Showing posts with label Thomas Keneally. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thomas Keneally. Show all posts

Monday, August 26, 2019

Craig Harrison (3): Days of Starlight (1988)



Craig Harrison: Days of Starlight (1988)


Antarctica. A small scientific base. A huge, unexpected discovery made in the ice: something which will alter not just our sense of the history of our planet, but the future of all mankind. Sound familiar?

Of course it does. John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) is, I suppose, the locus classicus for this particular plotline.



John Carpenter, dir.: The Thing (1982)


The special effects may look pretty hokey nowadays, but I can tell you that at the time they were quite horrifically compelling. Simply coming up with the idea of that severed head with legs scuttling around the base seemed like the kind of out-of-the-box thinking we simply hadn't encountered in horror films up to that point.

Of course there had to be a sequel - or rather a sequel / prequel - The Thing (2011), but it's interesting that they waited thirty years to make it.



Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., dir.: The Thing (2011)


And when it did come, it was immediately clear that many things had changed. The director is the star of the 1982 film. It's true that Kurt Russell got to run through his usual (slightly ironic) repertoire of heroics, but the film itself did not pander to the accepted conventions of how such things were supposed to run.

By 2011, the system had closed over and healed itself. There was a pretty girl starring - Mary Elizabeth Winstead - who got top billing, and whose oeuvre it tends to be linked to, rather than to that of its rather obscure journeyman director.

All in all, it's hard to see it as much more than a reversion to type. The first film version of the story, The Thing from Another World (1951), though set in the Arctic rather than the Antarctic, sets up its story by the playbook of the standard 1950s alien paranoia film.



Christian Nyby, dir.: The Thing from Another World (1951)


Of course it's no accident that essentially the same film should have to be remade every thirty years or so. The owners of the rights to a story know that the copyright on their property will expire unless it's renewed from time to time - hence the repeated Hollywood versions of franchises such as King Kong, Mighty Joe Young, The Mummy, The Wolfman, etc. etc.



John W. Campbell: Who Goes There (1938)


All three films are based - somewhat loosely, it must be admitted - on John W. Campbell's novella 'Who Goes There?', first published (under the pseudonym Don A. Stuart) in the August 1938 Astounding Science Fiction, of which he was then editor.



John W. Campbell: The Thing from Another World (1951)


An earlier, longer text of the story, entitled Frozen Hell, found among Campbell's papers at Harvard, has recently (2019) been republished on kindle. It was, however, the original version which was voted in 1973 one of the most influential SF stories ever written - just as Campbell himself is (for better or worse) still considered one of the most influential editors of the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction.



H. P. Lovecraft: At the Mountains of Madness (1931)


Of course, the actual premise of the story - the isolated base in the polar regions (North or South), the frozen aliens in the snow who revive unexpectedly, the desperate struggle for life against them - are all very reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft's classic novella At the Mountains of Madness, written in 1931, then submitted to his usual outlet, Weird Tales, later that year. Farnsworth Wright, the editor, rejected it for reasons of length, and so, instead, it was eventually serialized in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Astounding Stories.

Admittedly the story was actually accepted by Campbell's predecessor in the editorial chair, F. Orlin Tremaine. Campbell did not take over till the end of the following year, 1937, but clearly he must have read it, and presumably it influenced his own story.



Not that there's any great scandal in that. Lovecraft himself makes no secret of his indebtedness to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the closest thing to a novel Edgar Allan Poe ever wrote, and, quite honestly, one of the weirdest and most extreme pieces of fiction ever composed.

Lovecraft ends his own story, in fact, with a direct invocation of Arthur Gordon Pym, quoting the strange cry 'Tekeli-li, Tekeli-li': 'a cry associated with mysterious white-coloured birds and uttered by the natives of the Antarctic land of Tsalal whenever they encounter white objects.'



Jules Verne: Le Sphinx des glaces (1897)


The enigmatic ending of Poe's story, with the hero and his companion drifting towards an immense chasm in the (warm) Southern ocean, just as an immense spectral white figure appears before them, is directly addressed in Jules Verne's sequel Le Sphinx des glaces [The Sphinx of the Ice] (1897), translated into English with the rather more prosaic title An Antarctic Mystery.



