1959

Immortality, Inc. by Robert Sheckley

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MMRTLNC1959.jpgI almost never read science fiction, but one of the good things about the Audible Plus catalogue is that I can explore all manner of books that I probably wouldn’t race to pay money for or have taking up shelf space. And at some point I stumbled across Robert Sheckley’s 1959 novel Immortality, Inc. and added it to my downloads – and listened to it last week.

From the Wikipedia page (and, indeed, the fact that the novel has a Wikipedia page at all), I get the impression that Immortality, Inc. is well-known in certain circles. I was drawn to it because time travel is one of the bits of sci-fi that I find fascinating, and the title made me think of Paul Gallico’s intriguing novel The Foolish Immortals, about a scam to fool people into thinking they have immortality.

At first, Thomas Blaine doesn’t have immortality – he simply has his lifespan moved dramatically forward. The novel opens with a car crash in 1958 – his car careers out of control, the steering wheel comes off, and he is killed instantly – impaled on the steering column, which is quite the detail. But then he wakes up. It hasn’t been a dream – he’s just been in a coma.

At first, he is simply confused – and the medical staff, reporters, and business people around him are not providing any answers. It is more important that he answers their questions: about what he is experiencing, how he feels about it etc. It turns out that he is at the centre of a publicity campaign for the organisation that has made this time travel possible. Their priority is getting good footage of his awakening, rather than explaining what’s going on.

What’s going is that it’s 2110. Sheckley gradually introduces us to the changes that have taken place over 150 years – some of which are quite dispiriting. One of the first things Blaine sees is a long queue, and he thinks he ought to join it, but soon realises it is a line for a suicide booth.

In 2110, thoughts about what being alive means have changed significantly, as have the corresponding scientific abilities. Blaine is living in a body that belonged to somebody else, a strong and muscular young man, and he quickly finds that there is a trade for bodies. Minds are transferred between bodies, either from people who willingly choose to die or from people who are trafficked. Then there are zombies, who occupy bodies that are about to die.

Where does the immortality come in? That is the afterlife – something that has been scientifically proved, but which is only entered naturally with a one-in-a-million chance. Otherwise you have to buy your way in. Inequality hasn’t disappeared. Quite the opposite.

It’s curious, given the whole scope of human imagination that Sheckley could have developed, that he is most fixated on mortality. There are scenes where Sheckley has to fight for his life, where his mind or body are at risk of being stolen, where he needs to kill others. It does all give a (literal) vitality to the novel that would have been lost if it were crammed instead with fanciful scientific inventions that have no real urgency. Perhaps that’s why this novel appeals to this sci-fi sceptic – because it is about the essentials of life, and the trappings of a fictional future don’t get in the way of that too much.

Oh, and there’s a romance plot. Because of course there is.

It’s interesting to read a novel written in the 1950s about the 2110s. We are still closer to the 1950s, but of course a lot of time has passed since Sheckley wrote his futuristic vision. Some details about 2110 thus seem amusingly old-fashioned – and not just references to Abyssinia and Ceylon. Of course, he couldn’t have been expected to come up with the idea of the internet, but the modes of communication and broadcast feel more 1950s than any decade since.

Overall, I really enjoyed Immortality, Inc. At the heart of it is a confused man trying to work out what’s going on, and that’s usually a good vehicle for a reader who is also confused and trying to work it out. We can share his fascination, both amused and horrified in turn, and there is a pleasing simplicity to the survival dramas he undergoes. Naturally I won’t spoil the conclusion, but it ties up the narrative neatly and makes sense of various parts of the plot that seemed a little odd along the way.

I don’t think it has tempted me to dive headfirst into science fiction, but I enjoyed my sojourn there.

Mrs Panopoulis by Jon Godden

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Earlier in the year, I read and really loved the odd, cold, psychologically fascinating novel Told in Winter by Jon Godden (sister of the more famous Rumer). So I was keen to try more of her things, and I’m a sucker for novels about older women – so Mrs Panopoulis (1959) winged its way to me. Isn’t the cover gorgeous?

(I should say, at the outset, that I read this in the peak of my eyes getting back to working, and with quite a lot of dizziness, so it wasn’t the ideal time to take it all in. But it has a big font and it’s quite a simple story, so I thought it would be a good place to try reading again. And clearly that was a few months ago, so here goes nothing with this post! For those asking so kindly, health continues to be up and down but eyes have largely been fine, praise the Lord.)

