Philip K. Dick is the North American Borges (and if that doesn’t mean anything to you Ariel, don’t worry, Jorge Luis Borges is coming up soon…) Philip K. Dick (like Borges) is obsessed with the nature of reality. Dick tries to look behind the surface of things (behind the cars and jobs and furniture, behind politics and status, jokes and gravity, faces and skin) - behind the assumptions we make without even noticing we’re making them. Dick thinks that when we think we’re looking at the world, we’re merely looking into a mirror that reflects our own beliefs and prejudices. Dick, like Borges, believed there was a world behind that mirror, hidden from us, that was infinite and strange. That contained patterns which connected the points of chaos we perceive as life.
And their main vices are, appropriately, mirror images of each other. Borges wrote too little (his collected fiction makes a single fat book). Dick wrote too much (over seventy titles).
Philip K. Dick couldn’t get his early attempts at “normal” novels published, so he ended up, almost accidentally, writing science fiction. (To fail at being normal is to succeed at being weird.) Science fiction was the only publishing genre that saw the deep peculiarity of his worldview as a virtue rather than a vice, but SF didn’t pay well. (Its word-rates assumed you were pumping out disposable industrial product, as many SF writers were.) And so Philip K. Dick wrote fast, on speed, for money. At his speediest, he wrote eleven books in two years. As a result, many of his books have wonderful philosophical ideas, undermined by clunky, first-draft prose.
The Man In The High Castle is one of the few books he had time to rewrite and polish, so it reads better than most of his work. (And it won him his only award, a Hugo). It’s an alternate-history novel, where the Allies have lost World War Two. It’s set in a Japanese-occupied America. There are rumours that a reclusive novelist has written a book which describes the real universe, in which the Allies won the war… The hero tries to track down the writer, and the book. You slowly realise that perhaps neither of these universes is our own…
His other best book, from later in his career, is A Scanner Darkly, but you’d want to be in the whole of your health to read it. A book about paranoia that’s so powerful it can induce paranoia, it stars a man who goes so far undercover to investigate a drugs ring that he ends up ordered to spy on himself. It may be the best book about drugs ever written.
I just made one of the world's shortest movies. Fourteen seconds, one shot. It's called Flesh Frame, and it's a brief and oblique tribute to J. G. Ballard. Filmed on one of the earliest camera-phones, if it were any lower-fi, it would be a single blinking pixel.
I won't tell you anything else about the movie, because its only function is to evoke a mood (or, in English, give you a feeling). And nothing wrecks a mood-film like an explanation of what you tried to do and exactly how you did it.
I'll tell you a little about Ballard, though. (Some of you will know all this already: fair play to you. Go get an icecream and I'll see you later.)
J. G. Ballard is one of the few great British writers of the past century.
You could also call him one of the most original and radical British visual artists of the past century. His "novels" are often a series of astonishing images, hypnotically encoded in words.
He spent much of his childhood interned (along with his parents) by the Imperial Japanese Army, in a Shanghai prisoner camp.
After Ballard's wife died (very suddenly and very young), he wrote much of his most extreme fiction in short bursts at the kitchen table, between sandwich-making and soccer practice, while bringing up three children.
The resulting classic of modern headwrecker fiction, The Atrocity Exhibition, was pulped a week before publication by his American publisher, Doubleday, after the head of the firm finally read it. (Doubleday were also my American publisher, for Juno & Juliet, which they loved. When Doubleday rejected my follow-up, Jude, with horror - they particularly hated Level 3 - I knew I'd finally achieved something really exceptional.)
Three years later he wrote Crash, a novel about sex and car crashes that is still sending ripples through the culture. (The shudders of orgasm? Or death?) Finally published in 1973, in print ever since, and about as influential as a novel can be, the initial reader's report to his UK publisher was "This author is beyond psychiatric help. DO NOT PUBLISH."
He is now seventy seven, and his prostate cancer has spread to his ribs and spine. He will be dead soon, and I would recommend that you read some of his work immediately, so that you can thank him by postcard while he is still alive. (He doesn't really do email or computers.) J.G. Ballard, Shepperton, England would probably get through to him at this stage. (Or just write care of his publisher: J. G. Ballard, c/o Fourth Estate, HarperCollins Publishers, 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB, England).
If you don't know where to begin (I don't blame you, he's written a lot of stuff), I'll give you a quick guided tour of my favourites...
Feck it, I'll include links to Amazon while I'm at it, and if you buy one they'll slip me a shiny thruppenny bit. (Well, thirty or forty pence probably.)
