Tim Newton Anderson's Blog, page 8

Musical Comedy

It is no secret that I love music and I love comedy, and something combining the two is one of my favourite things.

I recently read a book about Viv Stanshall by his wife Ki Longfellow (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Illustrated-Vivian-Stanshall-Fairytale-Grimm/dp/097592558X/ref=sr_1_17?crid=30578YXFEUCDQ&keywords=viv+stanshall&qid=1677674704&sprefix=viv+stanshall%2Caps%2C95&sr=8-17) which included lots of his paintings as well as details of their life together. At the same time I was listening to Transmissions by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band which includes material performed on the John Peel Show which never made it onto a record. I also downloaded the John Peel recordings of the formative Rawlinson’s End saga.

The Bonzo’s were fortunate enough to have two musical geniuses in the band – Stanshall and Neil Innes. It is ironic that Innes played the John Lennon analogue Ron Nasty in the Rutles as in the Bonzo’s he was Paul to Stanshall’s John. However, the Rutles is up there with Spinal Tap as a comedy music mockumentary and includes amazing Beatles pastiche by Innes.

I was never fortunate enough to see the Bonzo’s live but I did see Stanshall and Innes in the first GRIMMS tour with members of the Liverpool scene including The Scaffold (another great comedy group).

The interesting thing about both fake bands – and comedy music bands in general – is that they were made up of great musicians. In order to parody something you have to be able to emulate it accurately. One of my other favourite bands – Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias – had this in spades. They were able to move smoothly between genres as I was fortunate enough to see live a couple of times. Famously, Spinal Tap played live at Live 8 while most of the “real” bands mimed to backing tracks.

There are two types of music and comedy. One is the Bonzo/Tap/Alberto route of being musicians who do comedy, and the other are comedians who do a bit of music. People of a certain age will remember the Goons singles and they were a major influence on The Firesign Theatre who would also include music in their groundbreaking comedy albums.

The members of Spinal Tap started out their careers in comedy troupes like National Lampoon and the Credibility Gap who included music in their albums. Christopher Guest was in National Lampoon’s Lemmings and Credibility Gap included Harry Shearer and Michael McKean. McKean was a co star in Laverne and Shirley and the first pairing with Guest was on the spin off Lenny and the Squigtones album.

There have been quite a few comedy/music films and programmes over the past few years including Flight of the Conchords – partially inspired I suspect by the success of Spinal Tap. If you liked them, then you will find a trip back to the bands that started it all rewarding.

The Influencers

I think there are two types of writers who have influenced me: the people who made me want to write, and those who influence the way I write.

Those who have influenced my desire to be a writer are often those who I admire but can rarely emulate – partly because of a genius I don’t possess and partly because I enjoy reading them but don’t want to write like because it is not who I am. This includes many modernists like Joyce, more Postmodernists like Barth, Barthelme, Coover etc, and the French avant-garde from the Symbolists and Decadents through the Surrealists to Oulipo.

While I can emulate some of their techniques at short length I am not enough of a poet to sustain their brilliance. My writing was once described as “journalistic” – which seems fair given that was my first profession. While I try to find the right words for my prose this is probably about a desire for accuracy rather than beauty. If it is elegant as well as accurate, so much the better.

The key writers who have informed my prose are science fiction and noir writers, and humourists. The first helped me describe things that don’t exist (yet) in a way they can seem real, the second the importance of character and atmosphere using a few words, and the third a facility with using the right words to create a smile, or even a laugh. This is different from placing words to create atmosphere as it relies on jarring rather a mood rather than establishing it.

All three of these influences are about using the right number of words as well as the right words. Too few and you don’t have a clear enough picture in your mind, too many and you can get lost in the language rather than the image. Clive James once criticised a popular author for sentences that told you both more than you needed to know and less at the same time.

It is a bit like the problem I share with others of sometimes writing the research rather than the story to show how much I know. I need to do the work, the reader shouldn’t have to. It is a great temptation when you set a story somewhere the reader will not be familiar with, especially if it is one you feel passionately about and want to share, but at the end of the day you are writing for them rather than yourself.

Going Underground

Part of the Joseph Campbell hero’s journey (and mage’s journey) is the descent underground and return to the surface transformed.