Mrs Panopoulis woke early, as the old do, but even earlier than she usually did because the ship’s engines had stopped. To her it was the stopping of an enormous heart. She lay on her back on the berth, and before she opened her eyes she moved her hand cautiously up to her breast. Her heart was beating unevenly, as it always did, but it was still beating.

Waves of light were running across the white-painted ceiling; she knew that they were reflections from the sea outside, but for a moment she could not remember where she was. The sound she heard in her sleep came again, a high, shrill mewing. “Seagulls!” she said, still half asleep, and then, “We have arrived.”

Typing that out now, I really like Godden’s writing. Maybe I wasn’t in the right state to appreciate it when I read it. Anyway, Mrs P and the people on her cruise have arrived at an island off the coast of ‘Portuguese East Africa’, whatever that is or was. Among the group are a pair of young things who have yet to acknowledge that they love each other, Martin and Flora (Mrs P’s great-niece) – Martin has travelled to meet a business partner whom he idolises. And Mrs Panopoulis has determined that she will shape their destiny.

The depiction of the island hovers on that line between interesting travel literature and not-very-sensitive cultural hierarchies. It isn’t out-and-out racist, but it also isn’t the most comfortable read. I’m felt that Godden was on safer ground when she was talking about the tourists who’d travelled there and the ex-pats who lived there. Mrs Panopoulis herself is a little sharp and rude, but driven by a thirst for adventure and an impatience with her own increasing age.

There were a lot of things to like in Mrs Panopoulis, not least the fully realised depiction of an old woman who doesn’t fall into any of the old-woman stereotypes. But, overall, I wish the novel had a bit more depth, a little more cultural sensitivity, and, without giving anything away, an entirely different ending.

So, this Godden isn’t in the same league as Told in Winter, but it might be one to revisit at some point, to see if I missed anything the first time around.

 

My Caravaggio Style by Doris Langley Moore

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It’s always exciting when Dean Street Press announce the next batch of novels in their Furrowed Middlebrow series, chosen by Scott at the excellent Furrowed Middlebrow blog. Every time I want all of them, and every time I only manage to read a handful – but thank you very much to the publisher for sending me a review copy of My Caravaggio Style (1959) by Doris Langley Moore. Don’t worry too much about the title – I’ll come onto that in a bit.

Quentin Williams is the narrator. He works in an antiquarian bookshop and is the writer of fairly unsuccessful biographies of people nobody much cares about. In a chance conversation with a passing American, he somehow manages to suggest that he has access to the memoirs of Lord Byron, believed to have been destroyed. One thing leads to another, and Quentin decides that he’ll give forgery a go.

Moore was a Byron expert and there is plenty of background detail about Byron here – or, rather, enough so that those of us who’ve never read a word of Byron don’t feel entirely adrift. She even does a good job of making you feel the significance these memoirs would be, though mostly because they’d be worth a lot of money. The cleverest thing is that we are always reluctantly on Quentin’s side when it comes to the forgery – because he is such an intensely dislikeable person.

I hope this was deliberate. He is arrogant, careless of the feelings of others, and particularly unpleasant to his girlfriend Jocasta. Every time he describes her, he talks endlessly about her beauty and stupidity. It’s the sort of viewpoint that is at the very worst edges of men-writing-about-women, so either Moore was impersonating a terrible man, or needed a quiet talking to. Let’s assume the former. This is the sort of thing Quentin says about Jocasta…

Such a vapid and unworthy comment quite irritated me. I had never regarded my beautiful Jocasta as an intellectual girl but she had been brought up by highly cultured grandparents, and I saw no reason why she should appear – no, I won’t say vulgar, for she had too little pretension ever to be that, but – I can only repeat – childish.

While we cannot forget the chief reason that he is dating her – she is so beautiful, y’all – it’s never clear what she sees in him. And, indeed, she’s very keen that they get married, despite him having no redeeming qualities at all. Quentin is rather easier to cheer for when he visits his great-aunt – by some convoluted reasoning, he needs some manuscript books from her attic and also needs her to witness him receiving them. I haven’t mentioned it yet, but Moore can be very witty – particularly in these sections. For example…

It was curious that so much good will towards the human race should be combined in my great-aunt with an inveterate reluctance to allow any member of it whom she saw at close quarters to be comfortable.

