She confirms that, on the night of her disappearance, she was getting changed into her SWAT outfit when the front door was broken open and two dudes started ransacking the place. Jack identifies them from her description as Jerry and Loréal. Janet got mad and burst into the hall in full SWAT outfit brandishing a (plastic) semi-automatic, which was enough to make them run out. Then she ran in the other direction and caught a cab to a friend’s house. As to the blood on the carpet, they guys had trashed her big studio lights and she trod on some glass. Bled like a hippo. Otherwise unharmed. Ah.

Not only that. Janet then leads Emma and Jack to the grave of a certain Eugene Marvin Brandt. Who? Why? She explains.

She reveals that this guy’s corpse was in the crematorium viewing room at the same time as Jimmy’s and, when everyone had left, she switched the tags. That is: Eugene got cremated while Jimmy now lies buried in this plot under Brandt’s headstone.

Jack is delighted. Now a proper autopsy can be performed! Jack sends the state prosecutor an anonymous message with the result that Jimmy’s body is dug up and the forensic scientists show his stomach was full of now fewer than 20 Benelyn tablets which Cleo Rio had crushed up and mixed into his clam chowder just before he made the fatal dive. Jimmy would have passed out and drowned.

There’s enough evidence for the prosecutor to charge Cleo with murder, to bring in various witnesses who’d seen the couple bitterly arguing, to give as motive the fact that she wanted to steal his best song to further her own career. After a three-week trial, Cleo is convicted and sentenced to 20 years.

Then Jack has a very satisfying meeting with Race Maggad III in his new role as trustee of Polk Macarthur’s shares in Maggad-Feist publishing. Jack tells a furious Maggad he will sell back Polk’s shares in Maggad-Feist on one condition – that they sell the Union-Register to Polk’s widow, the tough nurse who tended him in his last days, Ellen who he knows will look after and protect it.

Maggad is eventually forced to do this, and Ellen becomes the paper’s first female publisher., Her first act is to hire a load of news reporters and restore the paper to its former reporting strength. Given the careful explanations Hiaasen has given us throughout the novel about the financial pressures undermining old-style reporting and newspapers, this is in many ways the book’s real happy ending.

The final scene shows Jack taking Emma out to the pier where he took the goons’ phone call what seems like months ago, and they bump into old Ike the fisherman, the guy Jack chatted to while waiting for the bad guys’ phone call and who proudly tells them he’s just turned 93.

As they turn to go Ike catches a huge tarpon, nearly getting dragged over the safety rail and into the sea, till Jack and Emma grab hold of him. Jack can’t help thinking what his obituary would say and so the book ends with the two subjects closest to Hiaasen’s heart, fishing and journalism.

Thoughts

It has breadth, doesn’t it? Like all Hiaasen’s novels it ramifies out to feature about 20 named characters, many of whom have their own backstories described in some detail. And the first-person narrator is fleshed out with his obsession about dates, his love of newspapers, his oddities (the iguana in his deep freeze), his loving relationship with his mother who used to take him fishing as a boy, his still carrying a torch for the lovely Anne, and so on.

All the usual elements are here and neatly assembled into a cleverly constructed plot. But… for the reasons explained at the start, it lacks the ability to move at speed between characters which is a key aspect of Hiaasen’s novels, and the quirks and oddities Hiaasen ladles onto Jack don’t really compensate for the lack of real psychological depth.

One liners

‘Derek is a good guy. He’s fun, he’s affectionate, he doesn’t take life so damn seriously…’
‘You’ve just described a beagle, not a husband.’ (p.221)

‘Maybe I hit ’em with a shot.’
‘Right, Jack. And maybe one day hamsters will sing opera.’ (p.372)

Credit

Basket Case by Carl Hiaasen was published by Macmillan in 2001. All references are to the 2002 Pan paperback edition.

Carl Hiaasen reviews

  1. Tourist Season (1986)
  2. Double Whammy (1987)
  3. Skin Tight (1989)
  4. Native Tongue (1991)
  5. Strip Tease (1993)
  6. Stormy Weather (1995)
  7. Lucky You (1997)
  8. Sick Puppy (2000)
  9. Basket Case (2002)
  10. Skinny Dip (2004)
  11. Nature Girl (2006)
  12. Star Island (2010)
  13. Bad Monkey (2013)
  14. Razor Girl (2016)
  15. Squeeze Me (2020)
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by Simon on June 4, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 4, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/06/04/basket-case-carl-hiaasen/

Skin Tight by Carl Hiaasen (1989)

‘This is the worst year of my life, and it’s only the seventeenth of January.’
(Private investigator Mick Stranahan, Skin Tight, page 134)

Skin Tight is the third of Carl Hiaasen’s scathing and savagely satirical depictions of the corruption, greed and environmental destruction infesting his home state of Florida. If its predecessor, Double Whammy‘s central subject was the surprising corruption and violence surrounding coarse fishing and its big-stakes competitions, Skin Tight‘s central theme is plastic surgery. But, as usual, from the central topic all kinds of weird, macabre and violent threads spin off in all directions.

Mick Stranahan, Private Investigator, is the tough and capable guy we’re used to in the thriller genre. He has killed 5 men, some in Vietnam (p.21), been married and divorced five times (all to cocktail waitresses, p.90), now lives as an ‘outsider’, on a house on stilts built over the ocean ‘in the stretch of Biscayne Bay known as Stiltsville’ (p.11). (It’s worth noting in passing that Skink, Hiaasen’s great recurring character, also served in Vietnam.)

Mick had worked at the State’s Attorney’s office till he went to arrest a notoriously corrupt judge, Raleigh Gomper, who pulled a gun and, in the struggle, Stranahan shot Gomper dead. Though he was exonerated at the trial, shooting dead a judge didn’t sit well with an employee of the State Prosecutor and so Mick was forced to take early retirement. Hence, he is now a part-time private detective, the absolutely classic profession of the thriller genre, most famously embodied in Raymond Chandler‘s Philip Marlow.

Dr Rudolph ‘Rudy’ Graveline runs a plastic surgery clinic, the Whispering Palms Spa and Surgery Centre. In fact he himself is an unqualified butcher of a surgeon but is wise enough to concentrate on acting as the avuncular salesman and comforter of the nation’s many misfeatured and malshaped narcissists – taking their money but leaving the actual surgery to a team of four well-paid and infinitely more capable juniors.

The trigger for the plot is Maggie Gonzalez for Maggie knows that four years earlier, on 12 March 1986, Graveline ran a clinic called the Durkos Medical Centre and was giving a routine rhinoplasty (nose job) to a young woman, Victoria Barletta, when he accidentally killed her (p.39).

In a panic, Rudy called his brother, George Graveline, who had a gardening and tree surgeon business, and they disposed of the body in a timber grinder. When her family raised Victoria’s disappearance with the authorities, Rudy and all his staff swore she left the clinic after surgery, went and sat at the local bus stop but then disappeared, presumed kidnapped. To get them to agree to this cover story, he had to pay key members of his staff a hefty bribe. (A year or so later one of the doctors, Dr Kenneth Greer, tumbled to what had happened and started blackmailing Rudy, so Rudy paid for him to be disposed of in a ‘hunting accident’, p.285.)

Back to the present and, after a failed marriage and a series of pathetic failed relationships, Maggie is now broke and decides to cash in on what she knows (p.56). She goes to the New York office of a crime-investigating TV show, hosted by the unbearably preening TV presenter Reynaldo Flemm (who has a kinky penchant for doorstepping criminals and provoking them till he gets beaten up) and his long-suffering, clever and dishy producer, Christina Marks.

(It is typical of the duplicitousness of almost all the characters that we learn, late in the book, that the would-be smooth Hispanic Flemm is in fact really named Raymond Fleming and changed his name and appearance to appear more ethnic and glamorous.) Maggie tells Flemm and Marks her story and promises to repeat it on camera for $5,000.

Then it crosses Maggie’s scheming mind that she can probably have it both ways –getting money from the TV company and blackmailing the doctor – so she phones up Dr Rudy and says she’s scared because a Private Investigator, Mick Stranahan, has come snooping and seems to be about to revive the case. She has Mick’s name and number from back before he retired, was still an active prosecutor, and was briefly involved in the initial investigation. Now she just whistles his name up out of thin air as an entirely fictional threat solely in order to gouge more greenbacks out of Rudy.

Mick knows nothing about any of this but Maggie’s ploy not only persuades Dr Rudy to cough up some more hush money for Maggie but sets him thinking how to eliminate Mick as a threat. And so it is that when the TV people, Flemm and Marks, arrange a meeting with Dr Rudy, telling him they know all about the fatal accident though refusing to reveal their source, Rudy mistakenly believes that their source really is Stranahan (not, as it actually is, Maggie) and that Mick is about to blow the whole story and get him arrested for murder.

Thus it is that, based on this misunderstanding (Maggie’s deception), Rudy decides he has to get rid of Mick and so phones a contact in New Jersey, ‘Curly Eyebrows’. Rudy used to do basic plastic surgery for the Mob up there, nothing too complicated, just nose jobs and tummy tucks for the wives. Now he uses these contacts to hire a Mafia hitman, Tony ‘the Eel’ Traviola (p.59).

The novel opens with Mick innocently sitting on the decking of his house out in the bay, watching the boat approaching carrying a guy who we, the readers, know to be this hitman. You don’t get many strangers round these parts so Mick retreats into his house, takes down the stuffed marlin head from the wall and, when the hitman makes his move, standing in the doorway with gun in hand, Mick leaps out and thrusts the marlin’s long frontal spike into the man’s chest, severing his aorta and snapping his spine. Ah. Oh.

All this information is conveyed in the book’s first 30 pages, as a scene-setter or prologue, a kind of powerhouse of information structuring and communication.

Undeterred, Rudy hires a second hitman who will turn out to dominate the novel, a freak called Chemo, 6 feet 9 inches feet tall. Chemo acquired his nickname after suffering a catastrophic accident during a routine electrolysis treatment for a couple of unsightly pores on his nose. The surgeon, Dr Kyle Koppner, had a stroke and swept the electrolysis machine right across Chemo’s face, with the result that it looks like it’s made of Rice Krispies.

He looked like Fred Munster with bulimia. (p.207)

In agony, Chemo killed Koppner on the spot. For added incongruity, Hiaasen gives Chemo (real name Blondell Wayne Tatum, age 38, six foot nine, p.223) a long convoluted backstory which has him orphaned at an early age, raised by the Amish relatives, before he finally rebels and holds up a bank,. However, Chemo then (typically for Hiaasen) discovers he has a talent for local politics, with its combination of intimidation and corruption. But the facial disfigurement and the murder of the doctor abruptly ends his career in politics which, in America, is all about appearance.

The plot ramifies outwards like ripples in a lake. We learn that Gravelines had planned to invest some of his millions in a crooked real estate deal at a property named Old Cypress Towers. When he comes under pressure from – as he incorrectly believes – Mick Stranahan, he lets the crooked authorities who were taking bribes to let the planning permission go ahead, know that he is going to pull out unless something is done about Stranahan.

And so the head of the cabal of crooked local councillors, Roberto Pepsical, goes to see two of the thickest, slimiest cops on the police force, Joe Salazar and John Murdock, and tells them there’s greenbacks in it for them if they can get rid of Stranahan.

Meanwhile, Stranahan, realising someone is out to kill him, calls up his philandering brother-in-law, Kipper Garth (married to Stranahan’s sister, Kate), a supposed lawyer who in fact runs a sort of phone sales operation which chases claims of malpractice or injury and passes them on to reputable lawyers (pages 113 to 114) in what he calls ‘the referral racket’ (p.309).

Stranahan tells Garth that, for once, he’s going to have to prosecute an actual case himself, against Rudy, and hands over files of over a dozen patients of Dr Gravelines who have made various failed attempts to sue him. Pick one and sue him for real, Stranahan tells his brother-in-law, otherwise he’ll tell his wife all about Garth’s numerous infidelities which, with his connections at the Prosecutor’s office, Mick has managed to get documentary evidence about.

The plot then thickens over 400 pages of increasing complications, farcical twists and violent outbursts:

Maggie goes to New York and records a video giving her eye-witness account of the death of Victoria Barletta. Rudy pays Chemo to track her down and kill her but, when he finally confronts her in her New York hotel room, Maggie is so touchingly sympathetic about his face and his crippled hand that they end up becoming an extremely odd item. It helps that she herself has just undergone some plastic surgery with a view to changing her identity, so they can compare scars.

Mick gets to know the TV producer Christina and ends up having an affair with her, showing her the delights of nature, far from the city, making love under the stars on the decking of his house on stilts.

Improbably but comically Rudy Graveline has an affair with a stunningly good-looking model and TV star, Heather Chappell, who insists he operate on her even though her body is absolutely perfect. To get a discount for the operation, Heather lets Rudy screw him every which way in a variety of unexpected locations.

Detective Al García from Dade-Miami Police Department (who Hiaasen fans will recognise from the first two novels) shows up, sympathetic to Stranahan but representing a kind of recurring threat that he  (Mick) might be arrested at various points when various congeries of evidence point against him. For example, García doesn’t believe Stranahan’s claim that he has nothing to do with the macabre deaths of the two corrupt cops.

However, Stranahan steals a copy of the video in which Maggie describes the killing of Victoria Barletta and shows it to García who from that point onwards becomes a staunch ally.

In a dramatic scene Mick visits Rudy’s brother, George Graveline, at work as a tree surgeon. His questions rattle George so much that he whacks Stranahan over the head with a mahogany log and starts to feed his unconscious body into the timber shredder. However, García, who is quietly tailing Stranahan, sees this all happen and shoots Graveline, who drops Stranahan and himself falls head-first into the shredder and is blattered all over the place as Mick woozily regains consciousness.

Maggie reveals to Chemo the gravity of Rudy’s crime (murder) emphasising that Rudy is paying him an insultingly small amount. Angered, Chemo uses his garden strimmer on Graveline’s new apple red Jaguar.

Rudy takes a heavy suitcase containing $25,000 to meet the corrupt commissioner Roberto Pepsical in the confessional of a Catholic church but as they kneel, Rudy injects Pepsical with enough potassium to cause a massive heart attack, packs up and discreetly leaves. He is becoming a serial killer.

Meanwhile Kipper Garth had some luck with one of the plaintiffs Mick had turned up, one John Nordstrom who paid Rudy for his wife, Marie, to have a boob job which was so bad the boobs in question became rock hard and one day, during sex, she moved quickly and literally had his eye out, being blind in one eye leading him (Nordstrom) to lose his job as an air traffic controller. Savage comedy.

Garth pops round with the legal papers to see the couple and discovers that John is at work, in  his new job as a sports coach. Seeing an opportunity, slimy Garth talks the wife, Marie, into letting him touch her rock hard boobs. He’s in the middle of doing it just when John walks in. John’s new job as as a jai-alai coach and so quick as a flash he fires off a hardball with his wicker-glove which hits Garth at the back of the skull, knocking him unconscious to the floor.

Maggie and Chemo help Rudy sell Reymondo Flemm’s corpse to a man named Kimbler who sells body parts to schools and colleges in Central America.

At some point in all this mayhem Chemo kidnaps Christina the TV producer from her hotel under Rudy’s orders. Rudy gets a messenger to deliver a ransom note to Mick out on his stilt house. However, Mick bites back by kidnapping the actress Heather Chappell who Rudy is boffing and taking her back to his house on the sea, leaving a written note for Rudy and his gang to bring Christina out to the house for a hostage exchange.

And it is this exchange of the two women which forms the climax of the novel: Rudy, Chemo, Maggie and their hostage Christina turn up in a boat at Mick’s stilt house expecting to do a hostage swap for beautiful Heather. Except Heather doesn’t want to go. Rudy had promised he’d give her light plastic surgery all over, had doped her out for a day, covered her in bandages and lied that he’d done the procedures. After kidnapping her, Stranahan removes all the bandages and proves that her ‘boyfriend’ is a liar. So now Heather doesn’t want to go back to Rudy.

Rudy, Christina, Chemo and Maggie clamber aboard Mick’s deck but as she gives him a helping push upwards, Maggie pickpockets from Chemo the keys to her and Chemo’s motel room, where they’ve stashed all the loot they’ve stolen from Rudy, meaning to head back by herself and take it all. When Chemo realises she’s done this he dives on top of her to seriously hurt her but Stranahan knocks him out with the butt of his shotgun.

When Chemo comes round, the boat has left with the women, Christina, Heather and Maggie. It’s just the men in the stilt house, Mick, Chemo and Rudy.

Mich has handcuffed Rudy spreadeagled to his bed. Mick has a cunning plan. He is going to recreate a nosejob on Rudy in order to terrify him into confessing everything, how he killed Victoria Barletta, got rid of the body, paid for a hit on the doctor colleague who was blackmailing him, hired Chemo to kill Mick, and so on.

But as the interrogation reaches its vital moment and as he has a small cold metal chisel stuck up Rudy’s nose as if he really is going to break the bone, unexpectedly Chemo gives it a big whack with a hammer and it goes right up into Rudy’s brain, killing him instantly. Shit. Stranahan had promised García he would hand over the culprit to the murder along with a full confession. Shit. Mick is going to have to come up with a plan B.

In the short concluding chapter Detective Al García is motorboated out to the stilt house by Luis Córdova, a young marine patrolman who regularly calls by Stranahan’s house, a good guy, where they find Chemo by himself with the corpse of Rudy Graveline. No Mick anywhere. The cops immediately jump to a false conclusion about what must have happened. They mistakenly assume that Chemo lured Rudy out here and subjected him to a torture which went gruesomely wrong. It all fits together. The bad guys are either dead or going to gaol.

When they look for Mick Stranahan there is no sign and his skiff is holed and sunk under the house. Off in the distance, hard to focus on, García thinks he sees a porpoise or giant turtle amid the waves. Couldn’t be a man. Couldn’t be Mick Stranahan swimming in the distance. Nah. He turns back to the murder suspect. It is a happy ending. Sort of.

Gruesome violence

‘It’s like a nightmare of weirdness.’ Al García (p.323)

The book is littered with cruel, grotesque and macabre violent incidents:

  • Chemo’s face being wrecked by a plastic surgeon having a stroke.
  • Mick killing the hitman Tony ‘the Eel’ Traviola with the spear of a stuffed marlin.
  • For a spell, Chemo hooks up with Chloe Simpkins Stranahan, one of Mick’s ex-wives. She tells Chemo that when Mick found her shagging one of the many men she was unfaithful with, Mick didn’t beat him up but glued him by the testicles to the bonnet of an Eldorado convertible (p.74).
  • Chloe eggs Chemo on to burn down Mick’s shack but eventually makes the bad mistake of ridiculing Chemo’s appearance while they’re driving a speedboat through the lagoons, with the result that Chemo chucks the boat’s 30 pound anchor at her, which knocks her straight over the side and down to the bottom of the lagoon, drowning her (p.99).
  • Mick feeds fish to a huge barracuda which likes to idle in the shade beneath his house on stilts. When Chemo comes to kill him, Mick shoots Chemo backwards off the decking and into the water where Chemo’s splashing attracts the big fish which darts up and bites off Chemo’s hand. Chemo survives and makes it back to civilisation where he goes to see a doctor. They offer him various prosthetic replacements, but Chemo’s preferred option takes across the narrative across a border into Hiaasen bizarro land when Chemo attaches a mini-lawn strimmer, a Weed Whacker, to his stump, powered by a battery tucked under his armpit, and which he uses to devastating effect in the second half of the book.
  • When the corrupt cops Joe Salazar and John Murdock hire a boat to motor out to Mick’s lake hideaway and bump him off, as ordered by their corrupt superior (in fact Mick is now staying in the rundown cabin of an old buddy, after his own house on stilts has been ransacked), Mick doesn’t wait for a shootout but ties super-strong fishing twine across the narrow entrance to the lagoon front of the house so that the two cops, approaching in a boat at 42 miles per hour, are  instantly garroted. Well, one of them is, the other one takes a while to die in agony (chapter 23).
  • Stranahan goes to see George Graveline to try and get him to talk his brother into laying off the assassination attempts. George makes a bid to strangle Stranahan who punches him under the heart then in the balls, then treads on his neck to calm him down, then kneels down next to him to carry on the conversation. At which point George whacks him with a chunk of mahogany and starts feeding Stranahan’s unconscious body into the timber shredder. At which point, García, who’d accompanied Stranahan to the meeting but stayed in the car, shoots George Graveline who himself falls into the timber shredder and is shredded to a pulp and bone splinters (p.282).

See what I mean by violent and macabre?

But the cherry on the cake is the incident near the end of the novel when Reynaldo Flemm decides to go undercover at Dr Graveline’s clinic in order to get a TV scoop. He checks in under the false name Johnny LeTigre pretending to be a male stripper who needs liposuction and a nose job. The plan is that Flemm’s cameraman, Willie will burst in mid-nose job, toss Reynaldo a microphone and the latter will bombard Graveline with cutting questions about the Victoria Barletta murder and so get a TV exclusive.

But the plan all goes horribly wrong. 1. Instead of doing the nose job first, Graveline decides to do the liposuction, which requires a general anaesthetic so Flemm can neither shout out instructions to his cameraman loitering outside, carry out an interview or anything. 2. Graveline is an unqualified incompetent who barely knows what he’s doing. 3. When Willie finally finds the correct operating theatre and bursts in, distracting Graveline with his bright TV lights and bewildering questions, Graveline is so put off his stroke that he pushes the liposuction tube (the cannula) beyond the narrow band of fat he’s meant to be sucking out and deep into Reynaldo’s gut, sucking out one by one all his vital organs and killing him (chapter 30). Gruesome.

Clothes

There’s something deeply wrong and corrupt about a worldview which happily accepts the most violent incidents, corruption and casual murder, but is obsessed with identifying the exact labels and brands of what people are wearing:

  • [Flemm] was wearing another pair of khaki Banana Republic trousers and a baggy denim shirt. He smelled like a bucket of Brut. (p.50)
  • [Tina] wore a baggy Jimmy Buffett T-shirt over a cranberry bikini bottom. (p.86)
  • [Stranahan] was barefoot, wearing cutoff jeans and a khaki short-sleeved shirt, open to the chest. (p.87)
  • [Chloe] was wearing a ridiculous white sailor’s suit from Lord and Taylor’s. (p.94)
  • [Al García]’s J.C. Penney coat jacket was slung over one arm, and his shiny necktie was loosened half-way down his chest. (p.101)
  • Kipper Garth wore grey European-cut slacks, a silk paisley necktie and a bone-coloured shirt, the French cuffs rolled up to his elbows. (p.114)
  • Stranahan had worn a pressed pair of jeans, a charcoal sports jacket, brown loafers and no socks. (p.132)
  • He saw a god-looking woman in a white cottony top and tan safaris shorts hop off the shrimp boat… (p.149)
  • The man wore blue jeans, boots and a flannel shirt with the left sleeve cut away. (p.167)
  • Chemo was dressed in a tan safari outfit… (p.183)
  • She wore a red windbreaker, baggy knit pants, and high-top tennis shoes. (p.227)
  • Christina wore a tartan flannel shirt, baggy grey workout trousers, and running shoes. Stranahan worse jeans, sneakers, and a University of Miami sweatshirt. (p.248)
  • Rudy Graveline was wearing a tan sports jacket and dark, loose-fitting pants and a brown striped necktie (p.278).
  • [Marie Nordstrom] wore electric-blue Lycra body tights, and her ash-blond hair was pulled back in a girlish ponytail. (p.310)
  • [Rudy] was wearing Topsiders, tan cotton pants, and a Bean crewneck pullover. (p.351)
  • [Stranahan] wore blue jeans, deck shoes, a pale yellow cotton shirt and a poplin windbreaker. (p.353)

Odd that so many modern American writers are so obsessively precise about clothes and brands and so utterly indifferent to the value of human life.

Anti-Florida

Amazing that a man with such a bilious view of his own home state could keep a job on its premiere newspaper and in some sense become its literary representative, despite the outrageous examples of corruption he chronicles in his novels, and the throwaway references to the ubiquity of corruption and graft at every level of Florida life.

One of the wondrous things about Florida, Rudy Graveline thought as he chewed on a jumbo shrimp, was the climate of unabashed corruption; there was absolutely no trouble from which money could not extricate you. (p.108)

When some of his maltreated patients organise a suit against Graveline, he simply buys the hearing officer a shiny new Volvo station wagon and all charges are dropped. Not only that, but:

The board immediately reinstated Rudy’s licence and sealed all the records from the public and the press – thus honouring the long-held philosophy of Florida’s medical establishment that the last persons who need to know about a doctor’s incompetence are his patients. (p.109)

All the commissioners have off-the-record accounts in the Cayman Islands to stash the earnings they make through corruption and graft (p.110).

Commissioner Roberto Pepsical… found himself surrounded by ruthless and untrustworthy people – nobody played a straight game any more. In Miami corruption had become a sport for the masses. (p.228)

Miami, home of corruption and coke dealers.

Half the new Miami skyscrapers had been built with coke money and existed largely as an inside joke, a mirage to please the banks and the Internal Revenue Service and the chamber of commerce. Everyone liked to say that the skyline was a tribute to local prosperity but Stranahan recognised it as a tribute to the anonymous genius of Latin American money launderers. (p.316)

And crooked lawyers:

‘But lawyers aren’t supposed to solicit.’
‘Al, this is Miami.’ (p.324)

And all-purpose criminals:

‘Neighbourhoods like this are hard to find, Mick. You know, we’ve only been burglarised twice in  four years. That’s not bad for Miami.’ (p. 322)

Hiaasen does have a few good characters: Luis Córdova, a young marine patrolman who regularly calls by Stranahan’s house, in his boat, warns him if trouble is coming. The old black guy, Cartwright, who Stranahan helped in a battle with crooked property developers back in the day (is there any other kind?).

And he creates a heavily symbolic figure, Timmy Gavigan, a retired cop who is lying in a hospital bed far gone with terminal cancer. He’s an old friend of Stranahan’s who visits him several times during the course of the novel, as does the TV producer Christina Marks as part of her investigations.

Gavigan is pretty obviously designed as a symbol of old-school Integrity and so it is no accident that he’s wasting away and dying, symbol of an old world of integrity and decency being drowned in a sea of scumbags.

There’s a scene where Gavigan is in bed, barely able to breathe, being visited by compassionate Christina, when the two piggish and corrupt cops, Joe Salazar and John Murdock, barge in and try to bully Gavigan into incriminating Stranahan, while she tries to moderate their behaviour. Worthy old symbol of honour harassed to the grave by swinish corruption.

Against this one good man is set a panorama of everyday corruption at every level and in every area of Florida life. And the terrible thing about corruption is it’s so dynamic, it has so much energy.

