He shrank back still further, darting furtive glances in my direction. Then, while I stood there trembling, not knowing what else to say, he half opened his mouth.
He emitted from it a gurgling sound similar to those uttered by the strange men on this planet to express satisfaction or fear. There in front of me, without moving his lips, while my heart went numb with horror, Professor Antelle gave vent to a long-drawn howl.
Pierre Boulle’s Monkey Planet is the 1963 novel that was later famously filmed as Planet of the Apes. I was lucky to get hold of the 1966 Penguin paperback, the artwork quite chilling and predating the later editions that suffered a title change and were usually adorned with images from the series of films that were released between 1968 and 1973. Boulle’s novel makes an interesting read; comparisons with the films are obviously unavoidable but it differs enough to remain interesting in its own right.
Monkey Planet uses a framing device for its story, where a pair of space travellers called Jinn and Phyllis find a interstellar message in a bottle. The bottle contains a transcript by a French journalist called Ulysse Mérou who describes his journey across the galaxy with two scientists. Landing on a distant planet which they name Soror, they discover an Earth-like world inhabited by primitive, mute humans. Mérou is initially attracted to a female, who he names Nova, although they are soon disturbed by the humans being hunted by seemingly intelligent apes. One of his companions, Levain, is killed in the attack and Mérou finds himself captive in a world populated by talking gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans who dispute his claims to be an intelligent being. He is caged and made to mate with Nova before befriending two chimpanzee scientists Zira and Cornelius and eventually reasoning with his captors and winning his freedom, although he also learns that his other fellow traveller Professor Antelle has degenerated into a savage and has been placed in a zoo.
Mérou is asked to visit the excavation of an ancient city where an intact human speaking doll is uncovered. Further investigations lead him to realise that Soror was once like Earth, but over the course of thousands of years the apes rose to become the dominant species – although not actually advancing any further that their human predecessors. He also learns that Nova has given birth to his son, a seemingly advanced human, and these events lead Cornelius and Zira to engineer his escape back to Earth, along with Nova and the child. The journey at light speed means he returns to Earth at a point thousands of years after he originally left. Upon his return he is greeted by intelligent apes. Like Soror (Latin for sister), Earth has succumbed to the same evolutionary process…
The novel ends with the closing of the framing story where Jinn and Phyllis are also revealed to be intelligent apes, and they dismiss Mérou’s account as fiction.
Oddly, Boulle’s ending for Monkey Planet, where Mérou returns to a hideously altered Earth, owes more in common to Tim Burton’s 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes than it does to Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1968 original. Whilst the image of Charlton Heston (Taylor) finding the ruin of The Statue of Liberty is an iconic one, Boulle’s ending actually works best for me (which is odd, as Burton’s finale was fudged and ineffective). Boulle’s twist is quick and terrifying, and is somehow more convincing than Taylor’s predicament; whilst Taylor is angry with humanity Mérou’s mute shock seems to hit hardest. It is an ending in keeping with the novel, where humanity literally loses its voice.
Many of Boulle’s themes surfaced throughout the Apes franchise as it rolled on through four film sequels, further novelisations, a Marvel comic, a live action and a cartoon tv series. For example the master/servant relationship slowly being turned around, which is a theme of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. There’s also the class system of the three species of ape, personified by the military gorillas, the sceptical orangutan Dr Zaius and the kindly and affectionate Zira and Cornelius.
Pierre Boulle is best known for Planet of the Apes, although he also wrote Bridge over the River Kwai and apparently gave the shortest acceptance speech ever for it at the 1957 Oscars (“Merci”). He also wrote a film sequel called Planet of Men, although it was turned down and it is unclear how much it resembles the dark and depressing Beneath The Planet of the Apes which became the second film in the series. Planet of Men suggests something similar to the third film, Escape From the Planet of the Apes, where Zira and Cornelius return to 1970s Earth. And it is the birth of their child that sets off the paradox of events…
The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris was almost a novel I passed on. I had mixed feelings about And Then we Came to the End which, although revealing some excellent writing, was ultimately an overlong and slightly messy book. But I was swept up in the tide of eager anticipation that came with Ferris’ latest, and some comparisons to McCarthy and Beckett had me reversing my decision and placing my order.
