Gustav Meryink - 'The Golem'

This was a bit of an impulse purchase but a good one. The novel focuses upon the inhabitants of the Jewish ghetto in Prague during the late nineteenth century. As Borges put it, it's a story set in an Eastern Europe on "the other side of the mirror" where the central framing narrative - that of the unnamed narrator's dream in which he becomes another man some thirty years previous - is stacked with further dreams and dislocations relating to the eponymous Golem, a monster of Kabbalistic legend that appears every thirty-three years in a room with no door. The doppleganger theme and a general mirroring of characters and events are deeply woven into the text: the narrator inhabits the body of Pernath and at times also becomes the Golem (who at times takes on a resemblance to those it encounters) and this sense of labyrinthine interconnection lends the novel the surreal, hallucinatory air that something's not quite right even during the most lucid moments. The Golem is a strange dream.

Although at times the novel seems mired or perhaps slightly befogged in an odd mix of mysticism (according to the potted timeline of Meyrink's life included in the introduction, from 1893 to 1896 he investigated "Cabalism, freemasonry, yoga, alchemy and hashish") it is the meat of the story - the plots and counterplots hatched between the ghetto's inhabitants, Pernath's increasing delirium, and the way in which the cramped little enclave itself and the people within it are so vividly characterised - that maintains interest after the decidedly odd atmosphere has hooked it. Further to this, although I did at times find the alchemical content a little tiring (e.g. long sections on the concept of the fusion of male and female to create a perfect being) it reminded me slightly of similar content in Moorcock's The City of the Autumn Stars, another text that visits a Prague similar but quite different to the one of material reality. I also thought that I detected some reverse-echoes of Michael Cisco's The Divinity Student and, appropriately enough, The Golem in Meyrink's novel although at this point it's difficult to place exactly where. It's undoubtebly an influential text, if a relatively and undeservedly obscure one and I'm glad to have read it.

'Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex'

Quite a challenging, unsettling film and one that forces the viewer to confront their attitudes toward the concept of terrorism - or at least, for my own part, insofar as it has been constructed in the consciousness of my generation in England. Some may find it an affront to their politics; I found that I had to watch it with a certain amount of detachment. Nonetheless it's a fine film in many ways, not an easy one however, and following on from the likes of 'The Lives of Others' and 'Downfall' it represents another step in the steady advance of German cinema which has impressed me greatly of late.

'1964' by Jorge Luis Borges

            I
It is not magic now, the world. Alone,
you will not share the clarity of moonlight
or the placid gardens. Now there will be no moon
that is not a reflection of the past,
mirror of solitude, a sun of sorrow.
Goodbye now to the touch of hands and bodies
that love brought close together. Now you have only
your loyal memories and the empty days.
We only lose (you vainly tell yourself)
what we do not have, what we have never had.
But, to learn the fine art of forgetting,
it is not enough to put on a brave face.
Some sign - a rose - can tear the heart from you
and a chord on a guitar can do you in.

            II
I will not be happy now. It may not matter.
There are so many more things in the world.
Any random instance is as crowded
and varied as the sea. A life is brief,
and though the hours seem long, there is another
dark mystery that lies in wait for us
- death, that other sea, that other arrow
that frees us from the sun, the moon, and love.
The happiness you gave me once and later
took back from me will be obliterated.
That which was everything must turn to nothing.
I only keep the taste of my own sadness
and a vain urge that turns me to the Southside,
to a certain corner there, a certain door.

Review: 'Nights of Villjamur' by Mark Charan Newton

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time you'll probably know that my tastes can be quite specific. My relationship with Fantasy & Science Fiction has been a turbulent one: large scale booms and slumps in interest triggered by particular authors or movements lead me on to investigate contemporaries writing comparable material, earlier writers that influenced them, and so on. This is how I read: I rarely go for new works by new authors because I'm mostly too busy with books written twenty or thirty years ago whose echoes, I have been told, can be found in the works of authors I'm already a fan of. Miéville sent me in the direction of Moorcock and M. John Harrison (to name but two) who in turn brought me to Clark Ashton Smith. Vandermeer brought me to Borges and Italo Calvino, who then sent me off after the Thousand and One Arabian Nights. I tend to go backward in time more than forward. I don't often go out on a limb. I couldn't tell you who the top five best-selling Fantasy writers of the moment are - I don't have a clue.

We have a pact, new Fantasy fiction and I: I'll read you if you'll show me Something A Bit Different. To explain what I mean by "different" (although at times I'm not sure myself) I'll put it in context: the advent of the New Weird early this decade changed everything for me. I can't really read the George R.R. Martins of this world anymore, the Joe Abercrombies (even though I'm told he's quite good) and so on - my bearings and landmarks have now been irretrievably altered, and the appearance of words like Epic, High or Heroic beside Fantasy is more likely to make me put down a book than pick it up. After the New Weird, traditional Fantasy just doesn't really do it for me anymore - or rather I don't see it as a continuing, living genre in which I should invest my attention. "Show me something a bit different!" I cry. "Well, you know what I mean..." They shrug, as if to say "feudal intrigue and swordfights: what more could you want?" I reread 'Perdido Street Station' for the trillionth time instead.

This brings me to 'Nights of Villjamur'. I heard about Mark Charan Newton early this year and the Internet hype for his second novel (although the first from a major publisher) has been absolutely deafening. As I said, I tend to do a lot of my book buying via references and influences, and as such I read a few interviews, took a look at his blog and all seemed mighty promising. So, aside from slight misgivings about appearances of the word Epic in relation to the book, I went ahead and preordered with appetite whetted and expectations set.

