Culture

I’m Finally Reading… Ruth Rendell

Or, the housing arrangements of psychopaths

A Demon in my View (1976), The Face of Trespass (1974), Dark Corners (2015)

My first knowledge of Ruth Rendell was probably of seeing her name on library paperbacks around the house when I was a kid. I didn’t read her stuff until many years later after reading some glowing endorsements of her by authors I like. The only title of Rendell’s available that day on my library audiobook app was one called A Demon in My View. So I went ahead and downloaded it. That was back in March; by August I had read three out of her many dozens of novels published across nearly fifty years. I’ll give a run-down of each of the three, in the order in which I read them.

I should add that I listened to these novels as audiobooks, performed by Julian Glover (A Demon in my View) and Rick Jerrom (The Face of Trespass and Dark Corners), who both do a great job.

By the way, the reviews below contain some spoilers.

A Demon in My View

I was hooked on this story, right from the fucked-up start to the ironic and satisfying finish. A Demon in My View is about a man who once terrorised his fictional London suburb as a serial killer, but who has settled into a safer middle age by getting his kicks repeatedly ‘murdering’ a mannequin who lives in the neglected cellar of his shared, rented house.

The killer is a despicable sadist but Rendell manages to get us into his head, convinces us to feel an iota of sympathy for the wretch. He was raised by an aunt who judged him because he was born outside wedlock. There is something pitiable in his uptight, timid, neurotic narrative voice. But this timidity is the flip side of his murderous compulsions; he has a drive to feel power over others by causing fear and pain. The most horrifying example is the flashback scene involving the baby, which nobody who reads this book will ever forget until the day they die.

The whole story revolves around the tension between his hidden world and the intrusive realities of a shared housing arrangement. What we’ve got here is a story that’s fundamentally about housing, a theme that is important in all three books of Rendell’s that I have read.

The story is firmly rooted in its time and place, not in a way that dates it but in a way that enriches it. A new flatmate moves in; he has a very similar name to the secret serial killer, which provides all kinds of opportunities for confusion and subterfuge. In the 1970s, when this story is set, the post was crucial to people’s social lives and communications, and the only phone in a shared house word likewise be a shared one. The new arrival is really our main narrator and protagonist, but the long agony and final comeuppance he inflicts on our serial killer is unintentional and indirect.

Here is a writer, I thought, who can keep me in suspense, craft a believable social and cultural world, invest me in the practical limitations of comms in the 1970s, and horrify me with a rounded portrait of a human monster.

The Face of Trespass

The Face of Trespass is about a young writer living semi-feral in his friend’s cottage on the wooded margin of London while his girlfriend, a married woman, tries to convince him to murder someone. The story is bookended by a brilliant introduction and conclusion which involve a completely different cast of characters but which provide a resolution to the story. The day is not saved, but at least we get a significant consolation at the very end and from an unexpected source.

Murder is of course not relatable. But Rendell surrounds it, links it intimately, with things that are closer to our everyday lives. There’s lust, greed, envy. Again, housing. Scarcity of funds. An elderly mother living in another country and slowly dying; linked to this, a stepfather with emotional baggage and a language barrier.  Aunts and old school friends. Pets. Obligations.

Apart from the aforementioned bookends, we stay in the point of view of the main character, the struggling young writer. Everyone reading The Face of Trespass will be able to see clear as day how our main character is being set up. I found this a little frustrating; we hate protagonists who are fools, who walk blithely into trouble. But in the end all was forgiven. Rendell’s playing a deeper game. The girlfriend is out to set him up – that’s obvious. What’s not so obvious (though all the clues are there) is (spoiler alert) how he will get out of it in the end.

Even more so than in A Demon in my View, seventies comms are central to the novel; much of it revolves around people waiting by phones.

One surprising highlight of this novel is the stepfather. I don’t know if I would pick up a book based on some blurb about a stepfather-stepson relationship. But the murder/mystery/thriller genre here serves as a vehicle for an amusing and, in the end, quietly moving sub-plot.

Dark Corners

Dark Corners was Rendell’s last novel, written decades after the other two above. It is still very good and gripping, but rougher around the edges.

At one point in the novel the main character, again a writer, laments that the characters in his work-in-progress all speak like they come from the middle of the century. This must be Rendell’s little dig at herself; the characters speak and often act like they just walked out of the much more affordable London of A Demon in my View. Modern things like the internet are mentioned a lot, but usually bracketed with some comment like, ‘Johnny supposed that this was the way things were these days’ – as opposed to thirty years ago, before Johnny was born.

Like The Face of Trespass, pets and vets come into it. But it’s housing that’s at the heart of the novel, in ways that highlight how the issue has changed radically since the 1970s. The landlord in A Demon in my View is a rather greasy and selfish character; the landlord here is a struggling writer renting out the upstairs of his late Dad’s house so that he can work full-time on his novel. But his tenant proves to be far more trouble than he’s worth. He refuses to pay the rent and refuses to move out.

Meanwhile a rudderless young woman finds her rich friend dead, and proceeds to occupy her apartment and wear her clothes. But impersonating a rich person, like taking in a tenant, proves to be more trouble than it’s worth. In this case, that’s putting it mildly: she is brutally abducted and held for ransom.

These two characters are a few degrees of separation from one another and only meet toward the end, in a very fateful encounter.

Again, the literal setting is London – and there’s a powerful sense of place – but on a deeper level the setting is the human mind struggling with fear and longing. Rendell’s home turf is psychology. As in A Demon in My View, we see the murderer from the inside out, and he is wretched and pitiful. Unfortunately, like The Face of Trespass but more so, we have a struggling writer who spends a chunk of the novel just frustrating us with his passivity and short-sightedness.

There is a third, and subordinate, storyline about a retired man who rides buses for fun (Yes, a third storyline. All three of these books are very slight, but it’s amazing how much is crammed into Dark Corners). This storyline is fun, but its culmination is the retiree very suddenly foiling a terrorist bomb plot. Rendell has this humane side that allows her to write stories where a modest older man becomes a hero thanks to his eccentric hobby, and that is satisfying. The problem is that the bombing has nothing to do with anything else in the novel, and has no impact on subsequent events.

