2001: A Space Odyssey

I read 2001: A Space Odyssey in a day.  Suffice to say, it’s pretty great.  As an ex-film student/ current (but reluctant) film geek it appealed to me in quite a few ways and I’ve been saving it up.  It was nice to not be disappointed.

I studied Stanley Kubrick in university a lot.  I mean, there was an entire semester just dedicated to his work.  When I say that I have seen everything that man has directed, I am not exaggerating.  I’ve seen the early documentaries, I’ve endured Spartacus, I have watched Eyes Wide Shut more than once.  That’s how dedicated I am to this man.  And I love 2001: A Space Odyssey.  I didn’t- it took seeing it on the big screen of our seminar room to love it, but love it I do.  I don’t think I’ve ever gone into a book knowing so much about not only the plot, but the story of how the book came about itself and, I thought that meant that I wouldn’t enjoy it.  But it was like coming back to an old friend.  Granted, HAL 9000 is a bit too “murder the entire crew” for a conventional friendship.  But you know what I mean.

I think that Arthur C Clarke was the only unknown element of the entire book for me.  I know he’s this renowned sci-fi writer, but that doesn’t always mean that he’s going to be any good.  There’s a lot of very shit sci-fi in the world.  He is good.  The man can write a novel.  But… it’s not as good as the film.   I should be loath to compare the two because they are different media even if they are telling the same story.  But the book has always been so much an extension of the film.  It was only written in preparation for the film, so that Kubrick would have something to construct a screenplay from.  It is a rare circumstance in which the book and the film are two parts of a whole.

What the novel does is to give more detail than the film.   This is hardly surprising; the film consists of large chunks of dialogue-less narrative punctuated by the Blue Danube Waltz.  One part that particularly struck me was how Clarke wrote that famous edit- the graphic match between bone and spaceship that moves us from millions of years in the past to what was then the not too distant future.  It is seconds of film and an entire chapter of book.  Clarke documents the progression of Neanderthal man through the use of tools, mostly weapons and in less skilled hands it could have been a montage and it would have been awful.  The beauty of 2001: A Space Odyssey is its shear sparseness.  Kubrick understood the key parts of the narrative and discarded the exposition that is necessary to the book.  And he kind of changed cinema in the process. 

I know that this has been more about 2001: A Space Odyssey as a film than as a book, but it is a brilliant film.  The book enhances it, it made me remember just how much I love it.  Yes, the book has a plot that is far easier to follow than anyone could claim Kubrick’s masterpiece is.  But it is not genre defining in the way that the film is.  It is a good book, but I do not doubt for a second that if it had not been part of the process of making the film, it would have been forgotten as one in a long list of books Clarke wrote.   The book is good; the film is important.

The Mill on the Floss

I didn’t get along too well with The Mill on the Floss.  It took me a good fortnight to read it, and yes, that fortnight did include a holiday- but that should have meant uninterrupted plane reading time.   There was some of that, actually, I think I read about a sixth of the book in one go and it still took me bloody ages.  It just wasn’t one of those books that I found myself wanting to go back to when I put it down; add in to that a birthday, a long weekend away, and some ludicrous working hours and you don’t exactly have the perfect recipe for a speedy read.

My second George Eliot read tells the story of Maggie Tulliver and her relationship with a handful of men, most significantly her older brother Tom.  This is actually a pretty well written part of the book, Maggie idolises Tom, she is his childhood shadow, following him around and trying to be like him and then growing older and giving up on a man she cares for because she knows to do otherwise will displease him.  It’s believable and it is well written.  The ending of the book, however, is stupid and ill-contrived.  I don’t want to spoil it too much, but it feels lazy.  As though Eliot needed to quickly draw things to a close.  As endings go it’s essentially a notch above, “And then they woke up and it was all a dream.”

I think this book was another case of setting my expectations by the blurb.  I thought that this was going to be the story of a young woman chaffing against a society and a family that deny her independence and deny her a mind.   Instead, Maggie spends a great deal of the book trying to work out how to best please her brother and her father so that they will love her better.  She is hardly chomping at the bit to get away and have a life of her own.  It’s a shame.  I think the book I imagined this would be would probably have had me more hooked.   That’s not to say that there aren’t flashes of the book that I was expecting- they just don’t endure.  Maggie will argue with Tom, but will always defer to him and his authority in the end.

The book’s also about social climbing, or the ambition to climb socially.  Unsurprisingly, Maggie and Tom’s father owns a mill and wants a better life for his son.   He borrows money so Tom can have an expensive education and move in higher social circles than he does.  Ultimately, he is prevented this dream by circumstance and by the opportunism of rich men.  It’s amazing sometimes, the things that do not change.  Again, I wanted to find this more interesting than I did, but I think that the crux of the issue is that I just didn’t care about Tom.  He’s dull.  Even when being shown through Maggie’s eyes, he is dull.

