The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury

THE ILLUSTRATED MAN – RAY BRADBURY

It's a disturbing idea in itself that your tattoos might come alive and start moving and crawling about over your skin, talking in tongues and acting out stories. Can you imagine? To an extent, the kind of stories enacted would be dictated by the kind of tattoos you have but even the most incongruous of tattoos can be folded and twisted into something other depending on how feverish your imagination is. Which leads us to The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, whose imagination seems not only to have been feverish but near-tripping into delirium.

In the film of the book, the illustrated man is played by Rod Steiger and it's perfect casting. He's the itinerant worker whose body is covered head-to-toe in tattoos that take on a life of their own when looked at for too long. It's a simple device that Bradbury uses to connect 16 short stories but it works brilliantly. Each story being precise, economical and inspired. Each of them unique and innovative with a dark, adult undertow.

The Void almost predicts the Internet and virtual gaming, and how children will become the masters of it to the detriment of their parents.

Kaleidoscope describes a crew of astronauts falling through space after their rocket ship has been destroyed. Falling away from each other in different directions as tiny meteorites slice through them, cutting off hands and feet like a silent butcher. As one of them plummets towards Earth he knows that when he hits the atmosphere he'll burn like a match and he wonders if anyone will see him? On a country road in Illinois a small boy looks up and screams “Look, Mom, look! A falling star!”. “Make a wish,” says his mother “Make a wish.”

The Long Rain depicts a planet where the rain falls ceaselessly like Japanese water torture, sending the astronauts trudging through the jungle landscape insane.

Usher II is a precursor to Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 but depicting a world where all art has been banned and burnt, not just books.

The Rocket is the wonderful story of a future world where holiday trips in rockets to the stars are for rich people only and how a poor man treats his children to his own specially made trip in his own specially made rocket. It's a joy to read.

No Particular Night Or Morning is about the madness-inducing madness of space.

The Fox And The Forest has similarities with the films The Matrix and Terminator but written years ahead of both. The main characters have fled into the past from a future world of constant war involving the use of 'leprosy bombs'. Can you imagine the sheer terror of such a thing as a leprosy bomb?

The City also concerns itself with war but with a twist. A group of astronauts land on a planet in a far flung galaxy but little do they know that the planet has been waiting for them and is in fact a trap laid by the long gone former inhabitants of that planet for the descendants of the race that destroyed them whom they knew would one day return.

And then, in what is probably the most interesting and most disturbing of the stories there is The Playground that also depicts a world of endless war, terror and violence but this time that world is the world of childhood.

I met this guy once back in the 1980s who had spent years travelling around the world, doing the Hippy Trail thing. He told me of how in India he'd had a knife thrust into his guts and had come face-to-face with death. He was returning to England and was going to write about his experiences and in doing so essentially write about life and its meaning. He believed Science Fiction was the perfect medium for such things as not only can it fire the imagination and entertain but can also if required convey messages of sorts or at least some words of wisdom to make the reader wonder. I'm no Science Fiction aficionado but on reading Ray Bradbury I can see now what he meant.

The blurb on the back cover of The Illustrated Man describes the book as a collection of 'visionary tales' and that, I must say, is exactly what they are and this book is: Visionary.

John Serpico

The Stepford Wives - Ira Levin

THE STEPFORD WIVES – IRA LEVIN

Well, who'd have thought? Certainly not me. Who'd have thought that The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin would come so loaded? Starting with a quote from Simone de Beauvoir then giving mention to the Women's Liberation movement by the second page? Of course, it's possible to read into the story what you wish just as it's possible to read it as a straightforward thriller without any meaning or depth to it at all but then where's the fun in that? I see Ira Levin was also responsible for Rosemary's Baby and The Boys From Brazil so this in itself should have told me The Stepford Wives was going to be a little bit more than a Mills and Boone wielding a knife.

The plot doesn't really matter and in a way, mention of the Women's Liberation movement is merely a trope on which to hang the main theme of the story upon, that main theme being the issue of 'conformity'. It's been done before, of course – Invasion Of The Body Snatchers springs immediately to mind – but post World War Two it was always about the fear of a communist plot where the Great American Hero would be battling to preserve justice, freedom and mom's apple pie against the Red menace. The Stepford Wives is the complete opposite of this where the Liberated Woman fights against the American (male) Dream and its desire and design for the perfect hausfrau.

A woman's place, according to the good men of the town of Stepford is in the home, apparently. A lady in the parlour, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in bed. A strong woman is a weak woman and any hint of creativity is deemed frivolous. Resistance is futile, the allure and satisfaction gained from serving a husband too important to deny.