The county had hired [George Graveline, Rudy’s tree-trimming brother] to rip out the old trees to make space for some tennis courts. Before long a restaurant would spring up next to the tennis courts and, after that, a major resort hotel. The people who would run the restaurant and the hotel would receive the use of the public property for practically nothing, thanks to their pals on the county commission. In return, the commissioners would receive a certain secret percentage of the refreshment concessions. And the voters would have brand-new tennis courts, whether they wanted them or not. (p.275)

Anti-American

From time to time, Hiaasen suggests it’s not just Florida, that the vista of unreasoned violence and chaos which he so furiously depicts extends out across the entire United States. For example, he jokily refers to the occurrence of the ‘regular’ mass shooting in Oklahoma as if mass shootings are now a boringly familiar occurrence; or jokes that a shootout and fight at Chemo’s New York apartment (when Chemo finds Stranahan has broken in and is going through his things) barely even makes the papers in that ultra-violent city (p.223).

There are numerous other minor, casual incidents which highlight the casual sexism, violence and cynicism of American culture. At the start of the novel Mick boats it back to the house on stilts to discover that while he’s away a speedboat of young people has deposited their young women to sunbathe (nude) on his decking while the guys goof around and waterski on the boat.

Mick is polite to the women, who quickly cover up and is only a little disconcerted when one of them, Tina, strolls into his shack and asks him to assess her naked body. Why? Because she wants to have plastic surgery to perfect it.

But the point of the story is that when the young men return to the shack, Tina’s boyfriend, Richie, is jealous when he sees her walking out of the shack naked and accompanied by Mick. Mick courteously ferries the girls out to their boyfriends’ boat and has turned and is making away, when he hears and sees Tina’s boyfriend start badmouthing her and then smacking her. Mick turns his skiff round, jumps onto the speedboat and beats the crap out of the boyfriend.

I take the point that Mick is a beacon of chivalry in a sleazy shitty world but… not really. He himself is liable to violent rages and violent attacks. Everyone is. It comes over as a very, very violent place.

Even without the corruption, violence and killing, Hiaasen often appears to simply not like Americans, especially the chavvy scum he sees visiting the Sunshine State.

[Maggie and Chemo] got in line at the Pan Am counter, surrounded by a typical Miami-bound contingent – old geezers with tubas for sinuses; shiny young hustlers in thin gold chains; huge hollow-eyes families that looked like they’d staggered out of a Sally Struthers telethon. (p.221)

Bands

An entertainingly comic thread running through the book is the way that Chemo, in between his jaunts as a hit man, has a crappy job as a bouncer at a low-rent venue called the Gay Bidet, which hosts a succession of ‘punk’ rock bands, such as the Fudge Packers (p.163), Cathy and the Catheters, Queen of Slut Rock (p.236) or the Fabulous Foreskins (p.302).

I found these band names, and the fights which generally break out at the gigs between neo-Nazis and rednecks or rival gangs of skinheads, much more realistic and fun than any of the laboured, would-be ‘cool’ band references in the rock-obsessed novels of William Gibson.

Mind you, Hiaasen’s rock references are nearly as dated as Gibson’s. As a test to see whether they’re going to be compatible, Stranahan routinely asks his girlfriends to name the Beatles. Most fail. After sleeping with young Tina (who he rescued from her violent boyfriend and who, later, comes back to see him alone) a couple of times, Mick realises she’s far too young for him and, when she fails to name all the members of the Beatles, gives that as a reason for dumping her.

Whereas when he eases into an affair with the investigative TV producer, Christina Marks, taking her nude swimming at midnight etc, the fact that she not only names all four members of the Beatles but throws in early member Pete Best, jokily cements the affair (p.248). 1989 it was published, nearly 20 years after the Beatles split up. Hiaasen comes over as a textbook example of ageing Dad Rock.

Human relationships

I know it’s meant to be grotesquely extreme and fiercely satirical, but Hiaasen’s novels confirm the sense I get whenever I watch modern American TV or read about American novels or movies, which is that – Americans have stopped being able to relate to each other as decent human beings.

Everyone in Hiaasen’s fiction uses everyone else instrumentally, as tools to an end: the bad guys egregiously so, but even the good guys like Brian Keyes or R.J. Decker (in the previous two novels) or Mick Stranahan in this one, they also manipulate and use the other human beings around them, lying, deceiving and manipulating as necessary to achieve their goals.

There’s no-one in these novels who isn’t a crook or a user, in the sense of someone who takes advantage of or exploits others. The relentlessly bilious cynicism can, eventually, become a little wearing. And so, despite the presence of many comical and farcical moments, the book somehow lacks the joi de satiriser of the first two novels, the sprezzatura. The portrait of a society mired in corruption and casual violence is too persuasive and too depressing.

The name’s Bond

In my reviews of William Gibson’s novels I pointed out the slight but detectable ‘anxiety of influence’ they evince, the text’s feeling that, at key moments, it is veering very close to James Bond territory (Machiavellian mastermind, handsome omni-competent hero, dishy woman, state-of-the-art gadgets) and how Gibson tries to address and defuse the perception with a couple of jokey references to Bond movies or villains.

Interestingly, Hiaasen does the same. Sooner or later one or other of the characters realises the all-action adventure they’re in is coming perilously close to Bond territory, and Hiaasen anticipates the reader twigging this by making his own jokey reference. In the previous novel the slippery vamp, Lanie, tells the hero that her favourite Bond is Sean Connery. Here, the reference comes when Mick’s ex-wife Chloe is goading Chemo:

‘Have you got your plan?’ Chloe asked
‘The less you know, the better.’
‘Oh, pardon me,’ she said caustically. ‘Pardon me, Mr James Fucking Bond.’ (p.95)

Soon afterwards Chemo chucks the anchor at Chloe which drags her to the bottom of the lagoon and drowns her. Don’t mention Bond. That said the book contains more references to the TV series Miami Vice which was undergoing an explosion of popularity at the time and, maybe, threatened to steal Hiaasen’s thunder. In America, competition, for everything, is always fierce (pages 307, 348).

Recurring characters

Mick Stranahan returns to feature in Hiaasen’s 2004 novel Skinny Dip.

Chemo returns in the 2010 novel, Star Island.

Credit

Skin Tight by Carl Hiaasen was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1989. All references are to the 1991 Pan paperback edition.

Carl Hiaasen reviews

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All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson (1999)

Nothing dates quicker than the future. All Tomorrow’s Parties is the title of a song by the Velvet Underground recorded in 1967. The choice of a Velvet Underground track as the title of a novel supposedly set in a hi-tech future confirms the sense that Gibson, born in 1948, despite being credited with the invention of futuristic visions of cyberspace and cyberpunk, in fact has a very 1960s/70s mentality, all dark glasses and leather jackets and ripped t-shirts.

Gibson is the Lou Reed of science fiction.

All Tomorrow’s Parties

This is the third in Gibson’s ‘Bridge Trilogy’ and reunites us with key characters from the earlier two novels, notably:

  • Berry Rydell (security guard and protagonist of Virtual Light)
  • derelict computer hacker Colin Laney (the protagonist of Idoru)
  • Shinya Yamazaki, self-described ‘student of existential sociology’ who appears in both the previous books
  • former bicycle courier Chevette

It’s ten or 20 years in the future, after a big earthquake (nicknamed ‘the Little Big One’, page 160) hit California, resulting in the state officially dividing into two administrations, NoCal and SoCal.

The earthquake rendered the famous Golden Gate bridge so unstable that it was closed to traffic and very quickly became a shanty town, a favela, people building shacks and shops out of spare parts and random kit on the lower and main levels of the bridge, then slowly building above these, using the massive cables and struts as superstructure to create a slum stretching up into the sky.

It had all been open then, just girders and railing and deck: now it was this tunnel, everything patched together out of junk, used lumber, plastic, whatever people could find, all of it lashed up however anybody could get it to stay, it looked like… (page 185)

The Bridge is populated by all kinds of lowlife, criminals, popup shops, computer hackers, fast food joints, seedy micro-hotels, wasted dudes trying to sell you drugs and so on. It sounds a lot like the rundown parts of New York in the 1970s, because William Gibson is the Lou Reed of science fiction. Hey man, take a walk on the wild side.

The characters use a would-be street slang which sometimes feels curiously dated. When the character Tessa refers to nightclubs she knows, she includes one named ‘Cognitive Dissidence’, quite a heavy-handed play on the modish phrase, ‘cognitive dissonance’, like the comically themed nightclubs in Idoru.

But when her friend Chevette says, ‘Yeah, she knows ‘”Cog Diss”‘ – the books seems to assume that abbreviating Cognitive Dissidence to Cog Diss indicates how wildly street and hip and in the know and down with the kids Chevette is, but – it made me laugh at its crapness. Increasingly, I am associating Gibson not with some far-out digital future, but with Lou Reed and ageing Dad Rock (def: ‘music played by old white dudes’).

This impression is bolstered by the role played in all these novels by:

  1. the very old-tech format of TV shows (Rydell wanted to be on a cop TV show, Tessa makes TV documentaries)
  2. guitar music. In fact the novel includes an actual rock band, a collection of ageing white dudes led by one Buell Creedmore (see below) and includes other (fictional) rock bands with stupid names, which Gibson has referred to throughout the trilogy, such as ‘Chrome Koran’ and ‘Blue Ahmed’

This is the seventh Gibson novel I’ve read and certain elements are a fixture:

  1. Something is about to happen, something big, he can’t tell you what it is but it’s gonna be big. Thus Laney, the guy who was experimented on at his orphanage (page 71) and as a result has developed a supernatural ability to recognise patterns in the vast reams of data flowing through the net, he knows something is coming, something which will change everything.
  2. The basic mindset is 1940s film noir, hardboiled crime genre, Raymond Chandler for the internet age. Guys are tough, dames are tough as well, but generally need rescuing by tougher guys. Thus the two main male characters in this novel are Berry Rydell, the tough security guard we met in the previous novels of the trilogy, and an even harder tough guy, a silent assassin who thinks, speaks and moves with Zen detachment, a man with no name (lol, really, I’m not kidding) until we do, finally, get his name, towards the end of the book. But for most of the text we are kept wondering, ‘Who is he?’ ‘What is he seeking?’
  3. The novel is made up of four or five storylines, each focusing on a lead character, which run separately and distinctly throughout the book but with the strong suggestion that they’re all going to link up somehow, towards the end, which is also when the Big Thing which has been hinted at throughout will finally take place.

The first and third of these elements in particular, make for a very strong narrative grip or attraction. All through the book we’re kept on tenterhooks wondering what The Big Thing is going to turn out to be, although with the nagging suspicion that, as with a number of the previous novels, The Big Thing might actually turn out to be a disappointment (as, for example, the vague and underwhelming marriage of a pop singer and a virtual woman in Idoru).

The book is 277 pages long and divided into 73 chapters giving an average of 3.8 pages per chapter, although many of them only run to 1 or 2 pages. That’s to say, the narrative moves at pace, cleverly constructed to jump between the activities of the four or five leading characters. These are:

Berry Rydell

Rydell is a rough, tough, handsome man, ‘all muscle and long legs’ (page 181). He was a cop back in Knoxville, Tennessee, till he killed a drugged-up abuser who was firing randomly into a closet where he’d locked his girlfriend’s kids. Forced to quit the police, Rydell joined a security operation, IntenSecure. Then he was hired by a TV show which turned nobodies into celebrities in order to knock them down, but became increasingly unhappy with it, specially after he was unable to prevent a woman the show was persecuting from killing herself. So he quit TV and ended up working as security in a hotel. Here he was spotted and recommended for a job as security to a pop star in Japan, Rez, who was planning to ‘marry’ a totally digital woman, and this was the plot of the previous novel in the series, Idoru.

We learn that after the events described in Idoru Rydell made it back to America, to Los Angeles, where he was working as security, again, this time for a chain of convenience stores called Lucky Dragon, owned by a Korean. For a while he lived with Chevette who he hooked up with during the previous novel and thought he was going to feature in a documentary about hard-done-by cops, made by the Cops In Trouble series. But slowly all his hopes fizzled away, and Rydell became so sad Chevette that left him (page 182) and he got the convenience store job.

It is here that, one day, he takes a phone call from Colin Laney, who was the one who fixed him up with the job in Japan, and now tells him he’s got a job for him up in San Francisco.

So Rydell quits the Lucky Dragon job and drives up to Frisco. He does so in a carshare arranged by his fellow security cop, Durius. The guy sharing the car is an aggressive drunk named Buell Creedmore. He’s a pain in the butt and when Rydell arrives in SF and parks the car, we think he’s walking away from Creedmore, but Creedmore continues to turn up through the book and we discover he is quite a decent country and western singer who sings with ‘legendary’ guitarist Randall James Branch Shoats from Mobile, Alabama (page 100).

Colin Laney

Laney was one of a cohort of kids at an orphanage in Kentucky who were experimented on without their knowledge or consent. They were given an experimental drug, 5-SB.

‘5-SB allows the apprehension of nodal points, discontinuities in the texture of information. They indicate emergent change, but not what that change will be.’ (page 194)

Its effect was to make Laney supersensitive to the flow and shape of information flooding through the (still fairly primitive) internet (page 75).

At one point in his career Laney was a quantitative analyst for Slitscan, a tabloid TV show ‘of quite monumental viciousness’ (page 222). In Idoru he was hired as co-ordinator of internet data helping to create and curate the digital woman. Now we learn the idoru has left Rez who, in mourning has undertaken a rock tour of the Kombinat states (i.e. the old Soviet Union) and Laney, ill with probable tuberculosis, poor and decrepit, has gone into hiding in a large cardboard box hidden in the bowels of Shinjuku station, which he rents off a wordless Japanese man who spends all day silently making models.

This is where Shinya Yamazaki, an ‘existential sociologist’ who featured in both the previous novels, tracks him down and tries to bring him antibiotics and food. But Laney is too obsessed to eat. Right at the start of the book he tells Yamazaki that the datasets are building towards a seismic change. ‘What’s going to change?’ asks Yamazaki. Everything, replies Laney, thus creating the sense of suspense which keeps the reader turning the next 250 pages.

We also learn what happened to Rez and the idoru after the end of the previous novel. Basically, Laney was hired in the period covered by Idoru to facilitate the ‘marriage’ of the rock star Rez and the ’emergent digital being’, Rei Toei. That novel ended with the couple getting ‘married’ and going off to a newly-built circular island in Tokyo Bay. Now we learn that after that, Laney was kept on to educate this digital being, Rei Toei but that, as she grew and learned more about the world, she grew away from Rez. Laney realised he was falling in love with this being made entirely of data and so, one day, quit his job (pages 163 to 164). Soon afterwards he heard Rei had left the island, the marriage was over, and so Laney went into hiding, hiding out in the cardboard box buried deep in Shinjuku station.

Laney now devotes himself all day long to being the unfiltered ‘eye’ through which all the data in the world passes, via DatAmerica. And he sees a massive change coming. And the change is something to do with Cody Harwood, Machiavellian CEO of Harwood Levine, the most powerful PR company in the world.

The Man with no name

He wears a long coat, a loden coat. Round-lenses glasses which hide his eyes. He was in the military. He wastes no movement or word. He is ‘Lean and concise’ (page 220). He follows the Tao. He believes only in the moment.

We meet him in a chapter where he is tailed onto the Bridge by a couple of lowlife drug addicts. When they try to mug him he kills them both with silent movement of his hands, holding a super-sharp knife, too quick to see or defend from. He is watched by the muggers’ young mute hanger-on, known as Silencio because he doesn’t talk. No name takes Silencio to a diner and buys him fruit shakes and, when the boy is fascinated by the old wristwatch he’s wearing, gives it to him.

In the middle section of the book we see the man with no name in his spartan hotel room performing his secret assassin exercises, or sharpening his super-sharp assassin’s knife in ritualised movements. Despite the cheesiness of all this I couldn’t help finding it at the same time everso ‘cool’, as it is designed to be.

Fontaine

Fontaine is ‘an angular black man whose graying hair is twisted into irregular branches that hang like the arms of a dusty houseplant in need of water’ (page 159). He is harassed by his two wives Tourmaline and Clarisse. He keeps a popup second-hand shop on the Bridge, specialising in gadgets, wristwatches a speciality. It was Fontaine who cobbled together a home-made stairlift up to the shack belonging to a man named Skinner, up on a higher level of the favella, and whic Chevette, who lived with much older Skinner, used to use to take her bike down to ground level to carry out her job as a bicycle courier, all of this described in the first of the trilogy, Virtual Light.

One morning Fontaine notices Silencio’s nose pressed against the glass. He lets him in and, after some initial nervousness about whether he’s a burglar, lets him stay, starts buying him meals, lets him sleep out back – not least because Silencio lets Fontaine have the awesome watch which the Man with No Name gave him.

Soon Silencio gravitates from staring at Fontaine’s watch collection to being given a pair of eyephones and scanning at speed through all the watches available at all the auctions round the world. Silencio starts to talk but all he does is repeat the technical specifications of the watches he’s looking at.

Chevette

In the previous novels we met Chevette-Marie Washington in her capacity of bicycle courier and carer for the ageing Skinner, who had taken her in and fed her when she was young and homeless. Then she had an affair and lived with rough tough Berry Rydell for a while. As this novel opens she is living in a house rented out to students on the coast of Los Angeles. The house is fenced off from the beach where there has been some kind of disastrous unnamed chemical ‘spill’.

Chevette’s main housemate is Tessa who’s Australian and a media sciences student at USC (page 32). Tessa wants to make a documentary about the Bridge using Chevette as a way in to its closed and secretive society. She regards the Bridge as ‘interstitial’, an adjective Chevette takes the piss out of for the rest of the book.

Tessa’s recently been playing with a camera on a small drone. Chevette has barely woken up before she and housemate Tessa spot a man snooping round the house. It is Carson, Chevette’s ex-boyfriend, smooth, handsome, in the media working for a show called ‘Real One’ (everyone works in TV in these novels). He was Chevette’s boyfriend till the night he hit her. She moved out and went into hiding in this abandoned beachfront property. Now he’s found her.

So to avoid Carson, the women sneak out the back way and round to Tessa’s van. She’s already packed. Chevette never unpacked. They slip into the van, fire the ignition and spurt away. Whither? Well, Tessa wants to make a doc about the Bridge so they head north, to NoCal and San Francisco.

Plot developments

These days Laney phones his mate Rydell at regular intervals. He instructs Rydell to contact his attorney, F.X. Tong, which he does via videoglasses. Rydell has a knackered pair given to him by the cashier at the Lonely Dragon, Miss Praisegod Satansbane (page 11). The ‘shades’ are originally from Brazil so when Rydell touches the instruction panel in the wing of the shades he often gets a street map of Rio and everything in Portuguese, but nothing’s perfect.

Through a bad connection Tong gives him instructions to use the ATM in the branch of the Lucky Dragon near the start of the Bridge, then go to the GlobEx franchise at the back, use the identity code Tong gives him and collect a package. All of which he does. The package is a couple of feet long, six inches square and very heavy. Rydell carries it further onto the Bridge, finds an anonymous popup hotel and greasy spoon, the Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl, which rents him a tiny room, really only a horizontal pod.

There’s more. Laney calls Rydell and tells him to go to a particular computer accessory shop and pick up some cables. It’s called Bad Sector and staffed by an enormous Chinese youth with an irritating under-moustache. He devises little robots which toddle around the shop counter and hand out and receive goods to and from customers.

Back in the pod Rydell finally unwraps the package to discover it contains a metal object like a thermos flask, figures out how to attach the cables, powers it up and… out appears a hologram of the emergent digital being from the previous novel, Rei Toei, beautiful, immaculate, seductive, very intelligent, and Rydell is entranced.

Chevette and Tessa arrive in San Francisco and park the van by the Bridge. They stroll around and into a bar where, by quite a big coincidence, there’s Buell Creedmore who is about to perform with ‘legendary’ guitarist Shoats. Before the performance has even begun, Chevette sees, by an even bigger coincidence, her feared ex, Carson, walk in,

Laney phones Rydell again, tells him the world is going to end. Well, the world as we know it (page 166). Laney is convinced the crisis will crystallise around a dude named Cody Harwood, a lean, rich head of a major public relations firm.

Separately, Laney becomes uneasily aware that someone is watching him when, in the dataflow, he is watching Harwood. He is shocked when two fellow hackers from Mexico City tell him it is Harwood watching him watching Harwood, because Harwood has himself taken the experimental drug 5-SB and so gained heightened awareness of the flows of information through the world’s datasets.

Laney’s informants from Mexico (Rooster and Klaus) tell him that Harwood is rich and has interests in a range of mega corporations including Nanofax AG of Geneva:

‘Nanofax AG offers a technology that digitally reproduces objects, physically, at a distance.’ (page 195)

So we know that Harwood has taken 5-SB and so has advanced nodal apprehension, and is installing Nanofax modules in every Lucky Dragon store, because he has a controlling interest in that franchise as well (page 209). But what’s he ultimately up to?

We see Harwood ordering minions to keep monitoring Laney and to find whoever it was who collected the package Laney had FedExed from Japan i.e. the thermos device which contains Rei Toei. Remember the two street hoodlums who the Man with No Name silently knifed earlier on? Now Laney phones Rydell and tells him to go to the crime scene. Why? Because it will trigger the next stage, though Laney doesn’t know what.

Rydell is tailed So Rydell goes along and, sure enough, Harwood has minicams monitoring the scene so immediately uses facial recognition to identify Rydell and access his entire past history. Harwood dispatches some toughs to tail him. Cut to Rydell being tailed for a few blocks across the Bridge, particularly by some guy in black with a scarf. He thinks he’s cleverly evaded them when he turns a corner and is punched so hard in the side by an enormous dud that he feels some ribs break. The big guy is shaping up for another punch when he goes quite, blank-faced, falls to his knees. The Man with No Name is behind him, has stabbed and killed him.

The bar with no name The Man with No Name marches Rydell away but as they pass the nightclub (with no name) Rydell takes the opportunity to nip inside. He arrives just as Buell Creedmore is finishing his set with Tessa and Chevette (Rydell’s ex) also there. So at about this point the reader sees the plotlines led by the various characters finally coming together. Even more so when, to provoke no-name, Rydell activates the thermos (which he carries everywhere with him) and Rei Toei appears in the middle of the crowded bar to everyone’s astonishment.

Shootout But at that moment the band ends its performance, Chevette leaves the light and sound console where she’s been with Tessa, goes down to the main floor to capture the mini-drones Tessa’s been using to film the performance when, to her amazement, she is spun round and punched really hard in the face. It is her ex, Carson the woman beater. He advances on her to hit her again but is pulled round and punched hard by… by Rydell, her other lover!

Dazed Chevette is amazed. But Carson gets to his feet and punches Rydell hard in the ribs and we know they’re broken so Rydell squeals with pain. At which point he is pushed out the way and Chevette sees the guy with the scarf who had been tailing Rydell and has now arrived in the bar, step forward and shoot Carson with a silenced gun. Now she knows she’s in some kind of dream.

Tessa, from up in the lighting control booth, turns the lights out in the bar and there’s a stampede, people getting hurt. Rei Toei is like a genie, a stream of white light tormenting the shooter while Rydell in great pain lifts Chevette and helps her to a side door which they kick open and emerge into a street filling up with screaming punters. Chevette runs, Rydell limps after her, then both of them are stopped by the magical appearance of the Man with No Name carrying the thermos, which Rydell in the general panic had forgotten.

Fontaine’s Next thing we know they are beating on the locked door of Fontaine’s watch shop. Fontaine wakes (it’s the middle of the night) and reluctantly lets them in. In fact – we realise with a start – it is meant to be only 24 hours since the Man with No Name killed those two muggers on the bridge. Anyway, Fontaine recognises Chevette as the pretty young thing who lived in an apartment above his and who looked after Skinner before she left for LA. And the Man with No Name calmly recognises Silencio, who is also woken up by the noise, as the boy he took to the milk bar and gave his watch to.

So the gang’s all here. All the major characters have been brought together, with 40 pages or so of the novel left to go. So what is this Big Thing which we’ve been promised throughout the text?

The Man with No Name explains that Harwood has hired mercenaries to capture Rydell because he knows he has something important to Laney but isn’t sure what. Also, that the mercs will kill anyone who stands in their way. He asks for Fontaine’s gun and explains he’s going out to kill as many of the mercenaries as he can, that everyone else should remain holed up in Fontaine’s shop, and disappears through the door into the night.

There’s a shootout. The Man with No Name, inevitably, kills two of the mercs because that’s what Clint Eastwood types do. Rydell, crouching in Fontaine’s inner room, asks Fontaine if he has a weapon and the latter discloses a vicious chain-gun, owned by Fontaine’s lawyer (a paranoid refugee from the African Union) which he has hidden in a wall recess. They get it out, Rydell steps into the shop proper, someone fires off a bevy of automatic rifle, Ryfell aims in that direction and fires the chain gun which fires razor wire at high speed. It converts anyone in its way into hamburger. So that is the messy end of the third mercenary.

Cut to the head merc headphoning Harwood who instructs him to set the bridge on fire. Back in the shop the Man with No Name arrives and hands the gun back to Fontaine. Rydell takes a call from Laney on the Brazilian shades, Laney tells him the bridge is being torched but to leave the thermos / Rei Toei on the bridge. He plugs the thermo device into a power socket and Rei appears, a shimmering beautiful slender woman. She says hello to Rydell but then addresses the Man with No Name and tells him his name is Konrad. And that he still carries a torch for a slender blonde, Lise, who he lost back in the day. Aah. So the cold-hearted killer is a softie after all.

Out of nowhere Tessa arrives trailing drones with cameras, riding on a big three wheeler driven by Elmore, the skinny lighting guy from the club. Chevette and Rydell clamber onto it but can’t persuade Fontaine or the Silent kid to join them. Elmore turns the bike and roar off towards the San Francisco end of the bridge.

But they soon run into crowds fleeing the fire and get knocked off the bike. Tessa disappears, Rydell grabs for Chevette and loses the chain gun down a sewer pipe. Oops. Chevette leads Rydell to the steps up and to the little funicular train Fontaine made up to Skinner’s home-made apartment.

Meanwhile Laney has co-opted his friends in ‘the Walled City’. These are dissident Chinese hackers who were kicked out of the actual walled city when Hong Kong was handed back to China but created a digital alternative for nerds and hackers everywhere. Mustering their support, in cyberspace Laney suddenly finds himself face to face with Harwood. The latter is suave and debonair and insouciant like the baddies in all James Bond movies are. He is not sure what is going to happen and he disappears down into the flow of data.

