Dune by Frank Herbert

I'm continuing my series on rediscovering great books of my childhood. After Watership Down and The Hobbit, we now have Frank Herbert's Dune. 

Herbert's writing wasn't as instantly engaging as Tolkien's or Richard Adams'. Dune is full of odd names and terminology — come to think of it, so were The Hobbit and Watership Down — yet in Herbert's case, the prose is somewhat dense and awkward, difficult to get into.

But as soon as we reach Chapter 2, which introduces the evil Baron Harkonnen and his plans to destroy our heroes, the Atreides clan, the story achieves escape velocity. Herbert does something brilliant here. He immediately tells the reader the identity of the traitor in the Atreides' midst. 

So we spend the next 160 pages in a state of agonising suspense watching the characters we care about sleepwalk towards their doom, before the betrayal is finally (and bloodily) enacted and the trap is sprung.
 
As soon as we arrive on the planet Arrakis (Dune to you) Frank Herbert's prose really takes flight. His descriptions of the desert world bring it to vivid life: "chasms of tortured rock, patches of yellow-brown crossed by black lines of fault shattering. It was as though someone had dropped this ground from space and left it where it smashed." And "the cliff lifting golden tan in the morning light." It's obvious that, as with Edward Abbey, here we have a writer who loves the harsh beauty of his desert landscapes.

Herbert is also adept at evoking the futuristic machinery and technology, making it seem real through the use of small, telling detail. Like the personal force fields that act as shields to protect the wearer as Paul and his trainer fence with rapiers: "The air within their shield bubbles grew stale... With each new shield contact the smell of ozone grew stronger." 

Or his depiction of the ornithopters they use to fly over the barren deserts of Arrakis. Herbert makes them seem real through small, subtle detail ("the craft creaked as the others clambered aboard") and then he deploys them in the great sequence where they have to evacuate a massive Sand Crawler vehicle because of the approach of a giant worm, bent on their destruction. The personnel pour into the Duke's squad of small ornithopters and take to the skies: "Aircraft began lifting off the sand around them. It reminded the Duke of... carrion birds lifting away from the carcass of a wild ox." 

And the wonderful portrayal of the gargantuan worms themselves, their "uncaring majesty" as they go sliding through the sand.

However, what really keeps the reader entranced is the intoxicating combination of action and suspense as Paul Atreides and his mother Jessica are plunged into peril after peril while they discover this strange new world.

Add this beautifully conjured world to an irresistible adventure story and a fascinating array of concepts and you begin to see the elements which make Dune such a classic.

I'm delighted that another beloved book of my childhood has withstood the years so well.

(Image credits: As usual, I have taken a selection of the covers from Good Reads. And, as usual, many of my favourites were either missing or inadequate images. So the cover of the copy I'm actually reading, with the big gold lettering by Howard J. Shaw and the Gerry Grace art featuring the guys riding the worms — spoiler alert! You shouldn't put stuff like that on the covers, you silly publishers — is from a mysterious Russian site. Beware pop-ups if you go to it. The lovely Illustrated Dune cover, with art by the great John Schoenherr, is from the blog of Schoenherr's son Ian. Just as Pauline Bayne was the finest illustrator for the works of Tolkien and for Richard Adams' Watership Down, Schoenherr was the perfect Dune artist. The magnificent John Schoenherr cover for the original Analog magazine serialization (entitled Dune World) is from the excellent Ski-Ffy. The handsome Gollancz 'yellow jacket' 50th anniversary hardcover image is taken from eBay.)

Watership Down by Richard Adams

Having just enjoyed re-reading The Hobbit, the next great novel to revive from my childhood is Richard Adams's Watership Down. I was partly prompted to do this by hearing an excellent radio dramatisation.

But Watership Down proved to be a felicitous choice, not just because it is an immensely pleasurable read, but because of the pronounced similarity to Tolkien.

I'd never considered this before, but it really struck me now: both Adams and Tolkien write in a cosy, very English voice — the rabbits say things like "I'm sorry, old chap." Both writers have a deep love of nature and offer intoxicating descriptions of the countryside: "June was moving towards July and high summer. Hedgerows and verges were at their rankest and thickest. The rabbits sheltered in dim-green, sun-flecked caves of grass, flowering marjoram and cow-parsley."

And, like Tolkien, Adams has created a coherent, self-contained fantasy world complete with history, folklore, mythology, a language of its own — and maps.

(And, by an odd coincidence, both writers had Pauline Baynes as their definitive illustrator. She did the beautiful book cover at the beginning of this post, just as she did with The Hobbit last week.)

