Cat's Cradle

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Kurt Vonnegut is not exactly a familiar name when it comes to the impact left upon a modern reader's psyche; inquire about him and you get either blank stares, or, at the most, a mumbled response about how Slaughterhouse-Five wasn't half bad. And yet, if one were to look through the dusty annals of the twentieth century, they'd find Vonnegut among the few people who captured the essence of their times without making it look difficult.

The subject of this review first came out in 1961, a time when the Cold War was gathering momentum and the world was in very real danger of nuclear destruction. It is appropriate, then, that the central plot point in Cat's Cradle is a crystalline compound called ice-nine that can freeze all the water upon earth in seconds.It is created as a lark by one of the men who invented the Atom Bomb; after his death, his three children divide the compound among themselves. The novel follows the exploits of Jonah, a cynical novelist, as he searches a remote Caribbean island for the crystals. Woven into the plot are the teachings of Bokononism (a fictitious religion practiced by the people on the island) and a multitude of deftly-woven characters that bring out the undercurrent of madness that runs through our lives.

Cat's Cradle deals with the colossal magnitude of human folly, and the dangers of progress for the sake of progress. Along the way it deals out insight into love, hate and religion, among other things. Vonnegut's acerbic wit inspires no laughter except for the hysterical kind; the humor is served pitch black. But along the way we get a look at the landscape of those times... A bleak portrait, but a riveting one nonetheless.

Of special mention is the ingenuity of the story itself: the plot hums along at a steady pace, retaining its flow even as the narrator sets off on frequent tangents to point out the attractions there. The novel is compact (like most of Vonnegut's other works) but one doesn't feel short-changed at the end; the conclusion is surprising without being abrupt, and the final lines linger on long after the novel itself.

<quotation snipped to avoid spoilers.>

During the latter half of his career,Vonnegut wrote an autobiographical collage called Palm Sunday. Amongst its interesting (if haphazard) contents was a report card saying how he ranked his works with respect to one another. Slaughterhouse-Five was one of the books he'd given an A+.

Cat's Cradle was the other.

In fact, the University of Chicago (which had earlier dismissed Vonnegut's master's thesis as frivolous) awarded him his degree on the merit of this novel, which they felt was an apt analysis of the human condition. And while that endorsement might not lend too much credence to the novel, it is certainly a reminder that this book is more relevant than your average piece of fiction.

I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: "Nothing."

Transmetropolitan

Let us begin with a history lesson, fellers.

Ever heard of a guy named Hunter S. Thomson? Wrote a bunch of swell books. Most famous one was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. They even made a movie starring Depp and Benicio del Torro out of it.

Anyway, Thomson was famous even in non-fiction-reading-circles (read: tightass prudes) because of his writing style, which is now famous as Gonzo Journalism. It works by putting the reporter in the center of things rather than the peripheri, making him an active participant rather than a mute spectator. This lends Gonzo journalism a personalized touch that helps endear it to the masses (although endear is probably the wrong word in this context).

End of history lesson.

This long-winded monologue leads up to Transmetropolitan, whose narrative and presentation style both pay homage to Thomson and his brainchild. It deals with the (mis)adventures of Spider Jerusalem, a famous reporter who is yanked out of exile by an unfulfilled literary contract. The series follows Spider as he goes about exposing the uglier face of a city that is pretty darn repulsive to begin with.

Oh, and it is set in the 23rd Century. Bring on the cyberpunk!

The comic itself is built around the experiences of Spider, and subsequent entries in the column he writes ("I Hate It Here") for his local newsfeed (The Word). The comic itself reads like an eclectic seizure of outrageous events, punctuated by strangely haunting moments.
"Journalism is just a gun. It's only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that's all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world."

Spider Jerusalem himself is a Nihilist, an arrogant prick, a junkie, a sadistic asshole. But once he starts writing he becomes the center of his own universe: everything else just falls away. And a deranged man becomes the voice of reason in a dark, dystopic time. That has to be what sets this book apart from all others.

Transmetropolitan was the tour de force of Warren Ellis, the acclaimed comic writer and novelist who'd earlier worked on cult titles such as Hellblazer and The Authority. His friend Garth Ennis claims the series was inspired by Ellis's own frustrations while working on mainstream titles and not being taken seriously. You can certainly see where he's coming from-bizarre issues such as cryogenic revivals and posthuman secessionist movements are used as metaphors for the more familiar themes of alienation and discrimination, to give an example.
Or maybe the writer just enjoys being a complete lunatic.

Either way, Ellis's warped vision is brought to life by the by the stunning wizardry of penciller Darick Robertson, who brings alive the seamy underbelly with his art. The panels are heavily populated with cutaway gags and obscure pop cult references in the style of Bill Elders, although the actual artistic merit is Robertson's own.

At the time of writing I have reached only the fifteenth issue in a run that lasted five years; however, both the comic and the wikipedia page suggest that all issues following the twelfth will tie into the theme of the new presidency campaign and subsequent shenanigans of the Smiler (read the book!) and Spider's attempts to stop him; in which case, I guess this is the right time to give out first impressions-before they'll buried under an avalanche of meta-references and grand story arcs.

Not that I'm complaining, of course: Hunter S. Thomson's most critically-acclaimed book was the non-fiction Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, and I can't wait to see how Ellis tackles the challenge of finding a big enough mirror for modern society.

In conclusion: read Transmetropolitan. If you can buy back-issues of Archie comics or download the Batman/Deadpool bibliographies (wait, that's me), you can spare a few hundred bucks/a little bandwidth to try out something that is at once too moving to be just a comic book and too graphic to be anything else.

