The Communist Manifesto

 'A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism.'

Thus begins Marx&Engels Communist Manifesto, this evening's quick read. (Pro tip: the Penguin Little Black Classics edition is very cheap)

'All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies.'

The manifesto's intention is to present Communist views to tackle 'this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism'. 

At its best, the Manifesto reads like the grandiose introduction to a world-changing adventure story, or the scene-setting prologue at the start of an actioney video game. (In particular, I am reminded of the Race Intro narrations from World of Warcraft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQN5PgnBgU0) We are given a simplified overview of history, and empowering call to get out there and save the world:

'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. 

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. [...]

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.'

The Manifesto's criticisms of the capitalism are often still applicable: wage repression and the declining living standards of the working classes, etc, etc. And some of the suggested improvements are still appealing, eg. a progressive tax system. And there are some good lines throughout, eg. 'Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.'

But the manifesto obviously has problems. A sizable section deals with responses to Communism's critics: this section does not seem at all large enough given the failures of Communism in the previous century. The tone of the authors often feels too confident, like prophets assured that their visions of the coming Utopia have come from some Proletarian Deity. 

Perhaps the worst thing is how simplified it is; I haven't read anything else by Marx or Engels, but I'm assuming the manifesto was their way of getting their ideas a wider audience, by dumbing it down and making it accessible to anyone: the manifesto is to their other work what Brian Cox's 'Wonders of the Solar System' is to, say, Sir Roger Penrose's 'The Road to Reality'. 

I get the feeling that if you replaced 'bourgeoisie' with 'Corporate Overlords', then a lot of it could once again be be very popular with those leaning to the left. If you replaced 'bourgeoisie' with 'Liberal Metropolitan Elite', then a lot of it could be popular with those leaning further towards the right.

I would write more, but I'm getting sleepy. In summary: it's a historically important read which has some good bits and you can get through it in one sitting; I have not been converted to Communism.

Magic Is Bad

"You shall not permit a sorceress to live" - Exodus 22:18

“A man or a woman who is a medium or a necromancer shall surely be put to death." - Leviticus 20:27

Those lines from the Bible make it quite clear that Magic is Bad, and were the basis for Europe's witch hunting craze during the 15th to 18th centuries. The Islamic ruling on magic is equally clear, and comes from the Hadith (the Qur'an's expanded universe):

"The prescribed punishment for the magician is that he be executed by the sword."

Islam, like Christianity, affirms the existence of magic and assigns it to evil forces. Christianity assigns it to demons and Satan (the Devil). Islam assigns it to evil jinn and Iblis (the Devil). In Islam, 'satan' is not the name or title of a single Devil; it can be applied to any human or jinn who is opposed to Islam and Allah. This is slightly similar to an early Hebrew tradition in which the word 'satan' (adversary) was applied to any angel or servant whom God sent to oppose or tempt someone (to be their adversary) - there are examples of this usage in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. These 'satans' are loyal servants of God, doing his bidding, and were eventually merged together into the single Jewish Satan (The Adversary) from the Book of Job, who is still a loyal servant of God. The 'satan' jinn of Islam are against God, but since God controls everything, they're also doing exactly what he wants? Islam is particularly irritating because it doesn't seem to have anything resembling a coherent mythology, because Muhammad was an illiterate merchant who only knew bits of Jewish and Christian lore, which he slammed inconsistently together, sprinkling some Arabian folklore on top.

Umar, the second Caliph of Islam (634CE - 644CE), asked his soldiers to kill every fortuneteller and magician they found during their campaigns against the Persian and Byzantine empires. However, later Caliphs were more relaxed, so it was down to the hardcore Muslims to remind everyone how to deal with magicians. During the reign of Al-Walid I, a magician was present at the caliph's court. He wowed the audience by severing a man's head then re-attaching it to his body: the audience cheered and yelled, "OMFG! He can raise the dead!"

But one audience member wasn't impressed. He went to the next show with a sword strapped to his back. (No security searches back then.) As the the show began, the Good Muslim charged through the crowd, sword drawn, and chopped the magicians head off.

Turning to the shocked crowd, the Good Muslim yelled, "If he can really raise the dead, let him raise himself!"

The Good Muslim was arrested and imprisoned.

Bilal Philips

Having done a bit more research into the author of my current Islam book, I discover that he holds fairly extreme views. I bought it in an Islamic Bookshop in Nottingham, so expected it to be fairly mainstream. Yes, the author is a Sunni Muslim, who make up 80% of Muslims. But he is a Hanbali Sunni Muslim, who make up 15% of Muslims. And he is a Salafi Hanbali Sunni Muslim, who make up an even smaller proportion of Muslims. His views are fundamentalist and extreme, which have caused him to be banned from entering several countries (including the UK), although his views are mainstream in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Since Jihadi Islam (Al-Qaeda, ISIS, etc) is the most extreme branch of Salafi Islam, we could consider this author's views a sort-of 'moderate ISIS': he obviously shares a lot of their beliefs, but isn't quite THAT crazy. He has apparently denounced ISIS and received death threats from them.

Keep all that in mind when thinking about my most recent Islam posts, and any more I write based on his book. I feel I should re-iterate something I said in the first post of this new series:

'Since the Qur'an is a very tedious and self-contradictory book, it doesn't give you a very clear idea of Islamic belief, which meant that generations of Muhammad's successors have had to perform arduous exegesis to figure out what God was supposedly going on about... this means that it's very easy to create-your-own Islam to suit your existing prejudices and ideas, hence there are a billion interpretations of what Islam means.'

To give you some idea of the various branches of Islam, here's a handy diagram: 

God's Awesome Oneness

Following on from my last post (about Allah summoning to Eden every human being who has ever existed or ever will exist, in order to clarify with them that he alone is their God), Muslims believe that the Islam is the natural way humans are supposed to live: any deviations from the natural Islamic way of life are caused by the environment. If children are left alone, they grow up being good Muslims believing in Allah (obviously, no studies are cited to back up this assertion). A child is not born a blank slate, but an Islamic slate (geddit?). The natural Islamic way of life is called the 'Fitrah'. As a child grows up, environmental pressures - friends, parents, government, jinn, etc - lead them astray, turning them into Christians, Jews, Communists, etc.

'There is no god but God.' Islam is very big on the oneness and almightyness of God. It's extremely easy to blaspheme in Islam, if we're taking my book's stance as fairly orthodox. Here are some beliefs that go against the Islamic belief in God's awesome oneness:

Free will. Allah has complete control over the universe. Nothing happens without his will. Everything is under his control. (Since belief in free will is affirmed two chapters later, because otherwise the afterlife Reward vs Punishment thing would be utterly stupid, perhaps a denial of free will is also blasphemous?)

Associating other gods with Allah. Polytheism and dualism are bad. Christianity is bad because it divides God into three persons: Father, Son, Holy Spirit, united in substance. No: God is one. Deifying humans is also, obvs, a no-no: Muslims believe Jesus was a human prophet whose teaching was warped over time, resulting in Christianity.

Denying God's existence. Since my book is authored by a Sunni Muslim who disapproves of Sufi Islam, mystical theology - all is Allah, Allah is all - is also in this category: denying God's separateness from the rest of reality is as bad as denying him altogether.