A warning: Don't start with Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition, unless you're feeling well hard. They will do serious damage to your head. (Either you will throw the book across the room, or the book will throw you across the room.) Work up to them.(Yes, I know some of you ARE well hard. Fair enough, OK, go for it.)
A lovely place to start, if you're feeling at all delicate, would be with the short story collection Vermilion Sands, set in a desert resort full of cloud-sculptors and singing orchids. (One of his gentlest books, it is one of his own favourites.)
His most accessible and successful book was the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun, the story of an English boy's childhood in a Japanese prison camp. (Filmed later by Spielberg, yes. And, as with all Spielberg films, it would be a pretty good movie if you could remove the final 25 minutes of slush, in which Spielberg keeps trying to end it happily, against the grain of the story. Spielberg's strangely desperate attempts to end, to leave Ballard's dream without being changed by it, grow ever more conventional and sentimental, with each botched ending damaging the film more and more... it's fascinating to watch. As with Saving Private Ryan years later, Spielberg starts by telling us something true, and hard to bear, and then spends the rest of the film denying and rejecting that truth ever more hysterically, walling it off behind comforting clichés. Oooh, I could write a book...)
The followup to Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women, is a dreamy, wildly sensual classic.
The Crystal World is one of his early disaster trilogy, full of Max Ernst imagery. Crocodiles and jungle plants slowly turn to crystal. The world is dying beautifully. A man sails upriver, upriver, into the heart of lightness.
From his urban collapse period, Concrete Island is Robinson Crusoe on a huge traffic island, surrounded by lane after lane after lane of roaring cars. A man crashes there, and can't get off the island. Or doesn't want to. And then he finds a footprint... (I pay comic tribute to this in Jude: Level 2, when Jude spends weeks walking to London up the middle of a motorway's central reservation.)
The Unlimited Dream Company brings a dreamlike, William Blake, visionary end-of-the-world to the English suburbs. Banyan trees burst up through the pavement in front of the supermarket. People, after a difficult day at work, learn to fly, and are soon copulating with birds, high over Shepperton. Nobody seems to mind. (Anthony Burgess picked this as one of his Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939.)
And if you'd prefer something a little closer to a thriller, or detective fiction, there's Cocaine Nights. A death in a gated community. When all darkness and danger have been pushed outside the gates... is life still liveable, inside, as the sunshine bounces off the white concrete?
Those are my pick of the novels, but his short stories are among the best ever written. There's the Complete Short Stories (too heavy to hold in hardback, but sensible broken up into two volumes in the paperback.) The original collections... well they're all good (and mostly out of print), but I remember The Terminal Beach, in this edition, very fondly.
They'll hold you for now.
Seriously, pick one. Buy it. Read it. If you love it, tell him. He won't live forever.
A last warning: the reason J. G. Ballard doesn't sell like John Grisham is that Ballard's books knock you off balance and disturb you, annoy you. The language can be eerily flat. You can start to feel strange. Go with it. Get past it. It's worth it.
Well, that bomb was dealt with immediately. The guy with the toothache probably still squezz in his appointment at the dentist's.
I said, weeks ago, that I was about to put up my next Great Book for Teenage Boys. Well, I've been trying. But for some reason I am blocked like crazy. I've written the damn thing three times, and not posted it.
Whaddya do? Writers are crazy. And the book is a head-wrecker, so no wonder it's somehow still wrecking my head. Great book...
It might be the funniest book ever written about war, and it might be the best book ever written about war, and the two are connected. It’s mostly set on an island off Italy, during World War 2. Does it avoid the dark heart of war? Hell no. You’ll get there, eventually. Just hang on tight, because Heller (who was a bombardier in World War Two, flying over and back across Europe, dropping bombs on people’s heads from several miles up), flies backwards and forwards in time, closing in on the truth and the darkness. Events are described again and again, from different characters’ points of view, until you get a horrible, hilarious, multiple, God’s-eye view of what really happened. The book (like life, like death, like war), is packed with paradoxes, the most famous of which is the one in the title, a catch, which may or may not exist, and which rules and ruins men’s lives:
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
"That's some catch, that Catch-22," [Yossarian] observed.
OK, the great Norman Mailer, who died earlier this month: his best book, if you are a teenage boy, is Why Are We In Vietnam? (I would have put it on the list anyway, even if he hadn't just died.)
I had my notebook with me over the weekend (I was away from my computer), and I wrote so many notes on Why Are We In Vietnam? that it would take me another week to type them up and turn them into something that made sense. It was more a long essay than a blog entry.