Best of all, both these writers can tell a thunderingly good story which utterly immerses the reader in their created worlds. This is not least because they both understand that a great adventure story requires a great villain. Where The Hobbit had Smaug, Watership Down has General Woundwort, the iron-willed tyrant who rules the totalitarian warren Efrafa. He's a truly formidable bad guy.

But he isn't two-dimensional. Adams clearly admires Woundwort and the readers ends up, grudgingly, feeling the same. Indeed, Woundwort is tempted at one point to become a good guy: "At that moment, in the sunset on Watership Down, there was offered to General Woundwort the opportunity to show whether he was the leader of vision and genius which he believed himself to be, or whether he was no more than a tyrant with the courage and cunning of a pirate."

(Luckily for the adventure story, Woundwort plumps for the latter.)

This sort of nuanced, shaded characterisation is a feature of the book: Hazel is uncertain that he's worthy of leadership and only gradually grows into the role, while Bigwig starts off as a heavy and only gradually becomes sympathetic — indeed, heroic. He's magnificent as the final battle approaches, unafraid of Woundwort and spoiling for a fight

In fact Bigwig's line of dialogue when he confronts Woundwort has stayed in my mind ever since I read it as a kid: "Silflay hraka u embleer rah." Which roughly translates as "Eat shit you stinking boss."

The book is an addictive, engrossing read, packed with magnificent set-pieces. Notably the immensely suspenseful escape from Efrafa in a gorgeously described storm: "a long roll of thunder sounded  from the valley beyond. A few great, warm drops of rain were falling. Along the western horizon the lower clouds formed a single purple mass, against which distant trees stood out minute and sharp."

And of course there is the unforgettable final battle when Woundwort and his legions attack our heroes' burrow.

The suspense and action are brilliantly evoked, but there's much more to the book than that. Adams shows the rabbits struggling with abstract concepts, such as the boat they encounter, or the mosaic made by some very strange rabbits — only a few exceptional individuals among our heroes, like Blackberry and Fiver can grasp these things. This gives Watership Down an edge of intelligence and profound insight which most books of any kind lack. Let alone a thriller about rabbits ostensibly written for children.

This was a tremendously rewarding novel to re-read. It gave me as much pleasure as it did the first time around, decades ago.

Next on my pile of books: Richard Adams's second novel Shardik.

(Image credits: As usual, most of the covers are from the useful Good Reads, including the rather terrific art for the audio book version; I tried to identify the artist, but haven't been able to yet. But, bizarrely (yet typically) the best cover and the edition I actually re-read, the lovely Pauline Baynes original 1973 Puffin edition, is almost impossible to find on the internet. So for the main image at the beginning of this post I had to resort to a slightly tilted postcard of the cover I found for sale on eBay. And the Italian cover was sourced from the Italian site Fantasy Magazine.)

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

Pete Jackson's recent film adaptation of The Hobbit — I'm not going to provide a link to it; it's all over the internet — which has now reached its second part, spurred me to take the novel down off my shelf and re-read it. (Actually I borrowed my young nephew's more expendable non-vintage paperback to read on buses and trains.)

I initially had some niggles about the book. Well, one niggle. Tolkien used anachronistic analogies which seemed to jar the reader (or this reader) out of the ancient fantasy world of the story. Similes including a sound "like the whistle of an engine", knowing a route "as well as you do to the nearest post office" and a "smell like gunpowder" in a pre-gunpowder world.

But then I realised this was utterly deliberate. Tolkien here is what we call an omniscient narrator. He address the reader directly, in an informal and colloquial voice — and was after all aiming at a young audience. Which also explains and forgives the cosy tea-and-crumpets-at-the-fireside tone the book often has

Now that's over, let's get to the goodies, of which there are many. There's amusing, authentic sounding dialogue (notably from the trolls), fine violent fights, rhapsodic portrayal of the countryside and wildlife —  "the patches of rabbit-cropped turf, the thyme and the sage and the marjoram, and the yellow rockroses all vanished" — and wonderful moody descriptions, like the "enormous uncanny darkness" of Mirkwood, or "furtive shadows that fled from the approach of their torches" or the moment when "it seemed as if darkness flowed out like a vapour from the hole in the mountain-side."
 
I also really liked this sketch of Thorin, after he's been floated down a river in a barrel and left overnight: "out crept a most unhappy dwarf... He had a famished and a savage look like a dog that has been chained and forgotten in a kennel for a week."