Dominic Sena, dir.: Whiteout (2009)


Once you start looking, It's actually quite difficult to avoid these rather dreamy associations between ice, enigmatic femininity, and dangerous secrets hidden in the preserving cold.

Take, for instance, the 2009 film Whiteout, where Kate Beckinsale - as a rather improbable US Marshall - acts as the involuntary Lorelei drawing large numbers of men to death in their search for the treasure concealed in an old frozen Russian transport plane (it turns out to be diamonds, rather than the fissionable nuclear material she fears it to be for most of the film).

Curiously enough, the French title for this US / Canada / France co-production, Enfer Blanc, translates as 'White Hell' - not too far from Frozen Hell, the original title for Campbell's novel. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as the French say - or, in Winnie-the-Pooh's paraphrase: "The more it snows, the more it goes on snowing."






[SPOILER ALERT: reading this part of the post before you've finished Harrison's novel will definitely wreck your appreciation of its dénouement!]

So what contribution does the ostensible subject of this post, Craig Harrison, have to make to this set of various flavours of frozen hell?



Thomas Keneally: A Victim of the Aurora (1977)


Familiar, undoubtedly, with the John Carpenter film and its various antecedents - though possibly also influenced by some more literary excursions onto the ice, such as Thomas Keneally's 1977 heroic-age-of-antarctic-exploration detective novel A Victim of the Aurora - he takes a rather unexpected tangent.




When a team of research geologists at a remote American base in Antarctica discovers a two-metre-long silicon crystal, it becomes their most prized specimen. No one, however, anticipates the disruptive effect of the crystal - on the base's technical staff, nor on the silicon-chip technology sperating the base.
An attempt to investigate the powers of the crystal results in a startling discovery that appears to be of unparalleled significance.
But as the long winter darkness descends over the vast expanse of the earth's most alien continent, the research scientists at the base realise they must draw on all their resources to fight for their very survival.

DAYS OF STARLIGHT, set in the not-too-distant future, is a chillingly credible and timely tale, combining elements of the politico-psychological thriller and of speculative fiction.



There's no doubt that Harrison keeps up the claustrophobia and intensity associated with such narratives every bit as well as any of his predecessors. He keeps the sinister political overtones, too. The 'Delta Force' commandos sent by Washington to wipe out everyone with knowledge of this particular strange discovery in the ice are close cousins to the ruthless 'Blue Berets' in Broken October: sinister armed thugs whose idea of a good time is raping and murdering everyone they encounter.

Almost up to the last page, the story sounds like something which would make a heck of a good made-for-TV movie: clautrophobic (= fewer sets to build and maintain); cold (= bleached-out colours and backgrounds, easy to film); and with a very small cast (= great savings on extras, with more to spend on star power).

But then a basic weirdness, which has been growing throughout, only half-perceptibly, begins to manifest itself. What is the mysterious satellite to which the equally mysterious silicon crystal appears to be linked? It's a kind of transmitter, of course. In function, it's very like the moon monolith in Clarke & Kubrick's 2001, designed to send a message to some aliens a long way off just as soon as the inhabitants of this particular rock have reached a sufficient stage of development to warrant it.

I say 'warrant' rather than 'deserve' it because the whole book is about just what we deserve. And by 'we' I mean any and all beneficiaries of European hegemony. 'What if the aliens came and they were black?' is Harrison's basic question.



Roy Thomas: Avengers #102 (1972)


The crystal has been keeping an exact holographic of - everything, you see. The aliens will only need to look through it to see just what we've been up to, and it won't be a pretty sight. The book ends with Ben the protagonist's realisation that we have approximately 30 years to clean up our act - that's how long it will take them to get here, travelling at near light speed. 'What to do till the sentinels come,' to quote the title of a classic Marvel comic.