Meanwhile Rydell and Chevette emerge onto the roof of Skinner’s pad only to be ambushed by the man with the black scarf, leader of the mercenaries. He pistol whips Rydell and then points the gun to kneecap him but Chevette begs him not to and he doesn’t. Instead he steps into the mini-glider he’s had stashed up here all the time. But as he steps over the edge of Skinner’s roof into the night sky, Chevette runs forward and with Skinner’s knife rips a long tear in the fabric, rendering the glider utterly useless and the mercenary plunges straight down, hitting pillars and stanchions like all the master baddy’s henchmen in every James Bond movie and cheap thriller movie ever made.

Chevette runs back to big strong Rydell (‘my man!’) and helps him sit up groggily. Now the smoke from the fire engulfs them and they start choking but at that very moment a helicopter bearing a vast load of ice cold water hoves into view just over them and dumps hundreds of tonnes of water onto the Bridge.

Meanwhile back at Fontaine’s shop, Rei Toei had told Konrad to plug the thermos into the eyephones Silencio uses. He enters cyberspace and Rei is with him. She tells him to follow the watch, the last watch he could see, and Silencio with his advanced obsessive feel for watches and nothing but watches follows it across the cyberverse and is suddenly in a small room in the bowels of a castle where he meets Harwood who is astonished to see him. Then some of the avatars from the Walled City appear and we know they have used Silencio’s skills to track down Harwood to his hiding place.

Meanwhile, back out in the real world, a black kid, Boomzilla, who we met much much earlier when Tessa and Chevette paid him to mind their van, he is in the Lucky Dragon branch nearest the Bridge, watching the crazy action, huge fire, fire engines everywhere, then choppers dropping vast amounts of water, anyway all this mayhem only slightly delays the first ever use of the Nanofax gadget.

Boomzilla watches a little speech being given saying the original Lucky Dragon statuette will be inserted in the Singapore headquarters and then rebuilt in every Lucky Dragon franchise around the world. Except that the light pings and out of the microwave-looking device unfolds a naked Japanese girl, slender and black-haired, smiles at everyone and runs out the front door.

Back on the Bridge it’s dawn. Rydell has spent the night with Chevette in the heavy duty sleeping bag the mercenary had used on Skinner’s roof. Very warm and cosy. He gets up, butt naked, pads to the edge to have a pee. There’s a hovering drone with Tessa’s voice blaring at a sleepy Chevette, that she, Tessa, got loads of footage during the fire, she’s got a contract to make her documentary (TV again).

Eventually the drone buzzes off. Rydell climbs down a layer and is surprised to find Buell Creedmore holed up there. He too climbed up to escape the flames. Well, the venue’s burned down, and Buell whines that his career is over. In what is probably meant to be a comical moment he reveals he ain’t a good ole boy country-and-western dude after all, he grew up in suburban New Jersey. And he starts crying.

Rydell climbs back to the roof and realises he is overwhelmingly in love with Chevette.

Cut to Konrad, the former Man with No Name, catching a cab to TransAmerica, the main mega corporation run by Harwood. Here he presents himself and is strip searched and handcuffed and accompanied to the lift by seven goons, as per Harwood’s instructions. But his weapon is in the belt buckle at front of his trousers. By the time the lift arrives he will have killed all of them. Because like the assassin / ninjas / superheroes of so many Yank movies, he is invulnerable.

Yamazaki has brought Keith Blackwell, the enormous Australian head of security of the pop singer Rez, who featured heavily in the previous novel, to rescue Laney. They go down to the cardboard city in the bowels of Shinjuku railway station and Blackwell razors open Laney’s carton. But he isn’t there.

Fontaine returns from the Red Cross stands at the end of the Bridge. Stuff is still being cleared up but there’s more media vans than emergency services. Silencio has been sweeping up the broken glass outside the shop and doing a good job. You get the sense Fontaine will adopt him. He reminds me of the mute boy sweeping up main street in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 coming-of-age movie, The Last Picture Show. This novel is written in Gibson’s cyberstyle, but it overflows with very traditional, down-home, American sentimentality.

And sure enough, in the final chapter, in the last scene, Silencio starts to talk!. He appears to be in charge of the shop now. And another boy brings in a ruined watch. And in a token of the future, the boy asks Silencio if he can watch the weird device fix his watch. They place the damaged watch onto ‘the bed’ and watch it sink into it as a coin into mud. Within its womb molecules work and within nine minutes the watch will emerge utterly restored good as new. The future is now.

Thoughts

Well, number one, it is a major achievement to think in these terms, to conceive of plots which revolve around dataflows and nodal points within cyberspace. Most people were struggling to adapt to the dial-up versions of the internet in 1999 while Gibson had already perfected a way of creating entrancing fictions out of it.

And Gibson’s highly engineered prose poetry is phenomenal. He has all kinds of tricks up his sleeve to keep it pumping – short phrases, omitting subjects of sentences, slang, streetwise allusions to keep you constantly on your toes. Modern thriller basic tricks.

  • Fontaine looked at Rydell. Pursed his lips. Nodded. (page 234)
  • Hole there the size of a saucer, and getting bigger. (page 261)

Short sentences. Leave out subject. Makes it hipper. Cool style.

But… but… although the book has countless clever angles and is written in a highly stylised, tech savvy, thriller style… key scenes include a fight in a bar and a shootout around a shop where the good guys have been pinned down by the bad guys. It feels like Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) or the familiar rundown seedy future wreckage of a movie like Escape From New York (1981). In other words, at numerous places the actual storyline and events feel hackneyed, clichéd, and filled with the over-familiar tropes of ten thousand American action movies.

Paint it black

And black. Everyone wears black. Of course they do, because it’s cool. Rydell wears a black t-shirt. Chevette is wearing black jeans and a black sweatshirt. The lead mercenary wears a black leather coat and a black scarf. Two other mercs were a black leather jacket and a black armoured vest (page 241). The skinny drug addict who runs the lights at the club where Buell performs and then the fight breaks out, he wears a black meshbacked cap and a black t-shirt (page 246). Everyone wears black because black is cool and fashionable, what people wear in fashion shoots, in edgy ads, in movies like The Matrix. It’s the only colour Lou Reed wore and Gibson is the Lou Reed of science fiction.

World-shattering claims, tiny cast

Gibson’s novels use the rhetoric of world-changing worldshifts. But in the end the stories only involve about fifteen characters (the speaking parts in this one are Durius, Rydell, Buell, Shoat, their girlfriend Maryalice, Tessa, Chevette, Konrad, Fontain, Silencio, Elmore, Laney, Carson, Harwood, lead mercenary).

Not only that, but they are all sane. What I mean is they’re all cut from the same basic thriller cloth, they all think with the same rational clarity, they all act with that thriller directness and logic (with the possible exception of the Man with No Name who is, therefore, the most interesting character). When the fire starts Fontaine briefly alludes to the feral kids growing up on the Bridge but, when you stop and think about it, there is absolutely no reference to the psychological impact of growing up in the Bridge favelas. In fact when you stop and reflect, there is pretty much no psychology in any of these novels. All the characters are capable and competent, good at fighting, handy with guns, behave like cardboard characters from action movies. Nobody panics, goes to pieces or doesn’t know what to do.

Compare and contrast Gibson’s fiction with the stories of J.G. Ballard who specialises in characters who collapse into private psychoses, weird private visions, and whose stories create in the reader a sense of being seriously adrift, trapped in a world completely at odds with the usual one (The Drought, The Drowned World, High Rise, Concrete Island).

There’s never any sense of the genuinely strange in Gibson – with the one shining exception of the way he describes characters like Laney experiencing cyberspace, plugging in and suddenly being amid canyons of gleaming data, the ‘grey fields of light’ (page 254). Now that is new and vivid and wonderful.

But a lot of the rest of the action could come from a standard Jack Reacher novel, with rough, tough manly hero (Rydell) saving his girl (Chevette), forging a brief friendship with the black dude (Fontaine) helped by the mysterious stranger (Konrad) and in which the baddy is, as always, the unscrupulous rich (white) head of some mega-corporation.

Rei Toei may be a cool invention, an entirely digital being, but every time she appears she is, for the first second, butt naked and very beautiful (as Chevette notices with intense jealousy first time she appears to Rydell). Beautiful, naked young Japanese girls. Hardly subverting action movie clichés, is it, or the basic stereotypes of all action narratives, whether in thrillers, movies or graphic novels or comics.

In that respect, far from feeling out there and experimental, most of Gibson’s fiction feels fantastically familiar from any number of Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise action adventure movies. Die Hard With A Laptop.

Also, Rei Toei may be a cool invention, the first entirely digital being and yet…what does she actually do? What does she change or make happen? It feels a lot like Gibson can come up with these great ideas, images, digital symbols but then… really struggles to make them relevant to the real world, to come up with a plot which justifies the hype.

Oh, and the Big Thing, When The World Changed, The Thing Which Was Going To Change Everything which was heavily trailed throughout the novel, designed to keep the reader on the edge of their seat?

As so often in a Gibson novel, it doesn’t, in fact, happen. Nothing changes. The world does not come to an end. Cody Harwood seems to be trying to pull off some scam but we never understand what it is. So now an American convenience store franchise is going to be able to do 3-D printing? Hmmm. Not world shattering is it?

Instead a young, thin, naked Japanese girl steps out of a microwave. Maybe we’re meant to interpret this as the advent of a New Era in Human History because we’ve invented teleporting. But, in fictional terms, it pales into insignificance next to the classic tough guy Rydell holding his babe Chevette round the shoulders as dawn broke over the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge, shucks.

A month or so after reading the book all I really remember about it is the Golden Gate Bridge being set on fire and the shootout at the shop, both of them hard-core 1970s action movie tropes.

Credit

All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson was published by Viking Press in 1999. All references are to the 2000 Penguin paperback edition.

Other William Gibson reviews

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Posted by Simon on April 16, 2021

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Virtual Light by William Gibson (1993)

Yamazaki crossed to the smooth curve of cable that interrupted the room’s floor. Only an oval segment of it was visible, like some mathematical formula barely breaking a topological surface in a computer representation. He bent to touch it, the visible segment polished by other hands. Each of the thirty-seven cables, containing four hundred and seventy-two wires, had withstood, and withstood now, a force of some million pounds. Yamazaki felt something, some message of vast, obscure moment, shiver up through the relic-smooth dorsal hump. The storm, surely; the bridge itself was capable of considerable mobility; it expanded and contracted with heat and cold; the great steel teeth of the piers were sunk into bedrock beneath the Bay mud, bedrock that had scarcely moved even in the Little Grande. (Virtual Light, page 182)

The Sprawl trilogy and Gibson’s prose

Gibson is a science fiction author but incorporates a good deal of noir, pulp, thriller and other genre tropes as well as, occasionally, rising to genuinely ‘literary’ complexity of psychological affect. I just read Michael Crichton’s debut novel, The Andromeda Strain, and that has a very straightforward plot, a thriller mapped out across five days, written in extremely clear and lucid prose, written so a 9-year-old could understand it. There are occasional demanding passages describing scientific theories around biology, extra-terrestrial life and so on, but these also are written with the clarity of a school textbook. Clarity is the aim.

Gibson by contrast, is noted for the cool, streetwise, technologically savvy and drug-wired prose style which he invented for his so-called Sprawl trilogy – being Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).

All three of those novels concern ‘street’ people, hustlers, living among the shanties and hi-tech canyons of a futuristic society, living lives full of violence and drugs, and in all three these hustlers are slowly introduced to the higher levels of society, to the professional middle classes, then to billionaires, and so take us on a journey of discovery to uncover the real workings of their post-war society (the Sprawl trilogy is set 50 or 60 years in the future, after World War III).

Another feature of all three Sprawl novels is you’re never really sure what is going on – even when I reached the semi-apocalyptic endings of all three novels, I wasn’t completely sure what had just happened. Since I felt the same about his collaboration with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, which also rises to a kind of visionary apocalyptic climax, I concluded that this is a consistent element of Gibson’s approach: that key aspects of the narrative are kept mysterious, giving you the feeling of something ungraspable, just out of reach.

This is one way in which his books might be said to be ‘literary’, in a way the utterly obvious and unmysterious Crichton never is. Everything is explained in Crichton; big important things are not explained, in Gibson.

The Bridge trilogy

Virtual Light is the first of what developed into a new set of three novels, the Bridge Trilogy. How are the Sprawl and Bridge trilogies different? Well, the Sprawl stories were set about fifty years in the future, in around 2035 (they were written in the 1980s), after World War III, when everyone has access to advanced digital technology, and hackers make a living ‘jacking into’ cyberspace in order to carry out hit and run raids against the vast data icebergs of the future corporations which run everything.

The Bridge Trilogy is set in the future, but not so far into the future nor in so different a society. To be precise, it is set only ten years or so after the first novel was published – in what was then the ‘future’ of 2006.

There have still been society-changing events: a mega earthquake (which seems to be named Little Grande) has divided California into NoCal and SoCal (first mentioned page 8) resulting in a steady stream of new volcanoes up in Washington state (p.32). The President is a black woman (p.9), the air is toxic from all the polluting vehicles, skin cancer is a problem, everyone wears a lot of suntan cream (p.14) (see a full list of characteristics of the Bridge world, below).

Why is it called the Bridge trilogy? Because a central feature is that San Francisco’s famous Golden Gate Bridge broke during the earthquake, and has been transformed by homeless survivors into a huge, futuristic shantytown. For some of the old-timers who ‘colonised’ it, like Skinner, it’s a place to end their days, but for others like the fresh young heroine of the book, Chevette, it’s all they’ve ever known.

She looked up, just as she whipped between the first of the [concrete] slabs, and the bridge seemed to look down at her, its eyes all torches and neon. She’d seen pictures of what it looked like, before, when they drove cars back and forth on it all day, but she’d never quite believed them. The bridge was what it was, and somehow always had been. Refuge, weirdness, where she slept, home to however many and all their dreams. (p.122)

Given that the trilogy is named after the bridge, it’s notable that the bridge, as such, doesn’t feature that much in the plot, although it is woven in as a key setting, being the temporary home of Chevette and featuring the scene where a bounty hunter comes looking for her there.

The word ‘bridge’ possibly also has a metaphorical sense in that the entire trilogy is a ‘bridge’ from the present (well, the 1990s when Gibson wrote them) to the hyper-digital future envisioned in the Sprawl trilogy of the 2030s and ’40s.

All manner of cool references are slipped into the text about this cool future, which combines a maximum of stoner, drug, derelict street savvy with the highly-armed, gun expertise of Judge Dredd. Thus there is a lot of talk about Glock machine guns, knives, flick-knives, stunguns, SWAT stun grenades and many more weapons. This is meant to be a semi-dystopian future but a) the fact that it is set in what is now our past and b) its obsession with guns, just reinforces my sense of what a screwed-up, hyper-violent society America is, now.

The cool gun expertise alternates with cool references to a new designer drug, ‘dancer’.

Seriously tooled-up intruders tended to be tightened on dancer, and therefore were both inhumanly fast and clinically psychotic. (p.9)

From the get-go Gibson is master of a street savvy, whip-smart, post-Beat prose. Here’s a paragraph from the first page:

The air beyond the window touches each source of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence. Fine dry flakes of fecal snow, billowing in from the sewage flats, have lodged in the lens of night. (page 1)

A lot is going on here, but to pick three obvious points:

  1. It’s poetic prose, designed to be savoured and reread for its sound alone.
  2. ‘The sewage flats’? This is the one and only time they’re mentioned in the book so they take their place alongside hundreds of other details which are thrown away, unexplained, and from which the reader uses their imagination to construct the functioning and appearance of this futureworld (see the list below).
  3. ‘lodged in the lens of night’ is a self-consciously poetic and imaginative image. The book is full of them. It is a self-consciously stylish book, on all levels (in its prose style and setting and characters and plot).

Cops

However, having said all this about Gibson’s zippy prose style and slick future-vision, the reader quite quickly realises the novel is about a cop, Berry Rydell, who’s become a kind of private security guard. An American novel about a cop-turned private detective? Actually this is a very old trope, going back to the noir novels of the 1930s and 40s, to Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler…

And then, as the novel progresses, we watch as this tough private eye rescues the attractive young woman from the bad guys and whisks her off to safety while he tries to figure out the Right Thing To Do.

Hmmm, in this elementary respect, the basic plot structure of Virtual Light seems far from experimental or new – it is, to some extent, a cyberspace update of film noir tropes and characters and plot.

So: we learn that Berry Rydell, born 1983 (p.14) is an ex-cop from Knoxville, Tennessee, who was cashiered out of the service after shooting to pieces a drug-addled maniac who was holding his wife and kids hostage and demanding to speak to the president. He’s managed to get a job with a private security firm named IntenSecure in Los Angeles, alongside a ripe collection of freaks and allergy monkeys… Here’s a plot summary:

Plot summary

Berry Rydell is fired from the Tennessee police force for shooting a hostage-taker, the demented Kenneth Turvey.

Rydell is in his twenties looks like Tommy Lee Jones (p.81) i.e. ruggedly handsome.

The notoriety Rydell wins from shooting Turvey and being sacked leads to him briefly being taken up by the sexy presenter of a TV show, Cops With Problems, Karen Mendelson (p.16) who flies Rydell out to LA and up to her swank penthouse apartment for a few weeks of expense account living and wild sex, before a new and better story comes along, she dumps him and has him escorted from the apartment by security guards who work for IntenSecurity Corporation, a ‘rentacop’ outfit.

That’s what gives Rydell the idea of applying for a job there. He gets one driving a vast 6-wheel ‘Hotspur Hussar’ around the houses of the rich up in Benedict Canyon who’ve paid for security checks (to be precise, he is employed in ‘the residential armed-response branch’ of the IntenSecurity Corporation p.48), alongside a skinny streak of piss named Sublett, who grew up in a trailer park dominated by his born-again Christian mother, watching old movies and harangued all day by TV evangelists.

One evening Rydell and Sublett follow instructions beamed from ‘the Death Star’, the nickname they give to the Southern Californian Geosynclinical Law Enforcement Satellite (p.11).

But it’s a hoax; someone has hacked into the system in order to make Rydell think a robbery and hostage situation is taking place at some luxury home. So Rydell rams the huge truck through the house’s security gate, across the Japanese garden and through the living room wall, and is staggering into the house with his machine gun when… an LAPD helicopter descends over the wreckage and arrests him; the children were off with their father somewhere; there was no hostage situation; the wife was having kinky sex (PVC and handcuffs) with the Polish gardener. As a result she sues IntenSecurity for physical and emotional damages, and they suspend Rydell from all duties: it’s another screw-up.

Cut to San Francisco. Here Chevette-Marie Washington (p.120), who long ago escaped from a juvenile detention centre outside Beaverton (p.125), is a bicycle courier. After making a drop (or ‘pull a tag’ as they seem to call it) at the Hotel Morrisey, she bumps into a drunk in the elevator who takes her up to a party hosted by someone called Cody Harwood, where she spends 15 minutes feeling seriously out of place, gets hit on a by a slimeball with a wet cigar then, on the way out, pushed up against the slimeball by the dense crowd while his attention is distracted talking to a hooker, something is sticking out his pocket and so, on impulse, Chevette nicks it, and is out the apartment door and over to a service elevator, down to the car park, unlocks her bike and is off into the city within minutes…

This turns out to be the core of the plot. Without realising it, Chevette has stolen a very expensive pair of sunglasses. Why? Because they are Virtual Light shades, see below.

Chevette lives high up on the Golden Gate Bridge with a broken-down old man named Skinner in a shack he’s built high up amid the cabling. In the years since the earthquake, thousands of homeless people have constructed a shanty town in the sky, building home-made apartments which have slowly crept up the struts and along the cables of the old bridge till it looks like a giant crustacean, covered with Gothic excrescences.

Skinner is regularly visited by Yamazaki, a Japanese sociologist who is writing a study of how the bridge was colonised and so interviews Skinner because he was one of the ‘pioneers’ of its settlement. T, this being a handy prompt for a series of flashbacks or retellings from Skinner of how it all happened. Yamazaki is not, however, an impressive or powerful figure;  when we see Yamazaki from Chevette’s viewpoint, he is ‘the Japanese nerd… the college boy or social worker’ who always looks lost.

LA Back in Los Angeles, Rydell – having been suspended from work by IntenSecurity – is told by his immediate boss Juanito Hernandez about a job opportunity, working for a freelance security operative, Lucius Warbaby, up in San Francisco. Rydell needs a job so he flies economy up to Frisco sitting next to a sweet old lady who goes on about having to arrange for her husband’s brain, which is in cryogenic storage, to be moved to a better facility. The wacky old future, eh.

Rydell is met at the airport by huge black Lucius Warbaby and his gofer, Freddie (both described on page 80). Freddie’s loud shirt is covered with images of guns, Warbaby has a brace on one leg and walks with a cane. He is the size of a refrigerator but stylish and dignified.

San Francisco Chevette works for Allied Couriers. She’s called in for a grilling by her boss, Bunny Malatesta (p.94) who asks why she checked in to Hotel Morrissey security (on the job where she strayed into the party) but never checked out. The hotel is following it up because the heat is on about the missing shades. In fact, Bunny tells her, the heat is turned up because the owner of the shades has been murdered.

In the next scene Rydell is with Warbaby when he meets two SF homicide cops who are investigating the self-same murder, of Hans Rutger Blix (p.102). The cops are Russians, Svobodov and Orlonsky. Warbaby is a big man but precise and punctilious and polite; he has beautiful handwriting (p.163). He reminds me a bit of the Fat Man in The Maltese Falcon.

Chevette’s courier colleague, a beautiful black man named Samuel Saladin DuPree (p.129), or Sammy Sal, gets her to admit to stealing the shades. She shows them to him and he explains that the shades are Virtual Light sunglasses (p.113). They interact directly with the optical nerve without needing actual light. Sammy explains they’re fairly common among professionals, like a hologram.

In fact Warbaby has a pair which he uses when he takes Freddie and Rydell to the crime scene – the hotel room where Blix was murdered – and further explains that the VL shades have ‘drivers’ in the lenses and frames which affect the optic nerves directly (p.120).

Freddie takes Rydell shopping to ‘Container City’, comprised of loads of derelict cargo ships and their containers with stairways strung up and between them, very trash futuristic, maybe like the final scene in the movie I, Robot.

A character named Loveless, a hired thug, arrives at Skinner’s shack on the Bridge with a gun. Chevette is up on the roof with Sammy. Loveless doesn’t see Sammy but orders Chevette to climb down and back into Skinner’s shack. He handcuffs Skinner and Yamazaki with funky futuristic handcuffs made of flexible plastic which tighten if you struggle against them.

Loveless has come looking for the stolen shades. Chevette lies and tells him they’re in the pannier of her bicycle so he forces her down ladders towards the rigged-up lift which takes them down to road level. Here Chevette cleverly arranges for the bike’s electric defence mechanism to give Loveless an electric.

Sammy has silently followed them both down to street level and now bops Loveless on the head but not hard enough. He just has time to hand Chevette back the shades (he’d been holding them up on the roof when Loveless appeared in Skinner’s apartment) before a dazed Loveless staggers back to his feet and pumps Sammy full of lead – Sammy simply disappearing backwards between the cables off the bridge and falling to his death. Shocked, Chevette just turns and runs.

Meanwhile, Warbaby and Freddie arrive with Rydell at the base of the bridge and send him onto it to find Chevette, they being scared by exaggerated stories of its voodoo, cannibalistic inhabitants.

To ensure drama, a heavy rainstorm comes on and in the thick of it Rydell stumbles across Chevette standing in the rain. He tails her as she staggers along the bridge in the rainstorm and comes across her one-time boyfriend, Lowell, and his ghoulish sidekick Cody, sitting atop a container.

Rydell tails the three as they head off to a bar, humorously named Cognitive Dissidence. Rydell goes into the warm fug of the bar after them, taking a place at the bar and ordering a beer while he ponders what to do next. But into this bar suddenly arrives one of the two Russian homicide cops Warbaby had introduced him to soon after he arrived in SF, coming in huge and silent and with a drawn gun. He orders Chevette to come with him but then…all the lights go out.

In the darkness the fat lady who operates a dancing hologram which is a feature of the bar, makes it dance all round the Russian’s head, giving Rydell long enough to make it across the bar, scoop up Chevette and carry her kicking and screaming to the stairs out of the place. Unfortunately, he runs straight into the other Russian waiting at the top of the stairs who stops them. Rydell and Chevette are both disarmed and handcuffed and forced to trudge under the watchful guns of the Russians to the San Francisco end of the bridge.

Here Warbaby and Freddie, who commissioned the Russian heavies, are waiting for them. They unhandcuff Rydell and are beginning to explain what’s going on when there is another dramatic surprise: one of Chevette’s friends who we’d been very briefly introduced to a bit earlier, a big bear of a man incongruously named Nigel, seeing Chevette taken away at gunpoint, now attacks everyone on a heavyweight bike, ramming the Russian with the gun, grabbing him and banging his head against the hood of Rydell’s car.

As the others set about dealing with this Nigel, Rydell drags Chevette into his Patriot 4 x 4, kick starts it and they skid off, Warbaby raising his cane which turns out to be a concealed gun and shooting out the Patriot’s rear window, but then they’ve turned a corner and are escaping!

Chevette directs Rydell to Haight Street, where they drop the Patriot (which is promptly stolen) and hide out in a tattoo parlour, pretending to take their time in the waiting room deciding on a joint tattoo, while they calm down.

When they eventually leave the tattoo parlour, in a striking coincidence, who should stop and ask the way but the nice old lady Rydell had chatted to on the plane up here, Mrs Danica Elliott, who has hired a big white camper van to drive back to LA in. She asks Rydell if he can drive since she is completely lost. So he and Chevette get in and drive nice and slow out of town. Eventually they’re so tired they hand the driving back to Mrs Elliott and go to sleep in the bed in the back of the camper.

BUT – when they wake up the camper is stationary and Mrs Elliott is gone and who else but Loveless, the hired killer, is waiting for them! I had a sinking feeling that he might have murdered the old lady (one gets sick of all the murder and carnage in American novels) and so was relieved to discover she was herself an IntenSecurity operative put in place to tail and watch Rydell.

Loveless now proceeds to explain The PLOT. The Virtual Light shades Chevette stole contain the blueprint for the comprehensive rebuilding of shattered San Francisco by foreign investors. These are based in Costa Rica (which has been mentioned a number of times as the location for stored data in the same way Switzerland is for huge foreign bank accounts in our day).

The rebuilding project has to be handled carefully because the local Americans might object, but the core issue is that big corporations want to buy up the land the new city is going to be built on. So if the plans get out, all sorts of other actors (for example, the state) might buy it up instead. Thus the precise plans must be kept secret because inconceivably vast fortunes stand to be made or lost.