And Tolkien's characterisation is often marvellous, especially when he's discussing Smaug, the terrifying, gold-besotted dragon snoozing on his horde of treasure. Smaug's name may today suggest an item of furniture from Ikea, but Tolkien brings him unforgettably to life. As Bilbo approaches with trepidation the dragon's lair he hears "a rumble as of a gigantic tom-cat purring."

Smaug is genuinely fearsome, especially when he realises he's been robbed. "Up he soared blazing into into the air and settled on the mountain-top in a spout of green and scarlet flame." (And our heroes' poor old ponies don't fare too well, between Smaug and the goblins...)

I also particularly enjoyed the implicit class-war edge when Tolkien says of Smaug, "His rage passes all description — the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted."

What's more, Tolkien has a surprisingly line of wit and understatement. "Smaug had rather an overwhelming personality," he remarks at one point. And Bilbo calls him "Smaug the unassessably wealthy." And, in a priceless moment, Smaug goes flapping off towards the lake-town Esgaroth whose people are expecting the fulfilment of prophecies promising untold wealth coming back to them from the dragon's mountain. Instead what they get is an apocalyptic inferno and the fiery wrath of Smaug.

"The prophecies had gone rather wrong," remarks Tolkien.
 
But even better than Smaug is Thorin, leader of the dwarfs. For the entire book he has been likable enough and sympathetic — one of the good guys. But at the end he turns into an impressive bad guy and gives the plot a sudden new burst of energy.

Maddened by gold and corrupted in a manner worthy of worthy of B. Traven's characters in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Thorin refuses to share the hard-won treasure wrested from the dragon and goes to war against those who should be his allies and friends. 

In many ways it's the best part of the book and gives depth and complexity and sophistication to what was regarded as a children's novel.

(Image credits: all the book covers are from Good Reads including the one at left ('International Children's Bestseller') with the cover art by Max Meinzold, which I borrowed from my nephew. Thank you, Simon. But the main illustration is by the woman I consider the greatest of all Tolkien artists, Pauline Bayne. It was taken from the wonderful Bayne's own website. And there's an article about her Tolkien art here.)

Black Cargoes by Daniel P. Mannix

Ridley Scott's film Gladiator was conceived by screenwriter David Franzoni, and Franzoni got the idea from a book called Those About to Die by Daniel P. Mannix. He describes Mannix's book as "sort of a tawdry slash semi-serious novel about the Colosseum." 

Well, for a start it's not a novel, but a very compelling historical over-view. And "tawdry"? If he means in the sense "cheap, showy, of poor quality" then absolutely not. But arguably it is somewhat sensational. Mannix had a gift for choosing utterly compelling, and often gruesome, subjects and writing books about them which you can't put down. 

Besides the Roman games he also wrote historical accounts of torture, the Hellfire Club, Aleister Crowley... and the slave trade. Which brings us to the book at hand. Following on rather neatly from last week's post about that slavery malarkey (it's a pure coincidence, I swear guv) Black Cargoes is subtitled 'A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade.' It is co-written with Malcolm Cowley, but I'm not really doing him a disservice by discussing it as Mannix's book. In the introduction Cowley says "This is Daniel Mannix's book, based on his researches in London and East Africa. My own contribution was chiefly editorial." Cowley also wrote  three of the book's twelve chapters.

In common with many of Mannix's other works, Black Cargoes is an intelligent and informative catalogue of horrors. If you want to learn about the slave trade I doubt there's a better or more readable book on the subject (despite it being published half a century ago). 

Among the fascinating facts that I gleaned from it: the guinea coin, which was worth slightly more than the pound, got its name because it was made from exceptionally high quality gold from Guinea on the slave coast of Africa. The term "piccaninny" for a black child comes from the Spanish word "pequeño", meaning small. 

The infamous "middle passage" which referred to the hellish sea journey from Africa to the West Indies, on which so many slaves died, is so called because it was the mid-stage of a triangular trade which ran from Europe to Africa (you buy the slaves, swindling the seller as much as you can), Africa to the New World (you trade your surviving slaves for goods like sugar), and then from the New World back to Europe (you cash in and buy a big house in Liverpool). 

And, lastly, Wall Street is named after the wall which was put up to keep the slaves captive. The shrewd early American settlers soon discovered that the native American 'Indians' made lousy slaves — "either they proved intractable or they simply died." Indeed the Massachusetts Legislature complained that they were "of a malicious, surly and revengeful spirit; rude and insolent in their behaviour and very ungovernable." Good for the Indians.

The solution found by the canny Yankee traders? Sell off their ungovernable Indians in the West Indies before the word got out, and exchange them for more useful African slaves. Ah, business... Isn't it wonderful?