Is there a certain element of bathos in all this, after so much build-up, so much tension, so much spy-thriller intrigues? There certainly shouldn't be: it's a most ingenious solution to the narrative problem of how to find a new twist on the old Antarctic base story, but somehow there is. Turning it into yet another iteration of the conundrum black-white race relations seems just a little forced after Harrison's far more straightforward engagement with it in Broken October, and even the more effective, albeit fantastical and dreamlike extension of that in The Quiet Earth.



Fred Hoyle: The Black Cloud (1957)


But perhaps, in the end, that's the point. Days of Starlight may not work perfectly as a thriller (à la Whiteout or The Thing). Nor does it really succeed in emulating some of its more strictly Science Fictional influences: Fellow-Yorkshireman Fred Hoyle's classic The Black Cloud (1957), for instance, for the alien intelligence; or Stanisław Lem's His Master's Voice (1968) for the baffling artefact from another world (in Lem's case, a line of code in a book of random numbers which turns out to have been generated by the transmissions from a certain part of space).



Stanisław Lem: His Master's Voice (1968)


I suppose, in the end, that's what makes it - for me - an exemplary piece of New Zealand Speculative Fiction. Insofar as this can be seen as a genre at all, it tends to involve a certain rejection of cosmic solutions and speculations in favour of more nitty-gritty, number-eight wire, alternatives.

Sentient oceans and hyper-intelligent clouds are all very well, Harrison appears to be saying, but we've made a terrible mess of the place and the people who are actually here, all around us. Let's make a full acknowledgement of what it is we've done, as a first step in the process of repairing it. It falls almost naturally into the wording of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step programme.
We:
  • Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves [Step 4]
  • Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all [Step 8]
  • Made direct amends to such people wherever possible [Step 9]
As such, I think Days of Starlight must be seen as a worthy culmination to the SF trilogy Harrison began with Broken October (1976) and continued in The Quiet Earth (1981).



Robert A. Heinlein: Starship Troopers (1959)


It falls in line more with the preoccupations of writer / critics such as Samuel R. Delany - who famously argued that the protagonist of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers must be black - and Ursula K. Le Guin, the hero of whose Earthsea books, Ged, was always intended to be dark-skinned, though he's seldom been portrayed in that way in cover illustrations - than with more familiar SF tropes and themes.



Ursula K. Le Guin: A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)


But, once you start looking for it, the subject of racial prejudice intrudes everywhere: in Isaac Asimov's "robot" saga; in many other manifestations of the Android theme (such as Stanisław Lem's Solaris (1961), filmed so memorably by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972); or - for that matter - Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the inspiration for the 1982 film Blade Runner).



Blade Runner (1982)


So what's the problem, then (if there is a problem)? I suppose, for me, it lies in the implications of Harrison's contention, throughout the novel, that black and white people's brains do indeed work differently, and are based on a different design. This manifests, for instance, in the greater amount of REM sleep required by the black, mostly service people on the base.

It turns out in context that this is a sign of superiority, not inferiority - and the racist assumptions to the contrary of the base's chief doctor, Kellner, are thoroughly satirised in context.

It's just that - even in the context of a quite far-fetched piece of speculative fiction, entertaining such ideas of a fundamental difference seems a dangerous one (Ben, the protagonist, turns out to be tuned in to the alien satellite's transmissions, communicated through dreams, thanks to the fact that his great-grandfather was in fact black - he therefore escapes the tone-deafness of the other honkies in the story).

It's not that Harrison is unaware of this peril. There's a passage early on where Ben and his love interest, Linda, talk about Dr. Kellner's research as follows:
'Well, if people like Kellner can prove that blacks have got inferior brains, then it means that they needn't worry too much about what the West has done in the last couple of hundred years. And goes on doing ...
'And this cerebrum makes us superior?'
'He reckons it's the centre of our rationality.'
'And the cerebellum's the opposite?'
'Yes: and much older. More primitive, he'd say. Controls all the magical, dreamtime, intuitive, visionary perceptions.'
'And the marvellous sense of rhythm.' [35]
Har-de-ha-ha. The trouble is, this isn't all that far from the actual underlying thesis of the novel. It's a little like the anthropologists who've postulated at various times independent lines of descent for Australian Aborigines and other native races from those which produced the Caucasian master race.



