amateurish, moronic, thoughtless, sadistic, repetitive schlock with no redeeming value whatsoever. What enjoyment there isFrom Too Much Horror blog :
amateurish, moronic, thoughtless, sadistic, repetitive schlock with no redeeming value whatsoever. What enjoyment there is comes in the form of disbelief. You'll be amazed at the lack of any attempt at realism in any aspect. You'll be astounded at the depraved depths to which the author can descend!
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
I only just heard about this 1977 lunatic horror novel and it sounded like fun, so I thought I’d get a nice cheap sleazy looking hopefully stained copy and read it, but I couldn’t because it’s out of print and people are charging CRAZY SKY HIGH prices. But then I found that some kindly soul had done an audio book of it and put the whole thing on Youtube! Problem solved.
PRAYING MANTISES! THOUSANDS OF THEM! THE SIZE OF A MAN!
So here is a short summary of a book you will probably not read.
A man in a boat off a Columbian island observes an earthquake followed by a tsunami. Back on land he then can’t but notice that thousands of giant praying mantises are pouring forth from fissures in the very ground caused by the earthquake. And they are so hungry. So they are eating people.
Our hero is called Dyke and is 25 years old and he has an alarming back story. It seems he has been roaming the world committing all kinds of crimes, torturing people and so forth. He is no boy scout. And he had a disagreement with four of his shady chums and they beat him soundly and he was “robbed of his manhood” eleven years ago. Since then life has lost some of its sparkle. But now, Dyke feels excited and happy again, watching the mantises eat people. One of them even eats his only friend in Colombia – slowly! And it gets his juices flowing! So he decides to become King of the Mantises. That will show everybody.
He lures a mantis by offering it frozen sheep from his extraordinarily large boat refrigerator, then he captures it by using a steel reinforced net which he always carries because he is a tough hunter of wild beasts even though now he is without his manhood.
Dyke’s eyes had a molten steel stare that used to knuckle victims to their knees. His eyes compensate for the zigzag of awful scars all over his face and body. He had jet black shoulder length hair. "But he was a eunuch now. He could never marry". Not even a mantis. We will come to that sad episode.
THEY WERE A DEATH DEALING MANHOOD DESTROYING BOY BAND.
In a flashback we learn that the leader of this boy band was a boy who did not know what kindness was. Ryan Gout was the leader but Pete Stuart was the meanest, he gouged out people’s eyes and his favourite hobby was maiming children just for fun. He would laugh as he did so.
The gang was tired of kicking out old ladies’ brains for fifty dollars. They wanted to steal a million dollars. Pete says he has a bottle of nitro so they can blow a safe. And he knows where one is. So off they go, to Old Man Shield’s place. Whoever he is. They’re going to ring his doorbell, roll him around on the ground and knife him a little. So they do all that and chop up the old man. There is a lot of chopping, two or three pages. “Zeb’s blood red knife followed Pete’s into the heart section.” The old geezer is well dead “yet the boys cut on”.
So they blow up the old geezer’s safe and find a fortune in dollar bills.
After some post-robbery contemplation Dyke decides to rob all the loot for himself. Unfortunately he is discovered by the gang who whip out their flick knives and begin slicing with glee. “I’ll pull his socks off so we can get at his toes”. But it’s not his toes Dyke worries about.
“No don’t cut me there, cut me anywhere, but leave me that!” he whimpers.
But they do cut him there and leave him to die like a dog in the desert.
But luckily some local vaqueros rescue him and patch him up, including blood transfusions.
I’LL CALL HIM SLAYER
I’ll teach this mantis who he is and to come when I call.. I’ll call him Slayer!
Dyke trains Slayer. He figures that it will take two months to fully train him, and also to make “some kind of potion” that will stop Slayer or any other mantis from eating him. At this point Dyke catches a local man stealing from his store of food. He feeds him to Slayer. Ten page description of the ensuing meal. Slayer loves eating people alive, what’s the fun in eating dead people right? And Dyke gets his jollies watching Slayer. It’s a match made in heaven. Dyke wonders what it would be like to be eaten by Slayer – for a long time. “His own death would not exhilarate him".