While there are many people who feel Campbell’s monomyth is western centric and not as universal as he claimed – he was selective in picking myths that backed up his theory and lifted them from their cultural background – it is quite a useful tool when plotting.

That is why I really enjoyed reading Peter Ackroyd’s London Under with its miscellany of history and myth around London’s rivers, sewers and tube system. It sits on my reference shelf along with Trench and Hillman’s London Under London and Pike’s Subterranean Cities.

In my alternate history novel of 1896 Paris all three of the main protagonists descend below the city as key parts of their inner journey and much of the action takes place beneath Paris’ streets. In my urban fantasy novel based in Norwich there are also key scenes in the chalk tunnels beneath the city. I wasn’t consciously referencing Campbell as I wrote them, but recognised the parallel’s afterwards.

The roots of the underground journey clearly lie in the belief in death and resurrection and the pagan roots of that in the die back of nature in Autumn and the rebirth of life in Spring from seed. Many traditions around the solistices are based in this annual cycle. We bury our corpses like we plant seeds.

The underground is also about shit. Brian Aldiss’ novel The Dark Light Years imagined a civilisation based not on distancing its members from their bodily waste but celebrating it. In London there was a move from collecting and using dung for fertiliser and gunpowder to flushing it away so we never have to see it.

I am working on ideas for a Sherlock Holmes pastiche and one is incorporating the lost trade of Tosher – the people who sifted through shit and sewer deteritus to find treasure. The work dried up – or wetted up – when Bazalgette built the new sewer system so what did they do afterwards?

Is Dead the New Black

A Facebook contact of mine raised the issue of a prominent person in Science Fiction who suggested Samuel Delany got more attention than he deserved because he is black. This brings out important issues about both the nature of SF fandom and Black Lives Matter.

The idea that people who are black, or from any minority, get preferential treatment because of their difference and positive discrimination is one that is used regularly on social media and the media in general. The roots of this are often racist – especially when promulgated by the far right – but it also exploits the feelings of people who feel they are not getting their due in life and resent another group getting help. Even if that group suffers far worse. White working class men may well find it hard to get on in life, but they do not have the additional problem of being judged because of their skin colour as soon as they walk into a room.

The definition of racism is prejudice plus power, and however powerless white working class people feel, they still have more advantages than working class black people. The assertion that black lives matter does not imply that other lives don’t, no matter what the right wing may say. The statistics on the different ways black people are treated by the criminal justice system alone justify the campaign, as well as the evidence of institutional racism in many institutions. It is not just a problem for black people, of course, LGBTQ+ people in general and those with physical and mental disabilities also suffer unjust discrimination and a favourite trick of those in power is to set discriminated groups against each other to distract from the root of their common problems in the attitudes of the establishment.

Science fiction is no exception. I have just finished reading Dangerous Visions and New Worlds. Amongst other things it details the battles between the traditional science fiction writers, editors and fans against the new writers and ideas entering the genre in the 60s and 70s including previously excluded voices such as Delany, which reflect changes in wider society during those decades. As someone who grew up during that time I found all of this exciting and loved the New Wave writers including Delany who were drawing on influences from wider literature and art with innovations in content as well as style. That doesn’t mean there were no SF writers with these influences before this, but a lot of earlier writers were more interested in the science than the fiction.

Delany was one of these writers. While some of his novels are challenging to readers used to prose and themes based on SFs pulp origins, that is because they are ferociously intelligent and require more than a superficial knowledge of rocket science to appreciate. He was lauded because of his genius, not his colour.

One of my favourite novels of the time was Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream – supposedly a novel written in an alternative timeline by Adolf Hitler who had left Germany in a Communist takeover and become an SF illustrator in the US.

One of the joys of the book is the way it skewers the SF trope of the “man who knows” – a superman who battles the establishment. The enemy in Iron Dream are mutants who are contaminating the genome of “true humans”. The parallel with Hitler’s treatment of Jews and other minority groups are obvious but also the tendency in SF to have the other – aliens, vampires – as the baddies. Pulp fiction for generations treated “foreigners” in the same way, especially if they had a different skin colour and/or religion. In Cold War fiction communists or fellow travellers were added to the list of enemies of the heroes either directly or disguised as something else.