Humanizing God. Allah cannot be depicted in human or animal form. Allah is so beyond such imagery that, by depicting 'him' this way, you are implying a limitation of him: this is the beginnings of idolatry. Sistine Chapel bad.

The belief that energy can neither be created or destroyed is blasphemous, because Allah created everything and can destroy everything whenever he jolly well likes.

Praying to something, or someone, other than God. Allah has complete control over creation: all prayers should be directed to him. Praying to something, or someone, else implies that you believe that thing or person has powers over creation to rival Allah's. Don't pray to Muhammad. Don't pray to saints. Don't pray to angels. Likewise, belief in omens and charms, lucky and unlucky, are offensive to God, because they imply that the material thing (rabbit's foot, 4-leaf clover, broken mirror, etc) has powers over creation to rival Allah's total control. Fortunetelling of any kind is bad, because only Allah knows and controls the future: reading your horoscope is offensive to God.

God is one. God is all-powerful. Free will doesn't exist but also does. Only God knows the future. God is utterly transcendent and beyond our comprehension. Everyone with me so far?

Islamic Incoherence

A perfect example of how incoherent Islamic theology is: in chapter 1 of 'The Fundamentals of Tawheed (Islamic Monotheism)', I learned that belief in free will is blasphemous, because this belief goes against the idea that Allah has complete control over his creation (and the Qur'an verses which attest this); in chapter 3, I learn that if humanity doesn't have free will, then the whole reward and punishment thing is, obviously, pointless, therefore humans have free will, otherwise this religion doesn't make sense. Presumably this book went through multiple drafts. Presumably people proofread it. Doublethink at its finest.

Like early Christianity, Islam believes in bodily resurrection on Judgement Day, rather than the immediate post-mortem transition to Heaven or Hell envisioned by modern Christianity. When someone dies, their body disintegrates and their soul is put in a suspended state called 'Barzakh': the soul is frozen, oblivious, until Judgement Day, when the body is rebuilt and the soul has to confront its life choices, with their resultant reward or punishment. From the soul's perspective, it is an immediate transition to Judgement Day: suspended souls to do not perceive time, like one in a deep sleep.

Christianity, over the centuries, came up with a few explanations for what happened to people who died before Jesus, people who lived too early to share in the salvation he brought. They had to be in Hell. Some Christians just accepted this in an uncaring 'oh well, tough for them, lucky me being born when and where I was!' way. Others developed the idea of the 'Harrowing of Hell', which is alluded to in the New Testament: Jesus' descent into Hell after the crucifixion. In some interpretations, he smashed his way through Hell to rescue the old prophets and preach to the righteous, saving as many as he could and leading them to Heaven. In the 4th century Gospel of Nicodemus, Jesus conquers Hell and turns it from Satan's Kingdom into Satan's Prison. In Dante's Inferno, the two poets pass some ruined sections of Hell laid waste during Jesus' assault on the underworld (I imagined this as a sort-of holy equivalent of the Dead Scar in Quel'thalas from the Warcraft games).

Muhammad got in early so no speculations on this subject would be necessary, and also covered what would happen to people from different cultures who didn't know anything about Islam and God's rules. Obviously, he's already established that free will doesn't exist but also does, so don't expect anything too profound:

Shortly after creating Adam, the first man, God extracted from Adam's loins all of the future generations of humanity. He laid these out in front him, and spoke to them all face-to-face, saying:

"Am I not your Lord?"

And every single human who has ever existed or ever will exist replied: "Yes, we testify to it."

God then explained why he decided to have this meeting:

"That was in case you (mankind) should say on the Day of Resurrection, 'Surely we were unaware of all this. We had no idea that You, Allah, were our God. No one told us we were supposed to worship you alone."

Presumably, God then wiped all their memories so he could surprise them on Judgement Day, then shoved everyone back into Adam's testicles.

Islamic Determinism

Welcome to a new series of 'Mike Learns About Islam and Writes About It So You Can Learn Too' (working title). I'm currently reading up on the fundamentals of Sunni Islamic Monotheism. Since the Qur'an is a very tedious and self-contradictory book, it doesn't give you a very clear idea of Islamic belief, which meant that generations of Muhammad's successors have had to perform arduous exegesis to figure out what God was supposedly going on about. Some Muslims say that this is part of the text's holiness: God speaks, through the Qur'an, differently to each person. However, this means that it's very easy to create-your-own Islam to suit your existing prejudices and ideas, hence there are a billion interpretations of what Islam means. There are only two beliefs unifying all Muslims: (a) there is one god, Allah, and (b) Muhammad was his prophet. To quote one author: '[Muhammad] left serious theological difficulties to his more reflective successors'.

With that disclaimer out of the way, let's learn about one Sunni Muslim's interpretation of Islam. He's got a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D in Islamic theology and has been a university professor in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, and the book is apparently quite popular in Muslim communities, so we can assume his interpretation is fairly orthodox.

One of the things brought up in the first chapter is a heresy that has re-emerged again and again in Islamic culture throughout history. It's something that people really like to believe in. It's very important in many branches of Christianity.

Free will.

In Christianity, free will is often used as part of the explanation for the existence of evil in a cosmos created by a good God: true free will entails the ability to choose evil over good; freely-chosen good is greater than forced good, the existence of evil is a price worth paying (Benjamin Franklyn: 'They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety').

None of that in Islam. God created everything and predetermined everything. Which means that God created (a lot of) people with the intention of making them suffer because they did what he decided they would do, giving them no choice in the matter.

Some Qur'an verses against free will:

'Allah created you and whatever you do.' 

'It was not you who threw when you threw, but it was Allah who threw.'

'No calamity strikes except by Allah's permission'

'If the whole of mankind gathered together in order to do something to help you, they would only be able to do something for you which Allah had already written.'

'Had I wished, I could have granted each soul its right guidance. But My decree is binding: I shall fill Hell with both jinn and humans.'

'You did not slay them; it was Allah who slew them.'

'The Prince of Darkness' by Jeffrey Burton Russell

In The Prince of Darkness (1989), Jeffrey B. Russell has condensed his academic quartet on the history of the concepts of evil and the Devil from antiquity to the modern world - The Devil (1977), Satan (1981), Lucifer (1984), and Mephistopheles (1986) – into one slim book intended for a popular audience. The academic quartet has a total page count of 1223; The Prince of Darkness is only 288 pages including appendices and index. There is an astonishing amount of information in this small volume.

Burton begins with the ancient world mythologies, looking at the elements in them which influenced the Devil concept, such as: the chaos monsters including Leviathan and Tiamat; conflicts between gods, such as the Greek war between the Olympians and the Titans which ended with the Titans imprisoned in Tartarus; gods and spirits of death and destruction; and Zoroastrianism, with its good god and bad god in conflict across the cosmos until the end of time. 