Dyke makes his repellent potion. Pages about this. Finally, after a long process in which an anteater dies, he smears his arm with this horrible stuff and forces his feet to walk to Slayer’s cage, thinking “What if Slayer bites off my arm and chews it up before my eyes?... I wonder what it’s like watching a beast eat part of your body while you are helpless to prevent the gruesome snack?”
I’m sure we all wonder that from time to time.
“As the mantis stopped to catch his breath” …. Wait a minute, even I know that insects don’t have lungs…. Oh anyway, this is nitpicking…. Dyke muses :
I think I could see Slayer swim in a sea of blood and I could swim in it with him, especially if it was the blood of people, of men, of the four men I hate with all my guts. An ocean of blood wouldn’t sicken me… I could spend my whole life seeing him eat men alive…
Enough! I think I can see where this is going. There will be pages about Slayer eating people and Dyke enjoying it. He will track down the boy band and Slayer will eat them one by one with mean Pete left till last. And finally the potion will wear off and Slayer will eat Dyke. If anybody finished this astonishingly ridiculous novel, written in the same English language that Henry James used to write The Golden Bowl, then maybe they will let me know.
I will never look at a six feet tall praying mantis in the same way again....more
Back in the early 19th century the idea was to bung as many clauses as possible into your sentences – if you could interrupt yourself twelve times befBack in the early 19th century the idea was to bung as many clauses as possible into your sentences – if you could interrupt yourself twelve times before the full stop, that was style. Mostly I enjoy the sclerosis of early Victorian prose, it’s like wading through barb-wired treacle but you knew what you were in for and like spelunking it can be an invigorating challenge.
But Nathaniel Hawthorne - really, this guy is too much. Here he is talking about a little kid who’s already bought some gingerbread from the shop and now he’s returned :
Phœbe, on entering the shop, beheld there the already familiar face of the little devourer—if we can reckon his mighty deeds aright—of Jim Crow, the elephant, the camel, the dromedaries, and the locomotive. Having expended his private fortune, on the two preceding days, in the purchase of the above unheard-of luxuries, the young gentleman’s present errand was on the part of his mother, in quest of three eggs and half a pound of raisins.
This is sickly simpering stuff indeed. “The little devourer”….”his mighty deeds”…”his private fortune”…”unheard-of luxuries”… he is beating this spoofiness to death, it dies horribly long before he gets to the half pound of raisins. He thinks he’s being kindly-funny when he’s being revolting. Well, of course, that was the taste in polite humour back then – patronising little children mercilessly. And he doesn’t stop laying it on with a trowel :
These articles Phœbe accordingly supplied, and, as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of fate whither so varied a caravan had preceded him.
We are taking the whole first page of chapter 8 to hack through all this arch blathering about a gingerbread whale and the fun stuff about Jonah and the red pathway. And he will not stop wringing every last morsel of hilarity from the small boy.
This remarkable urchin, in truth, was the very emblem of old Father Time, both in respect of his all-devouring appetite for men and things, and because he, as well as Time, after ingulfing thus much of creation, looked almost as youthful as if he had been just that moment made.
Finally the kid leaves – phew, maybe we can get back on track now.
As the child went down the steps, a gentleman ascended them, and made his entrance into the shop.
Okay – a new character. Ah, wait – in 1850 that meant that you had to spend a page describing what he’s wearing because no one in those days knew what anything looked like.
It was the portly, and, had it possessed the advantage of a little more height, would have been the stately figure of a man considerably in the decline of life, dressed in a black suit of some thin stuff, resembling broadcloth as closely as possible. A gold-headed cane, of rare Oriental wood, added materially to the high respectability of his aspect, as did also a neckcloth of the utmost snowy purity, and the conscientious polish of his boots. His dark, square countenance, with its almost shaggy depth of eyebrows, was naturally impressive, and would, perhaps, have been rather stern, had not the gentleman considerately taken upon himself to mitigate the harsh effect by a look of exceeding good-humor and benevolence. Owing, however, to a somewhat massive accumulation of animal substance about the lower region of his face, the look was, perhaps, unctuous rather than spiritual, and had, so to speak, a kind of fleshly effulgence, not altogether so satisfactory as he doubtless intended it to be. A susceptible observer, at any rate, might have regarded it as affording very little evidence of the general benignity of soul whereof it purported to be the outward reflection. And if the observer chanced to be ill-natured, as well as acute and susceptible, he would probably suspect that the smile on the gentleman’s face was a good deal akin to the shine on his boots, and that each must have cost him and his boot-black, respectively, a good deal of hard labor to bring out and preserve them.