While attitudes may have changed on the surface, the reaction to Black Lives Matter shows that they are still very much there under the surface, disguised as something else. I wonder whether the current spate of Zombie plague shows may be an example of this – even if that may be unconscious on the part of the writers and producers. They still have the basic narrative that there is an enemy who is different and there are a small group of survivors who fight the threat, normally without any help from the government. This follows the whole survivalist movement trope and there are clear links between that and right wing views.

Science fiction in general has moved on quite a bit since the breakthroughs of the 60s. Different voices are more available from within Golden Age SFs traditional homes of the US and Europe (particularly the UK). Afrofuturism and translations of works from Asia are just one example. However, I do wonder if there are still voices within fandom which believe this is an example of trendy wokery preventing them from getting their voices heard because of positive discrimination.

Another Story published

I managed to miss the edition of Bewildering Stories is which I had a story – The Portrait of Damian Black.

The story is set in my London Institute of Parapsychology universe featuring my original main characters – an insurance investigator who develops magical skills and a writer who doesn’t. They are recruited by the Institute to help fight threats from the Abbey of Theleme amongst others in its work of maintaining the balance between the mystical, religious and scientific world views as we evolve towards the Omega Point.

Part of the inspiration was the significant number of artists – including many of the Surrealists – who dabbled in the occult. The title character does a lot more than dabble.

Other series in the universe feature the real life Lord Minimus in the 17th century – in the eopnymous story in Fall Into Fantasy and the Horror Club teenagers in Slay Ride in Nightmare Fuel.

There is a reasonably complete list of publications my stories appear in on my Amazon Author Page if you search for Tim Newton Anderson,

Are All Detective Stories OULIPO?

There is a department of OULIPO called Oulipopo which covers crime stories, although the only one I recall reading is Perec’s unfinished 53 Days. However there are ways in which all detective novels are exercises in constraints.

The most well known constraints are Father Ronald Knox’s rules for detective novels written for the Detective Club of famous crime novelists who agreed to abide by them, although several members stretched them to their limit. Rules included no identical twins and no Chinamen. One rule broken by Agatha Christie was that the culprit should be introduced early but the reader mustn’t get to know their thoughts – having the narrator in the Murder of Roger Ackroyd be the killer surely breaks this.

However there are unspoken constraints in detective novels. The main one is that there should be enough clues to identify the culprit but it should still be a surprise. This takes a great deal of planning, although I confess to having written a detective novel where I hadn’t decided who the killer was until half way through and then had to make sure I dropped clues into earlier parts of the narrative.

I have written a number of pastiche stories – two in the Black Coat Press Shadowmen series of anthologies and two featuring Sherlock Holmes. Actually 2.5 Sherlocks as I also did a story where he and Miss Marple feature but the actual detective who solves the crime is a hotel porter. Writing pastiche has further restraints as you need to be true to the characters and make sure your story slots into the timeline of their canon.

Popular characters often have fans (and editors) who will point out if you breach this rule which is why I have a score of reference books to make sure anything I write complies. As there are a hundred more pastiche and crossover stories each year this task becomes harder and harder. Even if not all become accepted as canon, you have to be aware of them so you do not duplicate or contradict accidentally. For the Holmes and Marple story I had to find a time when they would be able to meet realistically.

In one of the Shadowmen stories I wanted Raymond Chandler and P G Wodehouse to meet at Dulwich School which they both attended, but not at the same time. That gave me the idea of Wodehouse staying on for a cricket competition and Chandler having a try out before he formally started. The cricket match idea then led me to Wodehouse’s early cricket stories and the discovery that a couple of his characters shared the names of other fictional characters who I could incorporate. I then threw in other fictional public school and characters who had attended public schools and was able to weave a plot around them. As many were already in the expanded Wold Newton and Shadowmen continuity this was wonderful inspiration.

And using constraints to deepen creativity is what OULIPO is about.

Heroes and Villains

It is a truism in writing that all of your characters should be rounded. But who doesn’t love a great moustache twirling, scenery chewing villain even more than the hero/heroine?