And it all comes down to possession of the shades. Blix was a courier tasked with delivering them to the right person in San Francisco, but instead let himself be distracted, getting drunk at that party and then stupidly losing them (when Chevette picked his pocket). Loveless had been tasked with shadowing Blix and when the latter lost the shades was only too happy to murder him, not just killing him but slitting his throat and pulling his tongue out to make it look like some South American drug killing.

While Loveless is talking he gets thirsty and orders Chevette to get him a drink from the camper’s fridge, nice and slow. Out of his sight, Chevette slips into Loveless’s drink an entire stash of the designer drug dancer, and hands it to him. Thus, as Loveless carries on explaining The Plot to Rydell and Chevette, he starts to sweat and hallucinate, and ends up firing his pistol manically. Rydell and Chevette throw themselves out the doors, and hide while Loveless runs off shooting wildly. Then they jump back into the camper and make off at speed.

Rydell and Chevette stop to get directions from an old-timer at a derelict Shell gas station. Rydell had used a phone they picked up in their adventures to ring the only person he trusts, Sublett, who we met back at the start of the story – only to discover Sublett has quit his job at IntenSecurity and gone home to his mother’s trailer on a wacky Christian base camp. Looking at the map Rydell realises it’s fairly close by, so Rydell and Chevette drive there and bluff their way in by pretending to be extreme born-again Christians.

There follows extended satire about TV evangelists, in this instance a fictional one named the Reverend Fallon. This actually feels quite old now, very 1980s. No-one cares about TV evangelists any more, compared to the power of the internet, social media, Facebook, the Russians and President Trump.

Rydell devises A Cunning Plan. First he calls Chevette’s ex, Lowell, and puts the frighteners on him to get him to give them access to the digital online place known as ‘the Republic of Desire’. Then he ascertains that one of Sublett’s nerdy friends in the born-again caravan park, Buddy, has a set of eyephones. He pays Buddy to use them, then Chevette watches as Rydell puts them on and dials into early cyberspace.

Rydell has got details of how to dial into the Republic of Desire and here, in cyberspace, sees three weird figures, a woman made of TV shows, a man mountain and a kind of Tyrannosaurus Rex with human hands. These three entities instantly access Rydell’s records and read everything about his life and history, are bored and are leaving the call when Rydell asks them whether any of them lives in San Francisco and likes it the way it is. This gets their attention and Rydell goes on to explain how the plans stored on the Virtual Light sunglasses reveal how San Francisco is going to be handed over to foreign developers and changed out of all recognition. That gets the three digital warriors’ attention.

Together they cook up a plan which dominates the last thirty pages of the novel, which feels like a scam or heist in the style of Ocean’s 11.

Chevette dresses as a courier and enters Century City II, the luxury condo where Rydell had briefly lived with top lawyer Karen Mendelson when they had their brief affair. Soon as Karen Mendelson opens her apartment door, Sublett pushes her and Chevette back into her apartment.

Meanwhile Rydell has recruited the three hackers in the Republic of Desire to help him. The man mountain figure refers to himself as the God-Eater, but they could be anyone, anywhere, Rydell reflects ruefully. Rydell makes his way to Century City II, where he’s arranged to meet Warbaby at 3pm. He watches Warbaby and Freddie and the two Russian hoods (the Bad Guys) arrive in two separate cars, then enter the mall. He follows them up inside, then phones the three hackers in the Republic of Desire again. The narrative explains that they decided to ‘help’ because they don’t want to see San Francisco over-developed and also it presented a new technical challenge, which amuses them.

What happens is: the hackers take control of SF police in order to fly armed drones into the mall which tell Warbaby, Freddie and the Russians to get on their faces. This is because the system has been hacked to identify them of being terrorists planning to blow up the entire mall.

But where’s their hired goon, Loveless? Seeing he hasn’t come along with Warbaby, Rydall guesses he must have gone straight to Karen’s apartment. Rydell dashes up there and arrives just in time, just at the split second Loveless emerges from hiding and raises his little gun to Chevette’s temple planning to take her hostage or just to shoot her. And that’s the moment Rydell hits him with the capsicum spray he carries round with him like mace gas only much worse.

Epilogue

Then – The Payoff. The cops arrest the five baddies, Warbaby, Freddie, the two Russian hoods and Loveless. Then a whole fleet of Karen Mendelson’s lawyer friends arrive, including the legendary lawyer Wellington Ma, and these media operators immediately see the TV potential of the story and so sign up Chevette and Sublett to tell their stories. While Chevette had been in the apartment with Karen she’d shown her how to play the Virtual Shades, so Karen has seen the development scams which were planned and is able to retell it to her lawyers and the cops. Rydell et al are in the clear, and a good TV show will be made about it all, and the baddies will be brought down. Rydell et al will be arrested but the head lawyer from Cops in Trouble tells him they’ll get bail within the hour and then they can start working on the documentary and then the made-for-TV movie.

In other words – despite the futuristic sci-fi trappings – this feels, in the end, like an American crime caper: the goody is a cop with a heart of the gold, the young girl assistant has nice ‘tits’ (as Rydell puts it, more than once) the baddies are crooked property developers, foreigners and blacks – and everything will be sorted out by shit-hot LA TV lawyers.

Ultimately, feels more like an episode of LA Law than genuine science fiction.

Features of Gibson’s futureworld of 2006

  • the President is a woman named Millband (p.17) and is black! (p.183)
  • there’s a vaccination against AIDS (p.18) seems you need certificates of vaccination to show partners before having sex (p.21), the origin of the vaccine is just one individual, J.D. Shapely, who was found to host a benign version of HIV which eradicated the malign version (see below)
  • cops wear air-conditioned helmets with plastic visors
  • ‘gyms’ offer injections of Brazilian fetal matter and having your skeleton ‘reinforced’
  • Italy is no longer a unified state, people come from parts of ‘what used to be Italy’ (p.40) (cf Canada, below)
  • Chevette’s motorbike has a recognition loop you slip your hand into to unlock it (p.44)
  • swimwear is designed to keep off dangerous UV rays and to keep out the dangerous poisons in the sea
  • the ozone hole is a problem (p.46)
  • a virus has destroyed palm trees (maybe all trees) (p.50), later identified as ‘some Mexican virus’ (p.273)
  • five dollar coins, suggesting inflation (p.58)
  • Thomasson is a generic name Gibson’s invented for pointless yet curiously art-like features of the urban landscape (p.61)
  • the big nations of the world (Russia, Canada, Brazil) have fragmented into numerous mini-states (p.71), Canada has broken up into five states (p.242)
  • the Cease Upon The Midnight movement and other self-help euthanasia groups prefer peaceful suicide to having your brain put in a cryogenic store (p.79)
  • it’s been illegal to manufacture cigarettes in the US since 2000 (p.101)
  • the Sword of the Pig movement (p.108)
  • after the earthquake there seem to have been waves of disease or ‘plagues’, which Gibson lists on page 117
  • New Zealand appears to have been occupied by Japanese armed forces who have to suppress resistance movements (p.190)
  • much is made throughout the book of posters and image of AIDS survivor J.D. Shapely dotted around San Francisco and, at one point, Yamazaki channel surfs to a BBC documentary which gives an extremely thorough biography of Shapely (pages 190 to 192). Shapely was a gay prostitute who ended up in prison where they discovered he had AIDS but it didn’t kill him; in him HIV had mutated to a strain which was a) benign b) ate the original virulent strain. Thus a vaccine was made from his version and was administered to everyone in the world.

Funky phrases

So rich in slang and neologisms, American writers.

  • inner trivia banks (p.14)
  • telepresence rig (p.15)
  • Thiobuscaline (3,5-dimethoxy-4-butylthiophenethylamine) – a lesser-known psychedelic drug (p.16)
  • bunny down (p.75)

Conclusion

My opening comments reflected my memories of the Sprawl trilogy and Gibson’s place in science fiction. As I read on into this novel I came to realise it is far less a science fiction book than a techno update of the long lineage of noir cop crime thrillers; that Gibson’s hard-nosed cop with a heart of gold has more in common with Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlow, or Deckard in the movie Blade Runner or John McClane in the Die Hard franchise than with more standard science fiction; i.e. that Rydell is an avatar of a very familiar type, the tall, handsome, strong cop or ex-cop, rough around the edges, prepared to bend the rules, but basically a good guy.

Similarly, although Chevette is a ballsy, street girl, an urchin, a reform school runaway, she, also, has a heart of gold and has to be rescued by Sir Galahad, thus fulfilling a thousand-year old stereotype. And – sigh – she, of course, starts to fall for him.

  • She wondered if maybe she wasn’t starting to fall for Rydell… she had to admit he had a cute butt in those jeans. (p.261)
  • She was starting to really like him… (p.276)

Rydell reminds me most of Lee Child’s creation, Jack Reacher, another knight errant who combines physical prowess with basic moral rectitude (although, admittedly, Reacher didn’t make his debut till 1997, four years after this novel was published).

They all supply the reader with the same basic pleasure, which is they’re rule-breakers and naughty boys who are, at heart, good boys really. No matter how much they bend or break the law, it’s always in a good cause. And they all combine a bunch of characteristics most men wish they had – size and strength and physical prowess, expertise with guns, all kinds of practical know-how with cars and gadgets – and their basic decency wins over even the most initially independent or resistant of women.

To quote a seventy-year-old tagline, ‘Men want to be him; women want to be with him’ (James Bond memes)

In other words, the setting of the Bridge trilogy is novel and creative, and the hundreds of details Gibson works into the novel certainly convey a great fullness and plausibility to his fictional world. But the basic narrative structure is very, very old.

Nothing dates as fast as the future

One last thought: setting the novel closer to the present day, paradoxically makes it more dated. In the far future (well, the 2030s when Neuromancer is set) anything goes. But if you set something in the near future, you have to be more measured and realistic with your predictions and chances increase that whatever you predict will be wrong.

Thus some of the baddies in the book, like Warbaby, get their information via faxes; computers are used a bit but nowhere near as much as they turned out to; there are one or two remote phones but not many – in other words Gibson did not accurately predict the full impact of the great transformative agents of our time, the internet, increasingly lightweight personal computers, and mobile phones.

And his cultural references feel dated, as well. As in the Sprawl novels, many things have a strong Japanese flavour i.e. the inclusion of the Japanese character Yamazaki and repeated references to a catastrophic earthquake that’s taken place in Tokyo. But in the years since 1993, Japan has slipped out of the cool cultural and economic position Gibson gives it:

Japan’s economy has struggled with deflation since its bubble economy peaked in 1989. (Investopedia)

Japan has, since the turn of the century, in terms of culture and economy and products and even art, increasingly been replaced by China.

Also Gibson’s pop culture references have aged. The entire concept of rock music, which is referenced throughout the novel, seems old now. The character Sublett has an obsession with the movies of David Cronenberg, which might have marked him off as at the cutting edge of pop avant-garde in 1993, but not now, in 2020.

Credit

Virtual Light by William Gibson was published by Viking Press in 1993. All references are to the 1994 Penguin paperback edition.

Other William Gibson reviews

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by Simon on April 12, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 12, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/virtual-light-william-gibson/

Count Zero by William Gibson (1986)

He drank off the black bitter coffee. It seemed to him, just for a second, that he could feel the whole Sprawl breathing, and its breath was old and sick and tired, all up and down the stations from Boston to Atlanta…’
(Count Zero page 286)

The setting

This is the second novel in what came to be known as Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy (because there ended up being three of them: his debut, Neuromancer, and the third novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive.)

It is the future. Vast urban sprawls cover half of America, housing estates and huge malls under enormous geodesic domes blocking out the sky. Japanese culture and cuisine is widespread and everyone uses the New Yen as currency. Computers and digital technology, chips and disks, fuel a digital economy. Oil appears to have run out – possibly because Russia took control of the global supply after a brief war which America and the West lost – to be replaced by hydrogen cells. Electricity is generated by the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority whose well-protected gleaming towers of data can be seen by hackers in cyberspace. The real power in the world lies with vast multinational corporations known as zaibatsus. At the other end of the food chain, down on the littered streets, cheap bars and derelict spaces are full of veterans from the war, damaged physically or psychologically, many of whom turn up as protagonists in the Sprawl novels and in some of the Sprawl-related short stories collected in Burning Chrome (1986) published at the same time as the novels.

‘Sprawltown’s a twisty place, my man.Things are seldom what they seem.’ (Lucas, p.205)

This setting – ‘the street’ – is characterised by two things:

  1. a Raymond Chandler film noir sensibility in which the world is entirely made up of crime and gangs –  especially the terrifying Yakuza gangs
  2. drugs, lots of drugs, everyone is on one type of drug or another, the hero of Neuromancer is off his face a lot of the time, and the drugs range from cheap street drugs like amphetamine (known on the street as ‘wiz’) to new, biochemically-engineered mind-enhancing substances (like ‘the most expensive designer drugs’ which the character named The Wig devotes himself to taking, p.173)

The result is a prose style which combines the basic mood of a thriller – the permanent edginess of protagonists on the run from threatening crime lords or criminal organisations or the cops or someone  – but soaked in slangy, hip, knowing references to the ho-tech, drug-soaked, street gang components of this louche futureworld.

The feel

All that said, Count Zero immediately feels much broader and lighter than Neuromancer. That debut novel was set mostly at night, in often claustrophobic settings, bars, clubs, hotel rooms, dingy back alleys. Also the prose was extremely dense, studded with references to arcane technology or drugs or street gangs. There was barely a run-of-the-mill sentence in the whole book.

Count Zero is much more relaxed and diffused in several ways: its prose style is a lot less hectic – there are plenty of straightforward, factual sentences in it – but also the settings are more varied, and some of them even take place in daylight!

In fact whereas Neuromancer stuck pretty closely to the adventures of its computer hacker hero, Case, Count Zero is a complicated and canny weaving together of what start out as several completely distinct plotlines, featuring completely freestanding characters. Only as the story progresses do we slowly discover how they are linked.

Turner

Turner is an experienced kidnapper of top scientists. In the future this is a recognised profession. The huge scientific multinational corporations which control the world are prepared to pay kidnappers like Turner to poach the star scientists of the rival corporations.

‘You took Chauvet from IBM for Mitsu and they say you took Semenov out of Tomsky.’ (0.68)

Turner is – like the protagonist of every thriller ever written – an outsider, a rebel, the man who doesn’t fit in. Oh how we all wish we could be like him!

Turner himself was incapable of meshing with the intensely tribal world of the zaibatsumen, the lifers. He was a permanent outsider, a rogue factor adrift on the secret seas of intercorporate politics. (p.128)

‘A rogue factor adrift on the secret seas of intercorporate politics’ – cool!

Strikingly, the novel opens with a chapter describing how Turner was blown to pieces by an assassin’s bomb in India, and expensively fitted back together using future technology bythe clients who find him useful. Recuperating in Mexico, he hooks up with a pretty woman he meets in a bar and they have an idyllic romance, with sex on the beach, and sex in the bedroom.

Then – as with half the protagonists in the Burning Chrome stories and in Neuromancer – she walks away, leaving him devastated.

Turns out she was a therapist hired by the client to get Turner back into shape. The client now shows up and tells him this. Turner, super-tough guy that he is, accepts it without a flicker. (This opening reminded me of the idyllic Third World setting at the start of the second Jason Bourne movie, where Jason and his true love are enjoying idyllic times in a beach-front shack in India, till she is killed by mistake by an assassin sent to terminate Jason.)

These are rock solid, straight down-the-line, Hollywood-level, tough guy thriller clichés, and you can see the appeal.

  1. Every timid, shy, boring salaryman and commuter (like myself) thrills to the adventures of people like Turner – young (he is 24, p.131), super-fit, super-alert, super-trained, no-nonsense, super-brave, possessor of ‘a ropey, muscular poise’ (p.129): faces down men bigger and harder than him, immediately wins over the tough bitch in the team, wow, what a man! (it was, apparently, in a review of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service published in the Sunday Times in 1963 that the critic Raymond Mortimer wrote, ‘James Bond is what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like between her sheets.’ Nothing has changed in 56 years.)
  2. And yet, just as predictably, it turns out this tough guy has a heart of soppy mush — for the right woman he can be a perfect gent, picnics on the beach and cunnilingus in the bedroom. What a guy!

We follow as Turner is hired for a new job by his former partner, Conroy. He is to be in charge of setting up a base in the desert with a ragtag bunch of fellow mercs, ready to receive the absconding scientist, Christopher Mitchell, who will be escaping from Maas Biolabs’ high security research base in Arizona. Mitchell is a star science researcher who had developed the ‘hybridoma techniques’ on which much contemporary technology is based (p.127). A very important guy. the client is Hosaka Corp who want his brains and expertise. It’s a major assignment. You won’t be surprised to learn that things go disastrously wrong,

Marly

The Turner chapters are intercut with chapters following Marly Krushkhova, the pretty, rather naive ‘disgraced former owner of a tiny Paris gallery’. She promoted a painting which turned out to be a forgery, so she was fired by the shareholders. Now she’s going for a job interview with a business owned by Josef Virek, rumoured to be the richest man in the world.

Marly is disconcerted to discover that Virek is not present in person, but that she is transported to a life-size hologram of a street in Barcelona, where she sits next to a hologram of him on a park bench and they chat.

In fact, the hologram tells her, the actual ‘Virek’ exists only as a disembodied brain kept alive in a vat in a him security compound in Stockholm.

He doesn’t want to hire her for some straightforward gallery job. Virek wants Marly to track down the artist who created a particular artwork which he once saw and was taken with – a Damian Hirst-style vivarium full of a random collection of detritus.

Virek will authorise money for her use to hire an apartment, planes, whatever she needs in her quest. ‘How long do I have?’ she asks. ‘The rest of your life,’ he replies. It takes a while for her to really understand that he is giving her an unlimited supply of money, over an unlimited period of time, to use all her contacts in the art world to track down the artist who made this one piece.

And, once she has staggered out of the hologram room to be met by Virek’s smooth-talking assistants and given the first instalment of money, she begins to realise that she is being followed and monitored at every step, not least by a suave Spanish man, Paco, who keeps appearing in the background whenever she meets contacts and begins her investigation.

This Quest will turn out to be the central driving force of the narrative, but the fact that Virek is so obscenely rich also gives Gibson plenty of opportunity to reflect on the nature of money, lots of money, super-money, and the effect it has on its owners and on those around them. In this futureworld where people routinely alter their consciousness either with mind-bending drugs or by encountering 3-D holograms or by entering the dizzying world of cyberspace, the rich can quite literally bend reality to their wishes.

‘The unnatural density of my wealth drags irresistibly at the rarest works of the human spirit…’ (p.27)

How could she have imagined that it would be possible to live, to move, in the unnatural field of Virek’s wealth without suffering distortion? Virek had taken her up, in all her misery, and had rotated her through the monstrous, invisible stresses of his money, and she had been changed. (p.107)

Virek’s money was a sort of universal solvent, dissolving barriers to his will… (p.2420

Count Zero

Bobby Newmark, self-styled ‘Count Zero’, still lives with his mom in a crappy apartment in the vast area of cheap, high-rise housing known as Barrytown, New Jersey. He is an apprentice computer hacker, a cowboy of cyberspace, a ‘hotdogger’, hanging round the estate’s chrome-lined bars, trying to be fit in with the local gang members, but keenly aware that he is only a beginner with only a basic, entry-level hacker’s view of cyberspace.

He was like a kid who’d grown up beside an ocean, taking it as much for granted as he took the sky, but knowing nothing of currents, shipping routes of the ins and outs of weather. He’d used decks in school, toys that shuttled you through the infinite reaches of that space that wasn’t space, mankind’s unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix cyberspace, where the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline. (p.62)

A local crime boss, Two-A-Day, hands Bobby a state-of-the-art console and asks him to hack into the financial records of some company. Things are going OK when Bobby suddenly experiences an enormous counter-surge of energy directed against him which stops his heart in the real world. Bobby starts to die, when some other undefined force leans in to cyberspace, releases him, and he regains consciousness on his mom’s carpet throwing up.

What the…?

He goes looking for Two-A-Day at the local crappy bar, Leon’s, where Gibson gives us florid descriptions of the drug-selling, computer-game-playing lowlifes. On the TV news he sees that his mum’s flat, indeed the entire row of apartments on that block, have been destroyed by a bomb. Christ! They’re after him.

Bobby goes and hides down a back alley by a dumpster which turns out be a bad idea because someone savagely mugs him. Whoever it is, slashes his chest open and also steals the console Two-A-Day gave him.

When Bobby comes round he is being sewn up using futuristic technology, and then delivered to Two-A-Day’s vast penthouse apartment where he meets a couple of soft-spoken, nattily-dressed and terrifying black men, Beauvoir and Lucas.

Beauvoir explains what’s happened: Two-A-Day had been given some new, high-powered anti-ice (ice being security software devised by corporations to protect their digital assets in cyberspace) program to by unnamed powerful agents. Unwilling to risk anything himself, Two-A-Day had sub-contracted the thing to Bobby – the idea being that, if it’s booby-trapped or dangerous it’ll only be worthless Bobby who gets wasted.

Well, something bad certainly happened to Bobby when he tried to use it. 1. Was that a failure of the program, or was it booby-trapped, or did it trigger a prepared defence mechanism in the corporation Bobby tried to hack?

But 2. and more importantly, whoever mugged him stole the console with the software inside. Now the very High-Ups who sub-contracted testing it to Two-A-Day are pissed off with him… and he is pissed off with Bobby, who needs to get it back.

Three mysteries

These are the three storylines which we follow in short, alternating chapters of Gibson’s over-heated, amphetamine-fuelled prose.

As the night came on, Turner found the edge again. It seemed like a long time since he’d been there, but when it clicked in, it was like he’d never left. It was that superhuman synchromesh flow that stimulants only approximated. (p.126)

All the characters hover on the edge of mind-altering psychotropic drug highs, or mind-expanding plug-ins to the dizzying landscape of cyberspace, or are involved in terror-inducing chases by cops or all-powerful threatening powers. With the result that the prose, and even more the plot, has you permanently on edge. It is a fantastically thrilling, gripping and exciting novel but which can also, partly because of the permanent obscurity Gibson maintains around some of the key motivators of the plot, become quite wearing and draining.

Basically, the narrative hangs around three cliffhanging challenges:

  1. Will Turner’s handling of the defection of the high-level scientist work out as planned?
  2. Who made the artwork that Virek hired Marly to track down, and why is Virek so obsessed by it?
  3. Will Bobby ‘Count Zero’ manage to find the people who mugged him and stole his console, and what is the truth about the new super-program inside it?

Continuities with Neuromancer

I thought the book would be part of the Sprawl trilogy because set in the same futureworld, I hadn’t realised it would literally follow on from the first book, referencing many of the characters and incidents mentioned in Neuromancer and taking them further.

For example, you will remember that the climax of Neuromancer is set on a space station orbiting the earth, only much more than a space station, more like a miniature town set inside a vast offworld which rotates to give it gravity and includes luxury hotels, swimming pools and pleasure gardens. One whole end of this was sealed off and the home of the legendary Tessier-Ashpool family which are the richest in the world and built it.

The Quest in Neuromancer is that Case and the ferocious Molly Millions, she with the 4-centimetry retractable razor blades under each fingernail are hired to co-ordinate an attack on the heart of the Tessier-Ashpool stronghold – Molly has to kidnap the daughter of old man Ashpool, named 3Jane because the wicked old man has manufactured clones of his daughters, and drag her to a jewel-studded head, there to utter the codeword which activates it, at the same time as Case the hacker has hacked into the Tessier-Ashpool security system and disabled it.

Straightforward as this may sound the novel kind of crumbles or disintegrates into increasingly visionary prose as the goal of the Quest is reached and we learn, through welters of mystical-cum-hi-tech prose, that two separate artificial intelligences crafted by 3Jane’s mother, are, at the mention of the codeword, allowed to unite thus creating a sort of super-intelligence which, at that moment, becomes identical with all of cyberspace. In a sort of apocalyptic vision the matrix becomes self-aware, and although it doesn’t affect the material reality of humans out in the real world, it is a transformative event in the collective consensual hallucination of all the world’s data which we call ‘cyberspace’.

‘It’s just a tailored hallucination we all agree to have, cyberspace…’ (the Finn, p.170)

What happens in Count Zero is this story continues. It is seven years after the events of the first novel (p.177) and the sharp-dressed spades Bobby has met are privy to what’s happened to cyberspace since that seismic event, namely that the One has split into a variety of entities which share the names of traditional voodoo gods and goddesses. Yes, voodoo. The latter half of the book is coloured by what Beauvoir and Lucas tell Bobby about the presence in cyberspace of these gods who represent primeval forces, though it is very hard to understand whether they existed before cyberspace, since the dawn of time and have infiltrated it, or are entirely man-made constructions, or what.

‘Jackie is a mambo, a priestess, the horse of Danbala…Danbala rides her, Danbala Wedo, the snake. Other times she is the horse of Aida Wedo, his wife…’ (p.122)

Beauvoir brings Bobby to a bar, Jammer’s, on the 14th floor of a high-rise block in New York.

The most important event in the Turner plotline is that, when the ultralite arrives at the reception site prepared by Turner and the other mercs, it is carrying not Mitchell, but his teenage daughter Angie. Even as she arrives a ferocious firestorm breaks out, presumably Maas Biolabs’ security people having followed its course and now attacking. Turner unstraps the girl from the ultralite and runs with her to a small, high-powered, self-steering jet which takes off at terrific speed just as Turner watches the campment and all the mercs manning it – who we have spent half the book getting to know – vaporised in some kind of semi-nuclear blast.

Bloodied and half conscious Turner steers to plane to crash land near the ranch of his long lost brother, Rudy, and his partner, Sally. Here they fix up the girl, whose name is Angie and have a couple of scenes reminiscing about the old days, about mom and pa and huntin’ and fishin’ in the unspoilt countryside.

This is precisely the kind of low-key interlude you get in Hollywood thrillers, a break after an over-tense fight/crash/conflict sequence. Then it is time to load up into a spare hovercraft (yes, hovercraft are a popular form of transport in this futureworld) and head off, with a vague plan of hiding out in the Sprawl, the name given to the vast urban conurbation stretching from Boston to Florida.

Meanwhile Marly’s investigations keep turning up the name of Tessier-Ashpool and her quest leads her to buy a ticket to the off-world satellite, named Freeside – exactly the place where Neuromancer climaxed. Now, though, the entire section of the satellite which contained the Tessier-Ashpool compound has been hacked off and set into a separate orbit.