When Joanna, the main character in the book, begins to suspect there is something very wrong going on in the town in the way that one-by-one all the women succumb to the will of their husband's vision of the perfect wife, she is gaslit and made to think that actually she's the one who is wrong. Interestingly, Levin in the end leaves it open to interpretation as to whether Joanna was right all along or just being hysterical but either way she still ends up being assimilated.

And so, how might The Stepford Wives be translated so as to be of relevance to the modern-day world? Well, let's think about this for a moment, shall we? 2020 and it's the year of the pandemic virus. Populations groan beneath the weight of mass Right-wing propaganda. News is once-removed from reality and presented as a virtual reality where bodies of drowned child refugees are washed upon the shore but fail to register as flesh and blood but simply as an idea. A symbol of something other. Mono culture is all and if you don't buy into it then you're stranded and at best thought of as being weird. The term 'snowflake' is delivered as mockery but actually meant as a smack in the mouth. Money is the measure of life's worth. Privilege is sacrosanct, religion is an opiate and poverty, along with hunger and disease is a given.

Like lemmings humankind has been swarming towards the precipice, rushing head-on to hurl itself over the cliff and into the gaping jaws of global ecological disaster. It's been almost frenzied in its haste, near delirious in the sheer fun of it all. With not a care in the world or for the world literally. Jammed-up together in a mutual fuck fest of self-idolatry, self-satisfaction and self-flagellation and to hell in a handcart for those who can't keep up. This has been our normality. Our consensus. The great, fat, feverish mindset to which we conform to.

But then out of the blue a coronavirus has popped up. A less than microscopic life-form that unlike most other life-forms on earth doesn't fear us but instead rather actually likes us. We don't, however, like it. So much so that we stopped the world for it.

And suddenly there was silence. A suspended, hanging-in-the-air stillness. Nobody moved. Only our eyes darting from one to the other like in a grand, final duel in a cowboy film, waiting to see who would go for their gun first and ultimately who would be quickest on the draw.

“We need to get back to normality!” shout the spoilsports, the sadists and the overt masochists amongst us. But hang on, weren't we heading for a precipice? “Snowflake!” comes the reply. A smack in the mouth. Along with the most massive, unprecedented gaslighting ever.

As I said, though she realises something is very wrong, Joanna in The Stepford Wives is in the end assimilated. She tries to escape but is gaslit into thinking she's the one who is wrong so she hesitates and eventually conforms to the town of Stepford's normalcy. So can Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives be translated so as to be of relevance to the modern-day world? Unfortunately, the answer is 'yes' and very much so.

John Serpico

Sartre - Iris Murdoch

SARTRE – IRIS MURDOCH

Iris Murdoch on Sartre, and is that really so strange? Me being so shallow, however, I just buy it for the interesting cover featuring Mr Happy puffing on his pipe. According to Ray Lowry, NME cartoonist and front-line punk rock war correspondent featured on The Clash's London Calling album sleeve notes, it was actually double-glazing windows salesman supremo Ted Moult who was Britain's leading existentialist thinker though he may have been joking? In France, of course, it was Jean-Paul Sartre.

Sartre by Iris Murdoch is literacy criticism. It's an essay that chews over Sartre's philosophy, politics and body of work as he grapples tooth and nail with the absurd. Should there be a warning sign that comes with this book, I wonder? Like Dante's 'Abandon all hope ye who enter here'? Or like the message planted over sections of ancient world maps declaring 'Here monsters doth dwell'? As it's only words, then no, not really but it certainly helps if you're familiar with Sartre's Nausea and his Roads To Freedom trilogy. Which I guess we all are? Not that words and language don't come with inherent problems as well, though that's a whole other philosophical conundrum.

Murdoch does a kind of bee dance with Sartre and instead of just going for the jugular she teases, prods and pokes at aspects of his work. A lot of these prods and pokes are actually very accurate, eliciting recognition and agreement. Others, however, end up going nowhere. 'Recognition' is indeed a key word that Murdoch uses, as in less the feeling of meeting with something new than that of recognising something for which you've been waiting. This feeling of recognition, Murdoch says, attends for many people the reading of Sartre, herself included.

What is the 'truth' to which Sartre aspires, Murdoch asks? The answer, she tells us, is freedom. Freedom being 'the mobility of the consciousness', meaning we are potentially free so long as we are conscious – even within prison cell walls. To the hardened, revolutionary realist this might be a problem but we're talking philosophy here not political treatises.

When one is caught between the intolerable and the impossible nothing is justified except a state of rebellion, Murdoch deduces, however vain. And that's very true. After all, what else is there? The quandary being, what does it actually mean to be free? What does it entail? Is a yearning for freedom a means to an end or an end unto itself?