Carleton S. Coon (1904-1981)


The most notorious of these is undoubtedly the unfortunately named Carleton Coon, whose notorious book The Origin of Races (1962) argued:
that the human species divided into five races before it had evolved into Homo sapiens. Further, he suggested that the races evolved into Homo sapiens at different times.
Coon claimed that he had been prompted purely by a desire to follow the evidence where it led, but many of his contemporaries saw this idea as providing fuel for white segregationists and racists generally. Was Coon himself a racist? He, and most of his colleagues, have continued to deny the suggestion indignantly.

I did once see a documentary on the subject, though, where one of those colleagues summed up his feelings more or less as follows: he said that Coon had travelled to every corner of the globe, had met people of all races, worked and interacted with them, and lived among them. Many of them had become his close friends. And yet, he concluded, "I don't think for a moment that it ever occurred to Carleton S. Coon to regard any of them as his equals."

Craig Harrison - in his fiction and in his life - is a positive zealot for racial justice. This book of his is no exception. His fictional Dr. Kellner and the real-life Professor Coon would be seen by him as close intellectual cousins. But his book does have a tendency to encourage 'separate but equal' thinking about the various races of mankind.

It would be a real shame to dismiss his book unread on the strength of that, but I think that it does offer some explanation as to why so eminently filmable a story has remained untouched by directors ever since.



Pieter Bruegel: Hunters in the Snow (1656)
- a thematic reference in Tarkovsky's Solaris





Saturday, March 03, 2018

Novelists in their 80s



Francois-Joseph Sandmann: Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène (1820)


My brother Ken, one of various novelists in our extended family, once explained to us his intention to stop writing at the age of 60. After that there was a great risk of letting your senile lack of judgement falsify the true nature of your oeuvre, he claimed. He'll be hitting that mark next year, so it'll be interesting to see if he follows his own advice. My bet is he won't.

Nvertheless, I would have to admit that there's a certain amount to be said for this view. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), for instance, might have been well advised to hang up his spurs before perpetrating, in his sixties, such disappointing works as The Arrow of Gold (1819) or The Rover (1923). James Joyce (1882-1941) died at the age of 60, having finished his work on Finnegans Wake (1939), so we were spared that late epic about the sea he was allegedly intending to write next. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) stopped writing novels in his fifties and switched to poetry, claiming that he now preferred the conciseness attainable in verse as against the sheer heavy lifting required by novels. Herman Melville (1819-1891) stopped writing prose in his forties, though in that case there was the late flowering of Billy Budd, after nearly thirty years of verse writing.

Sixty might be a bit on the conservative side, but what of eighty? Life expectancies (in the developed world, at any rate) have vastly increased with the advent of modern medications against cholesterol, heart disease and a slew of other silent killers. Perhaps 80 is the new 60?

Over the summer I've been reading some novels - by some of my favourite authors - which nicely illustrate this dilemma. They are:

  • Umberto Eco: Numero Zero (2013 / 2015)

  • Tom Keneally: Napoleon's Last Island (2015)

  • Mario Vargas Llosa: The Discreet Hero (2013 / 2015)

(In the case of Eco and Vargas Llosa, the first date in brackets is the date of original publication, the second the date of publication of the English translation).

Umberto Eco was born in 1932, and died in 2016, at the age of 84. Tom Keneally was born in 1935, and is at present 82. Mario Vargas Llosa was born in 1936, and is now 81. Neither of the latter two show any signs of stopping writing: and writing novels, too. Both have published another one since the title listed above. So what are they like, these late works by an Italian polymath, an Australian jack-of-all-trades, and a Peruvian phenomenon? Surprisingly diverse, to be honest.





Umberto Eco, b. 5 January, 1932-d. 19 February, 2016


I have to admit to being a bit blind to the merits of The Name of the Rose when it first burst upon the world in the early 80s. It seemed laboured and over-constructed. I did enjoy the movie, though.