This is one of many strange improbabilities and coincidences that, to my mind, constitute gaps in the fabric of the novel. It’s all the more obvious when compared to how tight-knit the other two books are. It appears the novel is kind of about coincidences – stories criss-crossing in a Pulp Fiction kind of a way. Coincidence played a role in the others, but to a lesser degree, and with more subtlety, and to better effect.

Dark Corners is readable and satisfying, but rough and flawed. In addition to its other virtues, it is rough and flawed in interesting ways.

First and foremost, these were gripping thrillers that passed the time for me while I did chores or drove. But the contrasts between the younger writer and the older, between the younger London and the older, added a great deal to the experience for me.

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Before the Fall (3): Notes on The Dawn of Everything

How was life in the Stone Age? Was it all people shooting arrows at one another and falling into glaciers, or was it one big hippy commune? In this chapter Graeber and Wengrow leave behind the Enlightenment and start a chronological study of the earliest human societies, focusing on society in the Upper Paleolithic period. That’s the final part of the early Stone Age.

The first thing I learned here was pretty surprising: that humans lived spread out all over Africa for hundreds of thousands of years, with strong regional variations that meant they would have resembled giants, elves or hobbits to one another.

Then homo sapiens formed from a composite of all these very different sub-species, moved north into Eurasia, met the Denisovans and Neanderthals, and in time absorbed them.

The authors then perform the by-now familiar shuffle: thesis, antithesis, forget-about-either-thesis. Hobbes was wrong, Rousseau was wrong, here’s a better explanation.

A monument at Gobekli Tepe, Turkiye. On which, more below…

Princely Burials

What about the Upper Paleolithic ‘princely burials’ in Europe? Are these richly-endowed graves (countless person-hours of labour would have gone into them) not evidence of a rigid social hierarchy like what Hobbes said?

Reading about ‘princely burials’ myself in other contexts, I’ve always been annoyed at the assumption that they necessarily indicate social hierarchy, aristocracy, etc. An individual might be honored in death for all kinds of reasons – for heroism in battle or skill in crafts, for being an inventor, for saving lives, for poetry, for metallurgy, for mystical visions. They might be honored for being great leaders, but this doesn’t  mean they were aristocratic ones.

Graeber and Wengrow make an argument along similar lines to my guesses – that these were eccentric and visionary outsiders-turned-leaders, who were buried in riches (at a time when no-one was buried in death, with or without riches) as much to contain their potentially dangerous magic as to honour them. They construct a whole argument which takes in anthropology and archaeology, and which I found convincing.

So far they are at least living up to one promise: their version of history is interesting and rich. Our heads are full of capitalist and feudal assumptions, so we have to remember that just as objects which travel a long distance do not always indicate mere ‘trade’, elaborate burials do not always indicate ‘ruling class.’ The past is so much broader than the scopes of capitalism and feudalism through which we view it.

Monuments

We see the same pattern with the other type of artefact from the Stone Age which, like ‘princely burials’, are often taken up as proof of hierarchies and kings: grand, monumental buildings.

I’ve come across the fantasies of Graham Hancock and Ancient Apocalypse, in which Göbekli Tepe is evidence not just of kings but of an entire ancient empire which was more advanced than us and which left cryptic celestial warnings, and which colonized the world ‘teaching’ people how to do agriculture and masonry. A lot of the narrative hinges on the idea that Stone Age hunter-gatherers could not have built great stone monuments.

Even though they are so florid and fantastical, such arguments have always struck me as paradoxically boring. There is a more-than-open attitude to the possibility of Atlantis, aliens and giants, but dull pedantry when it comes to ancient societies. In unimaginably long stretches of time, tens of millennia, Graham Hancock cannot see any possibility that hunter-gatherers could have established a society which was, even temporarily, capable of building something like Göbekli Tepe.

Like with the burials, here Graeber and Wengrow give us a bit of archaeology (Stonehenge, Göbekli Tepe, Russian mammoth houses) and a bit of anthropology (such as the Inuits, the Nambikwara in Brazil and the Plains Indians in the United States) and paint a picture that is colourful and informative. I mean colourful not like atlanteans came along one day to teach us about seeds and the principle of the lever, but more like nomads and hunter-gatherers vary their social systems from season to season, sometimes gathering for great coordinated collective labour, sometimes dispersing to hunt and gather.

A small part of the Gobekli Tepe site from around 9000 BCE

It’s satisfying to get a clearer idea of how these monuments were built. But the best part is the idea that these societies changed their whole social system regularly to meet their needs. In one part of the year, the modern Nambikwara roamed in small bands, all these bands being under the strict control of one chief. For the other part, they gathered in hilltop villages, became democratic and communist, and had chiefs who functioned more like a social welfare department than a monarchy. But across all the other examples, no single pattern prevails: among one people, there is a settled season of strict hierarchy and a roaming season of relative informality. Among another, police functions are strictly seasonal and rotate between clans on an annual basis.

The anthropological stuff gives an insight into how Stone Age peoples might have lived: gathering after a great hunt with a superabundance of food and other goods, feasting, processing materials, building great structures, then dispersing again when the seasons turn.

A reconstruction of a house built from mammoth bones, Japan, 2013

What’s the upshot of all this?

Prehistoric society was not a realm of innocence or animal instinct – our ancestors were politically sophisticated.

Prehistoric society was not all one thing. A grading of one political system alongside each economic mode (for example, claiming that hunter-gatherers live in ‘bands’, horticulturalists under ‘chiefdoms’) is too pedantic even as a general guideline.

And here I kind of get the ‘plague on both your houses’ approach to Rousseau and Hobbes, because it’s ultimately from Rousseau that we get the idea that people pre-state and pre-class were simple and innocent.

However, this wouldn’t have been my understanding, and I’m broadly in the Rousseau ideological legacy. So they’re only throwing out bathwater here. Fine by me.

They haven’t succeeded in turning me off the idea of an economic basis corresponding to a political regime. Hunter-gatherers never seem to get around to parliamentary democracy, fascism, Stalinism, the Paris Commune or the Petrograd Soviet – not because they were/are too innocent to think of them, but because these systems do not correspond to their needs or means. The above are political systems proper to our age. There is a wide range of them, and which one you end up with depends on the last analysis on the outcome of a political struggle. But a certain type of economy, one where things like factories and railways are central, is a necessary prerequisite.