My dear fellow goodreaders, this was page 116 and I could take it no more. Congratulations to the steelier readers who finished this novel with their sanity intact. I decamped for the austere pages of Wikipedia where I read the Plot Summary. And ugh, what thin gruel it was. All that for this?
The DNFs come thick and fast. Will I actually finish a novel this year?
And you may find yourself reading a really pretentious book about Talking Heads And you may ask yourself- well...How did I get here? And you may ask youAnd you may find yourself reading a really pretentious book about Talking Heads And you may ask yourself- well...How did I get here? And you may ask yourself Where is that good book about Talking Heads that I wanted to read? And you may tell yourself This is isn’t it!
And you may ask yourself What is all this nonsense? And you may ask yourself Who thought this was worth publishing? And you may ask yourself Am I right?...Am I wrong? And you may tell yourself I’m right!
And you may hear the voice of Jonathan Lethem saying MY GOD!...WHAT HAVE I DONE?...more
The blurb says that the nasty old spinster Cousin Bette goes on a mission to destroy her supercilious condescending family, so I though well, that souThe blurb says that the nasty old spinster Cousin Bette goes on a mission to destroy her supercilious condescending family, so I though well, that sounds fun!
It also says “Cousin Bette is a book in which Balzac is most characteristically and triumphantly himself”. That turned out to be not so much fun because Balzac is an insufferable know it all who obsesses about a) people’s income; b) married men spending fortunes on their various mistresses, some of whom are more than somewhat young looking; and c) the quality of interior furnishing. Well you might say this applies to most authors – they are knowitalls about the world they’re writing about, and they do love to describe rooms and furniture, especially in the olden days because due to a lack of tv nobody knew what anything looked like.
When I checked my review of the only other Balzac I read – Old Goriot – I see it began very badly and tediously and then warmed up and I liked it in the end. But after dozens and dozens of pages of Cousin Bette he was still describing jewelery and mistresses and how if you could flash enough cash you could get yourself any pretty woman you cared to in France in the 1830s. Yourself being a man, of course.
So this is going to be all about hypocrisy and double standards and the awfulness of the rich and the even more awfulness of the many people trying to become rich or trying to pretend they’re still rich. I kind of ran out of patience before the plot got going. This book got to feel like medicine for an ailment I didn't have.
I hope Cousin Bette and her monobrow utterly wrecked this ghastly family and she shouldn’t have stopped there either. She should have formed a group of ninja guerrilla spinsters who could bring down all these lofty misstresstaking grandees with well-aimed poison darts. But I will never know.
As Elvis said
A little less conversation, a little more action, please All this aggravation ain't satisfactioning me
American authors in the 20s and 30s loved to write down every last possible detail of American life and two of them did it brilliantly (Sinclair LewisAmerican authors in the 20s and 30s loved to write down every last possible detail of American life and two of them did it brilliantly (Sinclair Lewis and Theodor Dreiser) and another one I have yet to investigate (John Dos Passos). This guy John O’Hara is writing later (1949) but is doing the same vast itemising and this time for me the magic didn’t work. I loved Sinclair Lewis’s ocean of minutiae in Main Street and Babbitt, but in the middle of those books are lovely characters and if you ain’t going to hook the reader with a strong plot, which Sinclair Lewis does not, you need great characters.
Mr O’Hara has the sardonic sociological eye for exhausting telling details (one page on all the courses at a banquet) but he does not have either the plot or the interesting characters. He throws us into the rich smug upper class of Pennsylvania circa 1900 and he thinks that’s enough to set us going on a 600 page novel.
Not for me… I finally (reluctantly) pressed the eject button. I got other fish to fry (tuna, salmon, halibut, mackerel, snapper, hake, trout, sardines, cod, herring and sturgeon).