The Mill on the Floss isn’t by any means bad.  I just don’t think that it was for me.  It wasn’t a particularly memorable read.  I don’t think that I really get what is usually referred to as something wanky like “the earthy humour of the working classes” which does run through the book- there’s a nice joke about clothes being so old that they’re back in style again near the beginning, but aside for that it’s just a bit of a dry book.

My next book is 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke.  In contrast, I read it in a day. 

The Names

I wasn’t blown away by The Names.  It’s a shame, really- I so enjoyed the last Don DeLillo book I read (White Noise) and the blurb of this one makes it look like something right up my street.  It promises intrigue and murder and a secret language cult and murder.  I like a good murder.  The blurb also promises a reflection on the nature of language itself- is it all defining, or restricting?  The Names, we are promised, will ask.

 DeLillo’s novel does raise some of these points, there are murders.  But- I found it lacking.  Now, I am more than willing to attribute this to the fact that I worked for more than 40 hours in the week that I read it.  And that I came down with a fairly terrific bout of laryngitis during this week which essentially meant that I wanted to read light hearted crap.  The Names is not light hearted crap.  It was not what I wanted. 

I think the bit that really got to me though was the unoriginality of the language cult.  What they do is commit murders with hammers for funsies, so far so good.  But because they’re really into words it’s not that simple.  They choose the victims who have names which linguistically link them to the place in which they are murdered.  What is this linguistic link, I hear you ask?  The victims’ initials match that of the place in which they are murdered!  While this sounds like the kind of overly simplistic writing you’d expect from a child (or an American TV crime drama) it’s actually a serious plot in the middle of a book about language.  You have to think that any book that features deep conversations about Aramaic wouldn’t have so lazy a murder plot.

I think one of the main reasons that I didn’t get on with the book is just that I completely failed to connect with any of the characters.  I can’t put my finger on why, but I just did not care about Jim Axton and his wife and stupidly named child.  I spent a good deal of this book wondering who the hell would call their child Tap; before it was revealed to be a nickname.  And Kathryn, the wife, she is given this quirk that people like to give her t-shirts.  It’s a shit quirk that depends on others and it doesn’t feel real.  It seems like she needed something to make her less ordinary and it really should not have been that. 

Anyway, there’s The Names.  I am pretty aware that in this blog I have written essentially nothing at all about the actual book but- y’know sorry not sorry.  This wasn’t what I thought it would be- it was a not very intriguing murder cult and one instance of pre-9/11 casual Islamophobia at an airport.  I didn’t get it.  I was disappointed.  So I decided to share my disappointment in truncated blog form.  I am over the 40% line: rejoice!

My next read is The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot.  

The Grass is Singing

The Grass Is Singing took me by surprise.  Again, I think it’s a case of judging it by the blurb and setting my expectations towards something that wasn’t going to be there. Given that this is book 400 of The List, you’d have hoped I’d have learnt by now.  But no- I’m still making the same old mistakes.  At least I didn't expect it to be anything like Doris Lessing's sci-fi novel Shikasta, so that's something.

This is Lessing's first novel and it has a lot of tropes of a first novel.  It is short and to the point, you can see Lessing's style developing.

The book tells the story of Mary and Dick Turner.  It kicks off with Mary's death (spoiler) a the hands of their servant, Moses, but most of the book follows Mary's life and her shambolic excuse for a marriage.  They are one of those couples who should clearly have never married- even in the start Mary's just up for it because she’s getting on a bit and people make her thing that she probably should.  So, Mary leaves that city to live with Dick on his farm in the middle of nowhere.   She hates it, she hates him, but most of all she hates the black farm workers.

I had so many problems with Mary because og her racism.  Lessing goes out of her way to make you like Mary in the early chapters- she overcomes adversity and in an independent woman in a man's world, she has so much potential as a feminist icon- and she's a horrible human.  The book is better for the fact that you don't want to dislike Mary, Lessing and Dick chalk so much up to her ignorance but it builds to an undeniable crescendo

The misleading blurb was also guilty when it came to the characterisation of Mary.  It talks of a kindness and understanding between her and Moses and I was expecting romance in the face of a negligent husband.  Even as the book continued, I expected a redemption storyline that just didn't emerge.  There's not let up or relief in The Grass is Singing.  It is not a happy enough book to allow that, like any newly arrived white colonials, the reader learns to expect the racism.  This isn't England, we are reminded, this is Rhodesia and things are different here. 

I'm still not sure is I like or enjoyed this book.  I have found that before with Lessing.  I can see why she won a Nobel Prize- she is brilliantly challenging.  And yet, I don't know if I ever look forward to reading her books; they are not page turners or what you want at the end of a long day of work.  But they are something.

Next time it's book 401 and the celebration of hitting 40% of The List being completed: The Names by Don DeLillo.