Just revisited the Hal Spacejock website.  It's a place you really want to go, especially if you're a Red Dwarf or Hitchhiker's Guide fan.  But it's a place you'd probably hate to go, if you're not - but who can say? - you might just like it anyway.

Having read enough about Hal, I've now taken the multiple-choice (1) quiz, and qualified for the Silver Nut award.  You could too, if you're observant enough.  Hell, you probably could, even if you read it in the shower after printing the e-book on toilet-roll to cut costs, and after getting shampoo in your eyes at that.  But it's a nice graphic anyway.

Try the nuts test yourself

But maybe, if I study the books (there's now four of them, and the author's threatening to write more) closely enough, there might be a Gold Nut award waiting for me?  Yeah, despicably greedy, that's me - silver for free, wants gold.  Would probably refuse a free T-bone steak, too, on the flimsy pretext of having sent my false teeth back to the dental mechanic for their 100,000-click service, and insisting I could eat nothing but filet mignon.  But, really, I'm not that bad; I'd never try to sell my grandmother, mainly because she's not even worth two bucks today.

I'm not going to describe the books, or even hint at their contents (especially books 2 to 4, which I haven't yet read) - except to say that if you read any of the author's work, you too would find it awfully hard not to try to impress others with your feeble wit.  Unless you're surprisingly and rarely gifted, like the author, with a wit at least vigorous enough to fight its way out of a wet paper bag.

Thank you, Simon Haynes, for a good belly-laugh at human foibles.  But why, oh why, do I find myself identifying with the hero, rather than with his ironically-named iron-and-ionic servant, Clunk?

(1) Not really. Ever heard of the English livery stable owner, Thomas Hobson?

Gao XingJian won a Nobel Prize for Literature for his book Soul Mountain (Lingshan). I haven't read that yet, but after reading this later book by him, One Man's Bible (Yige ren de sheng jing), I'm not sure I have the guts to tackle his prize work.

How can I put it?  There's a famous quote to the effect that "All of us are lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars".  Gao is so utterly pessimistically post-modernist that he can only say, in effect, "We're all lying in shit, and freedom consists in keeping your nose far enough out of the shit to draw another breath".  In his own actual words, he says:

"A person cannot be crushed if he refuses to be crushed. Others may oppress him, and defile him but, as long as he has not stopped breathing, he will still have the chance to raise his head.  It is a matter of being able to preserve this last breath, to hold on to this last breath so that one does not suffocate in the pile of shit." (p409, Flamingo translation by Mabel Lee, 2002)

What troubles me is this: If I had to live his life, would I have any happier or brighter a view of life?  There's plenty of research in the psychological literature to suggest that I'd be at least as miserable as he, if not downright suicidal.  For this poor bastard lived through the Chinese Communist "Great Leader", "Helmsman" and Party Chairman Mao DzeDong's so-called Cultural Revolution, which was nothing more than Mao's attempt to institutionalise revolution, by the simple expedient of brainwashing everyone to rebel by conforming (!) to his expectations.  For a whole decade, students were forced to rebel against teachers, workers against bosses, ordinary people ("masses") against appointed Party officials, wives against husbands and children against parents.  Everyone was expected to spy on everyone else, denouncing them for the slightest wrong thought or laughter, and to abjectly confess their own shortcomings and accept unspeakable humiliations.  Every well-organised and functioning school, factory, farm and village was ripped apart and its members sent hundreds or thousands of miles away to undergo "reform through labour".

Nobody was more despised than the "intellectuals", which term included everyone with any education.  So teachers no longer taught, and students no longer learnt.  Apart from the direct suffering of every citizen, one consequence of this oxymoronic madness was an almost complete waste of the "human capital" of an entire generation; the losers were not the reviled "capitalists" but all the people of the entire nation (one can hardly say "community") of China.  One of Gao's characters, Xu Qian, his protagonist's sometime virgin lover, says:

"We of this generation that has been sacrificed do not deserve any other fate ...". (p 262, ibid.)

In the end, did Mao achieve his aims? If all he wanted was to make a more malleable population, then he certainly observed the lesson of history that terrorism is extremely effective in the short term.  But if he wanted to entrench the naïve communist ideal of "From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs", his policy was an abject failure.  He was scarcely cold in his crystal casket before Deng XiaoPing had set Communist China firmly back on the road to major-league Capitalism, and a few years later, income inequality and systemic poverty was once again entrenched in the marginal agricultural lands of the New Empire.

