Bryan Murphy's Blog, page 4

The Sellout, continued

The daftness of racism is mirrored in the categories used to describe a “race”. In the UK, for instance, “Asian” refers only to people from South Asia. I'm not sure where that leaves people from East Asia, West Asia or Central Asia. In the USA, things seem to be even more bizarre. The term “Caucasian” can be applied to people born on the other side of the globe to the Caucusus. I think it means “white”. Then there is “Hispanic”, which implies you're not white, even if you come from Spain or Portugal. And anyone with the tiniest trace of African heritage is deemed “black”, irrespective of the evidence of one's eyes. In “The Sellout”, Paul Beatty makes riotous fun of the whole shebang surrounding “blackness” and pours cold water over the self-righteousness of racists of all persuasions, while leaving the reader in no doubt that racism is still pervavasive and still pernicious. He is a master of language endowed with rare insight into human society and the human mind. I hope that one day he will turn his attention to this far side of the Pond.

The Sellout

You know how everything is supposed to get worse, at least worse than it was back when we were in our prime? Well, very often it doesn't. Take racism in the UK. When I was a lad in the 1960s, people here were expected to be mildly racist. The football club I blindly followed (and still do) was one of the first in England to hire a black player, Gerry Francis, a man from South Africa. He was a very skillful player who soon earned enough respect and affection from the fans for them to refer to him by his name rather than as “the darkie”. Fast forward a few decades and the whole town is in the streets to welcome home a black sportswoman, Kelly Holmes, and her two Olympic gold medals. There is still far too much racism in the country, and it is still exploited by unscrupulous politicians, but its focus has shifted. The grandchildren of immigrants with “black” skin are now generally accepted as bone fide Brits, and something similar is happening with the children of immigrants from South Asia, if they opt for integration. The Other now comes dressed in “white” skin and hails from Eastern Europe. For the pleasure of being nasty to them, we have just given our European partners the V-sign and are preparing to chop those two fingers off. Silly really. Which brings me to Paul Beatty's comic masterpiece of anti-racism and anti-idiocy, “The Sellout”
[to be continued]

Success: a review

Amis's prose is always a joy to read, and sweetens the company of the grotesques with which he populates his tales. Yet "Martinland" is a bitter place, where only the weak can be strong, and their strength is never enough to protect them, especially not from themselves. Be careful when you laugh, for the wind will certainly change. Now, which of his works to relish next?

Killing Highsmith with Hollywood

A steamy lesbian romance taken from The Price of Salt, a story by the acid queen of crime, Patricia Highsmith. What could possibly go wrong? I guess the answer is: Hollywood. First, it cannot resist the temptation to try to suffuse with glamour one of the least glamorous periods of USAmerican history, the 1950s. The result, “Carol”, is as artificial as one of those 1950s postcards using touched-up colour. Then there is the waste of two major acting talents: Cate Blanchett, who seems to be playing an actress forced to play the stereotypical rich-bitch with a heart, and Rooney Mara, who seems to be playing an actress forced to play the stereotypical ingénue. Their characters are extended instead of developed, whereas the minor characters are more interesting but not pursued. Its only saving grace, for me, is its soporific effect.

Dementia with added superpowers

Last year, my 90-year-old stepfather fell victim to dementia. You don’t need me to explain how hard it was for him, or how rapid his decline. What surprised me was how he created an alternative world of his own and how steadfastly he maintained his central part in it until his body gave up on him. As a tribute, I wanted to suggest in my writing that even if we, as a society or as individuals, give up on people with dementia, they do not give up on themselves, and deserve admiration for it. That may sound pretty heavy, and labouring the point would be counter-productive, so I have not made “Charlie” the protagonist, and I have given him super-powers as a way of saying that we dismiss people with dementia at our peril. Now, I also believe that the very idea of super-powers is preposterous, so I have made Charlie’s limited and unreliable. And, to emphasise his humanity, I show him using them with both caprice and vindictiveness. I hope readers will not laugh at him, but laugh with him, and emphathise with him. Let us not forget that we are all more likely to get dementia than cancer.

