The Horus Heresy series continues in Graham McNeill’s epic Mechanicum. Graham McNeill is one of the Black Library’s “dream team” writers. The other members of the trio include the hyper-prolific Dan Abnett and Ben Counter. The trio wrote the first three novels of the Horus Heresy series.
The first three novels functioned like a self-contained trilogy, chronicling the Warmaster Horus and his descent into heresy and madness. James Swallow’s Flight of the Eisenstein (Book 4) was a taut thriller with crisp writing and wonderfully orchestrated space battles. Since then, the Horus Heresy has had its ups (Legion by Dan Abnett) and downs (Descent of Angels by Mitchel Scanlon). This reviewer happily reports that Mechanicum brings the series back up to fighting trim.
In the novel, the readers encounter the adepts and forge masters of Mars. Centuries ago, the Emperor and the Fabricator-General created a union between Terra and Mars. The Mechanicum is one of the pillars of the Imperium of Man. The novels functions as an institutional history, similar to earlier volumes that chronicled the origins of a specific Space Marine legion. Only Graham McNeill could pen a compelling narrative based on supply chain logistics and portraits of the mechanically modified denizens of Mars that humanize them.
The novel includes many competing plots (and competing plotters). Adept Koriel Zeth wants to build the Akashic Reader, a device capable of giving someone unlimited knowledge. Fabricator-Generator Kelbor-Hal wants to open the Moravec caverns, sealed by the Emperor’s command. Finally, Dalia Cythera, a lowly transcriber drafted by Adept Zeth to construct the Akashic Reader, deals with her visions of a dragon and a secret long buried in legend and deception. During this historical period of the Imperium, there is no single interpretation of the Omnissiah, the so-called Machine-God worshipped by the Mechanicum. To use more familiar figures, Adept Zeth, a champion of scientific exploration and eternal skeptic, could be seen as Dr. Richard Dawkins. She does not believe that the Machine-God actually exists. Fabricator-General Kelbor-Hal, a cold-blooded figure of monumental avarice and ambition, could be seen as Reverend Pat Robertson. Kelbor-Hal, a servant of the traitorous Warmaster Horus, will use every means at his disposal, including unleashing the demonic forces sealed away by the Emperor. And like Pat Robertson, he is not moved by the death of millions, but only uses it as a means to acquire more power in the name of the Machine-God.
While these machinations and theological debates occur, the Mechanicum suffers catastrophe after catastrophe. The atrocities lead to the inevitable split, with those loyal to the Emperor arrayed against those loyal to the Warmaster. The novel also includes great battle scenes with rival Titans, Reavers, and Knights fighting each other.
The novel is a wonderful continuation of the Horus Heresy, bringing a mix of space battles, ideological debates, and gothic imagery.
Alan Hollinghurst reveals his mastery of English prose with The Line of Beauty, the 2004 Man Booker Prize-winning novel set in the decadent days of Thatcher’s Britain. In the novel, Nick Guest, a Henry James scholar, spends time as a houseguest of the Feddens. Gerald Fedden is the newly-elected Tory MP and lives with his wife and children in a glorious mansion in Notting Hill. Nick’s long-burning infatuation for Gerald’s son Toby gets extinguished and then transfigured in the two loves he meets. The first love is with Leo, a West Indian, while the second is Wani, a wealthy Lebanese heir to a grocery store fortune.
Hollinghurst’s controls the prose with a crisp precision. The novel explores the life of Nick’s closeted homosexuality in a social commentary emanating as interior observation, not shrill agitprop. In a conversation with Lord Kessler, the brother of Rachel, Gerald’s wife, Nick explains that his thesis is about Henry James’s style, specifically “style that hides things and reveals things at the same time.” One could summarize The Line of Beauty in a similar vein. One could describe Hollinghurst’s style as Realist, but it is the heightened realism of James, Waugh, and Proust. The conceit of hiding and revelation play out in the novel’s plot.
While the line between the hidden and the revealed get blurred in the machinations of the characters, other lines reveal themselves. Clandestine encounters between men; lines of cocaine sniffed on mirrors; and the veiled specter of AIDS. In the end, the vanity, the wealth, and the connections reveal themselves as mere dross when Nick comes to terms with the very real, very close, and very tragic devastations of AIDS, bigotry, and love.
One sentence summary: Hollinghurst’s prose hits the brain like a perfectly balanced gin martini in this tale of love, lust, and loyalty set in Thatcher’s Britain.
My Friend the Fanatic: Travels With a Radical Islamist (2009), by Sadanand Dhume.
My Friend the Fanatic: Travels With a Radical Islamist, by Sadanad Dhume, is a fascinating look into Indonesian current affairs, culture, and religious tension. The twin engines of globalization and Islamism work diligently to earn people’s loyalty. One of the more disturbing things encountered in the book were the familiar enemies the Islamic extremists targeted: lesbians, abortionists, pop culture, individuality, and free choice. Odd how these targets meet with the same ire and hatred in the United State’s own Christian Right.