This book of Gao's, One Man's Bible, has wonderful moments of simple lyricism; dreams, poetry and mysterious symbolism; clever pen portraits of the kinds of people produced by a pervasive culture of fear, including the posturing bullies, the devious sneaks and the cunning chameleons; sober reflections on the nature of personal freedom and ultimate reasons for living; fantastic epsiodes of erotic sensualism.  It also has intrigue, danger, and action enough to keep you turning the pages to discover how it all turns out for the hero and his woman of the hour (James Bond and he could probably have a long conversation on the joys of womanising; they would almost certainly have agreed on the impossibility of true love).  In short, it is a literary marvel.

But in the end, does our "hero" win through?  What would you say of, or to, someone who has resolved to commit to nothing, to form no lasting relationships, to praise nothing and nobody, but to live earnestly in the sensual moment without hope, goal or desire?  Someone whose ideal woman is one -

"whose thinking is as lucid as yours, ... free of the bondage of the world ... who rejects the ties of a home, and does not bear children, ... who does not follow vanity and fashion, a natural and totally wanton woman ... who will, at this instant of time, enjoy with you the joys of being a fish in water ... as solitary as you, yet ... will fuse your solitude with hers in sexual gratification ... in caresses and one another's looks" (pp 402-3, ibid.)

- yet who is certain he can never find such a woman: "Where is such a woman to be found?" ?  Is this a man who is, as he wants to believe, finally free to wear the Buddha smile of contentment?  Or is this a man who has regressed to the infantile joy of getting warm by soiling himself; who is too beaten down and afraid to think that he may be, ultimately, a little more than a selfish and mindless animal; who justifies, by the manifest impossibility of his unrealistic ideal, his instinctual coupling with, his use and discarding of, one woman after another, and another?  Can we, finally, trust him when he writes the following passage?

"It is good to be alive, and you sing a hymn to life, sing it because life has not treated you badly in everything.  But sometimes life still makes your heart tremble, like this music ..." (p.408, ibid.)

The goodness of life seems to be a miserable jot.  Must life be so stingy with its goodness?

Gao is a clever technician.  He delays the action with all sorts of finally irrelevant episodes, few of which flatter the protagonist.  The pace picks up toward the end; scenes and styles chop and change with startling speed; and the final chapters focus ever more closely on his protagonist's achieving the wisdom of resignation.  But this resignation seems phony, and his wisdom offers scant comfort; there's just too much anguish to go through before he gets there, and he has no expectations of any better control over the circumstances of his life than when he started out.  Nor will he ever find that ideal woman, but he's perfectly prepared to go on with yet another liaison until he does.

One of his techniques should leave you wondering just who, exactly, is the narrator.  He swaps continually between third-person and second-person viewpoints, and occasionally and confusingly brings both viewpoints together.  You want to ask the narrator: "Is this you studying him?  And is he actually you?"  There's a red herring, rather than a clue, in the scene where "you", the playwright, sit alone in the empty theatre watching "him" strut on the stage.  Yet there's a real clue in the discovery of

"the old yellowing photograph ... taken thirty years ago in that reform-through-labour farm ... You want to see if his eyes will tell you anything.  His shaved head ... was held high.  He was proud ... even as a convict. ... you don't want to be immersed in memories.  He has already become footprints, which you have left behind.  Using this instant of time as the starting point, for you, writing is a spiritual journey."

And you want to know whether the narrator is the author, or another.  This last quotation shows that the "you" of the story is actually the author; the narrator's just talking to himself.  This is confirmed elsewhere, where "you" are examining "him" in the mirror.

My guess is that most of this ostensible novel is but thinly-veiled autobiography.  Whose thoughts would the author know most intimately, if not his own?  Yet the lack of "telling detail" in some of the situations and episodes described in the book suggests a reasonable likelihood that those episodes were inventions, not as fully imagined as when the author is reliving actual memories.