I’m glad I did. The Unnamed is the best novel I’ve read this year. It’s possibly the best novel I’ve read since The Road. It’s a book that somehow evades evaluation by me on the page; I find it difficult to articulate what I liked and admired about it, also hard to explain what the novel is about. Ferris has matured as a writer immensely, and has delivered something that surprises in its depth and insight when compared to his previous work.
If I was forced to outline The Unnamed? It features an American lawyer with a young family who battles a compulsion to wander. The urge to cover long distances in an often inhospitable landscape takes over; he leaves home and wakes up in a succession of remote and unattractive settings. Cold, filthy and often in danger, he call his wife. She brings him home, but the safety of the home only reminds of what his uncontrollable urges will force him to abandon. His condition avoids any diagnosis; briefly he agrees to wear a contraption that will monitor the functioning of his brain, although this fails to provide a solution to the doctor he increasingly loses faith in. His wife resorts to the more desperate strategy of chaining him to a bed. As the urge to walk begins to take over his existence, working life sees the crumbling of a case where an apparently innocent man is imprisoned for murder. His wife descends into alcoholism, finding isolated bars to drink in anonymity.
At times The Unnamed appears as Man’s migratory spirit writ large, and the later chapters are painful as the wandering dominates, forcing us across an increasingly bleak landscape. At times it suggests more than it is willing to explore; a desperately bleak winter, floods, scorching summers and mysteriously dead bees are almost apocalyptic – not as fully fledged as The Road but almost a precursor to it. It is a novel I recommend highly; bold, daring and original.
The Smoking Diaries (and Other Things)
Wednesday February 24, 2010
in books read 2010 |
Quite often one book can suggest another. Antonia Fraser’s Must You Go? made several references to Harold Pinter’s long standing friendship with Simon Gray, including Pinter’s reaction to Gray’s death in 2008. Gray’s own volume of memoirs, The Smoking Diaries, makes several references to Pinter, including observations of his own failing health. Ruminations on mortality can be depressing, although Gray successfully manages to invest a degree of warmth and humour into things. The Smoking Diaries reflects upon his own sixty a day habit (halved by the early 2000s when the memoirs were written – he’d already given up on the four bottles of champagne a day), observations of (mostly senile) fellow hotel guests, a troubled relationship with his father and the sorry alcoholism of his younger brother. Even the terror of a panic attack – where Gray rushes from his shed unable to remember his exact age. Whatever he writes about, however troubling, it is always compelling writing.
I’m sorry to say that I followed Simon Gray with two writers who couldn’t be less engaging. The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis is possibly the worst book I have ever picked up. It is pretentious, poorly written, dull and ultimately pointless. Its only achievement is recruiting more manpower for the anti-Amis brigade. Unfortunately things hardly improved with The Ghost by Robert Harris, a book recommended to me and one I was interested in because of the forthcoming Roman Polanski film. Sadly The Ghost is an unconvincing thriller in the Dan Brown mould. It’s predictable, the characters are wooden and the outcome is laughable.
But don’t despair. I’m now into The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris and it’s the best thing I’ve read for ages. A review will follow shortly…
A vast arrangement of flowers including foxy lilies and other glories in the window, and another on the mantlepiece, and in the back room, all luxuriant, then on up the stairs … I shall never forget them. Or Harold’s expression. A mixture of excitement, triumph and laughter. It transpired he asked the flower lady from Grosvenor House and commissioned them. ‘Is it for a party?’ she asked. ‘No it’s for Sunday night.’
In 1975 Harold Pinter met Antonia Fraser. They were both in their mid forties and both in long term marriages; Fraser to a Conservative MP and Pinter to the actress Vivien Merchant. Must You Go is an account, mostly gathered from Fraser’s diaries, of more than thirty happy years they spent together. For any reader interested in Pinter the artist, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Michael Billington’s excellent biography instead, but this is nevertheless a very good at at times very moving book.
Unlike Billington’s portrait, which drew attention for revealing Pinter’s long affair with Joan Bakewell, Must You Go doesn’t set out to spill any beans on the great man. In fact we can only really gather things from what is left out of the story, for example the abandonment and eventual decline of Merchant and Pinter’s estrangement from his son. Neither receive too much attention here, with Fraser keeping her distance from the people he chose to leave behind. There’s more emphasis on his lifelong friendships, which included Robert Shaw, Simon Gray and Samuel Beckett, and his new extended family (Fraser had six children from her first marriage).