It wasn't until I read Foucault's Pendulum that Eco's true distinction started to dawn on me. It could not be said to be a particularly well-constructed book, either - and it certainly drove away many of The Name of the Rose fans who expected him to continue in the same vein, like a kind of Brother Cadfael for Intellectuals. But the idea of the book was, I thought, brilliantly clever (and prescient, considering how much it predated Dan Brown and his ilk). I began to see how pointless it was to judge Eco by the standards of other writers: he demanded his own style of reading, as cerebral as he was himself, but with a strong streak of emotional vulnerability hidden away inside somewhere.

The Island of the Day Before is probably my favourite of all of his fictions. Again, it was very clever - but the various intermeshing plots seemed to spin more smoothly than Foucault's Pendulum. He was clearly learning on the job. Baudolino and The Prague Cemetery were less pleasing. While full of rich material, they seemed more predictable and linear than their predecessors.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana was an exception to this tendency, however. It's hard not to admire the portrait he paints there of a disintegrating mind - the suspicion that some of it might be autobiographical added particular poignancy to the novel.

Numero Zero has the makings of a brilliant book. The idea of painting a counter-history of post-war Italy based on the conceit that Mussolini did not in fact die, but went on hiding in the Vatican for many decades more, is an excellent (though disconcerting) one, and the portrait Eco provides of the world of petty journalism and jobbing writers that constitutes mid-century Italy's New Grub Street is similarly interesting. It is, nevertheless, a terrible piece of writing.

Why? Because it's too short to hold up the weight of its central conceit - because the conversations sound like lecture fragments, and the characters like stick figures in a powerpoint presentation - because he resorts to the most desperate mystery story cliches to finish off this albatross of a narrative. Because, in short, he lacked the energy and time to complete it, and yet somehow managed to persuade himself that it still merited publication.

It's a sad coda to the life work of a unique and brilliant writer. Should we have been allowed to read it? Curiosity was probably always going to commit it to some kind of publication. I suppose the real problem is that it appeared during his lifetime rather than posthumously. A preface apologising for its brevity and lack of finish would have ensured a much better reception, though, I would have thought.



Umberto Eco: Numero Zero (2015)


    Umberto Eco (1932-2016)

  1. The Name of the Rose. 1980. Trans. William Weaver. 1983. London: Picador, 1984.

  2. Reflections on The Name of the Rose. 1983. Trans. William Weaver. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg, 1985.

  3. Foucault's Pendulum. 1988. Trans. William Weaver. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989.

  4. The Island of the Day Before. 1994. Trans. William Weaver. 1995. Minerva. London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1996.

  5. Baudolino. 2000. Trans. William Weaver. 2002. London: Vintage Books, 2003.

  6. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. 2004. Trans. Geoffrey Brock. 2005. London: Vintage Books, 2006.

  7. The Prague Cemetery. 2010. Trans. Richard Dixon. Harvill Secker. London: Random House, 2011.

  8. Numero Zero. 2015. Trans. Richard Dixon. Harvill Secker. London: Vintage, 2015.






Eva Rinaldi: Thomas Keneally, b. 7 October, 1935 (aged 82)


So, if we take Umberto Eco's last novel as a vote against publishing such late fictions, what of Thomas (now 'Tom') Keneally's next-to-latest tome, Napoleon's Last Island?

I have to admit that, after a somewhat shaky start, I came to love this book. It seemed to me to combine all of Keneally's virtues, and very few of his faults. This despite that fact that the tale of Betsy Balcombe and her relationship with the ex-Emperor is a familiar one. I remember seeing a television play based on the story when I was a teenager, and it's come up for me in a number of other contexts since.

I think the first book I read by Keneally was his wonderful American Civil War epic Confederates. His command of the vernacular and incidental detail seemed to me superior to anything I'd read before about that war, even by bona fide American authors. It was his talent for ventriloquism which first impressed me about him, then.

After that I read desultorily in his work: the books which had been made into films (Schindler's Ark, Gossip from the Forest), and also the ones about Antarctica (The Survivor, A Victim of the Aurora). In all these cases I was struck by how much better they were than they had to be. That sounds a bit paradoxical, but what I mean is that there's a kind of middle style and general competence which many novelists evolve and which drags them through their day-today labours. It sounds terrible, but they don't really pull out the stops unless they absolutely have to.