For one thing, a great villain makes the main character seem even better (although you have to avoid making them a Mary Jane – someone without any faults who is always right).

The first two books of the Gormenghast trilogy are Steerpike’s far more than Titus Groan’s. Especially as Steerpike starts off as a hero overcoming the strictures of Gormenghast as a literal social climber. Similarly both the Master and Dr Who rebel against the rules of the Time Lords. Like Titus and Steerpike, the difference is one wants to find a way to bypass the rules for a better future while the other seeks to break the rules to place themselves at the top of the system. One seeks justice for all while the other seeks justice for themselves.

Perhaps for the English the roots of this rooting for the villain comes from Pantomime. We may be glad when the hero wins at the end, but we enjoy the villain far more. It must certainly be far more fun to play one.

Part of the challenge of writing a good villain is making them not only a difficult challenge for the main character rather than just a video game Big Boss but someone who could easily be a hero if they had chosen a different path. In my alternate history novel there are four villains – one is motivated by justice but chooses terrorism as a way to achieve it, one is motivated by patriotism, one by anger at the world and the fourth by a desire for power. I felt it was important to show why they were who they were and have a range of reasons for their behaviour. Hopefully that deepens their character rather than excuses their deeds

The Unreliable Narrator

The unreliable narrator is a common technique in fiction, although some would argue there are many examples in non fiction as well.

As a former journalist I am very familiar with the need to try and look at the vector of what people say. You have to think about not only what they say, but why they might be saying it. There is a convention in journalism that there are two sides to every story, but I always found there are as many sides as there are opinions on what happened. I also had to bear in mind that finding an opposing viewpoint wasn’t always useful in telling the full story – sometimes the first person’s account was pretty accurate and finding someone else who disagreed may just be distorting rather than clarifying the truth.

Since I started writing fiction I have tried using both “reliable” and unreliable narrators. I can’t claim the success of Gene Wolfe who was the master of this (in the Book of the New Sun trilogy his narrator has a perfect memory but tells the story as he experienced it at the time so includes his own misunderstanding of what was happening at the time) but it is certainly a fun thing to do. In one story I deliberately included a narrator who was either a compulsive liar or a sociopath (the symptoms are the same) being interviewed by the police so the reader has to work out how much, if anything, of his story is true.

In many cases the narrator simply lacks the maturity or self knowledge to tell the truth. In others they are deliberately trying to mislead and crime fiction has some great examples of this. Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd where the narrator id te murderer (sorry, spoiler) is the most famous but in my view the best is The Face on the Cutting Room Floor by Carson McCabe. It starts with the Christie trick (spoilers again) but then has the murderer giving a second version of events as a suicide note which is also called into question by a second narrator who may have their own reasons for calling doubt on the facts and distorting what actually happened.

Of course, the central thread of any crime novel is for the detective to determine which of the suspects/witnesses are lying so the extension of the deception into the narrator is logical.

It is easier , in some ways, in comedy, as it adds an extra level. The self deluded character is the essence of high comedy and Wodehouse’s Mr Mulliner stories have a narrator who is a fisherman and who would be expected to exagerate. I have used it in my club stories which are a homage to both Wodehouse and Maurice Richardson’s Englebrecht stories. The narrator of the story within a story is oblivious to his own self aggrandisement, self deception and prejudices. At some point I will write one from the viewpoint of the “villain” of the stories who is, of course equally self deluded.

Of course, I could just be deluding myself.

Truly Lost Fantasy

In this age of print on demand and e-books there are few titles not available to buy – even the most obscure.

When I first started reading David Lindsay after the amazing experience of Voyage to Arcturus, it was hard to find anything else by him. I was lucky enough to find rare editions of The Violet Apple and The Haunted Woman in second hand bookshops in London but it wasn’t until a few years ago I managed to get the Xanadu reprint of Sphinx and then Devil’s Tor and The Adventures of Monsieur de Mailley. Now there are several editions of books by and about him available from Amazon, although the wonderful Savoy edition of Arcturus is out of print.

