The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Volume One (Alan Moore)

This is the first graphic novel I have ever reviewed, and in truth my knowledge of the genre is not what it might be. I always want to get into them, but there are so many "traditional" novels out there that somehow it never happens. If you take a look at my bookshelf, then, you'll see a bunch of Conan graphic novels, a Vampirella compilation, some Daniel Clowes, and Alan Moore's seminal 'Watchmen'. So why choose now to buy some more? Well, back in 2003, the Hollywood film adaptation of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' came out. I went to see it, and despite the fact that most see it as a turkey of epic proportions, I actually enjoyed it, for what it was. It's a dumb, camp action movie, and I happen to have rather a tate for those. However, I was well aware, from reading press and so on, that the film was not at all like the graphic novels/comic series it was based on. As is Hollywood's wont, all edge and intelligence is extracted from such adaptations so as to cause audiences the least amount of intellectual stress possible, so although I enjoyed the movie, I always had it in mind to read the graphic novels. But (story of my life) I never got around to it. It was only when E4 repeated the film one lazy Sunday a few weeks ago that the thought resurfaced. I spent a good few hours on Wikipedia reading about the series and the rich background Moore created,  weaving canonical works of literature together to form a metaworld of incredible depth and complexity. As soon as I got paid last week, I got myself on Amazon and ordered the entire series. Let the review of Volume One commence!

For those who are unaware, the basic concept of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' is that British Intelligence has brought together five shadowy and unusual figures to perform a special mission for the crown, all of whom have been "borrowed" by the author from works of Victorian Literature. Mina Murray from 'Dracula', who, in this reality, has divorced Jonathan Harker, is the first to be recruited. She has gained the attribute of mind control from Dracula, who bit her twice before she was rescued. Her first task is to retrieve Allan Quartermain, H.Rider Haggard's adventurer from 'King Solomon's Mines' and 'She', from an opium den. They join with Captain Nemo, the submariner and pirate made famous by 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea' by Jules Verne. These three find and apprehend Hawley Griffin, H.G Wells' invisible man, at an Edmonton girls school, and then go on to capture Edward Hyde, who, according to Moore, did not after all die at the end of 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'. Both Hyde and Griffin are offered pardons for their crimes for joining the League. For Murray, Nemo and Quartermain, the League offers a kind of respite from their own private demons (rape at the hands of a vampire, the failure of the Indian Mutiny and opium addiction respectively). They are also paid exceptionally well. Their handler is Campion Bond, heavily hinted at as being an ancestor of Ian Fleming's James Bond, but actually himself working for the mysterious 'M'.

In Volume One, the mission involves the members of the League retrieving a mysterious metal named Cavorite from an East End crime syndicate run by a megalomaniacal Chinaman. When harnessed, Cavorite confers the power of flight on any engineered structure it is placed in. However, retrieving this metal is only the beginning, as a twist takes place where their shadowy employer is actually a criminal mastermind hell bent on dominating London, as well as being the Head of British Intelligence. I won't go any further than that with the spoilers- the plot is a rollicking old fashioned adventure and you'll love it. In critically analysing the text, it is sufficient to say that it is the little touches that make it special. It's a minor postmodern masterpiece, with references to so many historical events, literary texts, philosophical and social movements and scientific discoveries that one becomes embroiled in an elaborate game of "spot the reference" which is enormous fun. The narrative itself is completely self-aware, simultaneously paying homage to Victorian literature and parodying it. Victorian moral attitudes and linguistic conceits are sent up through the "coming next time" blurbs which close each chapter, and Moore does not shy away from being realistic about late nineteenth century attitudes to sex, gender and race, confident enough in his reader to be sure that they'll be able to interpret this as necessary contextual colour.

At the end of the novel proper is a traditional prose short story, a companion piece to the main narrative, explaining how Quartermain got embroiled in an unusual time travelling adventure with the Traveller (of H.G Wells' 'The Time Machine' fame) while in an opium induced coma. This is written very consciously in H.Rider Haggard's style, but falls short for me...maybe it's because I'm a big Rider-Haggard fan and know his work well, but I felt this short story to be largely unsuccessful in its aim, though I admired both the ambition and intent behind it.

'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen': Volume One' is a fantastic achievement and proof positive of the incredible talent Alan Moore possesses, as well as further proof of why all discerning literary types should read graphic novels as well as the more traditional kind. I was so impressed with the wit, excitement and intertextuality of the novel, and straight after finishing this volume, I waded straight into Volume Two...expect a blog post on that very soon after this one. In short, if you have any kind of interest in Victorian Literature and the Fin De Siecle, you should read Alan Moore's 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen', and when you do, send me a list of references you spotted and we'll compare notes...