Following this, we get an overview of the ancient Hebrew tradition leading to the development of fallen angels: the early Hebrew monotheists ascribed both good and evil to the One God, but the Jews later wanted to distance evil from the God they worshiped, to absolve him of blame, so they had God delegate some evil to the angels, loyal servants under his command, such as the satan in the Book of Job (this is modern Judaism's view of Satan: a loyal servant of the good-bad God). This delegating God calls for angel volunteers to act as tempters, satans: 1 Kings 22:19-23:

'And Micaiah said, “Therefore hear the word of the LORD: I saw the LORD sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left; and the LORD said, ‘Who will entice Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?’ And one said one thing, and another said another. Then a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD, saying, ‘I will entice him.’ And the LORD said to him, ‘By what means?’ And he said, ‘I will go out, and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ And he said, ‘You are to entice him, and you shall succeed; go out and do so.’ Now therefore behold, the LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; the LORD has declared disaster for you.”'

Delegated angels became rebel angels in Judaism's apocalyptic period, when the the Jews were convinced the world was going to end any day now. During this period a lot of texts, now considered apocryphal, developed different versions of the fallen angel myth. In some stories, Satan is kicked out of heaven for refusing to bow to newly created humanity. In others, angels fall to Earth lusting after human women. In others, the evil lord Mastema, Prince of Evil, leads an army of evil against God, constantly trying to thwart God's good plan. 

Early Christianity was a branch of Apocalyptic Judaism; the New Testament further developed apocalyptic and diabolical concepts. The early Christians believed that Satan was ruler of the world, 'the prince of this world', who would be punished at the end of time (any day now) by being shoved into Hell. Jesus' sacrifice had broken Satan's complete hold over humanity: those that turned to Jesus were saved. The pagan gods existed, but they were fallen angels who ruled the Roman empire. In the second century, Justin Martyr developed one of the first fully fleshed-out Christian cosmological worldviews: in it, he described 3 categories of evil beings: Satan, a great angel, who fell from grace through sin at the beginning of time; the rest of the fallen angels, who fell from heaven when they lusted after human women; and demons, the hybrid monsters of illicit angel-human interspecies sex. The evil ones had control over the world; Jesus' first coming signaled the beginning of the end of their reign. At the second coming they would be cast into Hell.

Over the centuries this worldview changed. There were stories about Christ's descent into Hell during the 3 days between death and resurrection: he breached the doors of Hell, preached to the righteous (who were only in there because they happened to be born too soon to convert to Christianity in their lifetimes), and locked Satan&Co up, turning their old Kingdom of the Dead into their prison. Satan&Co did not have complete free reign on earth; they had been imprisoned by Jesus, who would finish the job at the second coming. 

The earlier threefold division between Satan, fallen angels, and demons was abandoned: they all became the same, angels who fell with Satan at the beginning. Satan's power over earth and his imprisonment were combined somewhat contradictorily, both simultaneously occurring straight after his fall: Satan&Co were imprisoned in Hell after their rebellion, but also have considerable powers over the Earth.

There are chapters covering: the entertaining mythologies of Gnosticism and Manichaeism, both dualist cosmologies with a good god and a bad god; early Christian heresies, and how Satan became associated with them; the Desert Fathers, monks who believed the Devil was constantly tempting them; various theologians and how they reconciled evil with a good God – these early theologians culminated in Augustine of Hippo, who synthesized their ideas into the classical view of Western Christianity. 

Medieval Christianity is the next stage of Burton's history. As Christianity became popular, it got mixed up with a lot of pagan traditions (Saturnalia was a pagan festival of gift-giving over the Winter Solstice. Eostre was pagan deity of Spring who had a festival at the Spring Equinox.), and so the Christian Devil got mixed up with a lot of pagan traditions: he gained horns and cloven feet from the god Pan; he enjoys Pagan-style celebrations, sacrifices, the Wild Hunt. Lilith is Lucifer's mother. The Devil of Medieval folklore has a lot of strange similarities to Santa Claus. Throughout history there has been a divide in religions between the popular/folk religion of the masses, and the reasoned out religion of the elites. This divide was far wider in olden days, when literacy levels were extremely low and so the masses could not read sacred texts for themselves. 

We get an overview of Medieval theologians such as Anselm, Eruigena, and Aquinas, and a look at Cathar dualism (a medieval gnostic Christianity). And then along came Dante, who created one of the most important depictions of the Devil: trapped deep in the Earth, at the centre of the universe, farthest from God, in a cold, dark, place; immobile, bestial, pathetic. Dante's Satan is contrasted with the brightness, warmth, and lively mobility of Heaven. To many theologians, evil is nothingness, non-being: Satan's pathetic immobility shows him as the personification of evil as lifeless non-being.

In the Middle Ages, clerics wrote mystery plays to bolster the faith of uneducated laypeople. Some told the stories of Satan's rebellion, Adam and Eve in Eden, and on through Old Testament scenes. The plays end with the passion, and therefore triumph, of Jesus over Satan. Satan in these plays, while evil, is also made into a comically inept supervillain whose plans are foiled by God.

The witch hunting craze influenced popular perception of the Devil. How the Devil was thought of during the Reformation. The early development of the Faust legend; diabolical themes in the plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare (Doctor Faustus and Hamlet, respectively). A whole chapter is devoted to Milton's Paradise Lost, because it is one of the best things ever written and massively important in the history of the Devil idea. 

And then we get to the rise of unbelief in the Age of Enlightenment. Rationalism and empiricism weakened Christianity, belief in God and the Devil. Some branches of Christianity tried to adapt to this by almost eliminating the Devil from their theology. God and the Devil were seen as primitive superstitions. The Marquis de Sade, from whom we get Sadism, used the atheist argument to advocate cruelty and hedonism: if you enjoy torture, do it, because pleasure is good. Geothe wrote Faust, presenting a new Devil for a new world ('Mephistopheles in the most important literary Devil since Milton's, but the difference between Milton's Satan and Goethe's Mephisto is the difference between a basically Christian and a basically secular world view').

A Romantic movement arose in response to the Enlightenment. They valued emotions and feelings over reason and logic. They gave new meaning to traditional symbols. Satan, fighting against Jehovah, was a heroic figure fighting for freedom from illegitimate authority. Jesus, against Satan, was a hero fighting unjust worldly authority. Thus in Romantic eyes Satan could represent heroism, individualism and the strive for freedom, but also isolation and selfishness. The artists of this period played with the Devil concept in interesting but often incoherent way. William Blake's mythology, especially The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Lord Byron's Cain: A Mystery. Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, which combines the Greek Prometheus with the loving Jesus and the heroic Satan. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the first science fiction novel, about a man gaining Godlike powers, creating life: diabolical imagery surrounds the monster, but Frankenstein replaces supernatural horror with scientific horror. Victor Hugo's The End of Satan.

Romanticism split into Naturalism, which spurned the supernatural in favour of realism, and Decadence, an exploration of human sensuality. The latter led to a rise of occultism. Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil. Lautreamont's The Chants of Maldoror. J-K Huysman investigated the occult Satanism of his day and wrote the novel The Damned, a fictional account of his experiences in this secret world. Huysman was so repelled by what he witnessed that he converted to Catholicism. 