"These are the new streets of this city, where the New Scum try to live. You and me. And here in these streets are the things that we want: sex and birth, votes and traits, money and guilt, television and teddy bears.

But all we've actually got is each other.

You decide what that means."

The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger

The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.

Fantasy has always been something of an oddity, as far as discussions of genre are concerned. Unlike a murder mystery (which tends to follow a set of basic checkpoints: murder, suspects, motives, vital-clues-revealed-at-random-points) or even historical novels (which tend to be themed around exotic times and places whose differences from our own time and place are highlighted), there is no tangible way of actually describing what fantasy is. You could mutter something about dwarves and elves and ogres, but that would just be you describing the mark left on the literary landscape by Tolkien and his ilk. Fantasy is Quidditch, or a dragon’s egg discovered by a farmhand, or a sly genie toying with a cocky young magician, or a world where strange and wonderful things happen because of Dust falling from-

Okay, tell you what, Danny Boy: go stand in a corner until you can stop dribbling; we’re trying to have a serious discussion here.

Now.

Fantasy is anything that is strange (or fantastic) without becoming completely unlike the world which we inhabit. You could write about a bunch of semi-developed merpeople flouncing about in the primordial ooze; but it only crosses into the realm of fantasy if they have some quirky mannerisms that we can associate with real people. And Stephen King – a man who has now spent over five decades writing weird and wonderful things (even though he is still mostly associated with horror because that’s where some of his best work has been) – manages to do exactly that with the Gunslinger.

Write a credible fantasy, I mean. Not something about merpeople. That one’s still on the table.

The Gunslinger is the story of Roland Deschain – the eponymous lawbringer in King’s dystopic realm – who also happens to be the last of his kind. He is laconic, single-minded and unimaginative: a plodder and a bludgeoner, as he describes himself. But his skill with his trusty revolvers is unmatched; and his grit and determination make him the only one who can ever hope of reaching the Dark Tower, which happens to be the central theme to the entire saga. The novel (which is actually a collection of five related pieces in chronological order) deals with Roland’s pursuit of the Man in Black, and a few glimpses at his illustrious past. On the way we meet a bevy of believable characters and are offered a glimpse at ourselves through a funhouse mirror – which is the hallmark of a good piece of fantasy writing.

The world of Roland and the Dark Tower is shown to be a dusty, dying place: the once-proud land of the gunslingers has fallen into decay, with sparse settlements in the harsh environments of deserts and mountains. But it is the small touches connecting this world to ours that make the story enthralling and somehow disturbing; for instance, the song Hey, Jude repeats in the background at many crucial junctures in the story, serving to remind us that this unforgiving land might be our own world in the distant future.

Both the back cover of the book and King’s afterword remind us that the current volume is only the first in a much larger work that will follow; so perhaps the world will be fleshed out further as we progress through the story. But the story itself is not the prime concern here. It travels through a fulfilling arc and reaches a satisfactory conclusion (for now), but the focus remains on the characters in general, and the titular gunslinger in particular.

Roland’s character is lovingly crafted into a credible antihero – you may or may not like him, but he does manage to earn your respect by the time the tale (almost, but not quite) ends. There are shades of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, and also of the Childe Roland from Robert Browning’s poem (who was the chief inspiration behind his conception). The other characters are also fleshed out well – from the townsfolk of Tull to the two birds who play a vital role in the story (you read right). My favourite aspect of the characterization has to be the interplay between Jake, Roland and the Man In Black: the white, grey and black who both define and challenge the roles they’re meant to embody.

Speaking of Roland, his own back-story is far from complete at this point-we’re only told of how he became an apprentice, not the last gunslinger-but something tells me he will not be touched upon in so much detail in further volumes – he will remain the protagonist, of course, but as King introduces an ever-growing roster of characters (it is like a trademark of his) we will probably be subjected to the occasional flashbacks rather than the full-fledged detours that this volume afforded.

All the more reason to cherish the beginning, I guess.

The Gunslinger was written over a period of twelve and a half years, one segment at a time, while

King worked on larger pieces in the interim. He confessed that while the story seemed almost impossible to finish at his current pace (the afterword suggests a further length of around 3000 pages to follow) he had bright plans for it’s future.

At the time of writing this review, it has been almost six years since the last volume of the Dark Tower saga came out (the first edition of the Gunslinger was published a decade before I was born) and to be sure, I shall discuss the rest of the books as soon as I get my hands on them. But before I conclude, I would like to admit a small grouse: It seems King recently rewrote the Gunslinger in order to bring the cultural references up-to-date, and also to correct a few inconsistencies with future volumes. But while looking up the differences online (the copy I’ve read is a tattered old first edition) I thought they removed some of the grey aspects of Roland and made him... Well, a whiter character, so to speak. Plus I’m not exactly a fan of rewrites, per se: if the writer found it fit for publication to begin with, he has to respect his own decision.

So I would like to finish with a solid recommendation for this book: if you want to see what mature fantasy can be like – with dark undertones and minus the heavy reliance on Tolkien’s mindscapes – try the Gunslinger. An original, unrevised edition, if you can find it. Because it is a fine example of King at his prime, with a significant amount of literary weight minus the pretensions that sometimes go with the genre. And also because a new companion novel is due next year, and you owe it to yourself to be up-to-date with a phenomenon that precedes Potter, Bartimaeus, LEP Recon, Lyra, and everyone else on the spectrum.

There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met

To view the last of me, a living frame

For one more picture! in a sheet of flame

I saw them and I knew them all. And yet

Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,

And blew "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."