An American Dream (Norman Mailer)

The American Dream is an enormously prominent theme in the canon of Twentieth Century literature in the United States. The idea that anybody can make a success of themselves in the new world, in the "land of opportunity", is an idea which has consistently been interrogated by American novelists. By calling his novel 'An American Dream', Norman Mailer couldn't really have been more overt in announcing his intention to do just that. I feel that the grammatical significance of substituting the indefinite "an" for the definite "the" is incredibly important in reading this novel. It concerns the death of one American Dream, but there will be others, for it is in the DNA of the United States to dare to dream, no matter the consequences.

I have owned this book for eight years; it came in a box set of books from the 1960s, one per year of the decade, that I ordered from a book club at work. I had grand intentions at the time, I would read them all, in order, from 1960 to 1969. As memory serves, I gave up after 1962 and most of the books in the series remained unread, a wrong I am attempting to put right over the next few months (see also my review of 'The Drought' by J.G Ballard from April) Mailer's 'An American Dream' was published in 1965, having first been serialised in Esquire magazine in an attempt by Mailer to revive the Dickensian method of publishing fiction. It caused massive waves at the time with its graphic depiction of sex and violence and has been attacked by multiple feminist critics since, who accuse it of being overtly misogynist-not entirely inaccurately- but more on that later.

The narrator and protagonist, Stephen Rojack, is a decorated war hero, former congressman and sensationalist chat show host. He once dreamed of the kind of career trajectory enjoyed by Jack Kennedy, who he met in congress in 1946 and through whom he met his society beauty of a wife. It is this wife, Deborah Caughlin Mangaravidi Kelly, who has caused Rojack's life to fall somewhat short of the lofty heights it once promised to scale. In a neat homage to Fitzgerald, Deborah is described as "a girl who would be bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz", an emotionally abusive beauty who has managed to grind Rojack's ego into the ground with her metaphorical heel. As the novel begins, Rojack is on his way over to Deborah at her behest. Within a few pages, her taunting leads him to choke her to death. It's often the case that a murder or a death causes a weight to lift from off of a protagonist's shoulders- suddenly they are untouchable, alive, vital. Rojack's progress through the novel following the death of his wife forms the basis of the narrative, which is at times gripping and at others mundane. Ah, this book is a curious beast.

First, the good points. Rojack is an interesting creation, a hardboiled cynic good in a crisis, not unlike Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. The first two chapters, during which the murder is disguised as a suicide, are entertaining and blackly humourous, and the heelish thought process which leads Rojack to go downstairs to have sex with the maid as his wife lies dead is written with real applomb. The sections where Rojack goes head to head with the New York City Police Department are tense and fast moving, and Mailer here creates in the reader a genuine concern for his protagonist. However, there are black marks in the ledger too. Mailer's style is rather heavy on the metaphors, and at times there's so much imagery it's all too easy to forget what's actually happening in the plot. The book often seems to fall flat just as it's working up to a high point, and I must say that at times it was tough to sustain interest in the story, though the premise and bare facts of the plot are good. It's a structural and stylistic issue that speaks of a great deal of authorial vanity, letting language get in the way of the storytelling rather than letting language assist the storyline. The love story which occurs following the narrator's release from police custody seems to become significant far too quickly to be plausible, and is riddled with cliché besides (a nightclub singer who needs "saving", oh please). I can also see why female critics had issues with the way women are presented in the novel: as sex objects or problems that need to be eliminated. The sex scenes are embarrassing too, like an amateur D.H Lawrence. Many years after the publication of this book, Mailer won a "bad sex in fiction" award for his last novel 'The Castle In The Forest' and it's not hard to see why.

I think what's frustrating about 'An American Dream' is that it could- and should- have been an excellent book. It has the premise, characters and plot to be an effective dissection of the American Dream and by extension the American obsession with money, power and status, but falls flat due to ineffective pacing and an overly fussy style. It's also difficult to fully engage emotionally to the events which should require that kind of response. Due to these flaws, I found 'An American Dream' disappointing and a missed opportunity.