Large parts of the Roads To Freedom trilogy are composed of lengthy passages of introspective musing and internal monologues in particular from Mathieu, the main protagonist over the three books. In The Reprieve, Mathieu is alone upon a bridge and is contemplating suicide. He feels alone in the world and at that moment there is no-one who can tell him what to do. To jump or not to jump, that is the question? His life and his destiny are in his hands and no-one else’s. He is at that moment a free man but to what avail? 'I am free for nothing', he concludes. Likewise, at the end of The Age Of Reason after breaking up with his pregnant girlfriend, Mathieu feels nothing but an anger without an object. Mathieu has stolen, and now has abandoned his girlfriend when she is pregnant, all for nothing.

'If you want to understand something' Murdoch quotes Sartre as saying 'you must face it naked'. This is interpreted as doing practically the complete opposite of what is expected as when Mathieu opens his mouth to say 'I love you' to his girlfriend but says 'I don't love you' instead. Or when he tells his comrade in arms that resistance is senseless but then picks up a rifle. It's in the casting off of all allusions, delusions and illusions. In such moments, Mathieu is free but for what? That is the question. Did Sartre ever adequately answer it? Well, yes he did but Albert Camus probably answered it better and there's the nub of Murdoch's book. It's too late now, of course, but perhaps it would have been better for her (and for us) to have written about Camus rather than Sartre and it makes me wonder why she didn't? It makes me wonder if she would have danced the same kind of bee dance with Camus as she does with Sartre? It makes me wonder.

John Serpico

Exile And The Kingdom - Albert Camus

EXILE AND THE KINGDOM – ALBERT CAMUS

Exile And The Kingdom is a collection of six short stories written by Albert Camus and first published in 1957. So to cut to the quick: what have we got? Well, Camus was a brilliant mind and a brilliant writer and indeed is one of my firm favourites but for some reason reading this particular book of his was somewhat of a chore. On finishing it I did something I hardly ever do when it comes to books and that's to look at Wikipedia to see what it had to say about it there and curiously it's a completely different interpretation to mine. So much so, in fact, that I couldn't tell if it was me reading too much into the stories or actually too little?

The Adulterous Woman centres on a woman on a business trip with her husband and her not wishing to be there. At one point she looks at him and thinks to herself how love, even when filled with hate, doesn't have such a sullen face as his. During the middle of the night whilst staying at some crotchety old hotel at the edge of the desert, she steals herself away from their bed to take in the view from a balcony. It is here that she becomes conscious of the empty void in her life and for a moment wishes for nothing other than to throw herself into that void. This is the adultery she commits to which Camus alludes.

The Renegade is a depiction of the supremacy of evil and how evil begets evil even when challenged by an act of supposed goodness - that in itself can even be taken as an act of evil. There is no surpassing or undermining of it. Evil, it would seem, can be challenged but cannot be overthrown so the only solution to evil is to destroy it utterly. It's only weakness – it's Achilles Heel – is in the fact that evil knows it can be destroyed. Evil is not indestructible and it's aware of this. As Hitler once said: “Only one thing could have stopped us – if our adversaries had understood and from the first day had smashed, with the most extreme brutality, the nucleus of our new movement”. For some reason, The Renegade reminds me of Behold The Man, by Michael Moorcock, where the time traveller goes back in time to confirm the existence of Jesus only to end up enacting the role of Jesus and being himself crucified.

The Silent Men is about how the boss of a small business not doing the right thing for his staff leads to his staff not doing the right thing for him when tragedy strikes. The lesson being: an eye for any eye leaves the whole world blind. The Guest, on the other hand, is almost the complete opposite when a man trying to do the right thing ends up in fear of himself being murdered. The Artist At Work is almost a reiteration of Camus' famous line 'in the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer'. Or even possibly a description of Camus' own life? Whilst The Growing Stone is like a cross between Camus' The Fall and The Myth Of Sisyphus.

Context is all, of course, which means the date of publication of Exile And The Kingdom – 1957 – needs to be taken into consideration, it coming fifteen years after the publication of The Outsider and The Myth Of Sisyphus, one year after the publication of The Fall, and three years before his untimely death in 1960. It needs to be asked, what was Camus trying to do with these stories? What was the thought behind them? Is the reading of these stories effected by the day and age in which they are read, as in 2020 when the world is going through a pandemic-led existential crisis? As I said, am I trying to read too much into them or not enough? Whatever, I'm left with the feeling that Exile And The Kingdom is for Camus completists only.

John Serpico