Unfortunately for Indonesia, two successive dictatorships, the Asian economic collapse of the late 1990s, and the nation’s misleading reputation as a “moderate Islamic country” make it ripe picking for the extremists and opportunists. Like the Catholic Counter-reformation of the 17th century in Europe, the Saudi Wahhabist “Counter-reformation” (against modernity, feminism, etc.), funded by petrodollars, has produced a global spread in extremist madrases. The madrases are insidious institutions, since they only produce more madrases.
The sciences and humanities, the benchmarks of any decent educational system, face slow eradication, making the madrases de facto “factories for idiots” (Lindsay Wier’s description of detention in the TV series Freaks and Geeks). The amoebic spread has its origin in the Asian market collapse of the 1990s and Indonesia’s lack of separation between religion and government.
In the end the nation will become populated by pious clones who know the Koran backwards and forwards but will be unable to fix a motor, titrate a chemical compound, or interpret a passage from Salman Rushdie. Since hypocrisy is the conjoined twin of piety, the madrasa-products will decry the West, the US, and Modernity, while using terrorist tactics that include weapons and explosive made in the West. The transformation of the book’s “fanatic”, Herry, from a quasi-secular, kind of skeptical follower, to a full-on anti-Semitic, anti-Freemason author is both tragic and comedic. Comedic in the belief system so devoutly followed and tragic in seeing one person’s individuality strip-mined and obliterated. Herry’s devolution from pious journalist to fanatical clone mirrors Indonesia’s devolution from an archipelago embracing ethnic and religious pluralism to a Saudi puppet regime shackled to an arid puritanical faith.
One sentence summary: An exploration of the insidious nature of extremist faith and the methods by which political, legislative, and cultural power centers get co-opted.
The act of reading can exact a demanding price from the reader. If one lacks preparation, he or she can be left in a wallow of ignorance. Certain titles exist that a reader approaches with caution. The Cantos of Ezra Pound, Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and many others. Non-fiction works also intimidate potential readers. I am currently reading the second volume of Henry Kissinger’s memoirs, Years of Upheaval, and the first volume of Capital by Karl Marx. Each extracts certain demands from the reader in its own particular way.
Yes, this book actually exists. I’m reading the wrong Kissinger biography.
Years of Upheaval is best described as the memoirs of a government courtier. In the second volume, Kissinger deals with the Watergate scandal and its fallout in terms of maintaining a strong foreign policy. Nixon also elevates him from National Security Advisor to Secretary of State, the courtier becoming the minister. Years of Upheaval contains a style consistent with the first volume, White House Years, gossipy and academic, offering lessons in the exercise of government power and portraits of officials foreign and domestic.
Kissinger shares similarities with Marx’s economic critique. Marx’s shares Kissinger’s ethnic heritage. Kissinger, born in Germany, came to the United States as an exile, and succeeded in the worlds of academia and government. Karl Marx came from a family of assimilated German Jews, became active in both academia and politics, and spent the last years of his life as an exile in Great Britain. In Britain, he wrote his masterwork, the still controversial Capital: a Critique of Political Economy.
After reading Kissinger and Marx, one realizes that both exhibit positive progressive philosophies, albeit radically different in execution. Kissinger sees progress through the lens of a strong foreign policy and the adept use of “linkage.” Marx sees progress in the dictatorship of the proletariat and the classless society. Kissinger remains a realist whereas Marx underpins his work with a messianic and utopian thrust.
The utopian perspective has mellowed when Marx lived in exile, hence Capital’s function as a critique, not a call to arms like the Communist Manifesto. (Ironically, it is Kissinger’s pessimistic attitude that shines through in White House Years (1979) and Years of Upheaval (1981). He wrote both following the foreign policy disasters of the Carter years.)
Capital is not the first book I have read by Karl Marx. As an undergraduate, I read the Communist Manifesto for a European history class. In the break between degrees, I read the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and the Civil War in France, both short, tightly crafted political polemics written against the election, dictatorship, and Second Empire excess of Emperor Napoleon III. I only encountered Capital in excerpts for a graduate-level history class focusing on “globalization,” a slippery weasel word that can mean anything, depending on who you talk to and what they have to gain from his or her specific definition. One sees the same thing happening in our farcical political discourse with the revival of Joe McCarthy’s favorite scare word “socialism.”