After being attacked on scientific and historical fronts, religion was then attacked by psychologists: Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Carl Jung. Freud argued that the Devil was the personification of repressed unconscious desires. Klein argued that since children easily divide the world between good and bad, while adults learn ambivalence and shades of grey, the religious divide between good and evil is a sign of psychological immaturity. Carl Jung saw the Devil as an important psychological symbol that helped us face up to the existence of evil. Dostoevsky's The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov defends religion while facing up to problem of evil and presenting compelling evil characters. Twentieth century horrors re-emphasized the problem of evil. Satan in modern literature: Tolkien, CS Lewis, Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, the short stories of Flannery O'Connor, etc. The Devil in pop culture and music. LaVeyan Satanism ('their Satanic Bible is a melange of hedonistic maxims and incoherent occultism').

Burton believes that a lack of belief in a transcendent evil force makes the world more dangerous, and he looks at the arguments on both sides. My own opinion on this matter is undecided.

This is an astonishingly erudite book, and contains an incredible amount of information for less than 300 pages. My only complaint is that the Devil in Islam is not explored: Burton says in his introduction that this is treated in the Lucifer volume of his original quartet, but I feel like he could have fit even a short chapter on Islam's Devil into this book. Nevertheless, I thoroughly recommend this book for a relatively easy-reading history of the Devil and evil in human thought. 

An Islamic Bookshop

Today I went for a wander around one of the more multicultural areas of Nottingham. Not understanding the languages of overheard conversations, shop signs and products made me feel like a tourist going 'Ooooo! Look at all the foreign things!' It was like a mini holiday. Among the strange products I found ELDERFLOWER AND LEMON FANTA (see photo).

I found an Islamic Bookshop, which had a whole bookcase devoted to various editions of the Qur'an with different levels of prettiness and ostentation. I did wonder before going in whether all Qur'ans would be on top shelves, but I guess that only applies when the bookcase has more than just Qur'ans on it.

I browsed around: some of the sillier books were those with titles such as Hell & Its Denizens and The Inhabitants of Hell, which contained a lot of the usual fire and brimstone stuff common to religions with a damnation vs paradise afterlife dichotomy, but with a bit more casual sexism than you would get in a modern Christian work (while the Bible is horribly sexist, far more than the Qur'an in my opinion, Christianity has moved on quite a bit from it - women are allowed to speak in churches, for example): the author of one of these books quoted an ancient Muslim who had a vision of the queues for entering Heaven and Hell (waiting to get their Spiritual Passports stamped at the border crossing), remarking that there were far more women in the Hell queue because <old fashioned sexism>.

There was an extremely colourful book titled ONLY LOVE CAN DEFEAT TERRORISM.

I just had to buy A Concise Encyclopedia of Jinn. Islamic mythology features 3 intelligent species: angels, who God made from light; humans, who God made from clay; and Jinn, who God made from fire. Islamic angels do not have free will: they serve and obey God automatically. Humans and Jinn do have free will; Satan is a Jinn in Islamic mythology. Muhammad, as recorded in the Qur'an, preached to both humans and Jinn, invisible fire people. This fact is not mentioned often enough.

The book explains everything we 'know' about Jinn, using the Qur'an and Hadith (the secondary Muslim text) as main sources, and contains a lot of amusing speculation. Since Muhammad was the final prophet, who spoke to both Jinn and humans, and he implies that Jinn had prophets before him, the book concludes that Jinn culture probably has its own series of prophets leading up to Muhammad, but obviously we don't know anything about these invisible-fire-person prophets.

Jinn eat and drink. And fart. One story from the Hadith says that Satan times his farts to cover up the call to prayer. (I had to check the citation online: this is actually in the Hadith.)

Mythology be craycray.

'I, Lucifer' by Glen Duncan

Since finishing the Bible I've read quite a few books which play around with Biblical mythology in some way: if the Apocrypha and Talmud form the primary level of the Bible's expanded universe (EU), these more recent works form its secondary level. Some of these books are sympathetic towards Satan, the Adversary, the Prince of Darkness.

This tradition (probably) begins with Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), a cinematic poem (it features montages, epic battles, giant monsters, a sex scene, etc: it is a cinematic poem) retelling the War in Heaven and Creation myths. Satan is the poem's anti-hero protagonist, on a vengeful quest against a tyrant God. Milton, a Protestant Christian, was a republican who supported Cromwell & Co against King Charles I in the English Civil War; consciously or not, Milton's political views were channeled into his portrayal of Satan the freedom-loving rebel, making him the most endearing character in the poem. 

Milton's Satan is tempting because he is well-drawn and understandable, but his evil nature - he is supposed to be the personification of evil, after all - is not well fleshed out. He is evil because he opposes God, because the narrator repeatedly insults Satan and tells the reader that he is evil, and because he makes an evil speech worthy of a cartoon villain:

'Doing or suffering: but of this be sure,

To do ought good never will be our task,

But ever to do ill our sole delight,

As being the contrary to his high will

Whom we resist. If then his providence

Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,

Our labor must be to pervert that end,

And out of good still to find means of evil'

The poem is ambiguous over who the reader is supposed to support: we are drawn in to the questing and characterization of Satan the Protagonist, even though he is supposed to be the bad guy. A Satan character only works when he is a genuinely tempting figure: an obviously wrong Satan would never have convinced enough Angels to side with him in the Heavenly Civil War, etc. Here, as well as in many other areas, Paradise Lost succeeds.

The Revolt of the Angels (1914) by Anatole France recasts the fallen angels as somewhat comically inept radical revolutionaries trying to start a second rebellion against a tyrant God ("we shall carry war into the heavens, where we shall establish a peaceful democracy"). France's narrative is not ambiguous over who the reader should be supporting: the Fallen Angels are the good guys, God the tyrant is the bad guy (France was an atheist socialist). Satan's appearance is only brief: the novel follows angel and human characters in early 20th century Paris. Four middle chapters tell the history of Heaven and Earth from a fallen angel perspective, with the rise of Christianity being a very negative event ("The Christians burnt books, overthrew temples, set fire to the towns, and carried out their ravages as far as the deserts"). The novel is a wonderful satirical fantasy of war, politics, and religion.

To Reign In Hell (1984) by Steven Brust is an intensely irritating retelling of the War in Heaven myth. The plot is carried by a series of frustrating misunderstandings; the characters are poorly developed, and have annoying gimmicks; the dialogue is shit; it feels like a high school drama which happens to set in Heaven at the beginning of time. 

Michael Moorcock's The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981) has Satan send a mercenary (The War Hound) on a quest for the holy grail, which could be used to cure the world's pain: Satan hopes this benevolent act will earn him God's forgiveness. Other fallen angels are not too keen on the idea, and oppose the War Hound's quest. I actually read this quite a few years ago, so it is not fresh in my mind: I remember finding the idea more interesting than the execution: it is not one of my favourite Moorcock novels.

And then there's I, Lucifer (2002) by Glen Duncan: a novel told from the Devil's first-person perspective. He's been offered a deal: swap his life as a Devil for a life as a human and get a chance at redemption, Heavenly re-entry, with a month's free trial to help him decide. A month's very debauched free trial. The story alternates between the present day (the month's free trial) and Lucifer recounting past exploits (War in Heaven, Garden of Eden, the Crucifixion, the Inquisition, Nazi Germany, etc). 