Though it seems political systems are more broad and fluid the further back you go. Even what we file under ‘feudalism’ is by definition immensely varied and full of local peculiarities. And when I looked at Gaelic Ireland, I realised that under its legal constitution many different de facto regimes could exist, depending on hard factors like population and resources and soft factors like politics and culture.

But even that phrase ‘the further back you go’ is weighted with an assumption, isn’t it? An assumption about progress, development, advance. That economies actually do develop through stages, and do not slip backwards as easily as political systems do; it’s never actually happened that a country has been ‘bombed back to the Stone Age.’ I admit thermonuclear weapons do raise the possibility.

I guess Graeber and Wengrow wouldn’t agree, but it is possible to speak of progress and development and economic stages without being racist or reductive.

Our industrialized world has global warming, endemic and stark inequality, addiction, shanty towns, systematic cruelty to migrants, homelessness for the sole purpose of enriching landlords, debt bondage as a precondition for housing, widespread precarity,long hours and low pay, universal exploitation, and hysterical bigotry against anyone who’s different. It also has vaccines, washing machines, incubators, clean running water, and a super-abundant supply of manufactured goods. I think that second collection of things are more than mere creature comforts or mod cons – yes, even the manufactured goods that clutter my house and ‘do not spark joy’ – and what’s more I don’t see that they are predicated on the first set of things, the bad things, or dependent on them in any way.

The Marxist criterion at work here, as I’ve mentioned before, is the productivity of labour. In relation to that, we can speak of our society as being advanced or developed in relation to a society that lacks these things.

But the bad things listed above, and their absence in prehistoric societies, are a reminder that our society is still at an absolutely pitiful and contemptible level of development. The idle person who thinks it’s OK for him to be thousands of times wealthier than a nurse or cleaner, just because a piece of paper says that he owns this or that, is a victim of the greatest superstition that has ever held sway over the human mind. The 16th-century German had more reason when he bought indulgences off Johann Tetzel, and the Aztec priest had more practical common sense when he ripped the hearts out of war-captives to keep the sun in the sky.

The most valuable insight from this chapter – and it is a refutation of Rousseau whatever way you slice it – is that hierarchy is not a necessary overhead of (a) social complexity or (b) large population or (c) collective projects or (d) coordination over long distances. Sure, hierarchy is one way to do it, and indeed one way that it appears to have been done even in some pre-class societies. But this chapter tells a story of political sophistication and huge monuments, apparently without hereditary rulers or coercion.

I grew up with Gary Larson images of people living in caves and even coexisting with dinosaurs (Yabba dabba doo!). But even as a more well-read adult I still would have thought that before agriculture, people lived in small roaming groups of a few dozen people. This chapter has challenged this idea, but in a way that is actually very encouraging. These pre-agriculture, pre-state, pre-class societies could be large, complex and at least seasonally settled. Probably they had a wide variety of social structures, including hierarchies and castes, but these were not the rule.

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Before the Fall (1): Notes on The Dawn of Everything

Have human societies always been divided into classes? Do we naturally tend toward hierarchies? If not, when and how did we stumble into this vale of tears, and which way is the exit?

This blog meditated on these questions before in my series Celtic Communism? in which I asked whether James Connolly and others were right to assert that Gaelic Ireland was socialist.

At the moment I’m reading the very successful 2021 book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Wengrow and the late David Graeber. So far, it’s fascinating – which is not to say that I agree with all of it. Reading it, I sometimes tut and shake my head, sometimes suppress an urge to cheer out loud.  

To continue my ruminations on history, hierarchy and communism, I’m going to be blogging my reactions to The Dawn of Everything chapter by chapter, as I read it.

This post looks at…

Chapter 1: Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood

From The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow, 2021 (Penguin, 2022)

The authors set up two philosophers, Rousseau and Hobbes, as reference points. I haven’t read either myself, but here is a brief summary of what I learned from this chapter:

  • Hobbes argued that in early human societies life was ‘nasty, brutish and short,’ ‘a war of all against all,’ and that inequality, hierarchy and harsh penal systems rescued us from this chaotic state.
  • Rousseau argued that humans once lived in a state of wholesome communist innocence, but ‘ran headlong into their chains’ because inequality was a necessary overhead of prosperity and progress.
  • Graeber and Wengrow, on the other hand, argue that humans are neither innately good (as implied by Rousseau) nor evil (as implied by Hobbes), but creative and brilliant, and that actual early societies do not conform to either the Hobbes or the Rousseau model.
Rousseau, discoursing on inequality while a servant lights the fire

These two models, they argue, have three basic faults in common:

  1. They ‘simply aren’t true.’
  2. They have ‘dire political implications.’
  3. They make the past ‘needlessly dull.’

The chapter is engaging and witty, and plenty of the evidence presented here is really interesting. But my nagging feeling throughout was that ‘a plague on both your houses’ doesn’t really cut it.

For example on page 4 we read that many of the ‘first farming communities’ and the ‘earliest cities’ (my emphasis) remained democratic and egalitarian. This statement is meant as a refutation of Rousseau’s claim that once we invented agriculture we all started bowing down to priests and kings. But the authors are saying, in essence, ‘it took a while and didn’t happen everywhere all at once’ – not ‘it didn’t happen.’ It’s zooming in closer to the transition from primitive communism to class society and pointing at the messy interface. I am fascinated by that messy interface and I want to zoom in. But this chapter has failed to convince me that Rousseau’s version of events is broadly untrue. 

Moving on to the ‘Dire political implications.’ Regarding Hobbes, the dire implications are obvious to me: his model is an argument against freedom and for authoritarianism, against equality and for hierarchy. No thanks.

Thomas Hobbes, in a painting by John Michael Wright

But what are the dire implications of Rousseau? The authors say that talk of ‘inequality’ tends to reinforce inequality, to make it seem permanent, and that fifty or a hundred years ago there was a more powerful critique of ‘concentration of capital’ rather than inequality. But those who critiqued ‘concentration of capital’ 50-100 years ago, the communists, socialists and anarchists, would have had a much firmer theoretical grounding in Rousseau, via Engels, than the critics of inequality today. I feel Graeber & Wengrow do not shoulder the burden they have taken on themselves to prove that Rousseau has ‘dire political implications.’ 