It could also be argued that by the time Pinter had met Fraser he had already made his most artistic achievements, with his best works The Birthday Party, The Caretaker and The Homecoming already established as masterpieces. Perhaps happiness dulled his creative edge, and although he continued writing (Betrayal appeared in the early 80s) he did increasingly concentrate on poetry. And as the years march on, Pinter’s passion for politics begins to take prominence. Much of the book chronicles ugly moments in history; IRA bombs in London, The Rushdie affair (Salman Rushdie visits the Pinters under armed protection at the height of the Fatwa) and the Iraq war. Fraser is frank about their own shifting politics; Pinter voted conservative in 1979, SDP in a subsequent election and then finally Labour. In 1982, surprisingly, he supported the Falklands War.
Must You Go alludes to Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter’s very first meeting, and these are the first words he ever said to her. The phrase echoes through the book right until the end, and the closing diary entries recall an increasingly frail Pinter and he battled cancer. It’s a very intimate portrait of a fascinating man who enjoyed life as much as he could. In 2007, very sick, he appeared onstage for a short run in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, relishing again the joy of an actor that he had originally discovered at sixteen. Around the same time he accepted the Nobel Prize for literature, and enjoyed a revival of The Birthday Party. Busy until the end, his inevitable passing in 2008 was still a shock.
Felix Castor: The Halfway Mark
Mike Carey’s Felix Castor is currently dominating my bedside table. After completing The Devil You Know and Vicious Circle I am now making good progress with Dead Men’s Boots. To come are the fourth and fifth in the series, Thicker Than Water and The Naming of the Beasts.
Carey is an odd writer. At times his prose is extremely atmospheric and effective, but he often sinks into lazy and almost woeful writing. The fault is possibly the sheer weight of what he is attempting to achieve; very lengthy novels produced at regular intervals, where quality sometimes, but not always, suffers from the dictates of pace. Perhaps also Carey doesn’t have much faith in himself as a writer of quality. He is simply content to produce popular, or even pulp, fiction.
At over five hundred pages, Dead Men’s Boots does at times feel overlong. For a reader dedicated enough to reach the series as far as this third instalment it’s possible that Carey doesn’t need to fill in on as much as the background story as he does. Both Castor’s history and the stories of his associates are explained quite fully in both Vicious Circle and Dead Men’s Boots. Castor in an exorcist, discovering his talent at an early age when he had to rid himself of his dead sister’s ghost. He works in an alternative London, one intricately detailed to resemble the real capital but one also populated with a variety of horrors. Ghosts, zombies and loup gorous, demonic werewolf type creatures. He is joined by a series of recurring characters. Nicky is a zombie who has to keep his body chilled to avoid decomposition. He also enjoys a glass of wed wine but only to sniff, his digestive system long shut down. Juliet is a demon who preys on sexual lust, although since the close of The Devil you Know has become less of a threat and more of an ally to Castor. She’s also living in a single sex relationship with one of the supporting cast of Vicious Circle. Then there’s Rafi, a man possessed and incarcerated, whose plight haunts the background of the series.
Vicious Circle featured several interconnected stories, something Carey is revealing himself the master of. A missing ghost, a haunted church, both were extremely believable threads for a fantasy novel. In Dead Men’s Boots he appears more ambitious, and introduces several tales in parallel. The Rafi story continues, and Castor and his exorcist peers are tormented by a mysterious band of exorcist bashers. In the foreground however is Castor and Juliet’s investigation of a brutal murder. A man is convicted of the crime but was it really him? Or perhaps the ghost of a dead American criminal? Carey takes his characters beyond their usual setting with Castor and Juliet travelling to the US.
With five novels in three years, Mike Carey has created a successful franchise that, with a little tidying around the edges, will no doubt make the transfer to film or television that it’s crying out to do. However, in the Twilight soaked climate that also finds room for Being Human and True Blood it’s difficult to see how this would really be worthwhile. What Carey really needs to do is hone in his writing talent to produce a leaner piece of work that is content to stay on the page and not reveal itself as a wannabee screenplay. Somebody needs to give him a push, just a little one, for him to realise that he could be a quality author.
|
Next Page