But Ariel is waiting for his next book, and I can't make him wait another week. So here goes... Inna blog styleeee, fukktup, no gramma...
Norman Mailer wrote Why Are We In Vietnam? around the time I was still in the womb. It came out in 1967 and it was red-hot relevant to the big American dilemma: why the fuck are we in Vietnam?
What is it about? Well in some ways it's a shaggy dog story, or a shaggy bear story, or a shaggy war story... And that story is pretty simple: DJ and his friend, two Texan teenage boys, go on a hunting trip to Alaska with their rich fathers. They shoot animals, and they walk in the forests. DJ tells the tale in a supercharged Texas-turboblast of language.
But it's about what it's not about. And it's not about what it's about.
The title does half the work of the book, because it changes the meaning of every sentence that follows. Vietnam is hardly mentioned. But DJ and his friend have been drafted, and are going to Vietnam after this last trip with their fathers.
Mailer has knowledge of war (he fought in the Pacific in World War Two): DJ has not. But DJ will soon have Mailer's knowledge and the gap between character and author, so soon to be closed, crackles with literary electricity. The knowledge wants to discharge.: DJ wants to know, and Mailer wants him to know. Soon the trees, the animals, the guns are trying to tell him... The book contains some of the best ever descriptions of animals, plants, trees and soil (of the world without man in it). And then man comes into it...
The book is full of sex, shit and death, and of words invoking sex shit and death even when the subject is something else. Sex shit and death are the three-in-one God of this book, and it is best to hear these words as the (almost religious) speaking-in-tongues of a possessed young man, rather than as casual and meaningless obscenities. They are not casual and they are not meaningless (though they are often obscene, if the Latin root of obscene is ob caenum, "from filth").
A book in which rich Americans shoot animals from helicopters is obviously about 1960s Vietnam in a fairly direct way. But that is not the most important aspect of the book.
This book is not a history book. This book is prophecy, and thus timeless. You could slot it into the Bible as the Book of DJ, and it would fit in fine. To give the book its original force, and to totally refresh it, just scratch or paint out the word "Vietnam" on the cover, and scrawl in the word "Iraq", if you're American or British, "Chechnya" if you're Russian, "Tibet" if you're Chinese, "Palestine" if you're Israeli, "Congo" if you're from practically any of the Democratic Republic of the Congo's neighbours, "Darfur" if you're from Sudan, "Somalia" if you're from Ethiopia...
No really, do it. Make a physical mark. Damage the book. Make it yours.
It is not a clean and tidy book. It is not a nice, easy book. It is not a post-feminist book. It is not a left-liberal book. It's not even a "good" book, in a lot of ways (though it might be a great book). It doesn't give a shit whether you like it or not. A lot of recent readers have problems with that, as they do with Norman Mailer generally. But you cannot apply health and safety legislation to a shaman. The chicken has to really die (because you're going to really die). The blood has to splatter everywhere (because your atoms, too, will be scattered, and your pattern lost). Norman Mailer's art is messy because life is messy because death is messy.
OK that's it. That's all I can think of right now. Over to you.
OK, Ariel, here goes. I've been agonising over this ever since you asked me to recommend you some books to read while the teachers' strike is on. (Novelists shouldn't blog, we think too much and it nearly kills us. Then we come up with these constipated, over-written postings, about one every six months. Ridiculous! I could have, I should have, banged out a list in twenty seconds. It's a week later, and I'm still agonising...)
Anyway, I've given up on trying to do the list, and why they're good, in one go. I'll just try and do a book a day, roughly, for the next week or two, roughly.
Bear in mind, this isn't a list of the Greatest Books of All Time (though it overlaps such a list, a lot). It's a list of books that I'm glad I read as a teenaged boy, or that I wish I'd read as a teenaged boy, and that I think you might like too, maybe. I'd make a slightly different list for a teenaged girl, different again for a man in his twenties, a woman in her twenties...
They aren't in any particular order...
Number 1: Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth. An incredibly rude, incredibly funny book about growing up Jewish and horny in Newark. One warning: Portnoy's attitude to women is very 1969, when the book came out. And I wouldn't recommend it as a guide to behaviour. (Portnoy doesn't really believe that women are human beings, and a lot of his problems are made worse by this blind spot.). But boy is it honest and funny. Philip Roth is ruthlessly, brutally honest about what it feels like to be a boy, and then a man.
Julian Gough
The website of Julian Gough, author of Connect, Juno & Juliet, the Jude novels, and the ending to Minecraft. He is also the author of the Rabbit & Bear children’s books (illustrated beautifully by Jim Field).
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