Duncan's Lucifer is, like Milton's, very tempting: we can sympathize with his point of view. He is a libertarian Devil celebrating freedom from God's authority, but he is also horrifically evil: he celebrates genocide, torture, rape, paedophilia, etc. He is a thoroughly unpleasant, genuinely terrifying personification of evil. And yet he is tempting and seductive and understandable. A very successful characterization of the Devil: evil and charming, seductive and terrifying, horrible yet tempting. 

I found it hard to put this book down: to me it was one of those books that illustrates the Reader's Paradox: I wanted to keep reading, but I also didn't want it to end. The horror and the humor, the Biblical retellings and the modern day debauchery, it was all so mesmerizing. I don't think it would have worked if was just Biblical/historical Devil anecdotes, or just the modern day narrative: either of those would probably have been boring on their own. The novel's two alternating aspects are needed to keep it interesting and fresh.

I, Lucifer reminded me of Money (1984) by Martin Amis, who Duncan cites as one of his influences. Money's hedonistic protagonist, John Self, narrates a series of debauched anecdotes about him getting drunk, womanizing, wanking, eating unhealthily, taking drunks, and generally being an unpleasant person. I found Money entertaining for a while, but it didn't have enough variety to keep me reading. After about a hundred pages I found myself losing interest, thinking Alright, I get it, he drinks a lot and has problems with women, and wants to make lots of money. I decided to abandon it.

Duncan built on Milton's Devil, making him genuinely terrifying as well as relatable, and on Amis' unreliable hedonistic narrator, adding fantastical elements and a huge backstory (thousands of years), to break up the debauchery and keep the narrative interesting.

Lucifer knows an awful lot about being the Devil, but very little about being human - from our perspective - when he starts his free trial. Over the month he learns a lot about human nature and experience, which he tries to interpret from his earlier angelic perspective. Duncan took the story somewhere I was not expecting, and I'm glad for that.

(There is a story from an old Jewish source about a Rabbi having a friendly conversation with Satan - who in Judaism is a servant of God, not a Fallen Angel. The Rabbi chastises Satan for his harsh judgement of humans, arguing that if he were a human and not an angel, he would struggle to cope with human nature and experience. I'm sure that I have this story in one of my books, but I'm not sure which one.)

I haven't mentioned Duncan's prose yet. It's delightful and witty.

On the London Underground:

'The London Underground depresses God. The Paris Metro is rescued by bubbles of romance and intellectual flimflam (He can tune in for ten minutes and get something); the New York subway is a toilet, obviously, but it looks like the movies, you know, hip, famous, cool; Rome's Metropolitana - well, Rome's got a special dispensation, not surprisingly - but London, the London Underground gets Him down. The Lloyd-Webber ads; the cadaverous drivers with their deep-sea eyeballs and miles of unfulfilled dreams; the Lloyd-Webber ads; the puking office juniors and passed-out tramps; the death's-door beggars with their raw ankles and shat pants; the Lloyd-Webber ads; the buskers; the evening's fractured make-up and the morning's frowsty breath; all this and more - but chiefly the surrender to despair or vacancy the rattling tube demands, chiefly the tendency of London's human beings to collapse into a seat or hang from a rail in a state of bitter capitulation to the sadness and boredom and loneliness and excruciating glamourlessness of their lives. The only thing He sees on the Underground that cheers him up is blind people who have friendly relationships with their guide dogs.'

On Archangel Michael:

'He's might fond of his own name, needless to say, which he translates at parties as 'who is like God'. I wonder the Old Bugger lets him get away with it, since the correct - and far less flattering - translation is a rhetorical question: 'Who is like God?' Used to piss him off no end in the old days. Every time someone said, 'Er, Michael?' I used to cut in straight away with, 'Me.''

On smelling a bathroom for the first time:

'A lawless horde of smells: soap, chalk, rotting wood, limescale, sweat, semen, vaginal juice, toothpaste, ammonia, stale tea, vomit, linoleum, rust, chlorine - a stampede of whiffs, a roistering cavalcade of reeks, stinks and perfumes in Bacchanalian cahoots... all are weeyulcum... all are weeyulcum... Yes, they certainly were, though they fairly gang-banged my virgin nostrils. I sniffed, recklessly, the draughts long and deep; in went Gunn's Pantene for fine or flyaway, wreathed with his shit's ghost-odour, veined, too, with faded frangipani and sandalwood from ex-girlfriend Penelope's incense sticks he burns bathside as pungent accompaniment to the pain of remembering her.'

I should mention a negative. While Duncan's prose is fun and witty, it can sometimes be wrong: grammatically incorrect, with a comma missing or a comma in the wrong place, etc. A few times I had to re-read the sentences a few times to figure out what he was trying to say. He could've done with a better editor. These errors did not detract much from my overall enjoyment of the book though. I intend to read more of Duncan's novels, when I have read enough of my current to-read pile that I can justify buying more books.

If you're unsure whether you want to read it, here's the opening paragraph to, er, tempt you:

'I, Lucifer, Fallen Angel, Prince of Darkness, Bringer of Light, Ruler of Hell, Lord of the Flies, Father of Lies, Apostate Supreme, Tempter of Mankind, Old Serpent, Prince of This World, Seducer, Accuser, Tormentor, Blasphemer, and without doubt Best Fuck in the Seen and Unseen Universe (ask Eve, that minx) have decided - oo-la-la! - to tell all.'

'Penguin Island' by Anatole France

A partially sighted priest baptizes a bunch of penguins, because he thinks they are short pagans who need to be saved through Jesus Christ. This causes a commotion in Heaven, resulting in God transforming the penguins into humanoids and giving them souls. End of part 1 of 8. The rest of the book describes the history of the Penguin People's civilization, which is a satire of real human history.

When I first heard about this book - I'm not sure when or where - I thought it sounded so mad that I had to get round to reading it eventually. Re-read that premise above. It's brilliant.

I was disappointed: I did not enjoy the majority of the book.

I liked the opening. I do enjoy it when authors play around with mythology. God gets some great lines, include this circumlocution when reconciling human free will and divine determinism:

"My foreknowledge must not encroach upon their free will. In order not to impair human liberty, I will be ignorant of what I know, I will thicken upon my eyes the veils I have pierced, and in my blind clearsightedness I will let myself be surprised by what I have foreseen."

I enjoyed the ending: a commercialized Penguin dystopia being attacked by disillusioned terrorists. I do enjoy dystopian SF.

'The great Penguin people had no longer either traditions, intellectual culture, or arts. The progress of civilization manifested itself among them by murderous industry, infamous speculation, and hideous luxury. Its capital assumed, as did all the great cities of the time, a cosmopolitan and financial character. An immense and regular ugliness reigned within it. The country enjoyed perfect tranquility. It had reached its zenith.

The houses were never high enough to satisfy them; they kept on making them still higher and built them of thirty or forty storeys: with offices, shops, banks, societies one above another; they dug cellars and tunnels ever deeper downwards.'