Daniel Mannix is rather frowned upon in serious circles because, I suspect, he writes highly readable ("enjoyable" isn't quite the right word) studies of the darker side of human nature, and explores some of the most disturbing episodes in our history. Such subject matter shouldn't be fun to read about. But Mannix comes close to making it so. Which makes for guilty readers... who can't put his books down.

Incidentally, I can't help wondering if David Franzoni wasn't also acquainted with this book by Mannix. After all, Chapter 10 of Black Cargoes contains a detailed discussion of the Amistad slave mutiny of 1839. And what was Franzoni's breakthrough script? You guessed it, Amistad for Steven Spielberg.

Perhaps we shouldn't throw words like "tawdry" around when discussing such a valuable and rewarding writer as Daniel P. Mannix.

(Image credits: Most of the covers are taken from Amazon UK, except for this one from Amazon USA. Click on the links and buy a copy.)

That Slavery Malarkey: Django Unchained versus 12 Years a Slave

There is a famous Billie Holiday song called Strange Fruit (written by Abel Meeropol). It's a powerful and savage indictment of lynching and Southern racism. It's acknowledged as a classic and a milestone and it is to be admired. And I admire it. Unfortunately, I also rather think it's a heap of junk.

Why? Because, although it may be an excellent polemic, it's a lousy song. There is no pleasure to be had in listening to it. It is tedious, glum and strident. I'm sure some of its adherents would argue that it shouldn't be a pleasurable experience. Such serious subject matter, they'd say, demands an equally serious (read "po-faced") treatment.

I beg to differ. To support my argument, allow me to direct you to the delightful Count Basie Jimmy Rushing number It's the Same Old South (written by Jay Gorney and Edward Eliscu, from their revue Meet the People). This is also an assault on Jim Crow laws and racist atrocities. But instead of being doleful, blunt and overblown it is sarcastic, satirical and hilarious. And its lyrics are set to a jaunty, catchy tune that will have your foot tapping.

Instead of bludgeoning us with horrors as in Strange Fruit — "Pastoral scene of the gallant South/The bulging eye and the twisted mouth" — in It's the Same Old South we are offered snarky humour: "Let the Northerners keep Niagra/We’ll stick to our Southern pellagra."

This song shows that a pitiless attack on Southern bigotry can be swinging and upbeat and fun — it doesn't have to be a painful dirge.

This brings us to my argument about 12 Years a Slave versus Django Unchained. I think Tarrantino's Django is a vastly better movie and, even though it is a prurient, overheated pulp fantasy it is a better denunciation of slavery. No, strike that. Because it is a prurient, overheated pulp fantasy it is a better denunciation of slavery.

You come out of both movies hating slavery. But with Django Unchained you are also exhilarated, uplifted, and entertained. With 12 Years a Slave you are just numbed, dulled and deadened — and quite possibly bored. This is because the film makers of 12 Years are enslaved — if you will forgive the term — by the silly and simplistic notion that form must reflect content.

Thus 12 Years a Slave must be austere, horrific, tedious and repellent, because that is the experience it depicts. I say no. I say if you want to make an effective polemic against slavery why not couch it in the form of a hugely enjoyable, utterly lurid neo-Spaghetti Western?

Why is it better to take this approach? Because you will reach a larger audience. It will also be a more receptive audience because people enjoying an art work will be more open to the ideas it conveys.

Early in Django Unchained, Christopher Waltz dismisses "That slavery malarkey." This brilliantly throw-away line is a more effective reproach than hours of explicit polemicisim.

I'm not suggesting that 12 Years could, or should, have been reconfigured as Tarrantino style pop-art action movie. But neither did it need to be so solemnly numbing and ultimately dull. 

(Footnote: Amazingly the lyrics for It's the Same Old South are only available online in one place, and the geniuses who transcribed it didn't know what 'pellagra' meant, so they just invented a word. In any case, you can make a mental correction and read the lyrics here.)

(Image credits: Jimmy Rushing by great jazz photographer William P. Gottlieb is from Jazz in Photo. Billie Holiday by the equally great Don Hunstein is from Jazz Dot Com. The posters for 12 Years a Slave and Django Unchained are both from the reliable Ace Show Biz.)

Banker by Dick Francis

It's a testament to Dick Francis's skill that he can even make a merchant banker (that contemporary bogeyman) a likable figure. The title of his novel 'Banker' has a double meaning. It refers to both the hero of the story and to the racing slang for a horse who is believed to be a certain winner.

The milieu of private banks is only part of the setting for the book. Dick Francis also explores the fascinating world of alternative medicine and herbal remedies. The story is as compelling as I've come to expect from him, getting off to a flying start with a knife attack in the second chapter.