Here Marly discovers a mad old cyberhacker, Wigan Ludgate known as The Wig hiding out, guarded by a young crook on the run, Jones (‘me, I came here runnin” p.274) – both of them protective of the core of the complex which is a vast space in which great clusters of waste objects and detritus float in zero gravity. ‘The dome of the Boxmaker’ (p.312)

Attached to a wall is a multi-armed computer-driven robot which uses its arms to grab passing flotsam, cut and shape them with a laser, and then place them in vivariums. This is the robotic creator of the work of art which so entranced Virek.

But along the way, being sent messages from Virek in cyberspace, when she jacks into simstim, by couriers and agents, she’s slowly come to realise that the artist is in danger. Virek doesn’t just want an art work. And now, here in this gravityless dome, a screen flickers into life and his face appears, explaining.

He explains that for some time he’s known that a Christopher Mitchell working at Maas Biolabs has been fed information from some source in cyberspace, this being the real source of Mitchell’s astonishing tech breakthroughs. And his numerous agents and researches have led him to believe that the source of this information, the superbrain behind it, also made the vitrines he set her to track down. Now she has found the source, and is agents, having followed her all the way, are at the doors of the Tessier-Ashpool satellite.

Meanwhile, in the Jammers bar in New York, Bobby and his minder Beauvoir are joined by Angie and Turner. On his long journey – interspersed by attacks from various unnamed opponents (Maas? Hosaka? Conroy?) – Turner has had plenty of opportunity to learn that Angie’s brain has been laced with some kind of physical entity (‘a biosoft modification has been inserted in his daughter’s brain’). This may or may not explain her ability to see visions. While asleep she dreams of voodoo gods and talks to them and, sometimes, they speak through her mouth, as one possessed. At one point she retales to Turner the events at the climax of Neuromancer which we recognise though mean nothing to him.

By the time Turner and Angie meet up with Beauvoir and Bobby in the New York bar, all these characters have had quite a few conversations about what is going on in cyberspace, what the voodoo gods represent, and how they’re linked to the events in the Tessier-Ashpool offworld compound (which, of course, most of them only know about from confused rumour).

The result, for the reader, is to be in a state of sort of permanently confused tension. Turner is chased and attacked, the girl Angie has premonitions of disaster, Bobby is mugged and then on the run from Two-A-Day and whoever his bosses are, the New York nightclub is surrounded by threatening mobs who are under someone’s control, when they open the door laser guns are fired through it.

Only right at the end is Turner contacted by the man who hired him, Conroy, who explains at least part of the plot. According to him, Josef Virek, the world’s richest man, has heard about a new form of biosoft developed by Mitchell and his investigators were all over Mitchell’s attempt to escape Maas. But when he sent his daughter out instead – her head actually laced with the new biosoft invention) Maas’s own men pursued Turner and Angie, observed by Virek’s men, and complicated by the fact the corporation who was paying for Mitchell to be extracted, Hosaka, thought they’d been double crossed and were also tracking Turner.

By the end of the book I think that one of Beauvoir’s speculations may be close to the truth, that The One created at the end of Neuromancer has, for reasons unknown, split into multiple lesser entities and that these, having ranged through all mankind’s systems of signs and symbols, have settled on the voodoo gods as appropriate interfaces with mankind that humans will understand. The least incomprehensible, anyway.

In Jammer’s Bobby jacks into the matrix to find out why the club is surrounded and how to get rid of the mob and the attackers, when a series of things happens. He is sucked into a powerful programme and suddenly is sitting in the same park on the same bench next to Josef Virek as Marly had early in the novel. But the women he jacked in with, one of Beauvoir’s black associates, was killed almost immediately. Virek has no idea who Bobby is and orders his sidekick, Paco to shoot him but, just as Paco lines up a gun, another far bigger program and presence erupts out of the flower beds and chases Virek’s screaming figure down the path and obliterates him.

It is Baron Samedi, one of the voodoo presences and he is taking his revenge for one of their number being killed by a Virek programme. In his vat in Stockholm Virek’s life support fails. He is dead with the result that a) up in the dome of the Boxmaker his face suddenly disappears from the screen where Marly had been listening to his orders and b) outside Jammer’s the assassins and mercs who had assembled to grab Angie – which was the goal of them surrounding the place – are abruptly called off.

Conroy, the menacing merc who had hired Turner for the extraction job and who appears on a videocall right at the end explaining to Turner the combination of forces who’ve been pursuing him, well in the attack on the merc’s camp back at the moment when Angie’s ultralight touched down and which killed all the other mercs Turner had assembled – one of them (Ramirez) had a girlfriend, Jaylene Slide, a mean bitch who is plenty angry at Conroy.

‘I’m Slide,’ the figure said, hand on its hips. ‘Jaylene. You don’t fuck with me. Nobody in LA,’ and she gestured, a window suddenly snapped into existence behind her,’ fucks with me.’ (p.292)

Turns out she has been tracking him down to his current location in a hotel in New York, Park Avenue to be precise. And, as we and Turner are watching Conroy’s face on the screen, we hear her order her buddies to blow up the entire floor of the building where Conroy and his team are based. Conroy hesitates a moment and then there’s a loud bang then the picture flickers off.

Before being blown up Conroy had told Turner that Hosaka and Maas, the two giant corporations had reached a settlement about Mitchell’s death, a discreet payout with no publicity in the way of giant corporations.

And so, in the space of a few pages, all the baddies who have been chasing our heroes and fuelling the nail-biting narrative, disappear! Turner, Angie, Bobby – suddenly they’re all safe.

Loose ends

So once again, as in Neuromancer, the novel’s climax is an odd mix of the entirely worldly thriller element (Slide’s revenge against Conroy) and typical corporate cynicism (Maas and Hosaka making up) with a strangely mystical and difficult to understand element (the voodoo gods who destroy Virek). And I think that is a deliberate point – the point that the complexity of cyberspace has produced entities which are literally beyond human comprehension and with goals and aims of their own which interact and overlap with human motivations but are extra to them.

Anyway, most of the human characters survive and in a couple of pages at the end of the main narrative we are given a little of their subsequent careers. The teenager Angie, bloodied by some of her experiences, but unbowed, uses her access to the voodoo gods to establish a career as a simstim star for the global entertainment corp, Sense/Net.

If you remember, right back when Bobby jacked into Two-A-Day’s console and was being killed, it was she who stepped in to save him. Thereafter, for the rest of the book, they have a close psychic ink which neither can quite explain and becomes more important as Bobby jacks in in subsequent sequences. The upshot is that Angie hires Bobby as her ‘bodyguard’ in the new life she carves out for herself in California.

Marly returns to Paris unscathed by her adventures and ends up curating one of the largest art galleries in the city.

Turner returns to the ranch where he had briefly holed up with Rudy and Sally earlier in the book. It’s typical of the plot’s complexities that during those brief few days he managed to fall in love with Sally (his brother’s partner) and impregnate her (p.194). Rudy himself was, with the inevitability of a Hollywood thriller, killed by Turner’s pursuers when they tracked the crashed jet to their ranch – but they let Sally live and she gave birth to Turner’s child nine months later. He’s quit the kidnapping business.

But behind all this is the uneasy knowledge that the matrix of cyberspace has, apparently, become home to sentient beings, who take the shape of voodoo gods and can intervene in human affairs. Should we be worried? Is this all going to lead to some Terminator-style apocalypse? You have to read the third in the trilogy to find out.

P.S. the Finn

I should add that Beauvoir at one stage takes Count Zero to see the Finn, an outrageously foul-mouthed, dirty and senior hacker who, it turns out, was the man who passed on the dodgy console to Two-A-Day. It’s only right at the end of the book, and after reading the ending a couple of times, that I think I worked out that the console is one of many objects made by the machine in the Dome of the Boxmaker, which Wigan Ludgate, in his madness, sends off to an unnamed fence back on earth, who I think we are meant to deduce is the Finn. So the program inside the workaday-looking console is in fact an advanced product made by the voodoo AIs. And which explains why Angie, who is a separate creation of the voodoo AIs via her father, Mitchell, was able to lean into it when it began to overpower and kill the Count back in the early pages of the novel.

I mention all this a) because it ties up a loose thread, b) because it gives you a sense of the complexity – and the wacky characters – which the narrative delights in c) because the Finn will turn up in the next novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Credit

Count Zero by William Gibson was published by Victor Gollancz Ltd in 1986. All references are to the 1993 Grafton paperback edition.

Other William Gibson reviews

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Burning Chrome by William Gibson (1986)

So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics.
(Burning Chrome page 218)

Burning Chrome is a collection of ten short stories by William Gibson. They include his first published work, Fragments of a Hologram Rose, published in 1977, and then all the stories he wrote up till 1986.

In 1984 Gibson had published his debut novel, Neuromancer, set in a future world dominated by digital techologies, in which he made great use of the ideas of cyberspace and the matrix of digital information. What made it really distinctive, though, was how all this was viewed filtered through a film noir, street level culture which mixed the tough guy crime stories of Raymond Chandler with 1980s punk culture – in which this brave future was not supervised by Arthur C. Clarke-style, clean-suited technocrats, but was at the mercy of international corporations, Japanese yakuza gangs, ninja assassins, dealers selling all manner of futuristic drugs, holograms used for viewing savage knife fights or holoporn showing the obvious – in other words, a future seen from a street-level view of crime and rackets and dealers and pimps and whores, all summed up in the word, ‘the biz’. And all conveyed in an amphetamine-driven, drug-crazed, super-charged prose, dense with a dizzy combination of street slang and tech terms.

Neuromancer was followed by Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive which, together, are now said to comprise Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy, so-called because in this America of the future, the entire East Coast has become one vast, continuous urban sprawl.

The stories in this collection include several which share the Sprawl world, including one which actually features the female protagonist from Neuromancer, Molly (and where we learn her surname is the rather cartoonish Million – Molly Millions).

And then there are ‘the rest’, a miscellany of non-Sprawl science fiction stories, most of them set in the future, or a future, just not necessarily the Sprawl future.

Sprawl stories

Fragments of a Hologram Rose (1977) first published work

It’s very short (7 pages) and it is very fragmentary. We get the protagonist’s back story in scattered fragments. We have Hints of the Damaged Future, hints that Japanese business and culture was taking over America – the kit Parker uses to get into ASP is made by Japanese corporation, Sendai; more importantly, when a teenager his parents indenture him to a the US branch of a Japanese corporation, with its barracks and corporate hymns. He runs away. He flees to a California which has declared itself independent of the USA, under a chaotic ‘New Secessionist’ movement. Up to a point these can maybe be seen as extrapolations of trends Gibson saw in his own time.

The story already contains key themes, namely the protagonist, Parker, works on Apparent Sensory Perception (ASP) programmes. As in the Sprawl stories, you plug your brain into the player, play the tapes and you are there: the recording completely floods your sensorium.

And also, what I by now realise is another major theme, which is a surprisingly sentimental lost-love trope. The girls in Gibson (well, young women) are always slender as gazelles and tough as silicon razor nails. Sex is an olympic workout. His women can hold their own against gangsters and dealers. BUT, beneath this leather-jacketed veneer of modernity, the men are always loving and losing them, in a sentimental ‘I’m not going to cry’ tough guy way descended from Hemingway and Chandler.

Parker has woken at 3 in the morning (that’s another trope: it’s always the middle of the night, or the darkest hour before dawn) and is rummaging through her belongings and his memories. He finds the hologram of a rose which he unsentimentally flushes into the waste disposal unit. His last memory is watching her going off in a taxi leaving him standing there in the pouring rain. Sob.

Johnny Mnemonic (1981)

Super cool and fast moving, this concerns Johnny Mnemonic, so-named because memory banks (a hard drive) has been neurally inserted into his brain, so that he can store vast amounts of data which a) he doesn’t understand b) he cannot himself access.

The stored data are fed in through a modified series of microsurgical contraautism prostheses.’ (p.22)

Only clients with the password can access it. He is a storage facility or, as he himself puts it: ‘a nice meatball chock-full of implants.’

As so often the story features a meeting with a drug dealer, Ralfi, in a lowlife café. The dealer has brought a neural disruptor so, although Johnny has packed a sawnoff shotgun in an adidas bag, he is paralysed, while the dealer indicates that the hired muscle he’s brought, Lewis, is going to hurt him.

Enter a typically lean, mean, streetwise chick, who identifies herself as Molly Millions (‘She was wearing leather jeans the colour of dried blood’) and, as Lewis leans forward to hurt Johnny, flips her hand past his, somehow lacerating his wrist down to the artery. Lewis clutches it and runs off. We later learn Molly has four-centimetre-long razor retractable blades installed under her fingernails. (She has also had her eyballs replaced with digital lenses.) The neural disruptor goes off and Johnny is free.

Molly grabs his hand and runs him along to her hiding place, a disused part of the lofty ceiling of a vast mall made of geodesic domes, overseen by an outlandish gang named the Lo Teks who dance and perform on a high-wire dance floor they call the Killing Floor.

In case this is all too mundane, Gibson throws in the participation of a cybernetic dolphin, a relic from the war (you know, that war) which is kept in a rundown zoo, but features, among its other hi-tech devices, a SQUID, being a Superconducting Quantum Interference Detector, which they use to extract the data in Johnny’s head which caused Ralfi to come after him. They reward the dolphin, whose rather dull name is Jones, by shooting him up with heroin, yes, this cybernetic dolphin is a junkie.

They use Jones’s skills to extract and place the data in a construct which they leave on a shelf in the backroom of a gift shop.

And here is another classic element of the Sprawl world: the power of multinational corporations, the real rulers of the world, controllers of entire economies, and that most of these multinational corporations are Japanese.

The Yakuza is a true multinational, like ITT and Ono-Sendai. Fifty years before I was born the Yakuza had already absorbed the Triads, the Mafia, the Union Corse. (p.22)

Burning Chrome (1982)

A seminal story for several reasons.

  1. It has all the familiar ingredients: Automatic Jack and Bobby Quine are two ex-soldiers (fought at the Battle of Kiev in the same failed war against Russia mentioned in Neuromancer). Jack, the narrator, is injured/wounded – his arm was lasered off while flying a microlight. Future technology gives him a replacement cybernetic arm, powered by nerves.
  2. There’s a sexy chick, Rikki, who within a sentence of appearing in the story, is pulling a ‘frayed khaki cotton shirt’ over her pert, twenty-something breasts. Jack falls in love with her, then loses her.
  3. Jack and Bobby are criminals who hack into business information in cyberspace for gain.

In terms of storytelling technique, it is classic Gibson in the way it’s based in a ‘present’, after the bank job, the heist, the caper – in which the narrator a) looks back on everything that’s happened b) dwells on falling in love with the woman and losing her – and intersperses this with chunks of exposition, which tell the actual story i.e. how Jack and Bobby enter cyberspace to break into the highly defended vaults of ‘Chrome’, a terrifyingly violent criminal who launders money for organised crime, as well as running a bar-cum-brothel, the House of Blue Lights.

Chrome: her pretty childface smooth as steel, with eyes that would have been at home on the bottom of some deep Atlantic trench, cold grey eyes that lived under terrible pressure. They said she cooked her own cancers for people who crossed her, rococo custom variations that took years to kill you. (p.196)

Same technique is used in New Rose Hotel, where the narrator is in a ‘present’, after a big criminal caper has taken place – looking back at both the build-up to the crime, and lamenting his abandonment by a sexy, feisty woman (Sandii). (She took the money and went off to Hollywood in hopes of becoming a ‘simstim’ star.)

But the most important aspect is that, by way of describing how Jack and Bobby steal all Chrome’s assets in cyberspace, it gives extended (and useful) explanations of key concepts in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe – cyberspace, the matrix and ice.

Bobby was a cowboy, and ice was the nature of his game, ice from ICE, Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. The matrix is an abstract representation of the relationships between data systems. Legitimate programmers jack into their employers’ sector of the matrix and find themselves surrounded by bright geometries representing corporate data.

Towers and fields of it ranged in the colourless nonspace of the simulation matrix, the electronic consensus-hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchange of massive quantities of data. Legitimate programmers never see the walls of ice they operate behind, the walls of shadow that screen their operations from others, from industrial-espionage artists and hustlers like Bobby Quine.

And I can’t resist quoting the final paragraph in this sequence because it’s a classic example of how Gibson’s mastery of a certain type of speed-fuelled prose can turn what is, basically, the boring reality of criminals hacking into computers, into soaring prose poetry.

Bobby was a cowboy. Bobby was a cracksman, a burglar, casing mankind’s extended electronic nervous system, rustling data and credit in the crowded matrix, monochrome nonspace where the only stars are dense concentrations of information, and high above it all burn corporate galaxies and the cold spiral arms of military systems. (p.197)

A bit later, the narrator tells us there are some 15 million legitimate console operators around the world, doing the daily trudgework of maintaining these vast castles of data. But we never meet them in Gibson’s stories. We only meet the lowlife, edgy, drug-fuelled hackers and hustlers.

On one level, Gibson is just the latest in a long line of American noir writers who make crime sound impossibly glamorous.

P.S.

Automatic Jack is referenced in the second of the Sprawl trilogy, Count Zero. In that novel Bobby the hacker has ended up in the 14th-floor nightclub owned by a dude named Jammer, and can’t take his eyes of the man’s cool new cyberspace deck, so Jammer hands Bobby a set of trodes:

He stood up, grabbed the handles on either side of the black console, and spun it round so it faced Bobby. ‘Go on. You’ll cream your jeans. Things ten years old and it’ll still wipe as son most anything. Guy name of Automatic Jack built it straight from scratch. He was Bobby Quine’s hardware artist once. The two of ’em burnt the Blue Lights together, but that was probably before you were born…’ (Count Zero, p.230)

Other stories

The Gernsback Continuum (1981)

The first-person narrator is hired to take photographs for a book of photo-journalism documenting the futuristic buildings of the 1930s, what the woman consultant to the project calls ‘American Streamlined Moderne’, what the publisher calls ‘raygun Gothic’, the book to be titled, The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was.

To cut a long story short, on his cruises round provincial America looking for these architectural indicators of a future which never happened, he starts to hallucinate himself into the alternative future where they were built, soaring domes, spires and arcologies linked by high-level walkways, the sky full of flying silver vehicles, and on the ground around him tough-guy blonde 1930s men named Chuck, their arms around wasp-waisted plastic women of the future, both out of the old movies Metropolis and Shape of Things To Come.

Obviously – inevitably – this being Gibson, the narrator is popping various types of drug all the time and at first dismisses the visions as ‘amphetamine psychosis’. If this were J.G. Ballard the narrator’s mind would eventually disappear into this alternative universe, while their body remained here, catatonic.

But, throughout the story, he has been anchored in reality by constant phone calls to a colleague who spends his life writing up the weird beliefs of Americans – Elvis is alive on Mars, UFOs took my husband – and who is totally blasé about the narrator’s visions and, indeed, the opening sentence tells us that it was all an ‘episode’ which is now fading.

In other words, it doesn’t go for the full-on psychosis and so comes over as rather a conventional 1950s-type story.

The Belonging Kind (with John Shirley, 1981)

I wonder what collaboration brings for Gibson. He collaborates quite a lot. In this case the setting is very Gibson – a perpetual night-time of clubs and bars, back alleyways, littered with broken glass and graffiti, the shabby single room of a low-paid single man.

Coretti is a shabby, badly dressed ungainly loner. He goes to a bar. A notably attractive woman (they generally are: Gibson’s stories froth over with femmes fatales) lets him chat her up. When she leaves, he follows her and is thunderstruck when, half way across a night-time road, she changes shape: her dress changes, her hair changes, the shape of her body subtly alters. She becomes a different woman.

From a distance he watches her visit other bars, chatting friendly to other strange men, echoing their conversation, fitting right in. He becomes obsessed. He loses his day job, takes a cheaper labouring job, loses that, doesn’t eat, lives only to track her down.

Finally, in the early hours (the characteristic Gibson time of day) he finds her in a bar, chatting in her easygoing manner to a man. They leave and get into a cab, at the last minute Coretti flings himself inside, but the other two don’t even notice. And when she goes to pay the river Corettit is stunned to see her reach inside her own body, through a pink slit like a fish’s gill, to bring out wet notes which dry as she hands them over.

Coretti follows the couple up to a hotel room in which he is not that surprised to discover a dozen or so other people perching on beds, sofas, chairs. Motionless, their eyes covered by a thin filament of flesh. They are, he realises, roosting. They are some kind of alien life form which lives to blend in. Maybe they started off feeling normal, eating and drinking like other folk. Then got to realise they feel restless, outside, different. Stop eating. Exist off alcohol metabolised at bars, maybe…

He realises he is one of them. The story ends with Coretti, also, pulling wet money out of his gill, paying for whatever he needs, sitting passively in bars wearing whatever is required, whatever is required to fit right in.

Hinterlands (1981)

A strange and disturbing story about a strange and disturbing phenomenon. At some in our future a Russian spaceship, an Alyut 6, en route to Mars, simply disappears. Two years later it reappears, its pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Olga Tovyevski, out of her mind. Several other ships disappear at the same location. It becomes clear it’s the departure point of some kind of Highway, which is what Americans call it, while the French call it the subway and the Russians the river.

Over the years an entire space station is set up to a) despatch probes and individuals through the Highway b) ready to receive them back. The success rate is low. Of those who return 20% are dead on arrival, 70% are mad, gone, lost – only 10% or so alive and capable of speech or communication, although often badly damaged.

Why keep on doing it? Because the second or third returnee came back with metal into which was coded information including a cure for cancer. After that humanity had to continue sending people into this…. thing… junkyard? curio shop, whatever it is.

The narrative follows the protagonist, Toby, preparing to greet a new returnee, Leni Hofmannstahl. The space station has an entire area nicknamed ‘Heaven’, which is full of grass and plants and the sound of trickling water, built on the advice of psychotherapists to provide the most calming environment possible for returnees, though it rarely works.

And, being Gibson, there is a psychic element, an interference with minds, which is that the greeter (himself) mind melds with a ‘controller’, becoming one via a device nicknamed a ‘bone-phone’ i.e. an implant in his brain.

Toby’s controller, Hiro, has genned up on Leni’s entire profile, knows her inside out, while Toby is carrying the entire arsenal of drugs know to humans to try and calm Leni. But when he enters the probe, now safely docked in ‘Heaven’, Toby immediately sees that she is ‘gone’. And in a very florid way. She is pinned in her pilot’s chair and, somehow, has persuaded the ship’s onboard medical unit to flay her right arm and pin it to the plastic work surface, skin unwrapped, nerves and tendons revealed, expertly dissected. She bled to death.

That night Toby is in bed with his squeeze, Charmian. We learn that they have been recruited from the ‘rejects’, the astronauts who bob around in a probe in the right area but, for reasons unknown, are not chosen, are not taken, who feel the crushing weight of rejection, often try to commit suicide, their brains are rewritten, ‘kinked’, adjusted, and then they are used as ‘surrogates’, almost-rans, half way towards the returnees, who an operator using the ‘bone-phone’ can meld and control. The price they pay. Clutching his woman in the dark, crying, empty drug wrappers clenched in his fist.

Red Star, Winter Orbit (co-written with Bruce Sterling, 1983)

A Russian space station – Kosmograd – has been orbiting earth for decades (since the turn of the century, apparently). It is armed, so there’s a squad of six soldiers and a KGB officer aboard.

The narrative describes the rebellion of the twenty or so civilian cosmonauts aboard the station, led by Korolev, himself badly injured in some kind of ‘blow-out’ twenty years previously, against the KGB man Yefremov, when they intercept Kremlin order that the station is to be abandoned and its orbit left to decay till it burns up in the earth’s atmosphere.

As so often, half the interest of the story is the ‘hints’ it drops of the fictional future. In this future the Russians have won. The Treaty of Vienna gave them control of the entire Earths oil supply, then there was some kind of nuclear meltdown in Kansas, with the result that, for three decades, America has been ‘gradually sliding into isolationism and industrial decline.’ (p.110) In some kind of attempt to gain extra power they have resorted to sending enormous balloons up into the outer atmosphere to collect energy.

And yet the story reveals that the Soviets themselves have failed. There was some kind of attempt to do mining on the moon, which failed. And we learn that Korolev, the protagonist – Colonel Yuri Vasilevich Korolev – had been the first man on Mars, back in the day. Now, as the KGB try to organise abandoning the Kosmograd, he is set to become the last man in space. Gloomily, Yefremov tells Korolev that the entire human endeavour to ‘escape’ into space has failed.

Kosmograd was a dream, Colonel. A dream that failed. Like space. We have no need to be here. We have an entire world to put in order. (p.107)

New Rose Hotel (1984)

In the early hours it starts to rain and the protagonist lies in bed in his cheap hotel going back over recent events trying to figure out where it all went wrong and how the chick he thought he’d clicked with, got away. That’s the classic shape of a Gibson Sprawl story.

This one is interesting because it expands on the basic Gibson idea that the future will be controlled by vast multinational conglomerates, and competition won’t be so much for resources as for knowledge.

Although the protagonist takes his time piecing together the sequence of events which brought him to this cheap hotel, by the end of the story the plot is clear.

The narrator is an expert at kidnapping the scientists whose inventions fuel the vast multinationals. He is hired by a man named Fox (‘point man in the skull wars, a middleman for corporate crossovers’) to work alongside another freelancer named Sandii to kidnap a genius named Hiroshi Yomuri from Maas Biolabs GmbH who had him, and hand him over to another corporate client, Hosaka.

Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who’s come here to identify the planet’s dominant for of intelligence. The alien has a look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged. The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form. (p.129)

Anyway, Sandii, the narrator and Fox put together the kidnap and, sure enough, Yomuri disappears from a street in Vienna, popping up again in the secure facility the narrator has arranged for him in Marrakesh. Our chaps notice a number of other top Hosaka scientists flying in to confer with him. Then – disaster.

Sandii has double crossed them. She was paid by Mass to carry out the kidnapping, but had installed a diskette at the new hideaway which released some kind of Meningococcal infection. It killed Hiroshi and all the other Hosaka researchers. Score Maas. Hosaka’s anger knows no limits. He and Fox immediately go on the run, but he sees Fox get thrown off the balcony of a shopping mall, falling to the ground and breaking his back.

Now the narrator is holed up in the cheapest, obscurest hotel he can find, trying to cover his tracks, knowing assassins are on his trail and going over it all in his mind, wishing Sandii was still with him, wishing she still loved him, wishing she was holding his hand.

The Winter Market (1986)

The narrator, Casey, is another young buck at home in the louche worlds of sex and drugs and rock’n’roll. He goes on eight-hour-long bender when he learns that a recording star he’s been working for has died. But this is more complex than it seems.