Hotel World (Ali Smith)

Postmodern works of fiction are always something of a gamble for a budding author. Playing with elements of form, structure and language is not for the faint hearted. For female writers especially, comparisons with the likes of Toni Morrison, Jeanette Winterson and the grand dame of them all, Virginia Woolf, can be very unforgiving. Back in 2001, 'Hotel World' by Ali Smith was nominated for both the Orange Prize and the Booker, and I remember the hype surrounding it pretty well. I think I read the first chapter in a Sunday supplement soon after graduating from university that year, and from then on it was one of those books perpetually on my theoretical lists of "to reads". Back in November last year, my girlfriend decided she wanted to buy Smith's other major novel 'The Accidental', as she'd read somewhere that it was a modern classic. I responded by saying that if I were her, I'd start with 'Hotel World'. Soon after, she returned from a trip to London, drunkenly bearing a copy of 'Hotel World' for me and a copy of 'The Accidental' for her. I plucked it from the shelf last Friday, and a week on I am extremely glad to have finally read it. This is a very moving novel indeed, exceptionally clever but never pretentious, a novel worthy of Smith's laudable influences.

The novel is set in and around one branch of the ubiquitous Global Hotels chain, tracing the experiences of five women connected in some way to this sprawling monument to Capitalism. Each section has a different female narrator and a title taken from, or aping, the name of a grammatical tense (past, present historic, future conditional, future in the past, present). Each section is seemingly stand alone, only coalescing into a complete narrative in the final lines of the book. In this way, it very much resembles William Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury'. As I said previously, books like Faulkner's are a tough act to follow, so it's a testament to Smith's skill as a writer that she pulls off her ambitious experimentswith such applomb.

The first section is narrated by the ghost of Sara Wilby, a teenage hotel maid who, in a horrific accident some time before, plummeted six floors to her death in a dumbwaiter she climbed into for a bet. Sara's section concerns the intangibility of life and the way in which one never feels more alive than in the moment of one's death. The second section is from the point of view of Else Freeman, a homeless woman with a chronic cough who was once interviewed by a newspaper for a crass "what's in homeless people's pockets?" feature. She begs outside the branch of Global in which Sara died and is usually driven away by hotel staff who see her as off-putting to guests. At the end of Else's section, a hotel worker gifts her a room for free, both out of pity for her and out of a sense of disgust that the hotel has so many unused rooms. This hotel worker, Lise, is the focus of the next section. Sometime after allowing Else to have the room, she has had a nervous breakdown and is attempting to fill in a medical form. While doing so, various memories of her time in the hotel surface, giving a sense of how the place runs day to day, with guests meaninglessly checking in and out, a parade of shadowed faces, a metaphor for modern life. The section also illuminates Sara and Else's stories, revealing details that help explain the previous sections. Section four is filtered through a paying guest, Penny, a hotel reviewer who becomes embroiled in a peculiar and prolonged exchange between herself, Else and a teenage girl attempting to take something out of a wall. This girl turns out to be Sara's sister Clare, whose section follows next, a first person narrative broken in syntax and coherency, the stream of consciousness representing in heartbreaking terms the depth of her grief. Finally, the novel ends with a tale from a girl from a watch shop where Sara went to get her watch repaired. The two girls were attracted to each other, but neither could act on this first flowering of love and now the watch girl does not know that Sara is dead and that is the reason she never claimed the watch back. She dreams of one day tracking down Sara and showing her the watch post repair, which she has been affectionately wearing in the interim period as "she and S.Wilby have similar sized wrists". It's a beautiful section with which to finish the book.

The themes of this book are grand ones: grief, fate, love, existence. These themes function within the microcosm of one branch of Global Hotels, but of course they also apply more widely, and that's the beauty of the book. I found the writing to be, at times, heartstoppingly beautiful, particularly in Sara's section, Clare's section and the watch girl's section. The stream of consciousness never seems forced, the modernist tics like Sara's "Wooooooohoooo" to represent her fall to death never seem overly gimmicky. I feel that Smith has certainly tackled some big questions about what it is to be alive in the twenty-first century, and has managed to ask a lot of interesting sociological questions in rather an interesting way. 'Hotel World' is certainly worthy of the hype it garnered at the time of its publication, and indeed of its place in the book displays of "prominent female authors" it often finds itself in. Recommended.