I would recommend reading parts 1 and 8, 'The Beginnings' and 'Future Times', but I can't bring myself to recommend the rest of the novel. It had its moments, but there are far better things to read. Maybe if I was more aware of French history I would have enjoyed it more. I found it a hard chore to slog through, waiting for the good bits to crop up and then vanish pages behind me.

Brexit Thoughts

Attempting to organise my thoughts on Brexit.

When I checked the news on Friday morning I was angry, upset, disappointed, and embarrassed.

Angry, because the country had sided with the xenophobic isolationists. Even if the majority of Leave voters didn't vote on the basis of reducing immigration, it has given the racists the impression that the public is on their side, that their views are legitimate. There are reports that racism and hate crime have already increased in the wake of the vote. I hope this does not continue.

Upset, because it felt like a range of possible better futures had disintegrated. As the Brexit fallout stories started breaking, as the pound dropped and trillions were wiped from the world economy, it felt like Remain's Project Fear was becoming Project I-Told-You-So. There has been a lot on social media about the average ages of Leave (older) and Remain (younger) voters. Voter turnout among older people is estimated considerably higher than among the young: successive governments have alienated young people, because they have not been a major decisive factor in elections (Blair introduced tuition fees; Cameron scrapped EMA, tripled tuition fees, and excluded under-25s from the Living Wage): we need more young people to be politically engaged.

(I caught some of the 'Victoria Derbyshire' program this morning: it featured an interview with an elderly chap who explained that he and his wife have been having very strong arguments with their son, who accused them of voting in favour of him losing his job: his company is already looking at relocating.)

Disappointed, because the blatant lies of Vote Leave had won the day. The dishonesty of both campaigns gave me the impression that our elected officials treat politics as a game over who is better at lying to the public. Major Leave figures have already backtracked on many of the campaigns promises, with Farage saying 'lol ofc we're not gonna spend the money on the NHS', and Hannon saying 'y u think immigration wil go down? rofl wut gave u that idea?' (I have paraphrased). And then there's Johnson: read his execrable piece in the Telegraph, titled 'I cannot stress too much that Britain is part of Europe – and always will be'. It is worrying that none of them seem bothered by the sheer scale of their campaign's dishonesty, even after admitting it so quickly.

Embarrassed, because it was easy to see the rest of the world (excluding Donald Trump) looking at the UK and wondering 'what the fuck you doing, dickheads?'

Hopefully David Cameron will go down in history as one of Britain's worst Prime Ministers, having broken nearly all of his election pledges, the big one that he decides to keep leads to his resignation (at least he was honest about not staying for a third term). He was a weak Prime Minister, who only scraped a majority in 2015 by pandering to UKIP (Farage told his supporters to vote Conservative) and formenting division (Fear the SNP! Scotland will destroy us!), by telling porkies and (allegedly) committing electoral fraud, and he had the majority of the media on his side.

(Did you notice how Cameron and Osborne both seemed to have become aware that nobody trusted them anymore, so one of their favourite arguments was to list some of the people and institutes who happened to agree with them this time?)

Despite all this he believed he could comfortably win the referendum without a media majority, after giving the Leave group a free pass to promise whatever they liked (no official exit strategy was put forward) and present themselves as outsiders fighting the establishment. Fighting a 'Status Quo' vs 'Mystery Change' campaign wasn't a wise strategic move when you've just spent six years impoverishing people and not giving a shit about it.

(Imagine Cameron on Friday morning, looking back to the good old days when the worst he had to deal with was being accused of facefucking a dead pig.)

Now that Cameron is gone, we get to look forward to a new Conservative leader. It might be a contest between Theresa May and Boris Johnson, and I don't know which of those prospects is more terrifying. The posh British Trump or 'Iron Lady 2: Revenge of the Rich'? If May wins, we might get to live under a full-on dictatorship. Interesting times either way.

It didn't take long for a Corbyn shitstorm to ensue: mass resignations and a vote of no confidence. I liked Corbyn: he was refreshingly gentle and genuine, but my opinion of him is dropping. His EU campaigning was disappointing and lacklustre, and late. I don't think fighting 'Vote Leave, Take Control' with 'Don't Vote Leave, It Will Give Our Nasty Elected Government More Power' was a well thought out move. He could have done a lot more, but now is the wrong time for a coup, for the Labour party to be imploding. They could have stayed together, pointed to the warring panicking Tories, and said as one: "Look at what those bellends have done."

It looks like we will be going for the Norway option, which means we will still be paying into the EU budget, still have to abide by EU regulations, and still have free movement of people, but with no input on any EU decisions. Hopefully all the Leave people won't be too disappointed, especially if they voted on the basis of immigration, EU regulations, or payments to the EU...

'The Man Who Fell To Earth' by Walter Tevis

I started this book while waiting for a bus, read while on the bus, then continued reading when walking through town, eyes focused on the pages as though the text guided me to my destination. I can't remember the last time I read a fiction book while walking around.

Having a lot of work the last few days, I've only just got round to finishing the last few chapters. I've never seen the film adaptation, and didn't know anything about the story beyond the titular man falls to earth, and was pleasantly surprised by this elegant little SF classic (first published 1963). I was gripped by the story of Thomas Jerome Newton going native on Earth: Thomas and I panicked together during a particularly distressing scene, and I shared in his melancholy.

I don't know where I'm was going to go with this. There's a nice new edition out if you want to read it yourself, and don't want a old movie tie-in edition from the days before they could print photographs on book covers.

What is this?

Look at this terrible book cover. I hate terrible book covers.

I read this book recently, a collection of Roger Zelazny's short stories, and hated the cover every time I picked it up. It makes it look like throwaway sci-fi trash. A volcanic eruption; a flying saucer; a human male protagonist with a rifle; a female alien sidekick with an alien gun. Ugh.

And you know what makes this book cover even worse? It doesn't illustrate any of the stories! None of them feature a volcanic eruption, or a flying saucer, or a human male protagonist with a rifle, or a female alien sidekick with an alien gun. Or a single gun: there are no guns in any of the stories! Why was this cover chosen? I don't understand!

There's an SF retelling of Moby-Dick; a bleak story about terraforming; an SF Western with rogue AI cars as bandits; 'A Rose for Ecclesiastes', about a poet translating the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes into Martian; a talking stone; an almost mystical ascent up a forty-mile tall mountain; etc. I liked almost all of them, and they are far more interesting than the cover, or my list here, would have you believe.

I don't understand why this cover was chosen! It's worse than the 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth' covers with Tyrannosaurs on, or the 'Around the World in Eighty Days' covers with hot-air balloons on. At least they illustrate the movie adaptations. Grumble. Grumble.

[This is my fourth Zelazny book, after 'Lord of Light' (about the Hindu pantheon being recreated on a distant colony planet), which I liked; 'Creatures of Light and Darkness' (a far future story which is simultaneously a re-imagining of both Judeo-Christian and Egyptian mythologies - hard to explain in a sentence), which I liked; and 'Nine Princes in Amber' (the first in his long fantasy series), which I didn't like. I bought this one, despite the terrible cover, because it was recommended by reviewers who liked 'Lord of...' and 'Creatures of...', but didn't like 'Nine Princes...']

Reflections on Dementia Care

I now have a Level 2 Certificate in Dementia Care to add to my collection of qualifications. Achievement Unlocked.