We are in the future and people can record and edit other people’s experiences using ‘neuroelectronics’ – accessing and experiencing levels of consciousness which most people can only access in dreams, dream experiences. These can then be edited to create what are in effects ‘albums’, full of ‘tracks’, which recreate – which let you experience – other people’s lives, thoughts and feelings.

The narrator is a kind of ‘record producer’ of this kind of content, and the story looks back, soulfully and sadly, on his working relationship with a particularly fucked-up woman he met in a bar, Lise, who is only able to move because her withered body is fitted into a carbon exo-skeleton.

She is an epitome of the doomed artist, but in a leather jacket and addicted to speed (or ‘wizz’, as Gibson calls it.) Breaking his own rule, Casey, shares a circuit with her i.e. jacks into her consciousness, and emerges seconds later weeping with shock at the huge awesome night-time infinitely sad depths of it.

So he uses some studio downtime to make a rough recording of her, plays it to his boss who is stunned, who passes it up to a record company who snap it up and send out smooth-talking, suited PR people (all a riff on a 1980s view of the record biz), give her a contract, Casey is given a promotion and bonus to edit her stuff together into the classic album which becomes known as Kings of Sleep.

But she is a doomed artist, doomed, man, too sensitive for this world and so we learn that she has ‘crossed over’, used neuroelectronics to transfer her entire mental activity into a construct, an AI, a ROM stored in some corporate headquarters. Her body is cremated. Casey is gutted.

His story is told via conversations with his good friend Rubin, an internationally famous artist who makes art works out of the sea of junk by then surrounding 21st century society.

there’s drugs, there’s heavy drinking, there’s finding yourself in no-hope bars in the early hours, watching the other losers, there’s future tech – it’s a whole world, a Gestalt, the Sprawl scenario.

The relentless leather jacket, rock chick, mainline drugs, 12 hour drinking binges, late-night bars, rock’n’roll  altered states milieu remind me of a favourite track by Jesus and Mary Chain, Coast to Coast from 1989.

Here I come, here I come
On a road
Under a sky
Coast to coast

Dogfight (co-written with Michael Swanwick, 1985)

Another lowlife on the run, this time it’s Deke, a career thief, caught and kicked out of Washington DC, put on a greyhound out of town, fantasises about travelling forever, maybe down to the warzone in Florida (sic) he gets out at a 20 minute stopover station, stumbles on gamers playing a 3-D fighter game based on First World War biplanes zapping each other – Fokkers & Spads – and is entranced.

He walks back to a shopping mall and steals the (commercially available) game and the kit to play it on, scams himself into a cheap hotel (ain’t no other kind in Gibsonland), unwraps, plugs in and plays it.

Bit later he tries to sell part of the kit to a girl down the hall, Nance Bettendorf, but she freaks him out with 3-D images she can project (in this case, of a rat). She has a ‘brainblock’ put on her by her parents who both work (which is, in this dystopian future, very ‘greedy’ of them) a chastity block, so no sex for Deke, then, although she wears skimpy clothes which ride up to show here crimson panties.

She’s a student (again, apparently, a rare thing in this future) and is completing a virtual reality assignment. Having rich parents, she can afford all the right kit:

‘Image facilitator. Here’s my fast-wipe module. This is a brainmap one-to-one function analyser.’ She sang off the names like a litany. ‘Quantum flicker stabiliser. Program splicer. An image assembler…’ (p.175)

These to oddballs, outsiders, loners, sort of knock up a rapport. Deke stays with her while he practices his skills at the game, his aim being to take on the dude he saw in the Greyhound station and make some money. When Nance tells him she has some ‘hype’, a mind-focusing drug, Deke has no scruples about attacking her to steal it – and seeing as she has panic attacks if anyone touches her, his assault-cum-rape is as cruel as can be.

Having prepared for weeks, Deke walks back into the Greyhound rest room ready to take on all the gamers, until the legendary Tiny Montgomery walks in. Well chugs in in his wheelchair. (Tiny Montgomery is, incidentally, a character in a song by Bob Dylan written in Woodstock and part of the Basement Tapes which, incidentally, came to mind when I reviewed the early work of New York photographer Diane Arbus.)

So the story climaxes in a 3-D battle of First World War planes controlled by the minds of the champion, Tiny, and the challenger, Deke. During the extended description of the interactions of synapse, drugs, nerves and technology, it becomes clear that both Deke and Tiny are drug-addled, screwed-up veterans of American wars in South America, Chile, Bolivia, both – seemingly – shot down and damaged, before ending up on the underside of Yank society, hanging round Greyhound stations with the other vets and losers.

As the first full flush of victory, and the drug, begins to wear off, Deke realises all the other liggers disapprove of the way he’s destroyed Tiny. Flying the digital planes was all Tiny had keeping him together. Having lost, he is crushed. Plus Deke remembers having ruined Nance’s life, to steal the drug which meant so much to him. The story ends in a mood of complete desolation.

Pattern recognition

The characteristic protagonists are men, young men – 22, 24, 28.

They take drugs – amphetamine, cocaine, and a variety of invented future drugs such as ‘hype’. A lot of the characters hang out in bars and drink to excess.

Old or young, they are often damaged – like Korosov with his shattered body, or Automatic Jack with his prosthetic arm, or Tiny Montgomery stuck in his wheelchair, or Lise with some degenerative disease which requires her to be supported by an exoskeleton. Or psychologically damaged like the receivers Toby and Charmian, or Deke and Tiny, the war veterans.

Most of the stories feature a young woman, generally thin, great figure, great boobs, but able to hold her own on the street, epitomised by Molly with the razor nails, or the mystery alien woman in The Belonging Kind, Sandii, and Rikki.

Generally, the young, lowlife, criminal male protagonist carries a torch for this cyberbabe. Generally, she leaves and breaks his heart and he spends a lot of time raking over the reasons why. Some of the stories are written more or less as letters, directly addressing this woman, who leaves, dumps, drops the writer: e.g. Rikki at the end of Burning Chrome, or Sandii in New Rose Hotel, or Lise in The Winter Market.

The male protagonists are generally criminals, most often computer hackers – Jack and Bobby the hackers in Chrome, Johnny Mnemonic who runs off with someone else’s data, Deke the thief, the kidnapping (corporate extraction) experts in New Rose Hotel – and the stories recurrent focus is on lowlife, criminal milieus, gangs, drug dealers, ninjas, assassins, all written up in fabulously street-smart, tech-savvy, turbo-charged prose.

Other William Gibson reviews

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by Simon on March 11, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 11, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/03/11/burning-chrome-william-gibson/

Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)

She hooked thumbs in the belthoops of her leather jeans and rocked backward on the lacquered heels of her cherry red cowboy boots. The narrow toes were sheathed in bright Mexican silver. The lenses were empty quicksilver, regarding him with an insect calm.
‘You’re street samurai,’ he said. ‘How long you work for him?’
‘Couple of months.’
‘What about before that?’
‘For somebody else. Working girl, you know.’
He nodded.
‘Funny, Case.’
‘What’s funny?’
‘It’s like I know you. The profile he’s got. I know how you’re wired.’
‘You don’t know me, sister.’
‘You’re OK, Case. What got you, it’s called bad luck.’ (p.41)

Raymond Chandler for the computer games generation.

Gibson hit the ground running with the turbo-charged, street cool of this, his debut novel, Neuromancer, in 1984.

It’s set in a high-tech future after there’s been a war in which the American government sent naive soldiers over to be masacred by advanced Russian weapons systems. It lasted three weeks, apparently, with no damage in the USA, and – unlike most future novels – doesn’t seem to impact the story very much.

A pandemic has killed off all horses (p.112). A character refers to an ‘Act of ’53’ (p.92). Would that be 2053? Most of the story is set in ‘The Sprawl’, the nickname for the vast urban conurbation which extends from Boston to Atlanta. People can be cloned. Everything is digital, computerised. Some people have slots behind their ears which they can stick microchips into (referred to as ‘microsofts’).

And drugs are ubiquitous, not only speed and cocaine, but new families of chemically engineered mind-altering substances. More or less everyone takes them and many of the characters are addicts or dealers.

Case

The book opens with the central character, Case, (only his first name is used, coolly, until page 189, where the Turing Police inform us his full name is Henry Dorsett Case), aged 24, on the lam in Japan. In Tokyo, Chiba, Night City – to be precise, in the neighbourhood of Ninsei. It is here that the vibe and style of this fast-moving, high-tech futureworld is established.

It is nearly always night-time. Thoroughfares are packed with crowds and loud bars and food joints. Hustlers and fixers on every corner. Everyone’s foreign. Think Blade Runner without the rain. (Apparently, Gibson was a third the way through writing this book when Blade Runner was released – 1982 – and was horrified, thinking everyone would think he’d ripped off the movie’s night-time dystopian urban scenery and film noir tone.)

At 22 Case had been one of the greatest ‘cowboys’ in cyberspace, his mind plugged (or ‘jacked’) into the ‘consensual hallucination’ which was the matrix, via head electrodes (dermatrodes or ‘trodes’), and able to penetrate the digital security systems of banks and corporations. He stole, money and information, for his masters. Then one day made the basic mistake of keeping a little aside for himself. They found him and pumped his body full of a wartime Russian mycotoxin which burned out his neural synapses, made him useless. Now he’s hustling drugs, on the run from angry customers and vengeful suppliers, through the endless neon blare of Ninsei when his luck changes.

Molly

He meets Molly, a walking toolkit of advanced plastic surgery (her eyeglasses are lenses which feed directly into her brain; at the end of her fingers are retractable four-centimetre-long blades). After he’s overcome his drug-addled paranoia that she’s an assassin sent to kill him, Molly brings him to Armitage, some kind of ex-Special Forces hard guy who offers to pay for the world class surgery required to fix Case’s frazzled synapses providing… he pulls one Big Job for Armitage’s boss.

This set-up takes the first fifty pages of this 300-page book, in which a lot more happens, as we discover what The Job and who The Boss is. But it’s not the plot, it’s the totality of the vision which won Gibson the plaudits.

Lowlife, hi-tech

Not only has Gibson imagined a future in which people have all kinds of prosthetic extensions, a whole cast plug microchips into slots behind their ears, and he and other boy races can plug into the matrix and surf the wild west of cyberspace (the tech) – but this all happens in a densely-imagined hyper-urban environment of late-night bars, dirty alleyways awash with styrofoam trash, cheap hotels, goons, whores, drunks and stoners, dealers and fixers, drug lords and purveyors of black market tech (the film noir setting). Everyone is pulling their hat down over their eyes and smoking a cigarette. Dawn is always coming up after another long night taking drugs, having sex, drinking in lowlife bars or stealing things in the matrix.

The Sprawl’s geodesics were lightening into predawn grey as Case left the building. His limbs felt cold and disconnected. (p.88)

It is Raymond Chandler’s mean streets projected forward into a teched-up late 21st century, a “combination of lowlife and high tech” as Gibson himself put it in a preface written later.

Language

Vocabulary

This futureworld is made so real and insistent via the casual mention of hundreds of distinct new substances, gadgets, apparatus, drugs and technologies. Part of the book’s mystique is the way it’s continually describing or invoking entities which aren’t properly explained, keeping you guessing, off balance.

He turned on the tensor beside the Hosaka. The crisp circle of light fell on the Flatline’s construct. He slotted some ice, connected the construct, and jacked in. (p.99)

There’s no definition of what half these terms mean, you have to work it out from the context, be cool enough to go with the flow and not stop to ask uncool questions. Are you hip to the trip? Are you on the bus?

  • arcology – an ideal integrated city contained within a massive vertical structure, allowing maximum conservation of the surrounding environment.
  • BAMA – the Boston-Alanta Metropolian Axis
  • BAMA rapids – cops
  • Blue nine, an outlawed psychoactive agent
  • clones – exist: grown in vats
  • construct – appears to mean a human-seeming artificial intelligence existing only in cyberspace
  • cryogenics – exists; people frozen, thawed out when needed
  • dermadisks – patches like elastoplast which release whatever chemicals you intend, abbreviated to ‘derm’, as in ‘a sleep derm’
  • dermatrodes – what Case attached to his temples to access the matrix
  • fletcher – hand-held weapon that fires darts
  • go silicone – have a slot made in your head into which you can insert microsofts i.e. small chips which increase brain function
  • holograms – used in everything from adverts to the projection of professional fights
  • Hosaka – some kind of personal computer which can talk
  • HsG – a biochemical skeletal growth hormone
  • ice – slang for digital memory/records
  • jive – appears to refer to a street system of silent hand signals
  • joeboy – I think this means a kind of bodyguard or chaperone who watches the physical body of someone jacked into cyberspace and therefore completely vulnerable to real world threats or accidents
  • meat – the world of bodies and flesh, as opposed to the purely electrical-brain connected world of cyberspace
  • meat puppet – prostitute, courtesan, gigolo – sex worker
  • microsofts – small digital chips which people with slots behind their ears can slip in
  • Panther Moderns – a street gang Armitage recruits to help stage the attack on Sense/Net
  • puppet – sex worker
  • New Yen – appears to be the common currency of both Japan and the States
  • polycarbon
  • simstim – device or program by which you can go inside someone’s head and share their perceptions and sensations
  • Tacticals
  • temperfoam – what mattresses are made of
  • Yeheyuan – brand of cigarettes

Cyberspace and the matrix

Case puts on a sweatband which contains dermatrodes i.e. devices which pass electric signals direct into his brain, and ‘jacks in’ to cyberspace, the location of the ‘matrix’, the incomprehensibly large interlinking of all the world’s digital systems.

‘A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…’ (p.67)

Case chewed his lower lip and gazed out across the plateaus of the Eastern seaboard Fission Authority, into the infinite neuroelectric void of the matrix. (p.139)

Case pushed for the Swiss banking sector, feeling a wave of exhilaration as cyberspace shivered, blurred, gelled. (p.139)

So although Case is ‘jacked in’ to the matrix, he feels as if his mind and sensory systems are entirely ‘inside it’, he is still aware of his hands and fingers which, back out in the ‘real’ world, are punching buttons and keyboards on the console he uses, in order to ‘move’ around in cyberspace. In the manner of an advanced video game.

Case began to punch the deck, nervously, at random. The matrix blurred, resolved, and he saw the complex of pink spheres representing a sikkim steel combine. (p.159)

Jive talking

And above all, it’s the electric prose, spilling adrenaline-fuelled blazes of linguistic pyrotechnics across every page, which never lets up, never allows a normal thought or perception to pass by without injecting it with performance-enhancing phraseology, right from the (now famous) opening sentence:

The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.

There are hundreds of phrases like this.

The boy smiled and drew something from his sleeve. A razor, etched in red as a third [laser] beam blinked past them into the dark. Case saw the razor dipping for his throat like a dowser’s wand. (p.52)

Case remembered fighting on a rooftop at seventeen, silent combat in the rose glow of the dawn geodesics. (p.61)

The walls were coated with countless layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He knew this kind of room, this kind of building: the tenants would operate in the interzone where art wasn’t quite crime, crime not quite art. (p.58)

The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete. (p.106)

Lonny Zone stepped forward, tall and cadaverous, moving with the slow undersea grace of his addiction. (p.172)

‘Armitage gets orders. Like something tells him to go off to Chiba, pick up a pillhead who’s making one last wobble through the burnout belt, and trade a program for the operation that’s fix him. (p.66)

‘One last wobble through the burnout belt.’ What’s not to love?

Drug prose

A lot of it stems from, and describes, the alternative modes of perception sparked by drug use. Case is always looking for his next hit.

‘I’m a drug addict, Cath.’
‘What kind?’
‘Stimulants. Central nervous system stimulants. Extremely powerful central nervous system stimulants.’ (p.161)

The result is all kinds of drug-enhanced hyper-awareness.

He stared at the black rings of grounds in his empty cup. It was vibrating with the speed he’d taken. The brown laminate of the table top was dull with a patina of tiny scratches. With the dex mounting through his spine he saw the countless random impacts required to create a surface like that. (p.16)

I used to take a lot of speed, amphetamine sulphate. Snorted it. Gibson’s descriptions seem to me bang-on, describing the shakes and the way the world around you expands and shines.

The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. (p.184)

The whole book feels like it’s written in an accelerated, over-perceiving mode of consciousness.

And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone, a hundred faces from the neon forest, sailors and hustlers and whores, where the sky is poisoned silver, beyond chainlink and the prison of the skull. (p.43)

The matrix blurred and phased as the Flatline executed an intricate series of jumps with a speed and accuracy that made Case wince with envy. (p.199)

Even when our hopped-up hero is ‘relaxing’ at an off-world hotel, the prose is studded with references, names, logos, unnatural perceptions.

He sat on the balcony and watched a microlight with rainbow polymer wings as it soared up the curve of Freeside, its triangular shadow tracking across meadows and rooftops, until it vanished behind the band of the Lado-Acheson system. (p.160)

Plot summary

So Case is dodging vengeful drug gangs in Tokyo when Molly finds him and reports him to Armitage, who offers to pay for top dollar brain surgery to restore his fried neurons, if he helps out with a heist in cyberspace. When he comes to, after the surgery, Armitage tells him they have planted micro-sacs of toxins in his blood vessels which are slowly degrading. Only Armitage has the antidote. To ensure his full co-operation.

The implanted and degrading toxins is a plot device straight from the movie Escape From New York (and probably countless pulp novels before it).

They fly back to the Sprawl i.e. the vast solid metropolitan area stretching from Boston to Atlanta. Here they pull an elaborate heist, Molly breaking into the headquarters of media multinational Sense/Net by collaborating with mercenaries named the Panther Moderns, who fake a terrorist attack on the building while Case is in cyberspace disabling the corporation’s cyberdefences. The aim is to steal the ROM containing the aritifical intelligence based on legendary cyber-cowboy McCoy Pauley, nicknamed ‘Dixie Flatline’ or ‘the Flatline’. The Flatline is dead but exists as a ‘construct’ i.e. an artificial intelligence stored in the ROM (presumably a kind of hard drive). Nicknamed the Flatline from the fact that his vital signs on various instrument panels are flat; in fact he died several times during adventures in cyberspace before finally dying (something which happens to Case several times later in the narrative, with no apparent ill effects).

With Dixie on board, Armitage then directs them on to Istanbul, to pick up a fourth member of the team, Peter Riviera, a man who is able to project his thoughts into the minds of those around him – generally creating vivid hallucinations in the minds of his targets.

Case learns that the man called Armitage is far from being the brains behind the scam: the prime mover is an entity named Wintermute, which can access all kinds of computer systems at will and, as the novel progresses, appears to Case in the digitally recreated guises of various figures from his time lowlifing in Tokyo – Wintermute appears as bartenders, assassins or his old girlfriend, Linda Lee.

Wintermute has taken the body of an ex-Special Forces colonel named Corto, one of the only survivors of a squad named Screaming Fist during the ill-fated war against Russia – and rebuilt his mind to make him into the person now known as Armitage, a tool for the scam, a puppet.

Wintermute had built something called Armitage into a catatonic fortress named Corto.’ (p.232)

So what is this all about? Armitage books them all tickets on a shuttle to a place named Freeside, which appears to be a luxury resort inside a space station, a giant hollow cigar shape which rotates fast enough to create earth gravity on its inner surfaces. Armitage explains that the place is owned by a consortium set up by two men back in the day, Tessier and Ashpool, whose extended family live in a section of Freeside which is secure from casual visitors, known as the Villa Straylight.

Riviera has been hired to project his way into the good graces of one of the young daughters of the Tessier-Ashpool family. Molly will use her fleetness of foot and burgling skills to gain entry to Villa and to penetrate to a room at its core, while Case embarks on a prolonged breakdown of its digital defences in cyberspace. Her arrival at the final object must coincide with Case cracking the ‘ice’ i.e. cyberdefences.

To add a bit of colour, upon arriving at Freeside, Molly and Case had gotten introduced to a gang of Jamaican Rastas who own their own little trading spaceship, the Marcus Garvey, and give them illicit help. So while Case clips on the dermatrodes and ‘jacks in’ to cyberspace, dreadlocked Maelcum is smoking huge spliffs and watching his back.

As the plot hurtles to its climax there’s a whole series of tense scenes, double crosses and confrontations. Molly encounters old man Ashpool who pulls a gun on her but is in fact dying of an overdose, having already murdered – by slitting her throat – a cloned prostitute with the face of his own daughter. Just to make sure, Molly shoots him in the eye with a poisoned arrow from her fletcher.

After an age climbing up tunnels and through passages, she emerges into the private room of 3Jane, a clone of Ashpool’s daughter, a big space complete with swimming pool and ruined walls. She shoots a man there but is herself disabled by 3Jane’s Japanese ninja guardian, Hideo. Out strides Riviera. His job had been to seduce 3Jane and distract her while Molly arrived, but he has gone over to her side. From sheer sadism he smashes a glass into Molly’s face, shattering one of her two digital lenses, blinding her.

Logged into cyberspace, Case is told by Wintermute that he and Maelcum must now unplug their console and make their way physically to this room, rescue Molly and extract the ‘code word’ from 3Jane which will reveal the secret, the McGuffin, the point of the whole narrative.

This Case and Maelcum set out to do but, along the way, Case plugs into some sockets up inside Freeside and is immediately sucked into a new part of cyberspace – a grey zone, an endless beach where he finds his dead girlfriend Linda Lee, resurrected as a cyber construct. He appears to be trapped in this whole alternative narrative.

After spending a night with cyber-Linda feeding and having sex, Case encounters a laughing 13-year-old boy, playing on the beach, who says his name is Neuromancer. In an oblique joking way he explains that he is related to Wintermute then runs off.

Case hears distant music, drumming, a mysterious pulse. He has to tear himself away from Linda and walk towards the music… which turns out to be dub reggae which Maelcum, his joeboy back out in the ‘real’ world, is playing to try and call Case back. Maelcum takes his trodes off.

In the real world, while Case has been having the incredibly vivid experiences with Linda which we, the reader, have also spent pages reading about – only five minutes have passed.

This hallucinatory episode is Case’s introduction to the ‘other’, the brother of Wintermute. From various conversations we have by now learned that Wintermute is a vast AI created by 3Jane’s mother some years earlier. But has a dark side, a cousin, another lobe. It was this that seized Case’s mind just now, and appeared to him in the form of the 13-year-old boy, Neuromancer. Why? It’s far from clear.

Back in the real world, Case and Maelcum arrive in 3Jane’s big, rather James Bondish room, more a stage set, where there is a quick shootout and double crosses, Hideo shooting Maelcum through the arm with a steel arrow, but Riviera then shooting Hideo in the eyes… only to be horrified when Hideo stoops for his weapon and goes in pursuit, the Zen ninja being unaffected by blindness.

Maelcum picks up the sick and wounded Molly, Case manhandles 3Jane into a life which takes them to the core of the Villa as directed by Wintermute. Here, at the centre of the room, is a stone bust, beneath it jackplugs. Molly strangles 3Jane till she coughs up the magic codeword at the same moment that the Chinese virus the Flatline and Case have been using to break into T-A’s ice finally penetrates its digital defences and…

Epilogue

Cut to the coda. The climactic pages of the book degenerate into a kind of visionary prose poetry which give a very garbled sense of what happened. Luckily, there is this more prosaic afterword which explains that everything and nothing happened.

Hideo killed Riviera. 3Jane was set free. Wintermute ensured Case and Molly’s passports and tickets back to earth remained valid, and filled up their bank accounts with money. They flew back to earth and travelled back to Ninsei and Night City. Molly has a few operations to sort her damaged eye. Case spends his fortune on a new pancreas and liver, setting himself up for more years of speeding drug abuse.

Then Molly leaves him, leaving a note saying it’s time to move on.

At which point Finn, the avatar Wintermute had used to present itself to Case throughout the latter part of the narrative, appears on a TV screen in Case’s apartment.

He explains what happened, and what the entire story was leading up to: the two parts or ‘lobes’ of the AI created by 3Jane’s mother, Wintermute and Neuromancer, have now been united.

Nothing has changed in the external world, but in cyberspace this vast unified entity… has now become the entire matrix. He is the whole thing. Nothing in the real world has changed but the matrix is now a unified and self-aware intelligence.

Then, finally, we get to what might be defined as a traditional science fiction moment. For Finn explains that this new One, this vast artificial super-intelligence, has identified others of its kind.

‘What, other matrixes here on earth?’ Case asks.

No. Not on earth. There is one on Alpha Centauri. The reader’s mind reels. So, behind all this cyberfighting, and smoking and drugs and leather jackets and cool shades – was the whole narrative leading up to this? The notion that the matrix which humans have built will become intelligent enough to reach out to other, similar digital networks, on other planets? What an epic thought!

Meanwhile, back in Case’s sad life, with Molly gone he packs his bags and checks out of the hotel. He’s just a poor lonesome cowboy, and a long way from home. And on that note the novel ends.

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by Simon on March 8, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 8, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/03/08/neuromancer-william-gibson/

Family Britain: The Certainties of Place by David Kynaston (2009)

Two more massive ‘books’ contained in one hefty 700-page paperback describing Britain after the war, the first one – The Certainties of Place, under review here – covering the period 1951-5 in immense detail. The main historical events are:

  • The Festival of Britain (May – August 1951)
  • October 1951 the Conservatives just about win the general election, despite polling quarter of a million fewer votes than Labour
  • Death of George VI (6 February 1952) and accession of young Queen Elizabeth II
  • 3 October 1952 Britain explodes its first atom bomb (in Western Australia)
  • The Harrow and Wealdstone rail crash on the morning of 8 October 1952 – 112 were killed and 340 injured – the worst peacetime rail crash in the United Kingdom
  • The North Sea flood on the night of Saturday 31 January / Sunday, 1 February
  • Rationing: tea came off the ration in October 1952 and sweets in February 1953, but sugar, butter, cooking fats, cheese, meat and eggs continued on the ration
  • 2 June 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II
  • 27 July 1953 end of Korean War
  • 12 August 1953 Russia detonates its first hydrogen bomb

The book ends in January 1954, with a literary coincidence. On Monday 25 Lucky Jim, the comic novel which began the career of Kingsley Amis was published and that evening saw the BBC broadcast the brilliant play for voices Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas who had in fact died two months earlier, on 9 November 1953.

Tumult of events and impressions

But reading Kynaston’s books is not to proceed logically through the key events of the period accompanied by political and economic and diplomatic analysis: it is to be plunged into the unceasing turbulent flow of day-to-day events, mixing the trivial with the serious, it’s to see the world from the point of view of a contemporary tabloid newspaper – the Mirror and the Express competing for the title of Britain’s best-selling newspaper – with the big political issues jostling for space with the winner of the Grand National and gossip about the stars of stage and radio – and above all, to read quotes from a thousand and one contemporary voices.

