Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon (1931)

I chose to read this because I read somewhere on the Internet that it is a neglected science fiction classic, praised by Arthur C. Clark and other sci-fi luminaries. I was disappointed; I was bored; I slogged on through it because I very rarely give up on a book until the bitter end. I do not recommend it.

First, this is not really what is conventionally called a novel. It is an overview of history, with only broad events covered and no specific characters mentioned. It is even less specific than what you might find in a typical World History textbook in a middle school. But this is a different kind of history--it's the future history of the human species, from 1931 to 5 billion years in the future. Yes, it does mention a myriad of intriguing situations which could be appropriated by science fiction writers to create conventional novels. Perhaps that is why Clark and others appreciated it. No, it is not interesting or even believably predictive for the average reader. (His predictions for the years from 1931 to the present are totally inaccurate, to start with.)

What Stapledon does tell us that has been shown to be true is that history is cyclical and tends to repeat itself. But then we already knew that.

Darkness Visible by William Golding (1979)

On the surface, Darkness Visible tells two stories: In the first story, a child miraculously emerges from a fire "that is melting lead and distorting iron" during the London blitz. He is hideously burned on one side of his head and face, the burned side glowing white in the glare of the inferno, the unharmed side darkened. Given the name Matty by his doctor, he is predictably shunned by other children, only receiving what he mistakenly perceives as kindness from one of his teachers. Progressively consumed by the questions, "Who am I?," "What am I?," and "What am I here for?," as an adult he becomes a wanderer on the earth, seeking answers and visited by visions. In the second story, two twin girls, one light and one dark, grow up as symbolic orphans, with an absent mother and a emotionally absent father. The dark-haired one, Sophy, perceives a dark tunnel at the back of her mind that leads her, as a child, to kill a baby bird; as an adult, to achieve her first orgasm after stabbing her lover during coitus; and finally, to originate a kidnapping plot, which might or might not result in the victim's death from torture. Toni, the light-haired twin, seems to function more rationally, moving from religion, to transcendentalism, and finally to political terrorism. Matty's story and the twins' story come together in the suspenseful conclusion.

What this book is really about, however, is good and evil, the light and darkness within humanity. Golding constructs his message by blanketing the story under a dense layer of symbolism and religious imagery. Matty becomes a Christ figure, at one point even being symbolically crucified and castrated. (Evidently Golding believed lust to be a prime component of the darkness.) He enters and leaves the story in a blaze of fire. Freudian symbolism also enters in, with the twins perhaps representing the ego and the id. The dark twin, Sophy, certainly exhibits the Electra complex.

At times during my reading, my understanding became completely muddled under the barrage of allegorical messages. I am quite sure that Milton's Paradise Lost contains many clues, since Golding took his title from there, but I read that masterpiece so many years ago that I can hardly remember it. A reader must also have a background of Biblical knowledge to understand many of the references.

However limited my complete understanding, I believe I get the basic message, and it is an important one that has often been repeated in print and even in film: our job, as human beings, is to resist going over to the dark side.

Maggie, A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane (1893)

This novella by the author of The Red Badge of Courage is, like Nana by Emile Zola, a naturalistic examination of prostitution. In contrast to Zola, however, Crane tells us almost nothing about his heroine's career as a prostitute, but instead examines the circumstances that lead her to sell herself.

Maggie is a teenage girl living in a dirty apartment in the Bowery in New York City. Her father has long been missing; her mother is a slovenly drunkard who is so familiar to the police and the courts that they call her by her first name; her older brother is a delivery driver who fancies himself a real tough guy. When she meets one of her brother's friends who has become a bartender, she is immediately charmed, not only by his more polished dress and manners, but also by his very cleanliness. Despite appearances, however, he proves to be as lacking in empathy and morality as her own family.

It takes no leap of imagination to know that this sad story probably will not end well.

Crane tells a good bit of his story through dialogue, all duplicating the vernacular and pronunciation of New York City slums at the time. His depictions of the shabby surroundings, particularly of the filth and the unpleasant odors, add to the atmosphere of hopelessness. Maggie's downfall is seen as inevitable, doomed as she is by her environment and her genetic inheritance.

This slice of the bad side of life is extremely well done, but I prefer my literature to be a bit more hopeful.

Nana by Emile Zola (1880)

Continuing with my mini-unit of books about prostitutes (following Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill), I chose as my next this 19th Century French novel. Zola approaches his account in a naturalistic manner, portraying his heroine as the amoral product of her heredity and environment. As the child of a family of alcoholics and criminals, she is almost bestial in nature. Through her animal sexuality, she seduces men of a higher social standing, bringing them down to her level and destroying them. The intention of the novelist does not seem to be so much a condemnation of prostitution as it is a condemnation of a society which tolerates and even celebrates degradation. The scholarly introduction to my copy indicated that Zola was writing in reaction to the excesses of the French Second Empire. I can't speak to that, but it seems to me that American tabloid readers and trash-TV watchers who relish accounts of sexual escapades display a similar behavior.