Keneally was not at all like that. Each new challenge seemed to fill him with gusto. He clearly relished the difficulty of interpreting unlikely characters, and entering strange and alien environments. Reluctant to repeat himself, he remained on the lookout for fresh woods and pastures new.

In the case of Napoleon's Last Island, this has led him to concoct an excellent pastiche of Jane Austen's prose-style and psychological penetration, set in the strange landscape of the tiny mid-Atlantic island of St. Helena. Betsy Balcombe has a good deal in common with Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennett, with the Emperor as a kind of super Darcy, and even a long-suffering older sister to provide her with a foil.

The dramatic nature of the story leads one to expect a kind of costume drama potboiler, but Keneally's interests seem altogether elsewhere: in the oddities of human psychology as shown under stress, and in the paradox of the man of destiny reduced to an atom in the sea of humanity, but still somehow retaining his uncanny charisma and fascination. Like Foucault's Pendulum, Napoleon's Last Island appears to have disappointed a good many admirers of Keneally's Australian epics: but it's an admirably subtle piece of work for all that.

Chalk that up as a vote for keeping up with your craft even as you approach your ninth decade, then. (The list of his works below is only a selection, I should emphasise: the books by him that have ended up in my collection. A full listing would occupy many more pages).



Tom Keneally: Napoleon's Last Island (2015)


    Thomas Keneally (1935- )

  1. The Fear. 1965. London: Quartet Books, 1973.

  2. Bring Larks and Heroes. 1967. London: Quartet Books, 1973.

  3. Three Cheers for the Paraclete. 1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.

  4. The Survivor. 1969. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.

  5. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. 1972. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

  6. Blood Red, Sister Rose. 1974. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1976.

  7. Gossip from the Forest. London: Collins, 1975.

  8. Season in Purgatory. Sydney: Book Club Associates, 1976.

  9. A Victim of the Aurora. London: Collins, 1977.

  10. Passenger. London: Collins, 1979.

  11. Confederates. 1979. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1981.

  12. The Cut-Rate Kingdom. 1980. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books Australia, 1984.

  13. Schindler’s Ark. 1982. London: Coronet Books, 1983.

  14. Searching for Schindler. 2007. A Vintage Book. Sydney: Random House Australia Pty Ltd., 2008.

  15. The Playmaker. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1987.

  16. A River Town. Port Melbourne, Victoria: William Heinemann Australia, 1995.

  17. Napoleon's Last Island. A Vintage Book. Sydney: Random House Australia Pty Ltd., 2015.

  18. Crimes of the Father. 2016. A Vintage Book. Sydney: Random House Australia Pty Ltd., 2017.





Mario Vargas Llosa, b. 28 March, 1936 (aged 81)


So what of that wondrous, protean genius Mario Vargas Llosa? He's not the best known of the great writers of the Latin American "boom" of the sixties and seventies (it took him until 2010 to win the Nobel Prize his near-contemporary Gabriel García Márquez was awarded as far back as 1982), but he is - to my mind, at least - the best of them.

Year after year, decade after decade, he's produced a dazzling series of works, constantly reinventing himself and experimenting with new style: after the majestic, quasi-Faulknerian gravitas of those first three socio-historical novels The City and the Dogs, The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral, he post-modernised himself into the prankster of Pantaleon and the Special Service and the autobiographical Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

How I pored over his works while working on my Doctoral thesis on European Images of South American in the late 1980s! The book I was writing about, The War of the End of the World seemed to combine the virtues of both his late and his early style: the trickster in bed with the sociologist at last.

It wasn't for a long long time that he attained similar heights, however. He stood (unsuccessfully) for President of Peru in the late 80s, and his work seemed to suffer somewhat from the increasingly public nature of his life. His politics, too, had gone far to the right to the point that he was hardly on speaking terms with many of his former literary comrades in arms.