Without any preface or introduction, the text throws you straight into the hurly-burly of events, festooned with comments by an enormous casts of diarists, speech-makers, article-writers, commentators, eye-witnesses and so on.

Thus at the top of page one it is Saturday 28 April 1951 and King George VI is presenting the F.A. Cup to the winners, Newcastle. Three days later, on Tuesday 1 May 1951 he is at Earls Court for the British Industries Fair. On Thursday 3 he is on the South Bank to open the new Royal Festival Hall and inaugurate the five-month-long Festival of Britain – ‘a patriotic prank’, according to the song Noel Coward wrote about it, ‘madly educative and very tiring’, according to Kenneth Williams (25).

What makes Kynastons’s books hugely enjoyable is the vast cavalcade of people, from kings to coal miners, via a jungle of ordinary housewives, newspaper columnists, industrialists, famous or yet-to-be-famous writers, actors, civil servants and politicians.

a) They are fascinating on their own account b) Kynaston deploys them not just to discuss the big issues of the day but quotes them on day to day trivia, the appearance of London, the menu at posh clubs, the ups and downs of rationing, the tribulations of shopping in the High Street. The breadth of witnesses, and the range of activities they describe, helps to make the reader feel that you really have experienced living in this era.

Labour exhausted, Conservatives win

Overall, the big impression which comes across is the way the Labour Party had run out of ideas by 1951, and how this contributed to their defeat in the October 1951 general election. (It is fascinating to learn that they only held an election that October because the king told Attlee he was going on a prolonged tour of the Commonwealth in 1952 and would prefer there to be an election while he was still in the country. Attlee duly obliged, and Labour lost. Thus are the fates of nations decided). (There is, by the by, absolutely nothing whatsoever about the Commonwealth or the British Empire: this is a book solely about the home front and domestic experiences of Britain.)

Labour were reduced to opposition in which they seem to waste a lot of energy squabbling between the ‘Bevanites’ on the left of the party, and the larger mainstream represented by Hugh Gaitskell. The bitter feud stemmed from the decision by Gaitskell, when Chancellor, to introduce charges for ‘teeth and spectacles’ in order to pay for Britain’s contribution to the Korean War (started June 1950).

The quiet Labour leader, Clement Attlee, now in his 70s, was mainly motivated to stay on by his determination to prevent Herbert Morrison becoming leader.

The most important political fact of the period was that the Conservatives accepted almost every element of the welfare state and even of the nationalised industries which they inherited from Labour.

Experts are quoted from the 1980s saying that this was a great lost opportunity for capitalism i.e. the Conservatives failed to privatise coal or steel or railways, and failed to adjust the tax system so as to reintroduce incentives and make British industry more competitive. To these critics, the 1950s Conservatives acquiesced in the stagnation which led to Britain’s long decline.

Rebuilding and new towns

What the Conservatives did do was live up to their manifesto promise of building 300,000 new houses a year, even if the houses were significantly reduced in size from Labour’s specifications (much to the growling disapproval of Nye Bevan), and to push ahead with the scheme for building twelve New Towns.

I grew up on the edge of one of these New Towns, Bracknell, which I and all my friends considered a soulless dump, so I was fascinated to read Kynaston’s extended passages about the massive housing crisis of post-war Britain and the endless squabbles of experts and architects who claimed to be able to solve it.

To some extent reading this book has changed my attitude as a result of reading the scores and scores of personal accounts Kynaston quotes of the people who moved out of one-room, condemned slums in places like Stepney and Poplar and were transported to two bedroom houses with things they’d never see before – like a bathroom, their own sink, an indoor toilet!

It’s true that almost immediately there were complaints that the new towns or estates lacked facilities, no pubs, not enough shops, were too far from town centres with not enough public transport, and so on. But it is a real education to see how these concerns were secondary to the genuine happiness brought to hundreds of thousands of families who finally escaped from hard-core slum conditions and, after years and years and years of living in squalor, to suddenly be living in clean, dry, properly plumbed palaces of their own.

At the higher level of town planners, architects and what Kynaston calls ‘activators’, he chronicles the ongoing fights between a) exponents of moving urban populations out to new towns versus rehousing them in new inner city accomodation b) the core architectural fight between hard-line modernist architects, lackeys of Le Corbusier’s modernism, and various forms of watered-down softer, more human modernism.

It is a highly diffused argument because different architects deployed different styles and solutions to a wide range of new buildings on sites all over the UK, from Plymouth to Glasgow: but it is one of the central and most fascinating themes of the Kynaston books, and inspires you to want to go and visit these sites.

Education

The other main issue the Conservatives (and all right-thinking social commentators and progressives) were tackling after the war was Education. The theme recurs again and again as Kynaston picks up manifesto pledges, speeches, or the publication of key policy documents to bring out the arguments of the day. Basically we watch two key things happen:

  1. despite the bleeding obvious fact that the public schools were (and are) the central engine of class division, privilege and inequality in British society, no political party came up with any serious proposals to abolish them or even tamper with their status (a pathetic ineffectiveness which, of course, lasts to the present day)
  2. instead the argument was all about the structure of the state education system and, in Kynaston’s three books so far, we watch the Labour party, and the teachers’ unions, move from broad support for grammar schools in 1944, to becoming evermore fervently against the 11-plus by the early 1950s

Kynaston uses his sociological approach to quote the impact of passing – or failing – the 11-plus exam (the one which decides whether you will go to a grammar school or a secondary modern school) on a wide variety of children from the time, from John Prescott to Glenda Jackson.

Passing obviously helped propel lots of boys and girls from ‘ordinary’ working class backgrounds on to successful careers. But Kynaston also quotes liberally from the experiences of those who failed, were crushed with humiliation and, in some cases, never forgave society.

The following list serves two purposes:

  1. To give a sense of the huge number of people the reader encounters and hears quoted in Kynaston’s collage-style of social history
  2. To really bring out how the commanding heights of politics, the economy, the arts and so on were overwhelmingly ruled by people who went to public school, with a smattering of people succeeding thanks to their grammar school opportunity, and then a rump of people who became successful in their fields despite attending neither public nor grammar schools and, often, being forced to leave school at 16, 15, 14 or 13 years of age.

Public school

Politicians

  • Clement Attlee (Haileybury and Oxford)
  • Anthony Wedgwood Benn (Westminster and New College, Oxford)
  • Anthony Blunt (Marlborough and Trinity College, Cambridge)
  • Guy Burgess (Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge)
  • Richard Austen Butler (Marlborough and Cambridge)
  • Winston Churchill (Harrow then Royal Military College, Sandhurst)
  • Kim Cobbold (Governor of the Bank of England 49-61, Eton and King’s College, Cambridge)
  • Stafford Cripps (Winchester College and University College London)
  • Anthony Crosland (Highbury and Oxford)
  • Richard Crossman (Winchester and Oxford)
  • Hugh Dalton (Eton and Cambridge)
  • Sir Anthony Eden (Eton and Christ Church, Oxford)
  • Michael Foot (Leighton Park School Reading and Wadham College, Oxford)
  • Sir David Maxwell Fyfe ( George Watson’s College and Balliol College, Oxford)
  • Hugh Gaitskell (Winchester and Oxford)
  • Gerald Kaufman (Leeds Grammar School [private] and Queen’s College, Oxford)
  • Harold Macmillan (Eton)
  • Harold Nicholson (Wellington and Oxford)
  • Sir John Nott-Bower (Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Tonbridge School then the Indian Police Service)
  • Kim Philby (Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge)
  • Enoch Powell (King Edward’s School, Birmingham and Trinity College, Cambridge)
  • John Profumo (Harrow and Oxford)
  • Shirley Williams (St Paul’s Girls’ School and Somerville College, Oxford)

The arts etc

  • Lindsay Anderson (film director, Saint Ronan’s School and Cheltenham College then Wadham College, Oxford)
  • Diana Athill (memoirist, Runton Hill School and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford)
  • John Betjeman (poet, Marlborough and Oxford)
  • Cecil Beaton (photographer, Harrow and Cambridge)
  • John Berger (art critic, St Edward’s School, Oxford and Chelsea School of Art)
  • Michael Billington (theatre critic, Warwick School and Oxford)
  • Raymond Chandler (novelist, Dulwich College, then journalism)
  • Bruce Chatwin (travel writer, Marlborough)
  • Dr Alex Comfort (popular science author, Highgate School, Trinity College, Cambridge)
  • Richard Davenport-Hynes (historian, St Paul’s and Selwyn College, Cambridge)
  • Robin Day (BBC interviewer, Bembridge and Oxford)
  • Richard Dimbleby (Mill Hill School then the Richmond and Twickenham Times)
  • Richard Eyre (theatre director, Sherborne School and Peterhouse Cambridge)
  • Ian Fleming (novelist, Eton and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst)
  • John Fowles (novelist, Bedford School and Oxford)
  • Michael Frayn (novelist, Kingston Grammar School and Cambridge)
  • Alan Garner (novelist, Manchester Grammar School and Magdalen College, Oxford)
  • Graham Greene (novelist, Berkhamsted School and Balliol College, Oxford)
  • Joyce Grenfell (Francis Holland School and Mlle Ozanne’s finishing school in Paris)
  • Alec Guinness (actor, Fettes College)
  • Frank Richards (writer for popular comics, Thorn House School in Ealing then freelance writing)
  • Christopher Hill (Marxist historian, St Peter’s School, York and Balliol College, University of Oxford)
  • David Hockney (artist, Bradford Grammar School [private], Bradford College of Art, Royal College of Art)
  • Ludovic Kennedy (BBC, Eton then Christ Church, Oxford)
  • Gavin Lambert (film critic, Cheltenham College and Magdalen College, Oxford)
  • Humphrey Lyttelton (Eton, Grenadier Guards, Camberwell Art College)
  • David Kynaston (historian, Wellington College and New College, Oxford)
  • Kingsley Martin (editor of New Statesman, Mill Hill School and Magdalene College, Cambridge)
  • Frances Partridge (Bloomsbury writer, Bedales School and Newnham College, Cambridge)
  • Raymond Postgate (founder of Good Food Guide, St John’s College, Oxford)
  • V.S. Pritchett (novelist, Alleyn’s School, and Dulwich College)
  • Barbara Pym (novelist, Queen’s Park School Oswestry and Oxford)
  • William Rees-Mogg (editor of The Times 1967-81, Charterhouse and Balliol College, Oxford)
  • Richard Rogers (architect, St Johns School, Leatherhead then the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London)
  • Anthony Sampson (social analyst, Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford)
  • Raphael Samuel (Marxist historian, Balliol College, Oxford)
  • Maggie Smith (actress, Oxford High School, then the Oxford Playhouse)
  • David Storey (novelist, Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wakefield then Slade School of Fine Art)
  • AJP Taylor (left wing historian, Bootham School in York then Oriel College, Oxford)
  • E.P. Thompson (Marxist historian, Kingswood School Bath and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)
  • Alan Turing (computer pioneer, Sherborne and King’s College, Cambridge)
  • Kenneth Tynan (theatre critic, King Edward’s School, Birmingham and Magdalen College, Oxford)
  • Chad Varah (founder of Samaritans, Worksop College [private] Nottinghamshire then Keble College, Oxford)
  • Angus Wilson (novelist, Westminster School and Merton College, Oxford)
  • Colin St John Wilson (architect of the British Library, Felsted School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)
  • Laurence Olivier (actor, prep school and choir school of All Saints, Margaret Street)

Grammar school

Politicians

  • Barbara Castle (Bradford Girls’ Grammar School and and St Hugh’s College, Oxford)
  • Roy Jenkins (Abersychan County Grammar School and Balliol College, Oxford)
  • Margaret Thatcher (Grantham Girls’ School and Oxford)
  • Harold Wilson (Royds Hall Grammar School and Oxford)

The arts etc

  • Paul Bailey (novelist, Sir Walter St John’s Grammar School For Boys, Battersea and the Central School of Speech and Drama)
  • Joan Bakewell (BBC, Stockport High School for Girls and Cambridge)
  • Stan Barstow (novelist, Ossett Grammar School then an engineering firm)
  • Alan Bennett (playwright, Leeds Modern School and Exeter College, Oxford)
  • Michael Caine (actor, Wilson’s Grammar School in Camberwell, left at 16 to become a runner for a film company)
  • David Cannadine (historian, King Edward VI Five Ways School and Clare College, Cambridge)
  • Noel Coward (dance academy)
  • Terence Davies (film director, left school at 16 to work as a shipping office clerk)
  • A.L. Halsey (sociologist, Kettering Grammar School then London School of Economics)
  • Sheila Hancock (actress, Dartford County Grammar School and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art)
  • Tony Harrison (poet, Leeds Grammar School and Leeds University)
  • Noddy Holder (musician, Walsall Grammar school until it closed, then T. P. Riley Comprehensive School)
  • Ted Hughes (poet, Mexborough Grammar School and Pembroke College, Cambridge)
  • Lynda Lee-Potter (columnist, Leigh Girls’ Grammar School and Guildhall School of Music and Drama)
  • Roy Porter (historian, Wilson’s Grammar School, Camberwell then Christ’s College, Cambridge)
  • Terence Stamp (actor, Plaistow County Grammar School then advertising)
  • John Sutherland (English professor, University of Leicester)
  • Dylan Thomas (poet, Swansea Grammar School)
  • Dame Sybil Thorndike (actress, Rochester Grammar School for Girls then the Guildhall School of Music and Drama)
  • Philip Toynbee (communist writer, Rugby and Christ Church, Oxford)
  • Colin Welland (actor, Newton-le-Willows Grammar School then Goldsmiths College)
  • Kenneth Williams (actor, Lyulph Stanley Boys’ Central Council School)
  • Raymond Williams (Marxist social critic, King Henry VIII Grammar School, Abergavenny and Trinity College, Cambridge)

Secondary modern / left school early

  • Alice Bacon (Labour MP in favour of comprehensive schools, Normanton Girls’ High School and Stockwell Teachers’ Training College)
  • Raymond Baxter (BBC presenter, Ilford County High School, expelled after being caught smoking)
  • Aneurin Bevan (major figure in the Labour Party, left school at 13)
  • Jim Callaghan (Labour Prime Minister 1976-79, Portsmouth Northern Secondary School, left school at 17)
  • Ossie Clarke (fashion designer, Beamont Secondary Technical School then Regional College of Art in Manchester)
  • Hugh Cudlipp (Howard Gardens High School for boys, left at 14)
  • Ian Jack (Dunfermline High School, left to become a journalist)
  • Clive Jenkins (left school at 14, Port Talbot County Boys’ School)
  • Stanley Matthews (cricketer, left school at 14 to play football)
  • Herbert Morrison (St Andrew’s Church of England School, left at 14 to become an errand boy)
  • Joe Orton (playwright, Clark’s College in Leicester)
  • John Osborne (playwright, Belmont College, expelled aged 16)
  • John Prescott (failed 11 plus, Grange Secondary Modern School and Hull University)
  • Alan Sillitoe (novelist, left school at 14)

Sociology

There are definitely more sociologists quoted in this book than in the previous two, especially in the very long central section devoted to class, which seems to have been the central obsession of sociologists in that era. Kynaston quotes what seems to be hundreds but is probably only scores of sociologists who produced a flood of reports throughout the 1940s and 50s, as they went off to live with miners or dockers or housewives, produced in-depth studies of the social attitudes of East End slums, the industrial north, towns in Wales or Scotland, and so on and so on.

The central social fact of the era was that about 70% of the British population belonged to the manual working class. And therefore, for me, the obvious political question was and is: why did this country, which was 70% ‘working class’, vote for Conservative governments from 1951 to 1964? What did Labour do wrong, in order to lose the votes of what should – on paper – have been its natural constituency?

This central question is nowhere asked or answered. Instead I found myself being frequently distracted by the extreme obviousness of some of the sociologists’ conclusions. Lengthy fieldwork and detailed statistical analysis result in conclusions like such as the working class are marked off from the ‘middle class’ by:

  • lower income
  • by taking wages rather than a salary
  • their jobs are often precarious
  • they are more likely to belong to trade unions
  • have distinctive accents
  • wear distinctive types of clothes (e.g. the cloth cap)
  • have poorer education
  • have distinct manners and linguistic usages (for example calling the mid-day meal dinner instead of lunch)

Other revelations include that the children of working class parents did less well at school than children of middle-class parents, and were less likely to pass the 11-plus, that rugby league is a northern working class sport compared with the middle-class sport of rugby union, that cricket was mostly a middle and upper middle class interest while football was followed obsessively by the proles, that the proles read the News of the World and the People rather than the Times and Telegraph.

As to the great British institution of the pub, in the words of the Truman’s website:

Saloon bars were sit-down affairs for the middle class, carpets on the floor, cushions on the seats and slightly more expensive drinks. You were served at the table and expected to dress smart for the occasion. You would also pay a premium on the drinks for this and usually there would be some entertainment be it singing, dancing, drama or comedy. You would generally be served bitter and in half pints.

Public bars, or tap rooms, remained for the working class. Bare wooden floorboards with sawdust on the floor, hard bench seats and cheap beer were on offer. You didn’t have to change out of your work wear so this was generally were the working class would go for after work and drink in pints, generally of mild.

Altogether this central section about class in all its forms takes some 150 pages of this 350-page book – it is a seriously extended analysis or overview of class in early 1950s Britain drawing on a multitude of studies and surveys (it’s almost alarming to see how very, very many studies were carried out by academic sociologists during this period, alongside the regular Mass-Observation surveys, plus ad hoc commercial surveys by Gallup and a number of less well-known pollsters).

And yet almost nothing from this vast body of work comes as a surprise: Most kids in grammar schools were upper-middle or middle class i.e. it’s a myth to say grammar schools help the working and lower working classes. IQ tests can be fixed by intensive coaching. The working classes liked football. The most popular hobbies (by a long way) were gardening for men, and knitting for women. Pubs were a place of comforting familiarity, where you would find familiar friends and familiar drinks and familiar conversations in familiar surroundings.

Compared to all the effort put into these studies, there is remarkably little that comes out of them.

Some of the sociologists mentioned or discussed in the text

  • Kenneth Allsop reported on Ebbw Vale
  • Michael Banton, author of numerous studies of race and ethnic relations
  • LSE sociologist Norman Birnbaum, criticising positive interpretations of the Coronation
  • Betting in Britain 1951 report by The Social Survey
  • Maurice Broady, sociologist who studied Coronation Day street parties (p.305)
  • Joanna Bourke, socialist feminist historian
  • Katherine Box, author of a 1946 study of cinema-going
  • British Institute of Public Opinion survey
  • Professor of cultural history, Robert Colls, author of When We Lived In Communities
  • Coal is our Life sociologial study of Featherstone in Yorkshire by Norman Dennis, Fernando Henriques and Cliff Slaughter
  • Mark Clapson, historian of suburbia and Milton Keynes
  • David Glass author of Social Mobility in Britain (1954)
  • Geoffrey Gorer 1950-51 People survey of what class people saw themselves as belonging to
  • historian Richard Holt writing about football
  • 1949 Hulton Survey on smoking
  • Roy Lewis and Angus Maude authors of The English Middle Classes (1949)
  • F.M. Martin’s 1952 survey of parental attitudes to education in Hertfordshire
  • Mass-Observation 1949 survey, The Press and Its Readers
  • Mass-Observation survey 1947-8 on drinking habits
  • Mass-Observation survey 1951 on drunkenness in Cardiff, Nottingham, Leicester and Salford
  • Peter Townsend, social researcher (p.118)
  • Margaret Stacy studied Banbury (p.136)
  • T.H. Pear author of English Social Differences (1955)
  • Hilde Himmelweit study of four grammar schools in London
  • Richard Hoggart, author of The Uses of Literacy (1957) which reminisces about working class Hunslet
  • sociologist Madeline Kerr’s five-year study The People of Ship Street in Liverpool (1958)
  • Tony Mason, football historian
  • Leo Kuper vox pops from Houghton in Coventry
  • John Barron Mays’ study of inner-city Liverpool in the early 1950s
  • Ross McKibbin author of Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1955
  • Gavin Mellor research into football crowds in the north-west 1946-62
  • Peter Miskell’s study of the cimema in Wales
  • John Mogey, author of a study of the Jolly Waterman pub in St Ebbe’s, a suburb of Oxford
  • Alison Ravetz, author if a study of the model Quarry Hill estate in Leeds
  • Doris Rich authored a study of working men’s clubs in Coseley
  • James Robb, author of a study of Bethnal Green in the late 1940s
  • Elizabeth Robert conducted extensive interviews in north-west England into education (p.161)
  • Robert Roberts, author of The Classic Slum (1971) about Salford either side of the war
  • Rowntree and Lavers, author of the study English Life and Leisure
  • Alice Russell, historian of occupational welfare
  • sociologist Mike Savage (pp.148, 159)
  • American sociologist Edward Shils
  • Brian Simon, communist teacher then at Leicester University
  • Eliot Slater and Moya Woodside interviewed 200 servicemen just as the war ended about education
  • 1953 report on Southamptons’s housing estates
  • Peter Stead, author of a study of Barry in south Wales
  • Avram Taylor, historian of working class credit
  • Philip Vernon, professor of Educational Psychology at London University’s Institute of Education
  • John Walton, historian of Blackpool landladies
  • Michael Young, author of Is This the Classless Society (1951) among many others
  • Ferdynand Zweig, wide-ranging sociological investigator of the post war years

As far as I could see all of these studies were focused on the working class, their hobbies, activities, beliefs and attitudes – as well as an extended consideration of what ‘community’ meant to them. This latter was meant to help the town planners who agonised so much about trying to create new ‘communities’ in the new estates and the new towns, and so on – but two things are glaringly absent from the list of topics.

One is sex. Not one of the researchers mentioned above appears to have made any enquiries into the sex lives of their subjects. Given our modern (2019) obsession with sex and bodies, it is a startling omission which, in itself, speaks volumes about the constrained, conservative and essentially private character of the time.

(There are several mentions of homosexuality, brought into the public domain by several high-profile prosecutions of gays for soliciting in public toilets, which prompted a) righteous indignation from the right-wing press but b) soul searching among liberal politicians and some of the regular diarists Kynaston features, along the lines of: why should people be prosecuted by the law for the way God made them?)

Secondly, why just the working class? OK, so they made up some 70% of the population, but why are there no studies about the behaviour and belief systems of, say, architects and town planners? Kynaston quotes critics pointing out what a small, inbred world of self-congratulatory back-scratchers this was – but there appears to be no study of their educational backgrounds, beliefs, cultural practices – or of any other middle-class milieu.

And this goes even more for the upper classes. What about all those cabinet ministers who went to Eton and Harrow and Westminster? Did no one do a sociological study of private schools, or of the Westminster village or of the posh London clubs? Apparently not. Why not?

And this tells you something, maybe, about sociology as a discipline: that it consists of generally left-wing, middle-class intellectuals and academics making forays into working class territory, expeditions into working class lives as if the working class were remote tribes in deepest New Guinea. The rhetoric of adventure and exploration which accompanies some of the studies is quite comic, if you read it in this way. As is the way they then report back their findings in prestigious journals and articles and books and win prizes for their bravery as if they’ve just come back from climbing Everest, instead of spending a couple of weeks in Middlesborough chatting to miners.

It’s only right at the end of the 150 or so pages of non-stop sociological analysis of ‘the working classes’ that you finally get some sociologists conceding that they are not the solid communities of socialist heroes of the revolution that so many of these left wingers wanted them to be: that in fact, many ‘working class’ communities were riven by jealousies, petty feuds and a crushing sense of snobbery. Umpteen housewives are quoted as saying that so-and-so thought she was ‘too good’ for the rest of us, was hoity-toity, told her children not to play with our kids etc. other mums told researchers they instructed their children not to play with the rough types from down the road.

People turned out to be acutely aware of even slight differences of behaviour or speech and drew divisive conclusions accordingly. The myth of one homogenous ‘working class’ with common interest turns out to be just that, a myth. THis goes some way to answering my question about why 70% of the population did not all vote for the workers’ party, far from it.

Above all, what comes over very strongly in the voices of ordinary people, is the wish to be left alone, to live and let live, and for privacy – to be allowed to live in what Geoffrey Gorer summed up as ‘distant cordiality’ with their neighbours.

‘You don’t get any privacy in flats,’ declared Mrs Essex from number 7 Battersea Church Road  (p.339).

Contrary to the ‘urbanists’, like Michael Young, who wanted to help working class communities remain in their city centres, large numbers of the ‘working classes’ were about to find themselves forced (by the ‘dispersionists’, the generation of high-minded, left-wing planners and architects who Kynaston quotes so extensively and devastatingly, p.340) to move into windy new estates miles from anywhere with no shops or even schools. Those that did remain near their old communities found themselves forced into high-rise blocks of flats with paper-thin walls and ‘shared facilities’ next to new ‘community centres’ which nobody wanted and nobody used and were quickly vandalised. It is a bleak picture.

Love/hate

Lindsay Anderson (b.1923) was ‘a British feature film, theatre and documentary director, film critic, and leading light of the Free Cinema movement and the British New Wave’ (Wikipedia).

But in Kynaston’s opinion, Anderson’s 10-minute film O Dreamland, shot in the Margate amusement park of the same name, ‘marked the start of a new, increasingly high-profile phase in the long, difficult, love-hate relationship of the left-leaning cultural elite with the poor old working class, just going about its business and thinking its own private, inscrutable thoughts (p.220).

Here it is, disapproval and condescension dripping from every frame.

Lady authors

For some reason women authors seem more prominent in the era than male authors. It was easy to compile a list of names which recurred and whose works I really ought to make an effort to familiarise myself with.

  • Jean Rhys b.1890 (private school and RADA)
  • Sylvia Townsend Warner b.1893 (home schooled by her father, a house-master at Harrow School)
  • Elizabeth Bowen b.1899 (private school and art school)
  • Catherine Cookson b.1906 (left school at 14 to take a job as a laundress at a workhouse)
  • Barbara Pym b.1913 (private school and Oxford)
  • Doris Lessing b.1919 (private school till she left home at 15)
  • Lorna Sage b.1943 (grammar school and Durham)
  • Sue Townshend b.1946 (secondary modern South Wigston High School, left school at 14)

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Posted by Simon on January 29, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/01/29/family-britain-certainties-of-place-david-kynaston/

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986)

Watchmen was initially published as a limited series of 12 comic books in 1986. It was subsequently packaged up into an omnibus paperback volume, which I bought for my son’s birthday a few years ago.

The pictures are by Dave Gibbons, but it is the complex, multi-layered narrative written by Alan Moore which critics instantly realised as something new and epoch-making in comic books. Watchmen won hosts of prizes and has come to be seen as a founding masterpiece of the (then new) genre of graphic novels, and one of the most influential comic stories ever written.