Certainly, the book as a whole provides a credible portrait of a life still in motion; some invention has doubtless helped the flow and connections between parts.  If you were hoping  for a book telling of the triumph of the human spirit over incredible odds, you would be disappointed here.  This book describes the motion of a leaf through its life stages, from the first green bud in spring, through to the withered purple leaf still clinging to an almost bare branch in late autumn, and contemplates its eventual fall, spiralling to the ground, where it will lie, brown and dry, a little while before it begins to decay, disintegrate and eventually vanish from memory and from knowledge.  And this clever, extended allegory of the leaf serves well to illustrate the narrator's view that, like the leaf, a human being has little control, knowledge or even awareness of the whole ineluctable process of its cycle of life and death.

This book holds out no hope of rebirth; the author does not wish to show us how the decaying leaf feeds new shoots.  The only triumph the narrator can envisage is that the leaf might briefly reflect the light it grows and glows in; a tiny spark of awareness of one's own existence is for him the highest freedom.  Perhaps, if the author thought differently, he'd have distanced himself further from the narrator.

If there is, finally, a tragedy in this book, it is to be found in the spirit of him who made it.  One might expect his terrible history to destroy all his illusions, to shatter his belief in political party, religion, all kinds of institutions, and also his belief in family, in the possibility of a truly loving and unself-interested relationship and in a better future for his generation's children.  But one might wonder whether it must also totally destroy his faith in himself.

Read it and weep.

This novel by Richard Flanagan, "Gould's Book of Fish", is yet another "magical realist" work.  Recently I've been tempted to think that some writers who use this style just can't handle "gritty reality", so need to fit things into their own version of reality in which their conceits will work, their allegories extend perfectly and there are no untidy bits left over to explain.  In other words, maybe "magical realism" is a cop-out?

Then again, who doesn't try to change what they see, to make it fit into some kind of simpler system that they can understand, grasp, manipulate?  For the purpose of knowledge is to enable the knower to act effectively in his world.  What does it matter if the knowledge he has does not reflect any kind of objective reality? - just so long as his picture of the world lets him do the things he needs or wants to.

It's also a very understandable thing for writers, especially, to do.  Who else is daily in the business of creating credible alternative worlds?  This has always been most literally true in the case of science fiction and fantasy writers.  And in their positing other ways things might (really) be, they manage at the same time to show us which things probably wouldn't change; minor details like "human nature" (was there ever a more self-contradictory term?)  So in the end, it's understandable that the more mainstream novelists may also use this simple device of the SF&F writers, simply because it gives us a fresh perspective. It perhaps also points up which aspects of our everyday reality aren't essential to our being.  Anything you can change, and still leave people just people, is not, ultimately, the most important thing to stress about.

So that's how I've justified to myself my indulgence in "magical realist" literature.  Besides, I just love a little bit of magic, a temporary setting aside of the quotidian for the possible.  Sheer escapism!  This diversion over, let's turn to the book ... ;-)

The novel is ostensibly about a book of fish painted by a convict artist, William Buelow Gould, in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) in the 19th Century.  The artist was real, and so is his book of fish.  However, this imaginative reconstruction of his life is made up pretty much from the whole cloth.  Yet it carries a certain ring of psychological truth; I have no doubt as to the reality of the kind of character that Flanagan paints here.  What is magical, though, is the extent to which this one rather ordinary character, a petty thief, forger and confidence man, appears to embody within himself many other rather extraordinary people.  And how all these people - the Surgeon, the Commandant, Twopenny Sal and others - have their types in the various fishes that Gould paints in his book.

By the way, the novel includes reproductions of around ten of Gould's fish paintings, printed on glossy paper to show the fine detail of line and colouring. If not quite good enough to eat, they'd certainly look good taken from the book and framed as a set - perhaps in a fisherman's den or trophy room? Each of the fish reproduced lends its name to a chapter of the book, and represents one of the chief characters in it.

Yet in the end, can we be certain how many of these characters had an individual existence, outside the fertile mind of the forger?  The novel's epilogue informs us that: 'William Buelow Gould, alias "the Surgeon", alias "the Commandant", etc drowned whilst attempting escape'.