The Marxist development of the ideas of Rousseau added a vital component: that modern industrial society has created such an abundance of goods that it is possible to return to a classless and stateless society while preserving material prosperity. This view is not pessimistic, does not accept inequality as inevitable. I assume it is dealt with later, but it is an omission here.

There is a powerful and memorable assertion on page 8: ‘The ultimate question of human history […] is not our equal access to material resources […] but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together.’ Now, I don’t actually agree with that. I think the part about contributing to decisions (politics) is actually subordinate to the part about material resources. First, because most of the decisions will tend to be about how to allocate resources; second, because if there are some people who control most of the wealth, they will in the final analysis call the shots even in the most democratic system. But I appreciate the authors laying their cards on the table. The word that springs to mind for me is ‘voluntarism’ – an approach that downgrades considerations of how material conditions might limit the possibilities of human agency.

A museum reconstruction of Ötzi

This first chapter contains a satisfying rebuke to some modern-day iterations of the Hobbes model – the writings of Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond and Stephen Pinker. The latter presents Ötzi, a 5,000-year-old body found in the Alps with an arrow wound, as a ‘poster child for humanity in its original condition’ – the whole nasty, brutish and short thing. Graeber and Wengrow introduce Ötzi to Romito 2 – the 10,000-year-old remains of a man who suffered from a severe disability. Romito 2, in life, was taken care of by his community, given an equal share of meat, and when he died he was buried with care and respect.

The book also promises to be a stinging rebuke to eurocentrist and basically racist assumptions about history. ‘Western civilisation’ is just today’s ‘accepted synonym’ for what used to be called ‘the white race.’ As for the supposedly ‘western’ tradition of freedom, democracy and equality, ‘it is almost impossible to find a single author in the Western tradition, from Plato to Marcus Aurelius to Erasmus, who did not make it clear that they would have been opposed to such ideas […] it’s almost impossible to find a single European author before the nineteenth century who suggested [democracy] would be anything other than a terrible form of government.’ (Page 16) I agree wholeheartedly and I look forward to the further development of these ideas.

A Massim man in the Trobriand Islands, 1900s.

The last part of the chapter argues that the Hobbes and Rousseau models make history ‘needlessly dull.’ For example, material artefacts travelled great distances through such diverse means as vision quests, travelling healers and entertainers, women’s gambling, and the death-defying adventures of the Massim Islanders. To assume that objects can only travel through ‘trade,’ or to sum up such fascinating cultural activities as mere ‘trade,’ is to sell history and archaeology short. I’m not sure how much Rousseau or Hobbes can be blamed for the poverty of imagination which is under fire in these passages, but I’m looking forward to learning more about such cool and interesting stuff in the pages that follow.

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Nick Bano on Landlord Abolition

Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis by Nick Bano

Verso, 2024

So that headline about ‘landlord abolition’ caught your attention. Maybe you’re wondering, is it just a sensational name for a moderate reform policy, like when people talk about ‘prison abolition’? No, landlord Abolition, as laid out by Nick Bano in this eye-opening and well-written book, is the real deal.

Consider the following:

  • Renters in Britain in 1957 spent 6.5% of their income on rent (now think, how much do you spend on housing?).
  • Before 1951, any increase in land value created by planning decisions was taxed at 100%.
  • In the late ’70s, private rental was a dwindling sector and ‘the death of the landlord’ was widely predicted.
  • Landlords were eager to sell, councils willing to buy. Social housing stock grew massively without anyone having to lay one brick on top of another.

The private rental sector was saved by concerted government intervention during the Thatcher years. Housing stock was in poor repair. How to fix it? Give grants to local authorities to renovate their stock? No! Get private capital to pump money into housing! What could possibly go wrong?

Fast-forward thirty years: terraced houses built by local authorities a century ago are being sold for half a million.

We could fix our housing crisis today by increasing social housing stock. Rent controls are not only fair; they would drive landlords to sell to councils. The more social housing stock there is, the less desperate people will be for housing, the less landlords will be able to get away with charging. It would be a virtuous cycle culminating in the private rental sector shrinking away to occupy an insignificant margin of society.

House prices are tied to rental yields; when you buy a house, you are actually paying for the right to receive rents from it for the rest of your life, even if you never have any intention of renting it out. Reducing the private rental sector to insignificance would benefit home buyers and make mortgage lenders cry bitter, salty tears at all the money we get to keep in our pockets instead of giving them.

Bano is under no illusions that the collapse of the housing market, while it seems necessary and desirable, would be an economic catastrophe for Britain whose governments have bet the country’s shirt on the impossible dream of eternally rising housing costs. And under capitalism, the poor would pay first and steepest for any economic disaster.

The housing market is not a bubble – people are actually realizing profits. But it has to hit the limit of a crisis of affordability, unless British renters can be convinced to live in tiny cubicles or ever-worsening Dickensian squalor – which Bano, to be clear, does not rule out.

The main clarifying point for me was that this is not a crisis of housing supply, but a crisis of housing costs. The imperative to “build more houses”, unless they are all public, social housing, will actually continue to drive up costs (and also destroy the environment).

There is a lot in this short book. There is historical material, for example, about an amazing rent strike in 1915 and the role of housing in the lead-up to the Battle of Cable Street. There is incisive commentary on Grenfell. There is a chapter on race. There are plenty of concrete examples of the squalor, injustice and absurdity of housing in Britain today. There is an overview of how landlords changed from social pariahs to celebrated entrepreneurs in one generation.

My only reservation was wondering how much this analysis applies to Ireland, which is my neck of the woods. Here investment funds seem to be playing more of a role than in Britain, but the mom and pop landlord seems to be very much a social phenomenon here as well.

In 2022 £63 billion was paid in rent in the UK – of which £23.4 billion was Housing Benefit. All that public money – gone, just to reward landlords for charging unaffordable rents. Meanwhile they are incentivised to keep on hiking the rents. Ireland’s Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) is the same, and I bet similar numbers apply.