I have not finished Capital, but there have been some rewarding side trips taken. Reading Marx brought me back to Walter Benjamin, the influential German Jewish cultural critic. With rudimentary knowledge from Capital, his trenchant essays became easier to understand. Benjamin adeptly melded Marxist revolutionary theory with Jewish mysticism, creating a unique and challenging method of analysis of popular culture. In his massive and unfinished project the Arcades Project, Benjamin seeks to explore the world of the 19th century arcades and the specific sociocultural and political consequences created by their appearance. The arcades appeared during the Second Empire, another product of Baron Haussmann’s radical urban redesign of Paris. Haussmann’s influence on Parisian urban planning reflected a conservative thirst for order and a means to quell revolution. Long wide boulevards made it nearly impossible to build barricades.
Another side trip, inspired by reading Benjamin’s exploration of Second Empire urban design, involved reading a few articles in S,M,L,XL, by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mao. Reading about the emergence of Singapore as a major power one realizes there are as many flavors of socialism as capitalism. Singapore, following independence in the 1950s, literally Haussmannized the island, creating a strong capitalist city-state with socialist techniques.
When reading Capital, Marx’s trademark style is inescapable, even buried beneath the sedimentary layers of economic theory. The dense economic text can be as boring as any film by Andy Warhol, while other passages flash with the brilliance of comets. Marx braids together the separate strands of abstract economic theory, revolutionary polemic, and dialectical materialist philosophy. (The specifics of Marx’s economic philosophy will be covered in a book review.) His writing is labyrinthine, enlarded with footnotes. In my Penguin edition, there are footnotes to footnotes.
Inevitably, any discussion of Marx devolves into a political shouting match, the opposition bringing up gulags, Stalin, and mass murder. In order to appreciate Capital, at least from a literary and philosophical perspective, one must appreciate it on its own merits. The book was the product of a specific historical moment. The first edition came out in 1867 (references to the American Civil War abound) and modern capitalism was in genesis. Capitalism has evolved into something more complex than the simple antithesis of socialism. One need only look at anti-democratic regimes like Pinochet’s Chile, the People’s Republic of China, and Singapore to see the various flavors of non-democratic capitalism.
Capital involves the practice of reading. One can taken any text literally and seen it as an oracle of religious significance. The fanaticism of Maoists is strangely similar to the fanatics who worship at the altar of Ayn Rand. It is not the text, in and of itself, that is the problem, but the fanatical interpretation that usually breeds monsters and mayhem. Reading Capital in 2010 involves serious consideration. Deregulatory capitalism has created global economic devastation unseen since the Hoover Administration. By the same token, economies subject to total planning, have utterly failed. The 1976 preface by Ernest Mandel brought some chuckles since it was written in the heyday of Communist power. That said, Capital’s usefulness includes a user-friendly explanation of how capitalism actually works.
In the shadow of the Great Recession, readers must consider how to approach problems with an eye on both political and economic consequences. Capitalism free of government regulations is just as dangerous as a totally planned economy.
Unregulated capitalism is volatile, unstable, and explosive. Capital is the oxygen that makes economies grow and prosper, but only an idiot would throw matches at a tank of liquid oxygen. (Regulations are not a panacea either, since they need reform and streamlining as society changes.) Those shouting for the end of government regulations remain as out of touch and ludicrous as elderly Russians carrying around Stalin posters yearning for the “good old days.” One should not trade one brand of fanaticism for the other.
An economy under total planning can be stifling and ossified. Just look at the political system of the United States. Two choices and less imagination than a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfiction website. Each side entrenched in outdated theologies, desiccated family dynasties, and a permanent criminal class in cahoots with each other to grow fat and rich while their constituents face outsourcing, poverty, and disinformation from all sides. But, hey, the best system in the world. A totally planned economy results in stagnation and poverty. In The Company, Robert Littell’s epic tale of the Central Intelligence Agency, a economic forecasting seminar attempts to estimate the economic power of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. One economist described the Soviet Union at that time as “Upper Volta with missiles.”
Capital brings to mind the question posed by Alex in Anthony Burgess’s notorious work, A Clockwork Orange, “So what’s it gonna be then, eh?”
Years of experience has brought with it a fondness for the demanding read. My reading selections are promiscuous, omnivorous, and ecumenical. I’m an enthusiast for the Modern, the Experimental, and the Unclassifiable. I also enjoy reading space fantasy novels published by the Black Library. As a critic, I enjoy plumbing the depths of pop culture, high culture, and places in between.
One of the experiences I enjoy I will call the Demanding Read. This essay, the first part of two, will explore the Demanding Read in terms of fiction. The second essay will focus on non-fiction. Given that each reader possesses a different background, taste, and experience, the Demanding Read should be seen as a highly subjective category. In terms of this essay, the term “demanding” connotes difficulty, challenges, inaccessibility, and exhilaration. With challenging demands, the rewards offered to the reader can be highly enjoyable.