In an intriguing echo or foreshadowing of Gould's multiple personalities, the convict himself informs us that his aboriginal lover is known to the Commandant as "the Mulatto", to himself as "Twopenny Sal", and as various other things to various other people.  And unusually for a book purportedly of two centuries ago, he portrays himself in his journal as a sensual lover who find his all in the person and the loins of this woman of what was at the time possibly the most despised race on earth.  Has Flanagan transferred modern sensibilities to a man who would have been, by upbringing and social conditioning, totally incapable of them?  Is this just a hopeless romanticism?  Or is it an accurate reflection of how any honest man of Gould's obvious abilities must have reacted to such a situation?

Flanagan also has other tricks up his sleeve. He has, not one, but two Books of Fishes by Gould.  The first is the collection of his paintings prepared at the order of the Surgeon, as a scientific endeavour.  The second is Gould's secret journal, written in kangaroo blood and squid ink in a half-submerged prison cell at the tideline, which includes copies of his fish paintings from memory, but is much more importantly the story of his sojourn and eventual escape from the grim penal colony of Sarah Island - as a fish!

Which of the two books is the more real? - the tidy scientific pictorial catalogue of fish types, or the tumultuous artistic passionate catalogue of the human types?

Critics throw words around with great abandon: it's just as easy to write "masterpiece" as "codswallop".  So several of them, from around the world, have heaped praise on this book, and it has won prizes.  I don't know enough of the art of writing to judge whether this is a masterpiece or just another journeyman effort.  All I can say I that I'm sure I will want to read this book again, and quite soon at that.

In this 1997 novel, Arthur Golden tells a story of institutionalised violence against women and the poor, with astonishing empathy and insight.  It's extremely strange to note that the author was a young married man with children - and an American to boot!  My prejudices find such a man very unlikely to be capable of the delicacy and sensitivity he shows, or of the subtly complex layering of characteristics in his chief protagonist.  But I'm so glad to be proven wrong!  Behind the beauty of the women, and the glamour of their lifestyles, Golden lays bare the tedium of often dreary and powerless lives; we see that even the most fortunate of the geisha was truly "a bird in a gilded cage".

This novel is also a story of love requited, of harsh disappointments and embittered rivals betraying the trust it is so human to give.  But even the worst done by false friends is not enough to stay our heroine's accomplishment of her dearest dreams.  So it's also a fairytale.  And much of its enchantment lies in its cultivated yet honest sensuality, which imbues even the mundane with poetry.

As in any proper fairytale, the victor's gains are won at great cost.  To protect her fairy kingdom, the geisha Sayuri makes an astonishing decision, which amply demonstrates the depth of her commitment.

"Memoirs of a Geisha" is faultlessly constructed and superbly paced.  It is a tour de force of writing skill, and a triumph of humane engagement with a people whose institutions are so unlike anything seen in the West, yet whose psychology is palpably based on the same needs and emotions.  For insight into a culture whose rituals and preoccupations may seem bizarre, I can't think of a better introduction.  And Sayuri's Japan is the soil from which the modern Japan arose; its spirit lives on.

Last September, I finished my first reading of "An Equal Music", a wonderfully orchestrated novel of loss and gain, hardship and friendship, love and pain.  The author of this elegiac masterpiece is Vikram Seth, an Indian-born author whose characters speak with an English exactitude of what they must, and dare, while sharing the rest through the rituals of a polite society.  I know that I will read this book again, in part and in whole, and to this end have noted some evocative phrases that mark the progress of his tale.  But I have been careful not to give the game away in any detail, for with my immense gift for forgetting the sequence of events, I will be able to rediscover this so natural unfolding of impetuous cause and inevitable effect.  My brief notes follow below.  Read them as music; enjoy the cadences.

Part One - Two layers of glass between us.  (I did but see her passing by.)

Part Two - And she is wearing green.

Part Three - Books mainly.  And riddles.  But she doesn't listen.

Part Four - The silence of these years - rather irksomely somewhere between - a weird and jarring joy - hidden histories

Part Five - The swift ellipses of the earth - a pop-up map of memories - a psycho-terrorist - the mere elaboration of a song - Was ist denn los? - all fears dissolve in sunlight

Part Six - It's far worse because I love you - the alphabet of touch - nothing more perfect - grief and rue

Part Seven - Go then, with the breathing tide - waiting for nothing

Part Eight - Love and ice - from soul and soundpost - into endless night - to hear such music ...