Nine things that inspired Star Wars

This week I’m taking a break from Miseducation Misadventures to let you in on what runs through my head when I watch Star Wars. Re-watching it as an adult, I notice little things that I can trace back to their source – like the scattered mentions of spice mines and spice freighters in the first movie. Any guesses which SF novel that’s a nod to?

Here are nine sources from which Star Wars drew key ideas. If I’ve missed any interesting ones, chime in down in the comments.

1: Reproductive Biology (2,000 million BCE)

The final battle in 1977’s Star Wars involves a swarm of small starfighters approaching and seeking to penetrate the much larger orb of the Death Star. This looks a hell of a lot like a load of sperm trying to fertilise an egg, with zero-gravity space standing in for the liquid medium through which the little swimmers propel themselves. This was probably not deliberate – the imagery probably bubbled up from the filmmakers’ subconscious. It stands out all the more starkly against this pre-adolescent and mostly sexless galaxy.

2: Metropolis (1927)

And here we have a female version of C-3PO, in an experimental silent film from Weimar Germany.

3: Flash Gordon (Comic and movies, 1930s)

Star Wars took a few cues from Flash Gordon – most obviously the opening text crawl but also the general idea of a series about fun adventures in space.

4: World War Two (1939-1945)

In 1977 when Star Wars came out, World War Two was as recent as the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the first episode of The Simpsons, is to us.

And the movie helps the audience to grasp what is happening in space by using a visual language familiar to them: it has World War Two-era fighter planes in space. The Empire’s star destroyers resemble the warships of the mid-century. The Imperial officers dress like Nazis.

On the other hand, weirdly enough, Star Wars references the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. The final scene where the rebels have a rally and the human characters all get medals (a weird enough scene in itself) follows part of this notorious film very closely. An odd choice, having the good guys mimic the visuals of a genocidal regime, especially when the bad guys are clearly based on them.

5: Casablanca (1942)

In a colourful jazz bar full of diverse people, in a town full of thieves and refugees, in a desert land where an evil empire is tightening its grip, we meet a cynical smuggler who is secretly an idealist. Will he find it in himself to help the two desperate fugitives who are seeking passage to safety? Of all the cantinas in all the systems in all the galaxy…

6: Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1940s-1950s)

The story and themes of Star Wars and Foundation don’t resemble each other at all. But there are many little things which Asimov seeded in the science fiction genre which pop up in Star Wars:

  • Hyperspace travel
  • Weapons called blasters (much more lethal in Asimov)
  • A galactic empire
  • Space feudalism
  • A city which covers an entire planet (Trantor/Coruscant)
  • The wild outer rim of the galaxy
  • It goes right down to random names: Asimov’s Korellian Republic is echoed in the Corellian shipyards
  • Roguish traders who do the right thing in the end (Foundation has several Han Solos in it, who say things like ‘Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.’)

But for Asimov, empires are fundamentally good, the roguish trader is an advertisement for a doctrine of enlightened self-interest, and mysticism is nothing but a charade. All this is at odds with the anti-authoritarianism and sincerity of Star Wars.

7: Akira Kurosawa (1930s-1980s, especially 1950s)

Japan’s most well-known film director had a huge influence on George Lucas and Star Wars. I haven’t seen The Hidden Fortress (1958) but apparently it involves two peasants who escape from a battle (like C-3P0 and R2D2) and meet a princess; there are sword fights, and in the end a bad warlord changes sides. But I’ve seen a few others, like Throne of Blood, Ran and Seven Samurai. Any of these great samurai films show themselves to be ancestors of Star Wars. There are the sword fights and the robes and Darth Vader’s helmet. In a western ear, names like Obi-Wan Kenobi have a Japanese ring to them, and the Jedi resemble an idealised version of the Samurai.

8: Dune (1965)

Frank Herbert’s Dune is riding high after Denis Villeneuve’s great film adaptation and I’ve written about it a few times before. Like Foundation, it provided a lot of ideas for Star Wars to pick up.

  • Dune is closer than Foundation to the themes of Star Wars. It is a text that was obviously written at the height of the anti-colonial struggles of the 1960s; it is pretty negative about empire; it is deeply sincere about religion and mysticism (even in charade form!).
  • The Jedi look like samurai, but they owe much to Dune‘s Bene Gesserit, an order of women who cultivate superhuman powers.
  • Both texts feature a harsh desert planet (Arrakis/Tatooine)
  • And giant worms,
  • robed nomad raiders,
  • smugglers,
  • and moisture-harvesting technology.
  • As noted above, scattered references to spice in the first Star Wars movie are another nod to Dune.
  • And once again we have space feudalism.

Foundation and Dune are the best examples I can think of, but they are stand-ins for a whole rich genre of mid-century science fiction without which Star Wars would not have existed.

9: The US War in Vietnam (1965-1973)

A few years ago Star Wars creator George Lucas confirmed in this interview that his story was fundamentally anti-colonial, that his heroic rebels were based in part on the Vietcong and that the evil empire was based on the United States – along with other past empires and freedom fighters throughout history.

Vietnam has featured just as heavily in other radically different readings of Star Wars, which is unsurprising as the war ended just a couple of years before the movie came out. I can’t remember who exactly wrote this, but the idea is that Star Wars was an infantilising nostalgic escape for a US public keen to avoid thinking about their country’s military and moral defeat in Vietnam. White people with American accents got to be the guerrilla heroes – though from the costumes to the names and decor, it is one of the strengths of Star Wars that it has never looked or felt ‘western’ (unless you mean spaghetti western, as there’s more than a hint of ersatz Mexico and Sergio Leone in there).

A last word…

The point of this is not to be like ‘Star Wars is a rip-off’ but to remind everyone that it’s just a movie, a cultural text rooted in its time. Today we have the corporate cynics for whom nostalgia is a currency and the toxic fandom for whom nostalgia and innovation are just different kinds of betrayal. The worst excesses of the fandom, I suspect, are boosted and incentivised by social media, and the back-and-forth whining and apologetics are increasingly astroturfed online by accounts which have harvested awesome volumes of engagement in the past from people bickering about fun movies, and who see the next big controversy as a payday. In all of it, Star Wars is reified, taken out of culture and history, put on a pedestal. One would think it feel from the sky. Actually the movie is a brilliant synthesis, and if Lucas had the precious and pious attitude on display in so much of the online commentary, it never would have been made at all.