A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)

I have had John Kennedy Toole's 'A Confederacy of Dunces' on my shelf for over a year; a good friend gave it to me for my thirtieth birthday, and she's a friend whose taste in literature I trust completely, but somehow I just hadn't got around to reading it. I knew, of course, the tragic story behind the novel: the author's suicide at the age of only thirty-two with his masterpiece unpublished, only for it to be published eleven years later due to the unstinting persistence of his mother Thelma. In a way, this maudlin detail sort of put me off, which is unusual, as I am quite often a sucker for this sort of thing. I suppose I impute my reticence here to the fact that I knew this to be a comic novel, and the juxtaposition of this fact with the author's untimely death rather un-nerved me. Finally, as I went back to work after the Easter break, I took 'A Confederacy of Dunces' off my shelf and popped it in my satchel. Even then, I had no time to read it that week, so I took it out of my bag on Thursday last and stuck it on my bedside table. My girlfriend was away for the weekend, so when I awoke around eight on the morning of the Royal Wedding, utterly disgusted by our nation's bizarre fascination with a balding blue blooded moron marrying an upper-middle class stick insect, I picked the novel off my bedside table and began reading. Soon after, I began laughing out loud. And I kept reading. This is the best comic novel I have ever read, although to call it that does it something of a disservice; it's a burlesque of the entire twentieth century experiment.

Set in New Orleans in the early 1960s, this novel is undoubtedly dominated by its protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly. He is obese, slothful, eccentric, fiercely intelligent and holds the rest of the world in chilly contempt. When we first meet him, he is waiting for his mother outside a department store wearing his customary costume: an enormous plaid shirt, tent-like tweed trousers and a green hunting cap with ear flaps perpetually down to "prevent head colds". He has bought some sheet music and a replacement lute string. His bizarre appearance prompts a hapless police officer to accost him, leading to a picaresque riot in the streets as Ignatius and his mother escape through the chaos to a seedy bar called the Night of Joy, where a few too many beers leads Ignatius' mother to crash her car into a building. The bill for the damage is astronomical, so Irene Reilly's solution is to send her son, who since college has done nothing except scribble invective onto endless pads of paper in his room, out to work. Ignatius, of course, is utterly unsuited to work, not only because of his slothful attittude to, well, everything, but because his ideals and beliefs are thoroughly medieval in character (he subscribes to late-Roman philosopher Boethius' concept of Fortuna, the blind goddess of Fate spinning a wheel to determine our successes and failures). The surreally absurdist turns that Ignatius' attempts at work cause are genuinely hilarious, and it is around these forays into the world of work and around the people involved in Ignatius' street disturbance at the novel's outset that Toole creates the plot.

The sheer scale of this burlesque of life in 1960s New Orleans is so grand that it is in fact a very difficult book to sum up in any kind of pithy fashion. We have the bumbling patrolman who, in arresting an elderly man who stood up for the escaping Ignatius, earns himself the punishment of dressing up in costumes to try and bring in "suspicious characters" from the French quarter. We have the old man, Claude, obsessed with "Communiss" who ends up courting Ignatius' mother, an illiterate drinker who has indulged her collegiate son to the extent that he takes nothing she says seriously. While in the cells, Claude meets Jones, a black vagrant brought in for stealing a packet of cashew nuts, who is then made to get a job at the Night of Joy, the very bar Ignatius and his mother had hidden in. Ignatius works first at Levy Pants, an outdated work clothing wholesalers, as a filing clerk and then as a hotdog vendor, and the people he meets in these work places are also stirred into the plot. Interestingly, a lot of the literature I read is not plot based at all, rather a stream of events and reflections that are not necessarily connected by anything other than the fact that they are the reflections of the same narrator. When I do read third person omniscient plot based novels, I am struck by just how many balls are being juggled, knowing myself as a writer of fiction how difficult this actually is. The way Toole brings the various comedic plot threads together at the end of the novel is wonderful and the ending is one of the most satisfying I have recently read.

New Orleans itself is vividly rendered as a city of vice, iniquity, diversity and absurdity, one of the most complete portraits of a place I have come across in literature. Nothing is safe from Toole's satirical eye: race relations, McCarthy-ism, college education, all get the treatment. I was particularly fond of Myrna Minkoff, a correspondent and college classman of Ignatius from New York, a devotee of Freud and a beatnik, who writes him letters declaring that his experiences are nothing but paranoid fantasies brought on by a lack of sexual intercourse. Though he responds to these letters with rage, their sparring shows that they have a deep mutual respect for each other. Myrna is very much a cartoon parody figure, but such an amusing one that it is hard to criticise Toole for this fact.

I loved this book from the first paragraph. It is a grand parade of ridiculous events caused by one of the most memorable comic protagonists since Falstaff. As Walker Percy notes in his foreword, "it is a great pity that John Kennedy Toole is not alive and well and writing", for he surely would have produced a body of work well worth reading. Sadly, we have only this and 'Neon Bible', written when he was only sixteen. And yet, despite the tragedy of his suicide, the comic genius of this book will continue to be his deserved legacy. A must read.