I found one thoroughly delightful paragraph in this dismal thinks-it’s-so-funny chunk of mid-fifties ultraEnglish autofiction. Here it is - Laura is hI found one thoroughly delightful paragraph in this dismal thinks-it’s-so-funny chunk of mid-fifties ultraEnglish autofiction. Here it is - Laura is here thinking about patriotism :
I went on musing about why it was thought better and higher to love one’s country than one’s county, or town, or village, or house. Perhaps because it was larger. But then it would be still better to love one’s continent, and best of all to love one’s planet.
In Robert McCrum’s book The 100 Best Novels in English we find
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner Scoop by Evelyn Waugh Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
The first two are so-so, the last one is diabolically awful, and yet here they are in a book listing the 100 Best Novels in English EVER. So there is a tradition of critics loving extremely lame tame mildewed comic writing. The Towers of Trebizond fits neatly into this horrible little list. It’s a deadpan travelogue about some posh religious types who think that the thing to do would be to travel to remote north Turkey with an amusing camel and convert the Muslims to the Anglo-Catholic sect within the Church of England. The first 20 pages are almost perversely designed to put off any reader not intimately interested in the 60 major subdivisions of the Protestant faith with which the author makes so much innocent fun and I salute all readers who trudge through that ghastly thicket into the more normally boring travel writing with its endless minor aggravations and endless mild spoofing of every foreigner and endless self-congratulatory self-deprecation that the English used to weaponise so efficiently.
No doctors had to be called to stitch up my sides after splitting them laughing so hard at this book which I gladly DNFed at the half way point....more
This is a strange feverish novel all about Dostoyevsky. Susan Sontag describes the author’s unique style in the introduction perfectly :
Each paragraphThis is a strange feverish novel all about Dostoyevsky. Susan Sontag describes the author’s unique style in the introduction perfectly :
Each paragraph indent begins a long, long sentence, whose connectives are “and” (many of these) and “but” (several) and “although” and “and so” and “whereas” and “just as” and “because” and “as if” along with many dashes, and there is a full stop only when the paragraph ends…. A sentence that starts with Fedya and Anna in Dresden might flash back to Dostoyevsky’s convict years or to an earlier bout of gambling mania…then thread onto this a memory from the narrator’s medical student days and a rumination on some lines by Pushkin
The narrator is unnamed but it's Leonid Tsypkin himself who is interweaving his own pilgrimage to Petersburg to visit Dosto sites with mostly agonising scenes from his hero’s anguished life. So you get 1) Leonard’s travels; 2) Dosto and Anna’s travels and misadventures; 3) flashbacks to Dosto’s early life; and 4) comments on Russian literature all weaving in and out of each other, all written in a breathless helterskelter rush where – dashes – have replaced the humble full stop as if the author had been told he only had three hours to live. So as the prose rushes forward the poor reader has to slow down all the time to try to figure out what is going on. This produced in me a form of travel sickness.
As well as all that, the re-imagining of scenes from Dosto’s life are kind of spurious if like me you happen to have read a couple of years ago Joseph Frank’s magnificent Dosto biography. As Bob Dylan said
And me I wait so patiently, waiting to find out what price You have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice
If they’d asked me for a one word blurb for this back in 1929 I would have said :
"Putdownable!"
If they had asked me today I would have offered :
"UnpicIf they’d asked me for a one word blurb for this back in 1929 I would have said :
"Putdownable!"
If they had asked me today I would have offered :
"Unpickupable!"
It’s a shame – I loved J B Priestly’s next novel Angel Pavement, written only a year after this one. But there’s a relentless sunniness and a ghastly fixed-grin quality about The Good Companions that you often see on the faces of ventriloquist’s dummies. Curmudgeon that I am, this began to wear me down.
