"Is that what you'd do, Nolly?"

Jacket of a Portuguese translation of Narabedla Inc.

[Image source: Goodreads .]


Frederik Pohl: Narabedla Inc. (1988)


I retrieved this from the non-recyclable skip at the dump (where they can’t process hardcover books, so don't buy them, or publish them!). It had once been in a Wiltshire County Library but was marked WITHDRAWN and already looked ancient. I had no thought but to accept the random exposure to SF (a genre I've always avoided). Judging from the bites that came up on my wrist, I retrieved some other stuff too. My plan was, not to enjoy what I was reading but to close the door on it by writing about it here. It hasn’t really worked out like that.

Pohl’s method of making SF by reconstructing is well-documented. As with the vision of Norah Platt’s disconnected body-parts at the “barber’s”, the book sails joyfully past aesthetics, and they turn out not to matter too much; it clunks a bit, but it’s zestful and funny and plays a few tricks with your mind.

"Narabdela" is Aldebaran backwards, the red eye of Taurus, 65 light-years away from here. I saw it last week, and now I’ve been to the second moon of the seventh planet.

She had said ten minutes, but actually I was there in five. Of course, Tricia Madigan wasn’t... I looked round at the square -- not at the repellent monster-murdering-man centerpiece of it -- just trying to make sense of what I saw. Each of the streets that radiated from the square was a different style and period of architecture. There were thatched-roof cottages, like Norah Platt’s. There were high-rent-district ranch houses, like the one I borrowed from Malcolm Porchester. There were townhouse condo rows, streets of brownstone fronts, white frame houses with the kind of porches you see in old Andy Hardy movies.
   I looked up at the “sky” for help, but there was no help there. It was, I realized, a lot like the “sky” I’d seen in Henry Davidson-Jones’s office in the World Trade Center.... I turned at last to look at the agonized face of the man being crushed by the monster in the statue... did they have to show it so graphically?

The “sky” is a roof, as Nolly sees even now. It’s also not a statue, only an execution in slow time -- as in Don Giovanni. It wasn’t the World Trade Center but a go-box to a yacht. Davidson-Jones is about 200 years old. The real sky is a lot of starlight while they’re darkside; the Hyades look very close -- I’m not sure if that would be right. But Tricia really is a Texas baton-twirler who can make her hair any colour she likes. This is also Disneyland, isn’t it? But Pohl’s view of how Nolly’s consciousness registers another planet is credible -- the completely strange and the completely commonplace all mixed up. It was the kind of spot Pohl had been knocking around for years, of course.

Pohl was born in 1919 and was into SF early. Pohl’s social consciousness has been a thread in SF forever (it was always one way to go with it), most notably in his Kornbluth collaborations from the 1950s such as The Space Merchants, which registers the consumerism of the era of cars with fins, household appliances, and Vance Packard’s books about the ad industry. Pohl’s most productive time as a non-collaborating author came later, from the mid-1970s onwards. The interest in society and social responsibility and moral conundrums is manifest throughout Narabedla Inc., along with amused interests in science, accountancy, working out in the gym, opera and testosterone. The latter two are a part of the book that Pohl transforms out of James M. Cain’s Serenade (1938). Pohl good-naturedly severs most of the raw and thoroughly non-PC power of the earlier book, resolves the effeminizing Winston Hawes into the inter-planetary Davidson-Jones, and produces a medical explanation (adult mumps) for the swollen glands that affect both the baritone-hero’s voice and his testicles; in Serenade, this was all about loss of toro.

The name “Narabedla” isn’t Pohl’s invention either, because in 1957 there was Falcons from Narabedla by Marion Zimmer Bradley, a prolific author of science fantasy who was also a gay feminist and wrote I am a Lesbian (1962) under the pseudonym of Lee Chapman. She died in 1999 and her ashes were scattered on Glastonbury Tor.

Pohl was a super-fit sixty-nine when he wrote Narabedla Inc. -- he’s still writing today, I think* -- but it’s only natural that serious illness should be another of its prominent themes. As Rosmarie Waldrop has reminded us, via Tristan Tsara, collage produces self-portrait; and that’s how Narabedla Inc. sunnily comes across.

You won't be looking for prose style here, but after you’ve snapped it up for the story you still have little memory-lapses of radiant oddness like these:

So he does like a dog when it hangs out his tongue, only Barak don’t have a tongue, so he gets his cooling from evaporation in that ugly patch of fur by his dipstick, you know? He just leaks into it and lets it evaporate to cool off.

all three of the little kids hopped over the fence. Whistling and chirping in joy, they ran after the scurrying mice. Then each of them picked up one mouse by the tail and swallowed it. I could see the little animals writhing and struggling as they went sliding down those transparent digestive tracts.

*

NB Wikipedia lists this book under the British title Narabedla Ltd, and that's the title most people seem to use.

*Frederik Pohl died in 2013, aged 93.

[This and the following two notes are slightly-revised flotsam from my former website. This one was written in 2006.]

Jacket of the first edition of The Sun Chemist

[Image source: WorldOfBooks  .]

Lionel Davidson - The Sun Chemist (1976)


This is as good, perhaps, as The Riddle of the Sands. Of course, I try to take it apart to see how it works. The most evident technical challenge with a can't-put-it-down adventure is to hold the reader -- to avoid, or stave off, the disillusionment that threatens when mysteries are finally unravelled and the end looms in sight.