None of the books he wrote during these years was unreadable or unchallenging in its way (even the quasi-soft porn of In Praise of the Stepmother and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto), but it wasn't really until his dictator-novel (almost the classic Latin American subgenre) The Feast of the Goat appeared in 2001 that he really amazed the world again.

The Way to Paradise and The Dream of the Celt are both good ficto-biographies in their own right, but they hardly seemed up to the standard of his earlier work. The Discreet Hero is not among his masterworks, either, but it's a fascinating read for the fans (in particular).

Those of you who've read Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter will recall how the latter's scripts start to fold in on themselves, with characters appearing in the wrong contexts and contaminating the plotlines with unexpected interventions. So many of Vargas Llosa's own old characters - Lituma, Don Rigoberto, the 'Stepmother' herself - turn up in this novel that one has, at times, the odd feeling that the whole thing is set in Vargas-Llosa-land rather than any kind of recognisable Peru.

His obsession with the provincial Peru of the 1950s, its constant recurrence in its work, is supplanted here by an rather more 'contemporary' Lima and Piura. The characters all seem to live in the past, however: his past, Vargas Llosa's, rather more than their own.

The novel is neatly plotted and full of unexpected treats - though perhaps more for readers familiar with his work than any newcomers. The playfulness may seem a little forced at times, the virtuosity a bit tired, but there's no doubt that Vargas Llosa at his worst (and this book is a long way from his worst - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, say) is still superior to most other novelists at their best.

Would he, too, be wise to give up this strange compulsion to dream on paper and call the end-result art? I don't think so, no. The Feast of the Goat came after such a long dry spell that most critics had already written him off. I'm not expecting anything as good as that to come up again, but then, the essence of the unexpected is that you don't expect it. Who can say what the future holds for Mario Vargas Llosa? I hope not something as sad as Numero Zero, but it may well contain something as luminous and strange as Napoleon's Last Island.

Let's just say that as long as he's writing, I'll be reading (and buying). To hell with nay-sayers and agists! One can write a bad book at any age - and (I firmly believe) go on to redeem it with a good one. And always in the wings shimmers the alluring prospect of a Billy Budd, that late, redemptive masterpiece that comes out of left field - albeit often posthumously - to astonish the world ...



Mario Vargas Llosa: The Discreet Hero (2015)


    Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa (1936- )

  1. Vargas Llosa, Mario. The Cubs and Other Stories. 1965 & 1967. Trans. Gregory Kolovakos & Ronald Christ. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1979.

  2. The Time of the Hero. 1962. Trans. Lysander Kemp. 1966. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1986.

  3. The Green House. 1965. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. 1968. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1986.

  4. Conversation in the Cathedral. 1969. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. 1975. London: Faber, 1993.

  5. Captain Pantoja and the Special Service. 1973. Trans. Gregory Kolovakos & Ronald Christ. 1978. London: Faber, 1987.

  6. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. 1977. Trans. Helen R. Lane. 1982. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1984.

  7. The War of the End of the World. 1981. Trans. Helen R. Lane. 1984. London: Faber, 1986.

  8. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. 1984. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. 1986. London: Faber, 1987.

  9. Who Killed Palomino Molero? 1986. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. 1987. London: Faber, 1989.

  10. The Storyteller. 1987. Trans. Helen Lane. 1989. London: Faber, 1990.

  11. In Praise of the Stepmother. 1988. Trans. Helen Lane. 1990. London: Faber, 1992.

  12. Death in the Andes. 1993. Trans. Edith Grossman. 1996. London: Faber, 1997.

  13. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. 1997. Trans. Edith Grossman. 1998. London: Faber, 1999.

  14. The Feast of the Goat. 2001. Trans. Edith Grossman. 2002. London: Faber, 2003.

  15. The Way to Paradise. 2003. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. London: Faber, 2003.

  16. The Bad Girl: A Novel. 2006. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

  17. The Dream of the Celt. 2010. Trans. Edith Grossman. London: Faber, 2012.

  18. The Discreet Hero. 2013. Trans. Edith Grossman. London: Faber, 2015.

  19. The Neighbourhood. 2016. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.