To distract Jocasta from finding out about the forgery, Quentin sets her off doing a research project on Byron and animals. She gets really into it and starts to love reading Byron – rather ludicrously, Quentin gets terribly jealous that she should love Byron. His reasoning is fairly unhinged: Byron was a notorious womaniser and thus he doesn’t want his girlfriend falling in love with him. Despite, of course, Byron being long dead. And so he tries to write things in the forged memoir that will alienate Jocasta…

It’s all bonkers, but Moore manages to make the logic of the novel work well. I found that I wanted Quentin to succeed in his efforts, even as I wanted Jocasta to get as far away from him as possible. It’s always fun to read about literary obsessions taken to great lengths, and once different Byron scholars get involved (including ‘Doris Langley Moore’ as a character!) it’s all very amusing and dramatic.

And the title is apparently a reference to something Byron said about his own writing, though that does make it one of those slightly silly titles that only makes sense to the in-crowd. That aside, Moore did a great job of making this interesting to someone who doesn’t care at all whether or Byron’s memoirs are discovered.

Another success for Furrowed Middlebrow. Just as long as Moore knew she was creating an idiot and not a hero.

 

Letters to Louise by Theodore Dreiser (25 Books in 25 Days: #11)

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I love reading a collection of letters, and presumably that’s why I bought a copy of Letters to Louise (1959) – a collection of letters that Theodore Dreiser wrote to his friend and editor Louise Campbell (who was edited this book and wrote the commentary between letters). It certainly wasn’t because I had any affection for Theodore Dreiser, whom I have never read – though Sister Carrie has been on my shelf for a long time. Having said that, it might have gone in the moving-house-cull.

Dreiser tended to write quite short letters, often signed with alternative names (James Fenimore Cooper, Louisa May Alcott, etc.), but Campbell’s commentary is useful and engaging. And what I enjoyed most was the fondness and admiration that Dreiser manages to get into his letters – admiration for her editing talent. Since they met when she wrote him a letter chastising him for criticising Philadelphia, it’s impressive that he was open to the friendship at all.

Books like this are always a bit better when you get both sides of the exchange, which Letters to Louise doesn’t have, but I still enjoyed it. I feel like I know Dreiser pretty well from this short collection – or one part of his personality, anyway – and it’s fun to have Project Names and 25 Books in 25 Days come together to get something unexpected off my shelves.

The Unspeakable Skipton by Pamela Hansford Johnson (25 Books in 25 Days: #6)

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I think I bought Pamela Hansford Johnson’s The Unspeakable Skipton (1959) partly because of the similarity of the title to Saki’s The Unbearable Bassington – but I had also read a couple of PHJ’s other novels. I thought one was great (The Honours Board) and didn’t like another (An Error of Judgement), so where would Skipton sit on the spectrum?

She is certainly a varied author – this one isn’t like either of those, but it is very good. It’s principally a character piece. Daniel Skipton is a writer living hand-to-mouth in Belgium – he has had a critically successful novel followed by a critically unsuccessful one, and neither have made him much money. What he certainly doesn’t lack is self-confidence, as we see in the opening pages as he writes a bragging and insulting letter to his publisher, Utterson. While not writing, he endeavours to make money by convincing tourists to spend too much money on fake art, prostitutes, and a nude version of Leda (which the tourists who take up much of the book find hilarious).

Having had his lunch and rinsed out a pair of socks (he had only two pairs and kept one always in the wash), he took his manuscript from the table drawer, ranged before him his three pens, one with black ink, one with green, and one with red, and sat down to the hypnotic delight of polishing. The first draft of this book had been completed a year ago. Since then he had worked upon it every day, using the black pen for the correction of simple verbal or grammatical slips, the green pen for the burnishing of style, the red for marginal comment and suggestions for additional matter. He knew well enough that the cur Utterson would like to get his hands on it. It was not only a great book, it was the greatest novel in the English language, it would make his reputation all over the world and keep him in comfort, more than comfort, for the rest of his life.

Skipton reminded me quite a lot of Ignatius J Reilly, though The Unspeakable Skipton is nothing like A Confederacy of Dunces. It’s as though a character with Reilly’s monstrous nature was transposed to a much less heightened novel – and we see glimpses of Skipton’s genuine loneliness and desperation amongst the comedy of the situations Johnson creates.

Skipton is a wonderful creation, but I also enjoyed the band whom he encounters – from light-hearted Duncan to innocent Matthew to the intellectual snob Dorothy and her passive husband Cosmo. Dorothy apparently appears in another couple of novels in this sort-of series, and I would happily read more about her. She doesn’t have Skipton’s ruthless selfishness, but her sense of self-importance is not far behind – there is a wonderful scene where she gives a literary talk to an assembly of uninterested people.

So, The Unspeakable Skipton wasn’t really what I expected – but it is a character piece done with brio, and an unusual and confident novel.