JB Priestley took a very leisurely time (260 pages) to introduce me to three characters and get them by various improbable means to all meet up in a cheap & cheerful gaff in a town no one’s heard of. There’s a concert party troupe there (comedians, singers, soft shoe shufflers), all staring glumly into their pallid teacups. They’ve just been stranded out in the cold but still they wouldn't trade it for a sack of gold – yes, left high and dry by their rascally manager who scarpered with the money. But wait! Help is at hand in the form of Miss Brant! Because…
Well it’s all too tiresome. And you've kind of heard it all before. Stretching out before me was the prospect of 400 more pages of show people who smile when they are low, accompanied by a crowd of goodly hearted English jolly working people who perpetrate English stereotypes at the drop of a bowler. So I thought let’s not go on with the show. Not this one anyway.
It was silly of me to try this book but it’s a subject that fascinates me, which is why I already read three books on the exact same thing*. And CollaIt was silly of me to try this book but it’s a subject that fascinates me, which is why I already read three books on the exact same thing*. And Collapse by Vladislav Zubok was one too many. I was dazzled by the triumph of the recent Watergate: A New History by Garrett Graff – that was yet another large tome on one of my favourite subjects and it was really great. So I thought, okay, yes, a new big book on the bizarre almost bloodless disappearance of the mighty Soviet Union. Let’s read it.
Zubok tells the story in a strongly Gorbcentric way, we are hovering over Gorby’s shoulder almost daily from 1988 to 1991 – to steal a little from My Fair Lady, his joys, his woes, his highs, his lows are second nature to me now, like breathing out and breathing in. We learn that Gorb was a kind of very well-dressed bull in a Communist china shop. Or, he was that earnest and sweet backpacker who turns round on a crowded bus to show someone his map and knocks two old ladies onto the floor with his massive rucksack. He had “a beautiful vision of a more open Soviet Union gradually integrated into a ‘Common European Home’”. In the middle of political chaos “he still believed he would make history and not be regarded as someone who had merely bobbed on the surface of a revolutionary deluge”. He was the one true Communist who destroyed communism.
The problem with Zubok is that like Gorby himself he seems not to be able to see the wood for the trees, he drowns the non specialist reader in the complexities of the Soviet political system which was complicated to begin with, before Gorby started monkeying around and made it all beyond complicated. Eventually I had to conclude this is a book for students and professors who need the hyperdetail. I don’t need the hyperdetail. And plus, sorry Vladislav, but your style tends towards the dry. I mean, how can such a dramatic story sound mostly a bit dull?
Ah well… goodbye Gorby.
Hello Putin.
*(Armageddon Averted by Stephen Kotkin; Revolution 1989 by Victor Sebestyen; Down with Big Brother by Michael Dobbs – all recommended.)....more
There are two distinct schools of thought about this famous novel. One says it’s page-turningly brilliant and the other says it’s pernicious nonsense There are two distinct schools of thought about this famous novel. One says it’s page-turningly brilliant and the other says it’s pernicious nonsense and dull to boot. Naturally, being very grumpy, I am of the second school of thought. Sophia’s review from 2011 perfectly sums up all the problems
So I won’t repeat all her points. I quit on page 138. To begin with I was fairly uneasy about the whole idea of a white Western man writing as an Eastern woman but I still believe an author can’t be confined to their own time & place, that would be absurd. But this was pushing the boat out more than somewhat. In the acknowledgements printed at the back Mr Golden is most respectful of all his great Japanese informants, as well he might be. His main informant sued him for misrepresentation (settled out of court).
SOME OF THE DIALOGUE IS RIDICULOUS
This is a 12 year old girl speaking :
I’m no more a rival to her than a puddle is rival to the ocean.
I’d give anything to undo my mistakes. I’ve waited so patiently in the hopes that some opportunity might come along.
I’m like a river that has come up against a dam, and that dam is Hatsumomo.
Doesn’t sound like any 12 year old girl I ever heard, but maybe they all talked like this in 1920s Kyoto.