My rediscovery of forgotten fantasy started with Lin Carter’s Ballantine classic fantasy line. Regardless of his shortcomings as a writer, Carter is owed a major debt for bringing some great books back into print and virtually kickstarting the current fantasy boom. As well as Arcturus, he revived the posthumous career of James Branch Cabell, E R Eddison and many more. Other publishers tried to emulate Ballantine’s success including the Newcastle Publishing Company’s Forgotten Fantasy line (who had printed The Haunted Woman) but few had the resources to match the Ballantine range. Many of them are back in print thanks to publishers like Gollancz (who printed many of them in the first place) and others.

Gollancz copied Ballantine and re-issued some forgotten fantasy in the 70s/80s including Visiak’s amazing Medusa and the line also published Philip Pullman’s hard to find first novel Galatea (he doesn’t like it – I do).

However there were still books I wanted to read that I had to look long and hard for.

One was the amazing Twilight of the Gods by Richard Garnett. I was lucky enough to find a copy of the expanded second edition of this which includes several stories not in the Penguin 40s paperback. It has recently been re-issued by Dover Books with the full contents. It is clever, witty, and fantastical and well worth a read. It is as much Saki or John Collier as Tolkein (and talking of Collier, read His Monkey Wife).

Only a few of Cabell’s equally witty fantasies were in print for years and I had to search out second hand hardbacks, but you can now get all of them in print of demand. As a word of warning, though, start with Figures of Earth, Jurgen, The Silver Stallion and The Cream of the Jest as there is a reason they are the ones most readily available.

And talking of Savoy, as I was earlier, it is also worth searching for the out of print first edition of their version of Maurice Richardson’s Exploits of Englebrecht which is also fabulous in every use of the word.

Even in these days of Google it is hard to find new old good fantasy books. Many of the ones I originally sought out were by personal recommendation. I also found some from the introductions to other books like Terri Windling’s Elsewhere anthologies and later her best of the year books. They introduced me to the Garnett book and also W W Tarn’s Treasure of the Isle of Mist and Neil Gunn’s Green Isle of the Great Deep. I also found some contemporary overlooked authors including Noble Smith’s Stolen From Gypsies with its wonderful book within a book. If contemporaries Shakespeare and Cervantes had collaborated on a book this would be it.

Just a couple more to finish with – Pierre Delattre’s Tales of a Dalai Lama and Walking on the Air and Ruthven Todd’s The Lost Traveller. All quite surreal and amazing. Plus America’s lost surrealist Kenneth Patchen whose Journal of Albion Moonlight has echoes of Lautreamont’s Maldoror.

Lovin’ Vian

I’ve just finished reading two books related to the great Boris Vian.

The first is one of his two early novels – Vercoquin and the Plankton – published by the wonderful Wakefield Press (one of my favourite publishers). That only leaves three novels still to come out in an English translation – the other early book Trouble in the Swathes, the last Vernon Sullivan novel They Do Not Realise and his posthumous On n’y échappe pas. There are also some of his plays and his poetry.

The novel has all of the Vian trademarks of extravagant wordplay, extraordinary characters, and casual surrealism although it does not have the heart of his best novels. It feels more like the Vernon Sullivan To Hell With the Ugly than Froth on the Daydream. The translation by Terry Bradford is workmanlike but without the instinctive feel for the material Stanley Chapman had in his work on Froth and Heartsnatcher, however I prefer it to the Paul Knoblotch work for TamTam.

Despite its faults, it is thoroughly recommended to anyone who already loves Vian, and if you are new to this fabulous author, start with Froth.

The other book is Left Bank by Agnes Poirier from Bloomsbury. It is a cultural history of Paris during and immediately after its occupation in World War 2 (which is also the period Vercoquin is set in).

The polymath Vian features heavily in the book alongside his friends Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. As Paris opened up, Vian was a mainstay of the cultural scene on the Left Bank as not only a writer but jazz musician and impresario and the “Surprise Parties” of Vercoquin evolved into the packed cellars of the past war period the way the Zazous evolved.

Poirier’s book fills a gap in the cultural history of the city between the Surrealist and émigré scene in Montparnasse in the 20s and 30s and the 50s and 60s captured in James Campbell’s Paris Interzone and Barry Miles’ The Beat Hotel and as such I find it invaluable.

Anyone interested in how Paris developed and maintained its role as the centre of literary and artistic life should read these books.