A few more thoughts on adventure stories...

Thinking about Leigh Brackett's heroes, I might say that however disillusioned they often find themselves at the end of their adventures, their heroism resides in their capacity to remake the world in which they find themselves for the better. Or perhaps that's putting it too strong. Saving a world doesn't automatically improve it, which is why many adventure stories can be read as in some ways fundamentally reactionary. Sometimes Brackett depicts failure, and whatever her heroes' success, their achievements are always within worlds which are subject to history. It's explicitly stated in at least one story that the romantic world of Mars in which their adventures take place is slowly dying. Over a period of centuries, even millenia, this landscape will disapear. Innocence is already lost.

But think about this more generally. All the various permutations of adventure stories that I've read by this point. Success or failure, it's always an isolated individual who is at the centre of the narrative. Part of the promise of an adventure story is that individuals can save their worlds, even improve them, making their worlds more just. Thinking about heroism in the real world, it's easier to see how seductive such a vision is. Not to take anything away from the heroism that exists, but most heroism occurs within social structures. The heroism of soldiers or firemen  for example, is intensely social. Their professions place them in situations where heroism is possible, which is obviously less open to those of us who spend most of our days in an office. Which is not to say that heroism isn't found in other places. For some of us, ordinary life can require quite astonishing acts of bravery, and that's not to be slighted. Still, the kind of heroism that's celebrated in adventure narratives is rarely performed by romantic individuals here in the real world, where it is more likely to be the work of capable professionals who are trained to perform such acts.

If our sensibility is essentially romantic however, then living in a modern world which is currently largely run for the convenience of an essentially sociopathic elite, and in which heroic action can feel severely limited, the appeal becomes obvious. Think about the words which are used to justify the way the world is at present. So often we seem to be told we must be 'realistic', of the need for 'efficiency'. It's also a concious disavowel of romanticism and fantasy. At several points in reading Leigh Brackett's stories, I was reminded of the work of Graham Greene. Greene's characters are found in a world which is closer to the real (which is no doubt why some would argue his work is more mature), but I don't see how his dissillusioned characters are any less romantic. It's just that they exist in a world in which the kind of heroism available to those in a story by Leigh Brackett is no longer possible. That's what happens to heroic action in a world which is realistic.

In all likeliehood, individual heroism of the kind celebrated by adventure fiction has always been a romantic fiction, which might explain why the best of these kind of stories seem to belong to the past, either through their setting, or because that's when they were written. By their very nature perhaps, many adventure stories are looking backwards to a remembered past. As I noted in my previous post about adventure stories, adventure stories promise is a vision of freedom, a freedom from modernity. Which is not to say that the form is automatically reactionary. My admittedly limited awareness is that these days we don't seem to be able to do adventure stories, at least in the more high profile examples of the form where they're hedged about with irony in one way or another. A proper adventure can contain irony, but it still needs to be told straight.

Leigh Brackett...the queen of romantic interplannetry adventure!

Sea-Kings of Mars & Otherworldly Stories

Since I've already referred to this book a couple of times on this blog, I thought it only fair that I should devote a post to it now that I've finally finished it. I took my time with it because I struggle to read more than 600 pages of such writing. It's a little raw, unpolished, at times more concerned with simply getting from a to b as so much adventure writing is, with an obvious focus on action. it's writing for adolescents, which I don't mean as a criticism. I dearly wish I could have discovered this writer when I was on the verge of adolescence, around the same sort of time I was introduced to the work of her friend Michael Moorcock. And The Empire Strikes Back doesn't count, as it turns out that she didn't write the final script which was used for the film. Her posthumous credit was a sign of affection. She was though involved in the scripts for several Howard Hawks movies, including both The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo, two of my favourite films of Hollywood's golden age.

No matter, whatever her actual contributions to George Lucas' trilogy, a character like Han Solo is clearly a Leigh Brackett protagonist with the serial numbers filed off. She clearly loved that hard bitten, cynical man of action. Elements of the personas of both Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, appropriately enough. Interesting that from her descriptions, her most famous character, Eric John Stark, hero of three tales in this collection, appears to be black. Not that that's reflected in any cover art I've been able to find online. And Stark's Tarzan-like origin on Mercury as 'N'Chaka' suggests a white skin, growing up amongst savage tribespeople. Still, we're told so often about his dark skin that it doesn't seem wholly inconsistent with what's written. And it's refreshing to think that one of the major heroes of this era of pulp science fiction might have been black.

But yes, as the reference to Tarzan surely suggests, she romanticises primitivism, but so what? It's her romanticism about her fantastical vision of Mars which is surely the main attraction of her fiction. The plots are fairly simple, often reliant on tropes such as telepathy and lost races. What's really powerful is the atmosphere, redolent of fantasies of North Africa and heavy with a sense of ill defined loss, and her powerful descriptions of Mars' landscape. A late story like 'The Last Days of Shandakor', unusually for her told in the first person, is largely plotless, and all the better for it. With many of her stories, I found my attention tended to drift a little as we reached the usually action packed climax of the story. What I most wanted was simply to inhabit this magical, barely habitable Mars for as long as possible. And whilst she may be guilty of romanticising primitivism, a prominent themes is the clash between Mars' aborigines and Earth's destructive bureaucracy. Politically she is on the right side, as far as I'm concerned. Tyrany and authoritarianism, whatever forms they take, is always resisted by her otherwise cynical heroes. Brackett's use of telepathy is interesting in this light. It nearly always takes the form of bodily possession, literally conquering another person's self in taking away their body.