BUT MAINLY
Whereas many people in their enthusiastically describe this as compelling, I thought it was really not compelling. I was uncompelled. I was like a river that came up against a dam, and that dam was the remaining 290 pages of Memoirs of a Geisha ...more
No book is beyond criticism but a book of mournful elegiac wistful anguished memorialising of Jewish Germans before, during and after the Third Reich No book is beyond criticism but a book of mournful elegiac wistful anguished memorialising of Jewish Germans before, during and after the Third Reich might come close. Honesty compels me to admit that where everyone else found in The Emigrants profoundly moving narratives of trauma, loss and emigration spooling ribbons of intense melancholia, I, wretch that I am, could only keep tripping over maunderings about gardening and breakfasts and photograph albums and schoolrooms and upholstery and rooms and houses and illnesses and more houses until it because very clear that this was as much not the right book for me as it was the exact right book for everyone else with their garlands of stars; at which point I tiptoed backwards and away. ...more
Someone should have sent this book off to see Dr Nowzardan at his clinic in Houston, Texas. You know him from the famous tv show My 600lb Life. He migSomeone should have sent this book off to see Dr Nowzardan at his clinic in Houston, Texas. You know him from the famous tv show My 600lb Life. He might have been able to get Matthew Hollis to shed a couple hundred Pounds by some expert radical surgery, trimming the walls of fatty tissue and unclogging those silted up arteries and putting a clamp into the whole frankly obese enterprise to stop this exasperating book becoming ever more engorged with microdetail about restaurants, footling arguments, minor publication history, irrelevant holiday itineraries and endless minor illnesses. You may be thinking well all this is relevant to the writing of "The Waste Land", that famous monument of modernism, but most of it is about My 600 Ezra Pound Life (!) (since Eliot and Pound were the Laurel and Hardy of 1920s poetry) and all the other lesser literati that swam around in the same aquarium. For little me, this was how not to write about T S Eliot.
There are great books about How-We-Made-This-Movie, like Chain Saw Confidential by Leatherface (!- really!) and The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero (aThere are great books about How-We-Made-This-Movie, like Chain Saw Confidential by Leatherface (!- really!) and The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero (all about The Room) But this book is not one of those. Instead it’s a nails-on-the-blackboard what-crazy-days-they-were memoir by one of the producers of the horrible Oliver Stone movie Natural Born Killers.
Hasty note : you can write a funny fascinating book about a terrible movie : The Devil’s Candy by Julie Salamon about how The Bonfire of the Vanities became such a disaster is one. I hoped Jane Hamsher’s memoir would be more of the same but noooo.
It starts off pretty interesting even though it’s very clear from page one that Jane thinks she’s a scream and the reader may beg to differ. It begins with pre-fame Quentin Tarantino writing various scripts and sending them around and getting nowhere until Reservoir Dogs lit everyone up, at which point the said everyone remembered they had a dogeared mess of a QT script in their slush pile and dragged it out with ecstatic cries. NBK was one such. These two young hip gunslinging wannabe producers managed to wrench the NBK script out of the hands of the even more lowly guy who had the until-then-worthless option on it and then this golden egg was THEIRS, ha haaa.
Then the process is that you try to locate a competent director and some money to make the thing happen. Seemingly quite randomly Oliver Stone read the script and decided it would be his next big thing.
The great beast that is Oliver Stone then had these two minnow producers following him around on location scouting trips and running up corridors suggesting different models of cars that Mickey and Mallory should drive
Jane to Oliver : Mickey would want something wedge-shaped and angry. Probably a Mopar, a late Sixties or early Seventies E-body. A ‘Cuda or a Challenger with headers and glass packs and a full race cam that he installed himself.
Yes, this is how she talks. Or it's how she would like us to think it was how she talked.
At one point she tries to answer that perennial question what do film producers actually do? And the answer is in this case, not a lot, because as soon as the great Stone decided “I Will Do This Picture” his whole crew moved in and Jane & her partner were left thrashing around trying to justify their existence.
In the first half of this book, which is all I could stand to read, Jane libels the original wannabe producer Rand Vossler then libels Quentin Tarantino himself. The blurb calls this a “no-holds-barred account” and I would have to agree. I am very surprised it got published at all. I see from IMDB that her career as a producer appears to have lasted a generous six years. ...more
I loved Midnight’s Children and Shame but this one was an exercise in exasperation which I should have left well alone instead of becoming intrigued aI loved Midnight’s Children and Shame but this one was an exercise in exasperation which I should have left well alone instead of becoming intrigued again by its fearsome bloody reputation as a book that kills people. There were three reasons why I very strongly disliked this book.