Since August last year I have worked as a carer for the elderly in the countryside town of Easingwold. This job seemed to follow naturally on from my full-time volunteering in York and my childcare volunteering in Cambodia, forming a 'Care Trilogy' of life experiences.

Some reflections from the last eight months:

Carers are not paid enough for what the job entails. We are paid for every 15 minutes work, and if we break down the hourly rate to each call time, it starts to seem a bit silly, as though our employer is saying: "I'll give you £1.90 if you go to Mrs Alpha and make sure she takes the right tablets; then go to Mr Beta to help him shower, shave, dress, get his breakfast ready and give him his tablets, and I'll give you £3.78; then go to Mrs Gamma with Colleague A, and together hoist her onto the toilet, then help her shower and dress, etc, and I'll give you another fiver." Etc. I expect the issue of low-pay-considering-what-is-involved extends throughout the healthcare sector.

I am young. I now know many people who have been retired for longer than I have been alive. I look back at the time I have been alive: 24 years in total, only 6 years of being an adult. I look ahead at an estimated natural lifespan, and realize that I have at least twice my total lifetime to date still to live. I have 8 times my time as an adult still to go. I am young.

Many of our clients suffer from extreme boredom and loneliness. They struggle to find things to do; their friends and family have moved away or died; they're frail or disabled. Watching TV is often the default activity. One client sits in their flat all day, TV off, radio off, just sitting there, occasionally sipping their drink or napping, waiting for the next carer to visit. It is a shame that they are not open to technology; I expect that when we are older we will have ample apps, games and internet things to keep us more occupied and entertained during our senescence. I have lent my Kindle to one client who - their right arm is their only functioning limb - had been unable to read paper books. I've been trying to convince them to buy their own, but that is proving quite a challenge: they are extremely fiscally austere.

I don't know whether it's a generational thing or a countryside thing, or a bit of both, but most of our clients have had very few jobs in their lives. I haven't had many jobs, but I've already had more than a lot of our clients, who got a job straight after school and stayed in it until retirement. This doesn't seem either possible or desirable nowadays.

I have become increasingly sympathetic towards euthanasia over the past 8 months, encountering people who say they want to die but cannot.

Living in the countryside has shown me that I am very much not a countryside person. After the initial novelty wore off, it became very apparent that living in the countryside is extremely dull. An island in a sea of farms, Easingwold is a countryside town with a population of about 5000 people, most of whom are either retired or have lived here all their lives. Your personal universe shrinks in the countryside: everything beyond the farmy horizon may as well not exist, so little it seems to matter to your life. I am reminded of Terry Pratchett's Bromeliad trilogy, which gets its name from a species of plant in the Amazon, inside which small frogs can live out their entire lives. This is used as a metaphor throughout the books. It is easy to imagine Easingwold as a bromeliad, whose inhabitants - in the absence of modern communication technology - would spend their entire lives here, barely cognizant of the rest of the world, or the rest of the UK, or the rest of England.

The sheer dullness of the place seems to be accepted as a fact of life by those who have lived their entire lives here. (Thoreau's line, 'The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation', rings in my ears.) In Dante's Inferno, the first circle of Hell, Limbo, contains the souls of righteous non-Christians who are unable to go to Heaven because they happened to live too early in human history: they lived in the centuries before Jesus sacrificed himself to wash away humanity's innate sinfulness, so were unable to accept him as their saviour. The souls of Limbo are not actively punished or rewarded, they wait around, bored, with no connection to God: it is a Godforsaken place. Distancing myself slightly from religious language, I would say that Easingwold is:

(a) fun-forsaken, in that there is fuck all to do. Easingwold has a disproportionate number of alcoholics and drug-addicts, because there's fuck all to do. The smell of weed in the air seems out of place, almost anachronistic, in a quaint countryside setting, but it frequently forms around the loitering youth, because there's fuck all to do.

(b) spirit-forsaken, in that it is hard here to cultivate a sense of the numinous, the transcendent, etc. It is hard to get a feeling of the interconnectedness of all things when you feel like your personal universe is being forcibly shrunk by the Island in the Sea of Farms. (The pelagic metaphor is enhanced by the bus journey from Easingwold to York: a ricketty old bus on bumpy country roads feels like an, admittedly short in nautical terms, oceanic voyage.) The sky does not feel like a window looking on to an incomprehensibly vast and complicated cosmos; it feels like a dome trapping you in, the sky-firmament of ancient cosmologies.

(I am perhaps being a tad harsh: there are benefits to rural isolation. The myriad political, economic and humanitarian crises and atrocities around the globe might as well be on another planet, so far away they feel. I suppose this might contribute to why the fear of immigrants is rather strong in rural areas: aliens coming over here, interrupting our isolation, making us realize that the Earth has more in it than we thought.)

I do not like this isolation. I am a city person. I intend to move to a city by the end of the year. I also feel like I am done with care work now, and so intend to go into something completely different next, whatever that may be.

And Boris Said Unto the People

And Boris said unto the people of Britain, 

"If you vote Leave, I will give peace in the land, and you shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid. And I will remove illegal immigrants from the land, and terrorists shall not enter the land. We shall chase our enemies, and they shall fall before us. Five of us shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of us shall chase ten thousand, and our enemies shall fall before us. I will turn to you and make you fruitful, and Britain shall be great again. You shall eat old store long kept, and you shall clear out the old to make way for the new. I will make my dwelling among you, and I shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you and be your Prime Minister, and you shall be my people. I am Boris your Savior, who shall bring you out of the EU, that you should not be slaves to Brussels. 

"But if you will not listen to me and will not vote Leave, then this I promise you: You shall sow your seed in vain, for the migrants shall eat it. As you walk home at night, you shall be struck down by illegal immigrants. Those who hate you, the meddling Brussels Eurocrats, shall rule over you. Your strength shall be spent in vain, for your land shall not yield its increase, and the trees of the land shall not yield their fruit, because of EU regulations.

And the EU will let loose terrorists among you, which shall bereave you of your children and destroy your livestock and make you few in number, so that your roads shall be deserted of British people, although still very full of illegal immigrants. And if you gather within your cities, pestilence will be among you, because the migrants will bring new diseases with them, and you shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy, because the foreigners will betray you.

When the EU breaks your supply of bread, when EU red tape means that we cannot make proper British bread anymore, ten women shall bake your bread in a single oven and shall dole out your bread again by weight, and you shall eat and not be satisfied. And so you shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters. Migrants will steal your houses, and your dead bodies will be cast upon our Great British landmarks. Your land shall be a desolation, and your cities shall be a waste.

And I myself will never forgive you for voting Remain. I myself will devastate the land, so that the migrants who settle in it shall be appalled at it. And I will hunt you Remainers among the nations, and I will unsheathe a sword after you, and I will find you, and I will kill you."

-Based on Leviticus chapter 26. 

Rereading 'Do Androids Dream...?'

I decided to re-read Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) because I could barely remember it (I remembered the basic plot and that Deckard climbs a hill at some point: the significance of this ascent eluded me). My younger self was amazed by the novel: I was only just starting to read avidly then, and it was my first PKD novel. I've read a lot since then (including 9 more PKD novels), and become a lot more critical of what I read.