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What I’m Reading: Foundation by Isaac Asimov

‘Seldon crises are not solved by individuals but by historic forces. Hari Seldon, when he planned our course of future history, did not count on brilliant heroics but on the broad sweep of economics and sociology. So the solutions to the various crises must be achieved by the forces that become available to us at the time.’ 

– Hober Mallow, ‘The Merchant Princes,’ Foundation by Isaac Asimov

A lot of what’s fresh and brilliant in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, written as long ago as World War Two, have since become so common in the genre that they almost escape notice when you encounter them in these pages. 

We have travel by hyperspace (‘hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing’); weapons called blasters; roguish but ultimately moral traders; cities which cover entire planets; galactic empires with a civilised core and a wild outer rim. We even have a planet called ‘Korellia’ which reappears as the shipbuilding world of Corellia in Star Wars. 

A galaxy without women

The first thing that strikes the reader is that the characters are all male. From a Galactic population numbering – what did he say, a quadrillion? A quintillion? – there are almost no women the author believes are interesting enough for us to meet.  

Here follows a list of female characters in Foundation: 

  • A telephone operator (!) 
  • A servant who tries on a gizmo
  • The Commdora of Corellia

And, if we really want to be generous:

  • Hober Mallow’s hypothetical mistress (Maybe I’m pushing it now)
  • Housewives are key to Mallow’s scheme to bring down the Korellian Republic (…That’s pushing it.)

The next thing that strikes you is that this book was apparently written as if Isaac Asimov had a very limited special effects budget. The first part contains compelling descriptions of space travel and the city-planet Trantor, but the rest is almost like a stage play: largely a series of conversations in rooms, mostly between seated men. 

Discussing this with friends, I thought of radio dramas, a popular medium in the 1940s when Asimov was writing. He wasn’t writing with an eye to radio adaptation, as far as I know, but maybe he listened to a lot of them and they influenced his style. The 1970s BBC radio play of the Foundation series proves how well it translates to the medium. 

A galaxy without ‘great men’

The lack of a balanced representation of humanity in the cast of characters is pretty awful. But I like the morality and the philosophy of history this story expresses – that it is not ‘great men’ but great impersonal forces that shape history. True greatness lies in predicting and adapting to the currents of history – not holding back the tide, but riding the wave. Real material relations are more important than ideas and words. Don’t be fooled by pomp and regalia; the empire is losing crucial technical skills. Don’t be intimidated by military thugs and their death machines; those machines must be operated by human beings, who can be influenced in clever ways. 

The ‘greatest’ figures in Foundation history are not strutting macho types. Hardin and Mallow alike embrace a kind of humility and acceptance, as well as cunning and unscrupulousness.

Both Hardin and Mallow embark on too-clever-by-half plans that would, in reality, totally demoralise their own people long before they bear fruit. This is a common failing in fiction: the illusion that conflicts have to be solved by clever tricks in order to be narratively satisfying.

In fairness, the climaxes to ‘The Mayors’ and ‘The Merchant Princes’ are very satisfying. Defeat turns to victory in a matter of moments. These eukatastrophes are seamless and well-plotted. 

Cynicism

They use religion to harness the Four Kingdoms to the chariot of the Foundation. But religion is superseded – by the time of Mallow, it is necessary to realise that trade is the new superweapon of Terminus. And trade itself will one day be superseded, become an obstacle: 

‘So, then,’ said Jael. ‘You’re establishing a plutocracy. You’re making us a land of traders and merchant princes. Then what of the future?’

Mallow lifted his gloomy face, and exclaimed fiercely, ‘What business of mine is the future? No doubt Seldon has foreseen it and prepared against it. There will be other crises in the time to come when money power has become as dead a force as religion is now. Let my successors solve those new problems, as I have solved the one of today.’

The flip side of the novel’s cleverness is the smug attitude that comes through. You read this book and feel like you, Isaac Asimov and Salvor Hardin are the three smartest people in the universe, and all these trillions of people are stupid. It celebrates cynicism and manipulation. Hardin controls the press behind the scenes and takes power in a coup. This is to say nothing of the invented religion and how it brainwashes people. This is not moral, of course, but we are supposed to accept that it’s an example of ‘doing what’s right’ in spite of any silly ‘morality.’

A galaxy without violence?

We are told that ‘violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’ The author’s distaste for violence is rare and refreshing. He’s just not interested in it. The novel is better because of this. But the novel’s philosophy does not renounce violence; it just puts violence in its place, as the enforcer and copper-fastener of things already established by culture, economics and politics. It is not the last refuge of the incompetent; it is a necessary, though subordinate, stage of conquest. 

Consider the following exchange of dialogue: 

Jorane Sutt: You’re a Smyrnian, born in Smyrno, one of the former Four Kingdoms. You’re a Foundation man by education only. By birth, you’re an Outlander and a foreigner. No doubt your grandfather was a baron at the time of the wars with Anacreon and Loris, and no doubt your family estates were taken away when Sef Sermak redistributed the land.

Hober Mallow: No, by Black Space, no! My grandfather was a blood-poor son-of-a-spacer who died heaving coal at starving wages before the Foundation.

This passage tells us a lot: 

  • That the Foundation made war on Anacreon and Loris (two of the Four Kingdoms) some time in between the events of ‘The Mayors’ and ‘The Merchant Princes.’ 
  • That the Foundation has brought about a land revolution in the Four Kingdoms through the dispossession of the nobility. In other words, not just a war but a revolutionary war has taken place between two episodes. To cement in place and enforce the outcome of ‘The Mayors,’ war and revolution were still necessary. 
  • That the resolution of the second Seldon Crisis was not the end of Sermak’s political career (Sermak was the leader of the pro-war party in ‘The Mayors’). In fact, Sermak was heavily involved in the subjugation of the Four Kingdoms, to the extent that the land revolution is attributed to him. The pro-war Actionist Party have their day after all. 
  • People like Hober Mallow come from a background where before the Foundation they were denied any opportunities in life. The coming of the Foundation has been revolutionary, opening new opportunities for them. 