But at times, Leigh Brackett can feel like a bizarrely post-colonial writer! The use of North Africa in the creation of her fictional Mars is obvious - there's even a city called Barrakesh, so it's not like it isn't in plain site - do seem to invite an Orientalist reading. It's difficult to know quite what to make of all this. Her writing displays an obvious love with her invented alien world and cultures, and undoubtedly part of waht's so attractive is a romanticisation of North Africa, which reminds me of something I read online a while ago, that exoticism isn't always a bad thing, because it also expresses a liking for what's being exoticised. It can be the beginning of an engagement with a real place. Something of this development can be traced in this collection, where the final story, the last one Leigh Brackett wrote about Mars, before her romantic vision was lost to our advances in knowledge about the real Mars, is the most explicit confrontation with issues of colonialism of any of them. Here the villains aren't some mysterious lost race as in so many of her stories, but liberal do-gooders who really want to help the natives. The means by which they are ultimately persuaded to stop their interverence might feel implausible, but then this is an adventure story. Some of the endings to other stories are rather more bittersweet, even downbeat. It's actually quite rare that Brackett leaves you with a simple feeling of victory. So her romaticism isn't so far away from the real world after all.

Currently Reading

China Mieville, Un Lun Dun

This is actually a rereading as I'm currently reading it to my wife.

Dannie Abse, White Coat, Purple Coat: Collected Poems, 1948-1988

This was originally a gift from my Dad, years ago, when I started my undergraduate degree. Some books take a while to come to, long after you've first heard about them or first acquired them. There's just too much I'd like to read in my threescore and ten. I'm glad in a way this took so long to come to me, as it feels like it's absolutely the right thing for me to be reading at the moment. I wouldn't have enjoyed it or understood it nearly as much when I was 19.

Leigh Brackett, Sea-Kings of Mars & Otherworldly Stories

I adore some of the titles of old pulp science fiction, and Leigh Brackett has some wonderful ones: 'Sea Kings of Mars', 'Temptress of Venus', 'Queen of the Martian Catacombs'.

Patrick Parinder, Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day

Nothing to do with my academic work. I'm just becoming more and more interested in representations of Englishness.

E.M. Forster, Arctic Summer

Speaking of which, I've just recently started watching the famous BBC adaptation of I, Claudius. Or 'I, Clavdivs' as the titles have it. What's unexpectedly struck me is just how English it all is. Now this could simply be because of the terribly precise RP accents that most of the actors sport, but it also seems to be something in the language. Of course, the novel from which it was adapted was written by a poet who came from the English middle classes and Oxford and served as an officer in the First World War. Robert Graves was born at a time when the British Empire was at it's height and, not only for him but for the majority of English people at the time, the Empire was simply an accepted part of the cultural and political background. I know nothing about Graves' personal feelings about imperialism, nor do I think his novel was in any way a hidden allegory of, say, the British in India. It just feels as if a story of the Roman Empire has been 'Englished' by it's author's cultural background, for all that Graves was clearly trying to be faithful to his story's history. Again, perhaps this is nothing more than the process of adaptation at work. It could also be the fact that both societies were Imperialist in nature, and that the national identity of Britain and the British Empire was bound up with depictions of the Roman Empire (it goes back further still if we think of King Alfred's visit to Rome as a young boy and the influence it may or may not have had on him).

It may be nothing more than the coincidence of encountering them at the same time which has linked this in my mind with Forster's uncompleted novel. I can see why he might have abandoned it. The Italian scenes it begins with feel like a retread of his earlier Italian novels and the general theme embodied in the two main characters of reason vs. romanticism is close to that of Howard's End. Forster's fiction has been a love of mine since I first encountered it at 17. Something about his depiction of the chivalric ideal in a modern (early 20th century) scene resonates with I, Claudius for me. They're both conflating the past and present in really interesting ways. They're both fictions of Empire (Forster's uncompleted novel references the Empire at several points) even though on the surface that's far from apparent.

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

I'm going to be teaching Book 1 next term and though this was as good a time as any to finally read a book that's been sitting on my shelves since I was an undergraduate when I only read one or two of the opening cantos and the 'Bower of Bliss' episode from later in the poem. It also gives me the opportunity to post one of my favourite reviews of anything ever. Someone posted this on amazon in 2000:

One of the greatest fantasy novels ever - seriously!

Literature was never this easy! If you enjoyed Lord of the Rings or similar, this is the book for you. The Olde Englishe takes a little getting used to, but it's easier to read than Shakespeare, and the poetry only adds to the vividness of description. All of the standard fantasy elements: giants, dragons, knights, temptations, virtues etc. are present, but in unconventional forms in wonderfully original stories. It really is great fun, and a real treat for the regular fantasy reader. I wish we'd done it at school.

I honestly don't mean to sneer here. I think this is a wonderful review. It amuses me simply because it seems to describe an honest enthusiasm for a book that so many undergraduates studying English Literature must have either cursed or else avoided entirely, assuming they had the opportunity. I love the way this reviewer is able to appropriate Spencer's allegory of Elizabeth I and Protestant poetics to the canon of modern fantasy fiction initiated by Tolkien's famous trilogy.