In classic, brilliant fashion the author has his hero save someone from the attack, jumping on the teenager with the knife. But then the police jump on him, thinking he's assaulting the kid, and let the real attacker get away. This really punches the reader's buttons, making us angry and frustrated. The hallmark of a writer who truly knows his stuff, and can get a powerful emotional reaction from his audience (Thomas Harris is also superb in this regard).

The plot also packs a real emotional punch, and is often stomach churning, dealing as it does with the birth of deformed colts to prize thoroughbreds. It's an immensely suspenseful book because I genuinely didn't want anything bad to befall the horse Sandcastle or his owners.

But this being a thriller, bad things do happen, to all sorts of people. And animals. Once again Dick Francis impresses with the quality of his prose. There are masterful descriptions of horse racing: "The ground trembled from the thud of the hooves... the sweat, the effort and the speed filled eyes and ears and mind with pounding wonder and then were gone, flying away, leaving the silence." (I particularly like "pounding wonder". Nice alliteration of the "nd"s.)

There also beautiful little bits of observation. A stable lad is sweeping up in front of the thoroughbreds' stalls, watched by the horses "with the same depth of interest as a bus queue would extend to a busker." It's just perfect.

If there's a flaw in the book, it's that the death of one of the characters doesn't seem to have sufficient impact on some of the other characters. This didn't ring emotionally true to me. But that doesn't prevent Banker being one of Dick Francis's best.

(Image credits: The Colin Thomas cover photo at the top (white-on-black instead of his usual black-on-white designs) is from Jan-Willem Hubbers excellent site.  The others are from Good Reads. I'm rather fond of the German Kindle edition. And the yellow US hardcover is stylish, too.)

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

I've always regarded Kingsley Amis's masterpiece as being his brilliant ghost story The Green Man, so I've tended to ignore his much more famous first novel Lucky Jim. But Lucky Jim has been loved and admired by generations of readers and I recently re-read it myself, in the edition illustrated (right) with a very useful introduction by David Lodge.

I have always vividly remembered at least one inspired comic scene from the time I first read Lucky Jim, decades ago. It is the magnificent set piece where our hero Jim Dixon is desperately racing to try and get to the girl he loves before she leaves, and he's on a bus and it seems to be travelling in slow motion. 

Sitting on the top deck of the double decker, Jim is being driven into a frenzied rage by the bus's leisurely progress:"the driver added to his hypertrophied caution an almost psychopathic devotion to the interests of other road-users." 

Every possibly delay ensues in an almost animated-cartoon style. And Jim begins to fantasise feverishly about more of the same, encouraged by the bus driver's utter lack of urgency: "gossipping knots of loungers parted leisuredly at the touch of his reluctant bonnet; toddlers reeled to retrieve toys from under his just-revolving wheels."
 
When the bus stops to allow a farm tractor onto the road in front of it, "Dixon thought he really would have to run downstairs and knife the drivers of both vehicles."

Published 60 years ago, Lucky Jim stands up amazingly well. It's hilarious, brilliantly written and beautifully observed. The best drawn characters include Professor Welch (Jim's boss at the university where he has begun to teach, who holds Jim's fate in his hands). 

A master of evasion, Welch can never finish a sentence. Then there's Welch's son Bertrand, the loathsomely pretentious bearded, beret-wearing painter who has the girl Jim wants. And Margaret, Jim's sort-of girlfriend, a manipulative and emotionally blackmailing bundle of neuroses whom Jim can't quite get free of.

Unusually in Amis's canon, the book ends very happily and makes for an entirely satisfying read (though I kept tut-tutting about how many cigarettes everyone smoked).  Highly recommended.

Recent Penguin editions also include David Lodge's insightful and informative introduction which makes the interesting point that Lucky Jim was a sort of reversal of Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter. Greene's book was dark and tragic, Amis's light and comic. And while The Heart of the Matter leads to a genuine suicide through the hero's inability to free himself from morbid pity, Lucky Jim features a fake suicide which allows its hero to shake off just such pity, and escape happily to London with the girl he fancies.


(All the images were taken from Good Reads including the Penguin of Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter with the excellent Paul Hogarth cover illustration. The copy of Lucky Jim I just read had Jonny Hannah cover art, seen at the top of this post. Note the little vignettes surrounding Jim. For instance, you can see Bertrand with his beard and beret above Jim, and Professor Welch in his ridiculous fishing hat below him. I also discovered that the US first edition hardback had cover art by Edward Gorey, recently reprinted in both American and British paperbacks. Now I lust after a copy.)