The Sun Chemist begins as a mystery of finding out, full of clues, an unfailingly entertaining procedure while it lasts. Later, it switches to a different kind of adventure, the one where there is someone (who?) on the narrator’s trail. Here, the author needs to be nimble. I am not quite clear why the biffing of assistant Hopcroft, so early in the book, doesn’t induce more paranoia. It's all very well for the narrator to talk about it flippantly, but would he really think the same way? And when, finally, the narrator has the precious manuscript in his hands, we need to accept that he doesn’t think more coolly -- which might mean, for instance, staying in a provincial library, taking dozens of copies, and mailing them all over the world. He's perfectly safe; he has infinite time; but instead he hustles wantonly off to Heathrow airport with the manuscript in his bag, thus re-entering the very narrow corridor that his enemies can keep under observation.

Still, the resulting loss of the manuscript is necessary, not only for credibility but to produce the right sort of ending, muted, defeated, still delightfully flippant.

We mustn't imagine that the areas of structural weakness (or “nimbleness”) could be avoided. If not precisely in this form, they’d emerge somewhere else, because the basic premise that we readers agree to concede (“the real world and the adventure world are the same”) is a false one. As a form, nevertheless, the adventure story can be better or worse.

Adventure stories get better, too, as they age, because they start yielding up incidental information about their culture. This one presents a fascinating view of young Israel, without the shadow of Palestine, that's now wholly closed to us. (We want Igor Druyanov to succeed, for some reason -- perhaps an ingrained pursuit of truth, in this case happily not playing into the hands of corporations... For why should scientists seem so wearily to do so? Are the good of humanity and the good of the corporate really just the same thing, corporates being the executives of our benefits?)

Oh yes, one more thing -- Ham Wyke’s crucial slip about the warm desk-lamp isn't credible -- no-one would confuse spoken material with experienced material in this sort of way. As a species we're skilled deceivers and we soon learn to keep the two categories far apart in our mental libraries.


*

[Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolymsky_Heights .]


A brief addendum on Lionel Davidson's Kolymsky Heights (1994): This big book is (and is commonly recognized as) an exceptional triumph of the thriller genre. Only at the very death (on ice in the Baring Strait) does a certain level of doubt intrude. It’s a book written with great intuition; it doesn’t need to add up. Never once do we hear what the hero thinks about the extraordinary things he is shown inside the research station. The title refers to a not very important range of hills. The hero and heroine are reunited in the end -- very old-fashioned. The whole Japan / tramp-steamer episode is really an irrelevance (and surely Porter’s arrival at Green Cape is a bad way of drawing attention to yourself, close to the very spot where you plan to operate).

None of this matters. The book is an immense record of what people did. It’s very exciting. The “more” which the thriller is supposed at its best to be weighted with (“more than just a thriller”) is simply the sense of being there; fiddling with an engine, with gears, waiting for a flight. Siberia is drawn on for its mythic power -- the most impossible place to get into, the most impossible place to get out of.

As in The Sun Chemist, the quest is not for riches or salvation but information -- credibly detailed fictional science. It hangs here in a vacuum, this central section, with its lovely meeting with Ludmilla. As if the author invites you to forget it if you don’t want to bother with it.

An early scene such as Lazenby catching a salmon has nothing germane for the plot, but it’s a scene that confesses to being part of a thriller. “His gear was some way back, and when he reached it the light was too bad for him to see the gauge on his weighing hook.” Already there's the urgency, the recalcitrance of things, we're already being thrilled.


*


(Lionel Davidson was born in 1922 in Hull. He died in 2009.)


[Written in 2001-2002]

One of Michael MacCurdy's woodcut illustrations for a 1985 edition of The Man Who Planted Trees

[Image source: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/854839572996892042/ .]



Jean Giono: The Man Who Planted Trees (1953)


According to his daughter (in an afterword), Jean Giono (1895 - 1970), a hardworking professional writer well thought of by Gide, Malraux and Henry Miller, did not realize that his contribution to the Reader's Digest  feature The Most Remarkable Man I ever Met was supposed to be factual. He did write his story to give the impression it was factual, with precise dates and locations. The story is about a shepherd who slowly reafforests an area of moorland, and of the remarkable social regeneration that follows. I rather tend to think that Giono's deceit was intentional, gaining the story welcome publicity and posing the question rather more sharply in our minds, whether this kind of afforestation scheme would really be practicable and whether it would indeed work out with the good effects described in the fable.

[I have doubts about the survival of the seedlings in a location otherwise so short of leafy shoots. I think because of the wind you'd have to make (or grow) windbreaks first, and fence the saplings, which could not go unnoticed. Nature is intolerant of introduced plantings. But I don't really know.]

Just as Elzéard Bouffier ignored both world wars, so the story ignores all social and economic changes and supplies no answer about rural employment, subsuming everything to the dream of an acorn. Since Bouffier lives in total isolation his class and culture cease to exist and do not trouble a middle-class audience -- Wordsworth had done this too. It is thus a fairy tale in which little unseen acts of altruism visibly transform the world. It is an extension of the much-cherished dream that beautifying our garden does good to our society, and that it is not necessary to communicate with that society in order to benefit it. In fact it's better not to: "If they'd suspected what he was up to they'd have tried to stop him".

Giono is good on the forest as a reservoir of water and on nature's ability, once properly started, to grow on hugely and to self-transform. He saw the power in the acorn rather than its vulnerability. Belief in the virtues of tree-planting was nothing new, but Giono pitched his fable not at estate-owners but at helpless, ordinary people. His simple tale with its optimistic message thus provided both a fantasy and a striking contribution to popular environmental awareness in the West, subsequently of great political importance. His tale was self-validating, itself an acorn that burgeoned astonishingly.

The implications for a political literature are: that it has to be so simple as to be held totally in the mind after one reading; that all style is counter-productive; that its political meaning is created by the reader rather than the author. 

*

(The original French title is: L'homme qui plantait des arbres.)


[Written in 2007]