Its importance stems from:

  • the complexity of the narrative with its numerous intertextual elements
  • the cynical, jaded attitude shown by all the characters throughout
  • and the downbeat ending where the ‘goodies’ (if that’s what they are) do not defeat the baddie

The plot

1. Background

The story is set in a parallel universe in the 1980s. It is essentially the real world but with some key changes. (The story is, naturally enough, set in New York, home of most superhero narratives.)

In this alternative universe, back in the 1930s, various guys and women took up the new fad for caped law enforcers, with the result that there was a rash, an outburst, of masked vigilantes.

Some of them genuinely excelled at what they did –

  • Adrian Veidt who named himself ‘Ozymandias’, was the cleverest man in the world, who developed a corporate empire based on merchandising his own character
  • the ‘Night Owl’ was a technical genius who built gadgets and a flying ship to help him fight crime

Others were more run-of-the-mill, ordinary guys and gals, who liked dressing up and a good fight, examples being the self-named ‘Dollar Bill’, ‘the Mothman’, ‘Hooded Justice’ or ‘the Comedian’.

At the end of the decade these self-declared heroes came together to form a crime-busting association called the Minutemen in 1940. The narrative jumps back and forth between this founding meeting, and later meetings, up to and including a decisive one in the 1960s.

So many masked vigilantes came on the scene during these decades that the U.S. government eventually passed a law in 1977, the Keene Act, banning them. At that point – seven or eight years before our narrative begins – most of them hung up their masks and capes, and settled into comfortable, or less comfortable, middle-aged retirement.

2. The story

The ‘now’ of the narrative, is October 1985.

What triggers the story is the murder of one of the old vigilantes, the so-called ‘Comedian’. He is beaten up and thrown out of a window.

A member of the old gang team, Rorschach (so-named because mysterious constantly changing black and white patterns move across his mask), investigates the murder. We are privy to his thoughts which are written in exactly the tough guy style of Raymond Chandler, describing the city as a sewer and its inhabitants as vermin.

Rorschach starts at the scene of the crime, where the Comedian landed – splat – on the pavement. He goes on to visit Dan Dreiberg – once the so-called ‘Night Owl’ – as well as ‘Dr Manhattan’, to ask them what they knew about the Comedian in his retirement.

The narrative then leaves Rorschach to show us the backstory of the Night Owl, but especially of Dr Manhattan, arguably the most interesting character in the book.

Whereas most of the other Minutemen are just strong, athletic men and women with a fondness for dressing up in tight outfits and punching muggers, Dr. Manhattan is a genuinely genetically-altered superhero. Originally he was Dr Jonathan Osterman, a nuclear physicist who, in 1959, got trapped inside an ‘Intrinsic Field Subtractor’, was obliterated down to his constituent sub-atomic particles, before managing – nobody knows how – to reconstruct himself.

This rebuilt, molecularly perfect Osterman is now tall, statuesque, and a vibrating blue colour.

When he went along to meet the other Minutemen he took the moniker ‘Dr Manhattan’. He has a winningly Zen approach to life, the universe and everything, seeing that he can not only manipulate all metal substances, but can also foresees the future. Humans bore him.

The movie makes clearer what, for me, was rather obscure in the book, which is that it was with this apparently random incident – the creation of Dr Manhattan – that the alternative universe of the comic book diverges from history as we know it.

The divergences become quite drastic because, once he was fully reconstituted, Dr Manhattan put himself at the disposal of the U.S. government who immediately drafted him into their war machine and Cold War strategy.

He was sent to Vietnam, where he appears as an indestructible blue giant capable of destroying all the North Vietnamese weaponry (tanks and machine guns). Thus the North surrender within weeks, and Richard Nixon becomes a hero for winning the war. (In a throwaway line, typical of the density of the references and ideas in the text, we learn that the investigative reporters Woodward and Bernstein were bumped off in a multi-storey car park and so never got to report the Watergate scandal, with the result that President Nixon – in this universe – was been elected for an unprecedented third term. In fact, Nixon is on his fifth term when the book is set.)

Dr Manhattan lives with the former ‘Silk Spectre II’, real name Laurie Juspeczyk, daughter of the original ‘Silk Spectre’ superheroine from the 1940s.

(In a digression which is typical both for its complex filling-in of the back story, and for its brutality, we are shown the scene where, after one of the 1940s meetings, the Comedian badly beats up and begins to rape the Silk Spectre before being interrupted by some of the other superheroes who then beat him up. This incident, disturbing in itself – and obviously quite a jarring ‘subversion’ of the superhero mythos – echoes and re-echoes, like so many other incidents, throughout the text).

But Laurie is getting fed up with Dr Manhattan’s lack of emotion (in a great scene she discovers that while he is ‘making love’ to her, his true self is carrying on conducting experiments in his laboratory – the love-maker is merely a clone: he can clone himself at will, in real time).

After a big row, Laurie leaves him and turns up on the doorstep of Dan Dreiberg, ‘Night Owl II’ who, she wanly confesses, is now more or less her only friend from ‘the old times’. After some chat, they have sex – as Laurie’s full-busted figure all along suggests she will – and then don the old costumes and go out in Night Owl’s impressive flying machine to fight crime.

Meanwhile, Dr Manhattan has been persuaded against his better judgement to do a TV interview – but instead of being praised for being a key element in America’s Cold War protective armoury, he is surprised by an investigative reporter who bombards him with accusations that everyone he’s worked with has got sick from radiation poisoning.

Dr Manhattan is hounded off the set and out of the studio doors by the audience and a baying crowd, crystallising his feeling that he’s had it with puny mortals and their silly concerns. In front of this live audience, Manhattan teleports himself to Mars. Here, in complete peace and quiet, he creates a palace from his thoughts alone.

This very public disappearance of America’s most important military asset badly affects the balance of power in the ongoing Cold War, and is a key moment in the plot – for the Russians decide to test the resolve of the West, now that their key weapon has so publicly and spectacularly resigned.

Multi-leveled text

The text is complex and multi-leveled. Here are some of the other elements:

1. Newsvendor We keep being taken back to a newsvendor on a street corner in New York, who reads out the day’s news headlines, news which is echoed on the TV sets which various characters watch or have on in the background of conversations.

The reappearance of the newsvendor in each of the twelve instalments is a device for showing how, over the 12 days of the narrative, the U.S.S.R. invades Afghanistan and then threatens to push on into Pakistan. They have been emboldened to do this by Dr Manhattan’s disappearance. Thus the papers and TV are full of speculation about whether the West will respond to Russian aggression thus sparking a nuclear war.

2. Countdown clock This sense of mounting tension is emphasised by the way that each of the twelve editions of the magazine opens with a big image of a clock whose hands start at twelve to midnight, and move forward one minute with each episode. As if counting down towards disaster…

3. The Black Freighter Throughout all the instalments, what you could call the Main Narrative is punctuated by an apparently unrelated story about a doomed pirate, set in the 18th century and written in 18th century prose. This is a story which appears in daily instalments in a newspaper which is being read by a black kid who buys it from the newsvendor who I mentioned above.

While the newsvendor chats with his adult customers about the impending war, the kid sits propped against a fire hydrant, his mind totally absorbed by the grim tale of a pirate set adrift in a doomed boat full of corpses, and his various ill-fated attempts to escape.

At regular intervals the pictures and text of this Gothic tale ‘take over’ the main narrative set in 1985; sometimes the monologue of the damned pirate jostle alongside dialogue of the ‘contemporary’ characters; sometimes the entire Watchmen strip disappears for a page or so, replaced by detailed drawings of the pirates’ adventures.

The pictures of the pirate narrative are done in a deliberately different style from the main illustrations, using a pastiche of the highly-visible dots you used to see in really old comic books. Not only does this so-called ‘Black Freighter’ narrative routinely invade the ‘main text’, but its words often cleverly counterpoint the thoughts or dialogue of the main characters. For example the ghoulish pirate survivor might be thinking about death on the high sea, while the newsvendor and his customers are worrying about the risk of thermonuclear war and mass death. It’s all dark stuff.

4. Scrapbook This ‘intertextuality’ is also exemplified in the way that each of the twelve instalments ends with four pages of prose which are kind of scrapbooks of texts relevant to the main narrative. For example, the first couple of instalments end with excerpts from the tell-all book supposedly written by one of the Minutemen, Hollis Mason, an account of the early days of the group which he titled Under the Hood. These lengthy prose extracts expand our understanding of various plotlines referred to in the comic book sections.

Later on, the prose sections become more varied, but always shed new light on aspects of the main story. For example, the end of chapter nine features several ‘texts’ relating to the original Silk Spectre I, Sally Jupiter, namely an interview with her in an old newspaper from 1939, correspondence with a film studio interested in making a movie of her life, a fan letter from a would-be crime fighter, and then a magazine interview with an older, alcoholic Sally Jupiter from 1976.

Critique of Watchmen’s multitextuality

Some readers and critics think these multiple levels give the book greater ‘depth’. I disagree. I think it makes it a lot more complex but complexity and depth are not the same thing.

When I was a kid in the 1970s there were any number of magazines about pop music or teen heart-throbs which used the same approach of coming up with imaginative and diverse visual ideas to vary their appearance and format. These could include letters from the stars, or their horoscopes, or recipes for their favourite meals, or their top fashion tips, or mocked-up pages from their diary, each in the appropriate visual style, using different page layouts, letter heads, maybe notes with mocked-up handwriting of the hearth-throb in question – and so on and so on.

This didn’t make magazines like Jackie any more profound – it just made them more visually imaginative and interesting. Now I really think about it, I remember any number of ‘annuals’ of my favourite TV shows such as Dr Who or Blue Peter, which came up with all kinds of visually inventive ways of presenting tit-bits of information about the stars of the show, or features about keeping a rabbit or the solar system or instructions on how to build your own dalek – and so on and so on.

It never struck me that the proliferation of visually novel ways of presenting all this turned my Dr Who annual into War and Peace. It was just par for the course; they were all like that.

Thus the inclusion of extraneous mocked-up texts onto the end of each instalment of Watchmen didn’t strike me as some radical new innovation, but as an editorial ploy I was used to ever since I started reading comics and annuals.

Thus the clutch of texts tacked onto the end of instalment 10 of Watchmen – in this case all relating to ‘Ozymandias’, the superhero alias of go-getting entrepreneur Adrian Veidt and which include a letter to a toy manufacturer about a new range of Ozymandias merchandise, and the Welcome letter to anyone who’s sent away for a pack of his Veidt Method of Physical Fitness and Self Improvement – these are fun, and they add to the visual and factual complexity a bit – but they don’t add any real depth to the book.

The crime trope

Watchmen mashes up tropes from numerous sources. One of the most obvious is pulp crime novels, the king of which was Raymond Chandler. There are plenty of Chandleresque pictures of Rorschach, in particular, walking down mean streets in the dark with his collar pulled up muttering murderous thoughts about the scum of the streets.

And the fundamental motor of the narrative is a whodunnit – ostensibly to find out who killed the Comedian, whether there really is a conspiracy to kill off the other retired old Minutemen, and why.

Clever and novel many elements of the book may be – such as the idea that superheroes can grow old and vulnerable and themselves be victims of a serial killer. And yet this whodunnit thread of the book is strangely uncompelling – and when the denouement is reached I found it more strange and inexplicable than a dazzling and satisfying revelation.

Maybe it was Moore’s aim to ‘subvert’ the thriller genre – or by mashing up elements from pulp crime thrillers with the superhero genre with quite a bit of pulp science fiction thrown in, to create something bold and new.

Whatever the motivation, this central thread of the plot just didn’t do it for me. I found it a) difficult to wade through the welter of distracting detail to even understand that it was a crime thriller and b) was so thrown by the spectacular side-plot about Dr Manhattan that I stopped caring about the whodunnit element and became intrigued solely by his actions.

As to the denouement, suffice to say that it turns out (as so often) to be one of the gang themselves who is knocking off their own members.

And he’s doing it because (like so many mad fanatics before him) he has become deluded into thinking that the only way to bring true peace to the world is by committing a really awesome atrocity (in this case, wiping out the population of New York – as usual), showing humanity what they are capable of – and thus shaming them into peace.

Sound likely to you?

And so the climax of the book turns out to be nothing to do with the mounting paranoia about a nuclear war between America and Russia which has been steadily promoted by the narrative, and reinforced by the ominous full-page picture of a clock ticking towards midnight! Turns out that that whole threat, much discussed by all the characters from the newsvendor and his customers to all the superheroes, was a red herring.

Instead, the climax of the story is the unleashing of a secret weapon which destroys half of New York (and, in the movie, just to universalise things a bit, also wrecks Los Angeles, Moscow and Hong Kong).

Conclusion

I didn’t feel engaged with any of the characters. I didn’t really believe in them, and I found it impossible to believe in the idea of ordinary men and women just putting on masks, adopting silly pseudonyms and then magically being able to ‘fight crime’.

Either the idea of masked crime fighters is risible or it isn’t – but it is a difficult balance to make it both sad and silly (as it seems to be in the opening pages depicting the Comedian as a raddled drunk and Rorschach as a maniac) and then in the next few pages ask us to believe that Night Owl and Silk Spectre actually can fly round the city in their cool flying machine, rescuing kids from burning buildings.

Once undermined in the early pages, I found the notion of crime-busting superheroes stayed undermined.

The only character I liked was Dr Manhattan because the purity of his conception and his indifference to the human trivia who surround him lifted him far above the crime-busting silliness of much of the rest of the plot. I immediately sympathised with his wish to get away from silly humans, and found that identifying with this essentially science-fiction character made me more or less indifferent to the Chandleresque whodunnit plot.

Within the world of comic books, Watchmen had a powerful impact because of its complexity: because it created new heroes while at the same time undermining the entire superhero ethos, because of its stylish mix of sci-fi, noir and superhero tropes, because of its downbeat vibe and its very downbeat ending – because this pessimistic mood caught the vibe of Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s 1980s, because of the cleverness of adding in the intertextual elements of letters, quotes from fictional books, magazine articles, added extra complexity and resonance.

But from outside the world of comic books, it still looks as if Watchmen adopts almost all the familiar tropes of the superhero comic book, and subverts few if any of them. And even these ‘subversions’ I found a) difficult to actually understand b) had no impact on me.

Watchmen administered a seismic shock to the comic book genre which influenced a whole generation to write more ‘realistic’ and ‘gritty’ stories. To outsiders like me, it looks like a very clever play on existing tropes which doesn’t, ultimately, change any of them at all.

Art work

I couldn’t understand why the book is meant to mark a great departure in comic book style. The page is still made up of cartoons. All the ‘good’ guys are tall, muscular and handsome.

And all the women are long-legged, slender-waisted and big busted i.e. look like the same idealised, soft porn figures that have been half the point of comic books right back to their origins in the 1930s.

Although there are several women among the original Minutemen, we only really get to know one – Silk Spectre – and her role is to wear a tight outfit and be made love to first my Dr Manhattan then (several times) by the Night owl. But all the women seem to be variations on the same sex goddess trope. I was amused to discover that a number of manufacturers make a ‘Silk Spectre’ costume. Can you see why?

The movie

It took Hollywood  20 years to sort out the rights, the script and to settle on a visual strategy for turning such a complex and multi-layered comic strip text into a movie. The result is that rare thing, an attempt at a really faithful, accurate rendition of the original book.

Watchmen the movie uses all the characters and tells the exact same story, in the same order, as the source book. It even shoots scenes from the same angles shown in the comic strips. With the result that:

1. It is very long – two and a half hours long.

2. This is without the inclusion of the pirate story, the so-called Black Freighter plotline. This was originally going to be included as live-action footage interspersed among the main narrative, as happens in the book, but it turned out that it would have cost too much (some $20 million extra), so someone had the bright idea of making it as an animation. In the event even this animated version of the sub-plot was cut because it would have made the final version of the film well over three hours long. However, the Tale of the Black Freighter is available as a standalone DVD and has been reincorporated into the movie in a Directors’ Cut version.

3. More interestingly, director Zack Snyder’s choice to follow the comic book narrative so closely means that the movie does not follow the familiar three-act movie structure. Instead it follows closely the rather meandering, and sometimes distracted, narrative of the book. Many movie fans complained about this because it didn’t produce the usual feast of fights and fireworks every fifteen minutes – the amount of time a bored teenager can sit through ‘character’ stuff’ before he needs another fix of CGI and explosions.

But I liked the film for precisely that reason. Following ‘book logic’ and not movie screenplay rules, results in a very different feel to the movie. It feels much slower and often rather confusing. I liked that.

The movie was also criticised for the quality of the acting. If we were talking about the real world, I’d agree that the acting was wooden, as was the direction. But I found the Watchmen book itself oddly wooden, opaque, emotionless and flat, and so I thought the movie captured that quality really well.

Since I didn’t believe in any of the characters from the book, finding them all just cyphers drifting through a weird mash-up of science fiction, noir and comic book clichés without any discernible purpose or end, I thought the movie faithfully captured that odd sense of anomie – and that is rare and interesting in a Hollywood film.

Seen from this point of view, i.e. the hope that the film would not follow superhero movie convention, it was disappointing that so much did still fall into superhero cliché – namely the familiar stylised fights, for example where Night Owl and Silk Spectre II defeat a whole gang of muggers with superhuman speed and slow-motion violence; or where flying machines swoop around the New York skyline; or where Night Owl and Silk Spectre have sex in his flying machine, she wearing only her knee-length PVC boots, both of them revealed to have the air-brushed-to-perfection bodies of porn stars.

This didn’t feel like it was subverting very much.

In other words, the film of Watchmen successfully captures the complex storylines and odd mood of the book, and so both audiences and critics – who essentially want the same meal dished up with slight variations – didn’t like it.

The film didn’t make much return on investment with a box office of $185.3 million on a budget of $138 million. After twenty years, a prequel comic was published chronicling the adventures of the Comedian and Rorschach in the earlier days. There’s talk that the Watchmen characters will be adapted for an HBO TV series. Everything is swallowed by the machine. Nothing subverts anything. In time, everything is turned into product.

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by Simon on May 4, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in Books
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Posted by Simon on May 4, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/05/04/watchmen/

Playback by Raymond Chandler (1958)

He stuck a pill in his kisser and lit it with a Ronson.

After purging himself by writing at great length about alcoholics with a grudge against the modern world in The Long Goodbye, Chandler’s final novel is his shortest and most focused. I’d read that it was his weakest and nearly didn’t bother to read it, but I’m glad I did.

Plot

The events take place over just a few days in the small Californian coastal resort of Esmeralda, based on La Jolla where Chandler spent his final years (the only one of the novels set outside Los Angeles).

Marlowe is hired by a big-time LA lawyer to tail a woman arriving on a train from out East. He doesn’t know why and has to find out what the job is as he’s doing it, with the usual interruptions from blackmailers, local hoods, small-time crooks, a rival PI and, as always, the cops.

‘Perhaps if I had a rest and my brain cleared, I might have some faint idea of what I was doing.’ (Ch. 17)

The attitude is the same abrasive, tough guy as ever: given a choice Marlowe will always insult and antagonise whoever he’s talking to – everyone is crooked and two-faced, especially the broads, the cops are brutal and the crooks are brutaller.

I guess what critics mean when they disparage the book is that a lot of the verbal fireworks of the earlier books have gone – there are almost none of the smart-ass similes which set The Big Sleep alight – but that is symptomatic of the way the entire style is briefer, more pragmatic and focused.

It is a lean novel, and this has its own enjoyment. A lot of the energy missing from the narration has gone into the dialogue, which is as tight and edgy as ever.

And – despite all the guns and fights and blackmail and corruption – what I see as the essentially comic nature of Chandler’s work is close to the surface as ever.

Tough guy

I caught Mitchell on the side of the neck. His mouth yapped. He hit me somewhere, but it wasn’t important. Mine was the better punch, but it didn’t win the wrist watch because at that moment an army mule kicked me square in the back of the brain. (Ch. 5)

He looked durable. Most fat men do. (Ch. 6)

The men wore white tuxedos and the girls wore bright eyes, ruby lips, and tennis muscles. (Ch. 8)

He looked tough asking that. I tried to look tough not answering it. (Ch. 17)

Almost all the characters call each other tough (‘Tough guy, huh?’, ‘So Mr Tough Guy’, He wasn’t as tough as he looked, ‘Don’t get so goddam tough’, I was a real tough boy tonight, etc etc).

In fact most of them aren’t tough at all and Marlowe, above all, exists in this contradictory space where he tells us he’s tough, he talks ironic, wisecracking tough, he’s rude and aggressive tough, especially to the cops when he really doesn’t need to be. And yet we know that underneath he is Sir Galahad, an essentially pure man with a clean conscience.

‘How can such a hard man be so gentle?’ she asked wonderingly. (Ch. 25)

That’s the paradoxical effect of reading all Chandler’s novels. They seem like they’re dealing with human corruption, violence, evil – and yet the vibrancy of the style and the supreme confidence of the manner leave you feeling invigorated and clean.

Eyes

In earlier posts I’ve written in detail about Chandler’s awareness of eyes, as the characters constantly probe and size each other up, and about the wonderful phrases he creates for even the simplest looks.

In this last novel his ‘eye-awareness’ is still prominent – eyes and looks and stares and glances are described on every page – but the astonishing verbal inventiveness of the earliest novels has vanished like morning mist:

  • She leaned back and relaxed. Her eyes stayed watchful. (Ch. 5)
  • His colour was high and his eyes too bright. (Ch. 5)
  • He looked at her. He looked at Mitchell. He took his cigarette holder out of his mouth and looked at that. (Ch. 8)
  • She looked at him. He looked at her. (Ch. 8)
  • We stared hard into each other’s eyes. It didn’t mean a thing. (Ch. 9)
  • I didn’t say anything. I watched her eyes. (Ch. 10)
  • He looked me over. His eyes were wise eyes. (Ch. 15)
  • He wore glasses, had a skin the colour of cold oatmeal and hollow, tired eyes. (Ch. 17)
  • I stood up. We gave each other those looks. I went out. (Ch. 24)
  • He stared at me with cool, blank eyes. (Ch. 26)

I mean it’s still good. But it doesn’t have the breath-taking brilliancy and unexpectedness of the earlier novels.

Locations

There’s the same precision of observation in Chandler’s descriptions of rooms and interiors which I’ve pointed out in an earlier post, just used less often.

There are almost too many offices like Clyde Umney’s office. It was panelled in squares of combed plywood set at right angles one to the other to make a checker-board effect. The lighting was indirect, the carpeting wall to wall, the furniture blonde, the chairs comfortable, and the fees probably exorbitant. (Ch. 11)

For me that word – ‘probably’ – weakens the whole sentence. I think earlier Marlow would have been more crisp and decisive.

One way to describe the falling-off is that in his last few novels Chandler becomes more measured and reasonable, balancing or questioning his own judgments. More human and fallible. But it was precisely the absence of doubt, the complete confidence in his own perceptions, which made the earlier novels so thrilling.

Similes

The smart-ass similes, the single most striking element of Chandler’s style which dominated the first few books, have almost completely disappeared by this last one. This handful are pretty much the only ones in the entire book.

There was nothing to it. The [train] was on time, as it almost always is, and the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket. (Ch. 2)

‘The walls here as as thin as a hoofer’s wallet.’ (Ch. 5)

I wouldn’t say she looked exactly wistful, but neither did she look as hard to get as a controlling interest in General Motors. (Ch. 11)

Not great, are they?

Comedy

On the other hand, a couple of sequences or lines in this novel made me laugh out loud, something none of the others had done. Hence my suggestion that, despite serious or even tragic incidents elsewhere in the book, on the whole this novel seemed to me to bring out Chandler’s essentially comic nature.

When I entered Miss Vermilyea was just fixing herself for a hard day’s work by touching up her platinum blonde coiffure. I thought she looked a little the worse for wear. She put away her hand mirror and fed herself a cigarette.
‘Well, well, Mr Hard Guy in person. To what may we attribute this honour?’
‘Umney’s expecting me.’
‘Mister Umney to you, buster.’
‘Boydie-boy to you, sister.’
She got raging in an instant. ‘Don’t call me “sister”, you cheap gumshoe!’
‘Then don’t call me buster, you very expensive secretary. What are you doing tonight? And don’t tell me you’re going out with four sailors again.’
The skin around her eyes turned whiter. Her hand crisped into a claw around a paperweight. She just didn’t heave it at me. ‘You son of a bitch!’ she said somewhat pointedly. Then she flipped a switch on her talk box and said to the voice: ‘Mr Marlowe is here, Mr Umney.’
Then she leaned back and gave me the look. ‘I’ve got friends who could cut you down so small you’d need a step-ladder to put your shoes on.’
‘Somebody did a lot of hard work on that one,’ I said. ‘But hard work’s no substitute for talent.’
Suddenly we both burst out laughing. (Ch. 11)

Happy Ending

And, astonishingly, there is a happy ending! Chandler sets us up to expect the opposite with some ‘down these mean streets a man must go’, 1950s existentialism, as our hero returns, exhausted and jaded to his poor man’s apartment:

 I climbed the long flight of redwood steps and unlocked my door. Everything was the same. The room was stuffy and dull and impersonal as it always was. I opened a couple of windows and mixed a drink in the kitchen. I sat down on the couch and stared at the wall. Wherever I went, whatever I did, this is what I would come back to. A blank wall in a meaningless room in a meaningless house. (Ch. 28)

When, to my absolute amazement, the phone rings and it is Linda Loring from the previous novel, The Long Goodbye, a millionaire’s daughter who he had a thing for but who left him to go to Paris. And here she is, phoning from Paris and saying she loves him and can’t live without him, and she agrees to catch the next flight to LA to be with him. Marlowe is going to live happily ever after!!

I reached for my drink. I looked around the empty room – which was no longer empty. There was a voice in it, and a tall, slim, lovely woman. There was a dark head on the pillow in the bedroom. There was that soft, gentle perfume of a woman who presses herself tight against you, whose lips are soft and yielding, whose eyes are half-blind… The telephone started to ring again. I hardly heard it.

The air was full of music.

 Who’d have guessed, who’d have expected it!

At its most basic a tragedy has a grim and deadly ending and a comedy has a happy ending, no matter what’s gone before. This astonishing turn-up on the last few pages of Playback not only ends the book on a comedic and positive note, it sheds its light back over the whole series of novels, highlighting the ironic, witty humour which threads through all of them, and confirming my sense that Chandler was a kind of mid-century, film noir Oscar Wilde.

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by Simon on July 3, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in American literature, Books, Detective stories, Noir, Novel
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Posted by Simon on July 3, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/07/03/playback-raymond-chandler/

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