Nana begins her career as a celebrated demimondaine (courtesan) by appearing almost nude in a play on the Paris stage. Blond and voluptuous, she immediately captures the attentions of several upper class sensualists who vie with one another to gain her favors, showering her with expensive gifts and money. Moving from one to another, always betraying the man who is financing her at the moment, she ultimately sets out to entrap the one man whose religious beliefs prompt him to resist her charms. Once in her power, he allows Nana to humiliate and betray him time and time again. Nana delights in sucking the last remnants of dignity and fortune from her willing victims. A journalist writes of her as a "golden fly" who "sucked death from the carrion left by the roadside and now, buzzing, dancing, and flittering like a precious stone, was entering palaces through the windows and poisoning the men inside...."

Throughout the novel, Zola interestingly uses animal images to reference the behavior of his characters. Nana is the "Golden Beast," the "...Beast of the Scriptures, a lewd creature of the jungle." At a horse race, spectator comments about Nana the woman and a horse by the same name are interchangeable. She forces her most pathetic victim to crawl around the floor growling like a bear or barking like a dog, fetching her shoes in his mouth.

This novel is fascinating and very well done. It is not overtly moralistic like Defoe's Moll Flanders or pornographic like Cleland's Fanny Hill. Ultimately, however, it is so depressing that I will not ever read it again.

Fanny Hill by John Cleland (1748)

The scholarly introduction to the novel Moll Flanders, which I reviewed last month, mentioned a couple of other early novels about prostitutes. I decided to read these, too, to compare them to Defoe's novel, which I considered to be hypocritically sanctimonious. The writer of the introduction even remarked that Fanny Hill was thought to have been written as a direct response to Defoe's treatment of the subject of prostitution.

The two are different, for sure.

Defoe only told the reader that his heroine engaged in prostitution, reserving his detailed descriptions for her various ingenious thefts and scams. Cleland shows the reader, in detail, scenes from his heroine's life as a prostitute. I was surprised to find myself reading, as it turns out, perhaps the first pornographic novel.

I can't speak for how readers in the 18th Century perceived the novel, but for a modern reader (at least this one), instead of being titillating it is delightfully funny. The humor, which might be somewhat intentional and might be from an effort to circumvent censorship, comes from Cleland's highly imaginative use of an extensive variety of euphemisms and metaphors to describe every aspect of the sexual act. He is particularly inventive in describing the male sexual equipment, never using either a scientific or a vulgar term. It is interesting to note that the author was 22 at the time and was writing while in jail.

The whole of the plot is just a filler to get from one amorous event to the next. At the end, Cleland allows Fanny to moralize a bit about how much better it is to live a virtuous life, but her comments are obviously tongue--in-cheek.

Fanny Hill was banned from publication in the United States until 1963. I can't imagine why. As pornography it is really not very effective. As literature, it is at least better than Moll Flanders, primarily because of its creative circumlocution.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell (2013)

Karen Russell begins the first of this book's eight short stories with a seemingly prosaic account of an elderly man sitting on a bench in a lemon grove, watching the lemons fall. His wife "has no patience for this sort of meditation. 'Jesus Christ, Clyde,' she says. 'You need a hobby.'" Then at the end of the next paragraph, the old man says, "They never guess that I am a vampire."

This will give you some idea of Russell's magical mixture of the mundane with the fantastic. The results can be, by turns, wistfully touching or terror inducing or laugh-out-loud hilarious, sometimes all in the same story. In addition, her arresting prose abounds with original and startling images. For example, she writes, "The giant seagull had a sheriff's build--distended barrel chest, spindly legs splayed into star-shaped feet." She describes a children's playground that "looked like a madhouse. Padded swings, padded slides, padded gyms, padded seesaws and go-wheelies: all the once-fun equipment had gotten upholstered by the city in this red loony-bin foam."

In addition to aging vampires, this collection includes young women who have been transformed into human silkworms, dead presidents reincarnated as horses, a message therapist who can erase memories through the manipulation of a veteran's tattoos, a young pioneer boy who makes a desperate nightmare ride, and a scarecrow found by young bullies that resembles one of their favorite victims. No matter how far-fetched the scenario, however, the emotions portrayed are true-to-life.

Russell reminds me very much of one of my favorite authors, Angela Carter, who also used magic realism with a subtext agenda. While Carter's subtext almost always had a feminist basis, Russell's subtext has to do with what it means to be human.

I highly recommend this short story collection, as well as Russell's earlier novel, Swamplandia (reviewed June, 2012). I understand that her first collection of short stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, is also very good.

Written in the Stars by Aisha Saeed (2015)

My granddaughter Rori suggested I read this Young Adult novel during a discussion we had about India and its culture, following my reading of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, another book she had loaned me. It concerns an American teenager who is the daughter of immigrants from Pakistan. Wishing to preserve their culture, the parents adhere to the values and many of the customs of their home country, so when they discover that their daughter Naile has a secret romantic relationship with a classmate whom they consider to be unsuitable, they take her to Pakistan, ostensibly to visit their large extended family and to teach her more about her heritage. In actuality, they are plotting to arrange a marriage for her to a suitable man.

The author is herself of Pakistani heritage, and, in a note at the end of the book, says that she wrote the book to spotlight the continuing practice of arranged marriages in many cultures and to provide encouragement to young women who find themselves in similar situations.

Rori's critical assessment of the book was that it had an interesting and suspenseful plot, but that its simplistic style made it seem amateurish. I agree with her.

Side note: I just love it that I have grandchildren who are also addicted to reading and who discuss books with me.