All of this is between the lines. Foundation is short and well-paced, but in places there’s a depth and density to it. These lines remind us that even though the novel leaves violence to one side, the universe in which the novel is set is just as violent as ours. The worst ‘barbarism’ in the novel is that which the Empire carries out on Siwenna – atom-blasting the population in revenge for a rebellion which that population didn’t even support.

This brings us back to the points about how it’s written like a radio play. Of course, it was written for magazines and presumably each instalment had to be kept fairly short. Most of what happens in the novel happens through dialogue, but Asimov puts that dialogue to work. The dialogue is good as drama, but it really shines as worldbuilding. It’s nutritious stuff around which your imagination can sketch in the galaxy outside the four walls of the room where, inevitably, men are talking.

What I’m Reading: Judge Dredd Case Files Volume 03

Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files Volume 03, progs 116-154 (Rebellion/ 2000AD, 1979-1980, 2008). Written by John Wagner and Pat Mills. Art by Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, Mike McMahon, Brendan McCarthy, Ian Gibson, Garry Leach, Ron Smith, John Cooper, Barry Mitchell

My Sláine series remains relatively popular, so clearly a lot of people share my fascination with 2000AD comics. Years ago the whole Judge Dredd back catalogue was re-released in these huge ‘Case File’ tomes. The best I’ve seen to date has been Volume 02 (which I’ve praised here before). That included two great epic storylines, the Cursed Earth saga and Judge Cal. There’s nothing as brilliant or as large-scale here; Volume 03 collects a few one-off stories and short series. Some of these I’d come across before in other volumes years ago, such as the first appearance of Judge Death. Others were new. 

Of the series, my favourite was one where a plague of poisonous spiders threatens a small town in the Cursed Earth, and Dredd has to help a community of mutants to resist. Then the spiders infest part of Mega-City One, so without a moment’s hesitation Dredd has the whole neighbourhood bombed flat. The spiders didn’t get under my skin, but a mutant talking horse named Henry Ford did. When the mutinous, grumbling mount got bitten and I thought he was going to die, I felt pretty sad. He survived, only to witness in horror Dredd’s incineration of a whole sector of the city. 

Of the one-offs, far and away the best was the one about Uncle Umpty’s candy. This is so funny and so sad at the same time. It’s very short but it feels like there’s a lot in it. A kind, whimsical and talented old man invents a range of sweets that taste unspeakably wonderful and aren’t addictive or harmful in any way. On principle Dredd does not approve. But on tasting it, Dredd declares ‘It’s delicious!’ and actually smiles. But this little story sums up how absolutely pathological the society and culture of Mega-City One are: people go mad for Uncle Ump’s candy, leading to a breakdown in law and order. The judges take extreme measures against this wonderful old man just to ensure that his candy is gone forever. 

The people of Mega-City One are very, very stupid. They are an unkind caricature of the people of capitalist societies: prone to fads and mindlessly acquisitive. But the ultimate consequence of their frenzied consumption is that they can’t be allowed to have nice things at all. They almost (almost, but not quite) deserve this ultra-punitive law enforcement system. Outside of contrived ticking time-bomb situations, the more conventional (but not necessarily bad) storylines where it’s a choice between the status quo and the annihilation of billions of people, the Judges plainly do more harm than good. Judge Death (‘The crime is life! The sentence is death!’) is only Judge Dredd taken to the logical conclusion of his misanthropy. Sometimes he plays it atraight as a Dirty Harry type. Sometimes he gives a hint of remorse or compassion; sometimes it’s not that, but only his sheer integrity leading to the same outcome. And sometimes, as with Umpty Candy, he is a brilliant and merciless caricature of himself.

What I’m Reading: The Only Good Indians

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga Press, 2020). Audiobook narrated by Shaun Taylor-Corbett. 

Here are two images of this novel that sum it up best: a sweat lodge made from random old blankets, sleeping bags and jackets so that it looks like, the narrator says, a pile of hobos; and a woman with the head of an elk. 

This is US horror writing in the mould of Stephen King: garage-door social realism; characters whose internal monologues bring them to life as much as their words and actions; incomprehensible passages about sports; monsters and apparitions that feel like an extension of the mundane world and are all the more horrible for that.

But as it goes on The Only Good Indians reveals a folk-tale quality that you don’t find in King. 

It’s set around a Blackfoot reservation in the present day, and the story is steeped in the grim conditions in which the Indians live (that’s the term the author and characters use). Lewis has made it to his mid-30s without dying of diabetes or an overdose or suicide or a car crash, or freezing to death after passing out, and he considers that a small miracle. Don’t tempt fate: the first quarter of the book depicts his complete unravelling, his descent into blood-soaked psychosis. The apparition of the elk-head woman drives him to it. 

Lewis is one of four friends in the crosshairs of this monster. When they were in their early twenties, they committed a transgression which involved blowing a pregnant elk to pieces with rifle fire. Ten years later a dangerous elk spirit has come for revenge – not only to kill them but to destroy everything they love. 

Each one of these Indian characters feels like a traumatised survivor of some terrible war. Each one of them has managed to get through some bad shit and to put their lives together. As death comes to claim them one by one, it feels wasteful and hopeless. The worst part is, it feels true: people who fight their way up out of a bad situation and build new lives for themselves are always prey to some demon from the past catching up with them. 

Twice while reading this novel, once at the one-quarter mark and once at the three-quarter mark, I stopped reading and put it aside, disgusted with it. ‘So it’s like that,’ I thought. ‘Every woman in the story has to die a horrible – and improbable – death.’ The brutality felt capricious and meaningless. We’re supposed to think the elk-head woman was pushing an open door when she turned Lewis into a murderous ghoul, but to me when the killing started it felt too abrupt. It’s difficult to get invested in one character only to switch to some others two-three hours in.

But both times I gave it a week and came back to it, and found myself drawn in again. It’s not really like that. It really is going somewhere, building up to something. Not every woman and man dies. There is a way out.

Denorah, the teenage daughter of one of the four men, is the only ‘calf’ any of them produced. She is a brilliant basketball player, someone who will really make her tribe proud one day. After a long sequence involving the makeshift sweat lodge which builds slowly from tense humour to pure horror, Denorah finds herself in the crosshairs of the elk-head woman. The final struggle falls to her.  