THE TIRESOME STRUCTURE
It could be most of this book is a meticulous account of the dreams aka visions of mostly one character. And he has dreams within dreams. The as it were real-world plot inches along like a slow bicycle race with this person’s back story and that person’s back story and the dreams jump around as dreams do so this whole cumbersome multi-layered affair seems to be going nowhere for many pages.
THE UNFUNNY COMIC VOICE
Cajoling, supercilious, sneering, mocking, silly, making constant quips, it exhausts and finally aggravates. Here he is wittering on about angels:
The human condition, but what of the angelic? Halfway between Allahgod and homosap, did they ever doubt? They did: challenging God’s will one day muttering beneath the Throne, daring to ask forbidden things: antiquestions. Is it right that. Could it not be argued. Freedom, the old antiquest. He calmed them down, naturally, employing management skills a la god. Flattered them: you will be the instruments of my will on earth, of the salvationdamnation of man, all the usual etcetera. And hey presto, end of protest, on with the haloes, back to work. Angels are easily pacified, turn them into instruments and they’ll play your harpy tune.
The above passage raises another big problem – who exactly is talking here? This narrator, is he actually The Devil as is implied early on? *
THE EARLY HISTORY OF ISLAM ACCORDING TO SALMAN RUSHDIE
A whole lot of this book is taken up with a detailed sequence of dream-narratives that dispense with the dream framework and become a comic-ironic history of the life of a religious leader who is never called Mohammed but referred to as either The Prophet or as Mahound, an insulting medieval name for Mohammed. (It came from the French Mahun which was a contraction of Mahomet. Well, so the internet tells me.) So we get the twisty tale of how Mahound eventually got rid of the polytheism of the city of Jahilia and how Islam, here called Submission, became accepted as the true religion. Well, what could possibly be offensive about that, since that is what actually happened? Only everything.
As an example of how detailed this gets, there’s a whole chapter about Mahound making a deal with the city boss to accept three of the female local gods into his religion in return for the city of Jahilia accepting him as The Prophet. The boss says you can’t just throw out all these three hundred gods, the people won’t stand for it. Well, says Mahound, how about if I say the people can keep these three gods but we’re gonna re-brand them as angels. Okay, says the city boss, that sounds like a deal.
Then of course there is the notorious section where the sex workers in the largest brothel in Jahilia pretend for their clients’ amusement to be the wives of Mahound. They are fooling around and being deliberately offensive, and gradually they take on the characters of Mahound’s wives. This is the section which earned Rushdie the famous fatwa but it is by no means the only part which might strike a Muslim as blasphemous. The scribe Salman (hmmm, same name as our author) gets the job of writing down Mahound’s words and frankly he gets fed up of it:
When he sat at The Prophet’s feet, writing down rules rules rules, he began, surreptitiously, to change things.
And strangely, the Prophet does not notice. Salman says:
So there I was, actually writing the Book, or rewriting, anyway, polluting the word of God with my own profane language. But good heavens, if my poor words could not be distinguished from the Revelation of God’s own Messenger, then what did that mean?
SOMETHING OF A MISCALCULATION
Speaking as an atheistic liberal, I have no desire to get anyone mad at Rushdie all over again. But there is no doubt he was playing around with the most sensitive ideas about Islam here. It’s possible he thought a brilliantly complex post-modern metanarrative aimed squarely at Booker Prize judges, London Review of Books subscribers and the like would fall outside of the purview of the Muslim world, and he could, as it were, hide his subversive fabulation in the spotlight. In this he was catastrophically mistaken.
The intricate obsessive re-telling of the early history of Islam is the main reason I had to give this up : it’s deadly boring for a non-religious reader. You don’t know if this or that name or incident is suppose to be a caricature of history or an ironical comment or a plain historical fact. Reading The Satanic Verses turns into an exercise in frustration – who is supposed to be an angel? What’s an angel anyway? Is it the Devil who is telling me this whole shaggy god story anyway? Did I care once?
Salman Rushdie is one of our greatest authors but in The Satanic Verses he was barking up the wrongest possible tree.
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*This narrator says to the reader : “Who am I? Let’s put it this way : who has the best tunes?”...more
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