Charlie has dementia, superpowers and deep black humour. Meet SuperOldie! http://bit.ly/1QoVeGR

SuperOldie is here!

Charlie suffers from dementia, superpowers and black humour. SuperOldie is here! http://bit.ly/1QoVeGR

The Hardest Word

To write science fiction, even the dystopian kind, is to express optimism, for inherent in all science fiction is the claim that there will actually be a future.
The future in whose existence we can have most confidence is of course the near future, which has been shaped mostly by us old-timers. Because it is likely in many ways to be a dark future, today’s young people deserve an apology from us. So here comes one: “Sorry!” On behalf of my whole generation.
From my generation of Brits, it has to be even more heartfelt, because we had things so much easier than most people elsewhere, and therefore have more to answer for. We were born after the Second World War had ended; we had the National Health Service but no National Service; our politicians declined to send us to kill and die in Vietnam; we were nurtured on free school milk, given grants to study and found jobs if we wanted them. Naturally, we wanted more, though for everyone, not just ourselves. Indeed, we got more, but mostly for ourselves.
The end of those days of plenty was foreshadowed when a Minister of Education stopped milk being offered to the nation’s children and thereby earned herself the nickname “The Milk Snatcher” to rhyme with her surname: Thatcher, a word no longer connected with roofing so much as with a longing to return to feudal levels of inequality, a phenomenon that tends to favour the older generation, at least while pensions still exist.
To my eyes, today’s young people are showing amazing creativity, coupled with a superior resistance to bullshit, so maybe we can claim their education as our one success. Will that creativity and perspicacity be enough to guarantee them a future? Frankly, I doubt it. Our problem as a species, in my view, is that our technological evolution has far outpaced our social evolution. Nihilists who see the continued existence of human life as an optional irrelevance, from the left-behind “Neo-Cons” of yesterday to today’s “Islamic State”, are more than happy to use the former to forestall the latter, and their successors will have an even better chance of finishing the job.
So, probably, no future for anyone. That means that today’s science fiction is sheer fantasy. Dammit, I never set out to write Fantasy. To paraphrase Oliver Hardy: “This is a fine mess we’ve got you into”. Joking apart, to the youngsters, once again, sorry.

Meditation without Mumbo-Jumbo

That is the title of a book I’d like to read. Or write. It seems there is good evidence that meditation can have beneficial psychological effects. It isn’t rocket science: if you calm your mind and relax your body in the middle of the day, it’s likely to be as good as a siesta. We don’t need to take on board an encyclopaedia of mumbo-jumbo to enjoy a siesta, and the same must be true for meditation. Acupuncture is similar. It turns out that sticking pins in you can help reduce pain, but it is not especially important where they go, and it has nowt to do with cosmic energy. The potential benefits of yoga also have more to do with the laws of nature than the machinations of gurus. Maybe the book I’m after has already been written. I guess if I were money-savvy, I wouldn’t even dream of writing it; instead, I’d be dreaming up a load of mumbo-jumbo with which to sell siesta programmes.

Dementia

I’m just back from my native land, where I saw my 90 year-old stepfather into a residential home which specializes in the care of the dementia from which he is suffering. It got me thinking about the way the old are treated in literature, on those few occasions they are allowed across its hallowed portals. At best they are treated with condescension and sentimentality. Rarely is there any attempt to get inside their heads, particularly if they are suffering from dementia. That’s hardly surprising, perhaps, since old people with dementia are not in a position to explain themselves clearly, let alone write about their experience and feelings. This opacity is touched upon in a rare acknowledgement of it in the book I’m currently reading: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, so kudos to him. I’m as guilty as anyone else: the only really old character in my writing is the retired spook Franco Tira in Murder by Suicide, and he is largely a stereotype, and no more demented than he was when in his prime. To counterbalance this, I’m thinking of writing a tale about a very old person with superpowers, ones that will be put to no good use. That way I can satirise our attitudes both towards the “paranormal” and towards old age.

Shameless puff

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