That’s where I am now: in the last half-hour of the audiobook with no idea if the ending is going to come down on the side of the things I liked or the things I didn’t like. While he nearly lost me once or twice, now I’m convinced Jones knows what he’s doing, and I’m keen to see how it all ends. 

[Edit 26 May 2024: the ending brought it all together. Even better than I hoped.]

The Three-Body Problem on page and screen (2) The Flickering Universe (Premium)

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Dune: Part Two – a bold, brilliant adaptation

(Don’t worry, no spoilers)

We live in an age of excess – excess of consumer products, of information, of outrageous and unbearable things happening in the world. Maybe that’s why Denis Villeneuve and co, in Dune: Part Two, endeavour to overload the brains of the audience with images grotesque and surreal but also solid and tangible, and on occasion, too, to contrast this excess with stark desert simplicity.

I’ve been blogging about adaptations of Dune. What is this movie like as an adaptation of the latter part of Frank Herbert’s Dune?

Most of the major landmarks in the story are there, such as Jessica, then later Paul, taking the water of life; Paul riding a sandworm; Feyd-Rautha in the arena; and the final climactic battle (the family atomics, ‘a great-grandmother of a storm’…) The film interprets these landmark moments with extraordinary technique and inspiration. When Paul mounts a worm for the first time it’s truly scary and intense. I’ve seen this moment on film twice before, but I never got anything close to a sense of how viscerally terrifying it would be to really do this. The Harkonnen planet Giedi Prime is not just ugly, but an unsettling, distressing place to spend 20-30 minutes. The filmmakers have taken the time to show us how the spice drug is taken from a drowned worm, how moisture is sucked out of the dead (and sometimes the still-living!), and what a palanquin mounted on a worm looks like.

The landmarks are there, and rendered with power and intensity. But the routes between them are changed. It’s that type of adaptation.

For example, the first action scene is completely new; mst of Paul and Chani’s dialogue is not from the book (though it fits right in); Paul learns to ride a sandworm a lot earlier; Paul receiving the name ‘Mu’ad Dib’ comes a lot later.

(By the way, a line uttered by Paul when he comes face to face with Baron Vladimir Harkonnen suggests that this adaptation is set in one of the alternate timelines foreseen by Paul in the novel.)

But it goes beyond that. Things are not changed only for the sake of economy or clarity. The biggest changes are in the service of tackling the defects of the book – the stress placed on bloodlines and eugenics; the white saviour enlisting the credulous natives; Chani, the most obliging of this very obliging bunch of natives, consenting to being Don Paul’s goomah while he marries someone else. In the novel the Fremen, for all their pride and ferocity, never call bullshit on the ridiculous aristocratic institutions to which Paul expects them to bow down, or on the Bene Gesserit’s shameless manipulation of faith in the service of their insane agenda.

In the movie, each major character (Stilgar, Jessica, Chani, Gurney) is aligned to an agenda, and exerts an influence on Paul; it’s a laser focus as regards character that pares things right down, renders conflicts more extreme and dramatic.

This film rejects space feudalism and eugenics; look at Chani’s reaction when Gurney Halleck speaks of Paul’s ‘bloodline,’ in the context of her earlier statement about how all Fremen are equal.

If you’ve seen the film, you know what I’m talking about, and if you haven’t I won’t spoil it. But in this movie the Fremen are not extras who wandered off the set of The Life of Brian ready to fall for the first messiah who climbs up on a soap box. In this movie Chani’s pride and self-respect do not allow her to be such a pushover as she is in the novel (‘History will call us wives’). Paul’s political choices have consequences for him and others. He really hurts Chani.

1984’s Dune ended on a note of triumph; 2000’s TV version is true to the novel in that it mostly leaves you with good feelings. This movie takes the book’s undercurrent of tragedy and drags it to centre stage. The jihad is not a foggy prediction; it’s kicking off right before our eyes. Paul’s victory has come at a terrible cost, personified in a specific character who, in this adaptation, serves as his conscience.

This ending meant that I left the cinema not with a sense of ‘all’s well that ends well’ but with a strange feeling, something rich and contradictory between triumph, relief and sadness.

High praise so far. What do I not like about the adaptation?

I felt that the script relied too heavily on named Harkonnen characters brutally assaulting and killing their underlings; it’s repetitive, ugly and unsubtle.

There was one thing I couldn’t get out of my mind. Every time I saw Jessica after the first hour or so my reaction was, ‘Jesus, is she still pregnant?’ Speaking of Jesus, it’s written that he was three years preaching before his crucifixion. Now imagine a movie where Jesus dethrones Tiberius Caesar just three months after he begins his ministry. Just ask anyone who has ever been involved in a pregnancy or, I assume, in a jihad: a guerrilla war takes longer than a trimester. In the book we cut away for two years, then return to find Paul at last ready to ride a sandworm. Even two years was cutting it fine. How do Paul and Jessica get millions of Fremen eating out of their hands in just six months? The movie works hard to get us away from the white saviour narrative stuff, but this telescoping of the timeline sends us back a large part of the way.

Linked to this, I missed a certain omniscient syringe-wielding toddler who didn’t make the cut.

[Edit, 8 mar 2024.] Here’s another problem. Would it kill Hollywood directors to give speaking roles to actors from the Middle East? What’s the terrible thing that would happen if you gave roles to people from the country you filmed in (or countries where they speak the same language, or practise the same religion)? I didn’t want to raise it at first, because with Dune it’s always going to be a fine line between accusing authors of erasure and accusing them of appropriation. But it occurs to me that just hiring some Arab or Muslim talent is neither erasure nor appropriation. Ridley Scott hired Ghassan Massoud to play Salah ad-Din (Saladin) in Kingdom of Heaven – and the sky did not fall on our heads. Dune borrows so heavily from the Muslim world. It should start paying back.

To see this movie on the big screen was to be put through a succession of intense and unexpected experiences. Sometimes you’ll see a movie that has some great moments, images or scenes, but just isn’t great overall. But in Dune: Part Two, it all adds up to something powerful and brilliant. And as an adaptation, it favours the things I like in Frank Herbert’s novel, and militates against the things I find embarrassing. In particular it leans hard into the tragedy and dread that make the ending of the novel Dune so different.