I recently finished Laura Warholic by Alexander Theroux. An encyclopedic magnum opus about love, lust, sex, democracy, and spirituality, the novel overflowed with references to high and low culture. Some chapters read like encyclopedia entries, closer to essays than narrative. Theroux’s linguistic acrobatics matched his boundless energy and outrage at the current state of affairs for the United States, the world, and humanity in general. The dust jacket summary calls the novel “maximalist.” The Fantagraphics hardcover I own runs 878 pages of small print. Theroux also boasts a vocabulary and knowledge as intimidating as Will Self. Caveat emptor.
Take a representative paragraph:
“What can I say? He looked like Evan Dando of the Lemonheads. Très slanky,” explained Laura who, in spite of it all, insisted all along she wanted to be with Eyestones. How could anyone ever trust such a person, he wondered, even if he loved her? After she had moved down from Newburyport to Cambridge other names were mentioned. He once saw her talking to a black man, a quop-nosed goon in a porkpie hat, unshaven, with a batik handkerchief tied round his head. Was this Jamm the Wesort, the person whom she had several times alluded with no further clarification, except to say she had met him in some night-school art class in which she said she was enrolled? Other names and shadowy figures mentioned but who she claimed were only acquaintances were Dave, Lamont, Dan. She referred to men as “snacks,” their penises as “beer cans,” their company “jive time.” And yet for all her efforts men always ignored her after being with her once or twice and never called back. Over time, he had learned, even worse, that she had had at least one abortion, maybe more, and diseases like retroflexio uteri and myoma and ovarian tumors. She seemed to be offering almost to wrest it from craven cowardice a kind of information-warfare that, even if defiant, carried in its frankness what absolved her – what she hoped would absolve her – from deceit. Still, it was all rather like the low expectation of no longer existing in, by, with, or for someone, anyone, whom she might love. Listening to her, Eyestones wondered what ever happened to the power of profundity of love, the long-lost world, say, of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered when the beautiful Syrian, Erminia, who desperately in love with Tancred and finding him fallen in combat, cuts off her hair to staunch the bleeding? It was a world of from which Laura, suffering so, self-excluded herself. Oh but she knew she was right. Thank you, trollop.
The paragraph reads like a short story, nearly self-contained and propelled by a narrative drive. The numerous references (Evan Dando, retroflexio uteri, Jerusalem Delivered, quop-nosed, etc.) place demands on the reader. How many readers would get both the references to the band the Lemonheads and the plot of Jerusalem Delivered? It is no wonder twenty years separate Laura Warholic from Theroux’s last novel, An Adultery.
Evan Dando
Jerusalem Delivered by Tasso
While the novel is demanding in its linguistic and cultural references, the narrative itself follows a straightforward arc. Digressions, rants, monologues, essays, fables, and other devices throw the narrative off course, but the narrative itself is easy enough to grasp. The novel, distilled down to its ur-narrative, is a love story. In this way, Theroux approaches the torment and damnation of the lovers found Graham Greene’s novels.
On the opposite pole, far from Alexander Theroux’s satirical maximalism, is the novel How It Is by Samuel Beckett. Written in 1961, originally in French, translated by the author, the book has three chapters and covers only 147 pages. Following the tour de force of the Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable), Beckett continues in his quest to strip writing (and by extension, fictional narrative) down to its basic elements. How It Is involves a narrator meeting Pim, carrying tins in a sack, and being submerged in mud. The usual descriptors for Beckett apply here: surreal, absurd, symbolic, bleak, tramps, and minimal.
Unlike the paragraph from Laura Warholic, long and bursting with references high and low, driven forward with narrative energy and verbal acrobatics, How It Is comes across as ambiguous and inert. Eraserhead in print.
Here’s a representative paragraph:
paradise before the hoping from sleep I come to sleep return between the two there is all all the doing suffering failing bungling achieving until the mud yawns again that’s how they’re trying to tell me this time part one before Pim from one sleep to the next
The reader must figure out where each thought ends and where the next begins. The lack of punctuation demands the reader pay attention. This becomes challenging because the narration encompasses attributes working against each other. The text becomes self-defeating and self-destructive. The narrator seems unable to finish a coherent thought or is easily distracted. The paragraph is both a run-on sentence and a series of fragments. Allusive and opaque, linear and circular, minimal and expansive, the prose represents a slow-motion freeze-frame of Barthes’s famous Death of the Author. But who is the author? Where is the author? What is the author doing? The reader can never be sure, although there are many compelling theories. The prose itself offers no final and definitive clues.
In the end, How It Is shows a speaker, at once powerless and downtrodden, combating the imminent defeat of negation by talking. Talking and talking and talking, even if the talk lacks narrative sense. The talking is a “stain upon the silence,” to quote Beckett. It is what every writer wants to do. To leave something that is more permanent than ourselves. “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!” Hamlet said.