When I finally read the novel I wasn't disappointed. One major factor in my enjoyment was the subgenre/tradition in which it is placed: the Dying Earth. There's something very cool about Newton's resurrection of this form of fiction, one that originates from the pulp Weird days where Fantasy, Sci-Fi and Horror were still all the contents of a great glorious melting pot rather than being neatly divided and subdivided into marketing categories. Mark has stated in interviews that he previously attempted to write New Weird but turned away from it because editors nowadays won't touch it with a barge pole. I have a suspicion, the same one that arose when reading 'Thunderer' and 'Gears of the City' by Felix Gilman, that the author's trying to smuggle in some of that inter-genre, New Weird, a bit different goodness on the sly. There's enough swashbuckling swords and sorcery, machiavellian machinations of powers and dominions, and so on here to keep the readers of the Fantasy mainstream on board, yet when you take a closer look you realise that the "magic" might well actually be salvaged high-tech of a ravaged future long past and that the characters and society of the novel are, below the surface, more akin in many ways to the inhabitants of a real-world modern city than those of days of yore. Indeed, this is no mere stale tale of the grand destinies of the great and the good, rather at times we see relatively ordinary people with their relatable worries about careers and relationships, working and living in what comes across as a real city rather than a hackneyed Fantasy backdrop. This is one of the things that I liked in Miéville's Bas Lag novels. It's one of the things that keep me reading in the genre at all.

This sense of Villjamur as a working city full of individuals and their lives as opposed to a broadly sketched stage for big events comes across in Newton's handling of its numerous non-human inhabitants. He takes their unique characteristics, with their advantages and drawbacks, and shows (with evident thought) exactly how they fit into society, for instance showing us why the rumel might be particularly suited to police work, why garuda are found in particular sections of the armed forces, or how a banshee might assist in a murder enquiry. They aren't just quasi-human monster-folk there for the sake of it. It is a coherent and expansively imagined world.

I'm quite glad I read 'Nights of Villjamur' shortly after finishing Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun'. I picked up a few things in the former that I'm pretty sure are references to the latter, for instance a certain token given by one character to another in exchange for a helping hand by chance (no spoilers here!) or the colour of a garment. It's nice to recognize these things, reinforcing as it does the sense that the author is drawing from such an excellent tradition and showing an endearing and infectious fondness for it. I would even venture to describe this as an updated Dying Earth, one for a new century in the wake of the New Weird event. Rather than greeting the sun's waning with fatalism or mysticism as in other works, the world of Newton's creation is characterised by a grounded pragmatism - the powers of Villjamur take calculated steps to prepare for the coming ice-age as opposed to treating it as an abstract doomsday that they are resigned to or hope to be saved from by higher powers. It is hard to imagine the inhabitants of Zothique stockpiling firewood.

The novel kicks along at a fair pace, never dawdling unnecessarily, with no temptation on my part to skip ahead at any point - a page turner certainly. Newton's is an assured tone, with solid and polished prose, but at times I felt as if it was perhaps a little too clipped and focused upon driving the plot forward, sometimes relishing more the quieter, thoughtful moments of introspection or description. There's a vein of good humour running throughout - the characters are forever exchanging snappy quips, making wry observations, and there are moments of touching humanity that brought smiles to my face or tugged at heart strings. An interesting thing to note is that I actually related the most, and felt the most attached to, one of the novel's non-human characters - although I never lost sight of the fact that the character wasn't human. In a way that's quite an achievement really.

In conclusion, I'd recommend 'Nights of Villjamur'. Mark Charan Newton's definitely doing Something A Bit Different. From whatever perspective you're approaching it and whatever your requirements from a Fantasy novel I think it'll tick a lot of boxes. It did for me.

'Afterwards' by Clark Ashton Smith

There is a silence in the world
Since we have said farewell;
And beauty with an alien speech
An alien tale would tell.

There is a silence in the world,
Which is not peace nor quiet:
Ever I seek to flee therefrom,
And walk the ways of riot.

But when I hear the music moan
In rooms of thronging laughter,
A tongueless demon drives me forth,
And silence follows after.

City of Darkness

Sometimes in the process of worldbuilding you come across a real-world place that resonates so thoroughly with the place that you're imagining/creating that it stops you right there in your tracks, stunned. This was the case when I recently discovered the Kowloon Walled City. It was one of those moments where you are reminded once again that reality really can be stranger than fiction and you have to step up your game a bit in turn to keep up. The goalposts (to use a metaphor from an albeit much loathed sport) are constantly shifting.



By all accounts it really was the most astounding place: Kowloon's dark other, a city within and also without a city - a scorned, renegade parasite metropolis with its own rules (or rather lack of them) existing as a society of its own on the very fringes of another. Without the attentions of architects and with utter disregard toward planning regulations, by the time of its demolition in the early 90s Hak Nam (its colloquial name meaning 'City of Darkness') had become almost one gigantic building that reached up to fifteen storeys high in places, a mass of homogenised ramshackle structures packed together so tightly that sunlight barely reached the lower levels and that could be (and sometimes was) traversed almost entirely via the rooftops.



The Walled City existed, at least during the earlier half of the twentieth century, in a state of harmonious anarchy. Generations upon generations were born, lived and died in Hak Nam, businesses flourished, and although the drug trade, vice, and other organised criminal activity did too, it was in many respects a place where people lived their lives like any other. To quote Jeff Goldblum in 'Jurassic Park' - "Life finds a way".


If you're interested in finding out more about the Kowloon Walled City, I vehemently recommend 'City of Darkness', a book by Greg Girard and Ian Lambot from which the images above originate. It's a wonderful piece of photojournalism and is probably the best way to explore the city for those of us who will now never get a chance to visit it.