From the opening paragraph I guessed that I wasn't going to be as impressed this time:

'A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. Surprised - it always surprised him to find himself awake without prior notice - he rose from the bed, stood up in his multicoloured pyjamas, and stretched. Now, in her bed, his wife Iran opened her gray, unmerry eyes, blinked, then groaned and shut her eyes again.'

However, I still enjoyed it and rate it highly as a PKD novel: it's not up there with A Scanner Darkly (1977) or VALIS (1981) - both of these are based on Dick's personal experiences, and so are far more personal and emotionally involving works - but I still consider it one of his best. If you can forgive the terrible prose, the ideas and plot make an engaging read.

PKD's work invites analysis and exegesis: his ideas and imagery are interesting and compelling, but suffer from often not being developed into entirely satisfying stories. Do Android's Dream...? is a very important and influential novel in the canon of stories exploring What is human? and What makes a fake fake? (other notable examples from this canon are R.U.R. (1920) by Karel Capek, the play from which we get the word 'robot', and Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009), etc). Fakery abounds in the novel: there's mood organs, which allow characters to artificially control their emotions; there's Deckard's electric sheep, munching grass on the rooftop; and, of course, there's the androids, the fake humans.

A comparison is made between the androids and the 'specials' (people who have been damaged by radiation exposure). The former - 'great intellect, ability to accomplish much, but also this [coldness]' - are hunted down as a danger to humanity, and are identified by failing an empathy test. The latter - fully empathic - are banned from reproducing or leaving Earth ('a menace to the pristine heredity of the race... ceased, in effect, to be part of mankind'), and are identified by failing genetic and IQ tests. The androids are getting so close to the real thing that the empathy test is the only remaining way to tell them apart, but it's implied early on that certain humans, psychopaths, could fail the empathy test, leading to their execution. The specials have been dehumanized by their society, perceived as having lost their humanity through radiation damage, but they have retained (perhaps even increased) their empathy. 

Mood organ allows people to alter their emotions artificially, yet this fakery is accepted and normal: why not the artificial emotions of the androids? Why not their fear, anger, and ambition? The artificial animals even look ill when they break (''disease' circuits built in... when a primary component misfired, the whole thing appeared - not broken - but organically ill'), and require as much care as real animals. When does the fake become reality? What traits make a human human? Is the distinction between real and fake simply part of our shared imagination, our human desire to categorize? What's so bad about the fakes? (I am reminded of art forgeries: specifically the tale of the Nazi who found out all his great art was forged, and was heartbroken - if anyone can remember the full details of this story, please help me out). Etc, etc, Dickian mindfuckery, analysis, exegesis, etc, etc. Fun book.

PKD's stories frequently contain religious themes: from the simple Platonic-Gnostic allusions in The Penultimate Truth (1964) through the spiritual conflict and shared hallucinations of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) we come to Mercerism and its conflict with the TV presenter Buster Friendly in Do Androids Dream...? From here Dick went on to invent a fictional theology in A Maze of Death (1970) and then went full gnostic after a mental breakdown/divine revelation in 1974, an experience explored in his VALIS trilogy: VALIS, The Divine Invasion (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982).

(In The Penultimate Truth most humans live underground in nuclear bunkers, convinced by propaganda videos that a colossal war is occurring on the surface; but there is no war, the world is at peace: the ruling elite are working together to keep the masses controlled and afraid. The Three Stigmata... is about the rivalry between two companies selling rival escapist drugs: one which grants shared hallucinations between users, the other gives the user a private hallucination so vivid that it cannot be distinguished from reality.)

Mercerism is a religion of the shared experience of suffering: it enhances empathy, making its adherents more concerned about their fellow men. Buster Friendly and His Friendly Friends provide simple entertainment and distraction, giving the sad people of Earth the illusion of friendship and warmth. The dualism here is an improved subtilised version of the earlier spiritual conflict in The Three Stigmata..., and does not take center-stage in the plot. (It was completely omitted from the film adaptation.)

The plot is fairly well sustained to the end: it is ambiguous on some fronts, but satisfying enough overall: the protagonist has developed, his life and world has changed, etc. I have a tendency to dislike Dick's endings: Ubik (1969), A Maze of Death, and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974) each have annoying endings. The first two can be forgiven: they have been very influential, have been absorbed into SF to such an extent that the originals can feel tacky. Flow My Tears..., however, I will not forgive: it starts off so promising, the plot-train gliding along at a pleasant pace; then parts start to fall off and are left behind; it rattles and shakes, suggesting hasty ill-planned construction; and then derails, smashing into the ground. As you crawl out from the flaming wreckage and look upon the ruined carriages that promised a fascinating destination, you regret boarding in the first place.

Abandoned Money

I read about a third of Money (1984), and found it enjoyable. I wouldn't call it great though, and doubt that I will ever read anything by Martin Amis again. I think Money's problem is that, as Amis has said himself, it is a 'voice novel': almost plotless, a series of debauched anecdotes made entertaining by the amusing narrator-protagonist. However, at 454 pages (I reached page 169), it feels too long a novel to be carried mainly by its voice: I found myself losing interest, thinking Alright, I get it, he drinks a lot and has problems with women, and wants to make lots of money. There are better books out there: I decided to abandon it.

Four Christopher Priest Novels

After owning a copy for over 3 years, and meeting the author 3 times, I have finally got round to reading The Prestige (1995). It is the fourth Priest novel I have read, following The Affirmation (1981), Inverted World (1974), and Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972) - I read these three way back in 2012, so they are not quite fresh in my mind.

Fake cover, featuring Escher's Drawing Hands

The Affirmation was my first Priest novel, and it remains my favourite. Drawing Hands by M.C. Escher would be a perfect cover image for this novel which contains two parallel stories: one set in 'our' world, the other set in a 'fictional' world. Both protagonists attempt, for differing reasons, to write autobiographies, but end up retelling their life stories in a fictional setting. The two autobiographies/fantasies blend in to each other, and the reader is left wondering which world is supposed to be 'real'. It's a very clever, very artistic mindfuck of a novel. Priest describes it as his 'key' novel: when his writing became obviously unique, Priestian, with its unreliable narrator(s) and narrative shocks.

'This is the book CP regards as his ‘key’ novel: all the novels before it lead towards The Affirmation, none of the ones that follow could have been written without it. It is deceptive in form, not only in the way the protagonist’s story is told, but also in the way it is presented.' (source)

Inverted World is the best of Priest's pre-Affirmation novels, when his work still resembled traditional SF, and has one of the most famous opening lines in all SF:

'I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles.'

The characters of Inverted World live in an ever-moving city, fleeing from a destructive gravitational field. In front of the city engineers are constantly placing railway tracks; behind, the old tracks are being pulled up. The protagonist, Helward Mann, comes of age and joins one of city's guilds. Through him we learn about the city and the wider world. Some of the imagery of Inverted World is quite trippy and psychedelic. I remember the second half not being as satisfying as the first, but it is still a very good book and certainly worth reading.

Fugue for a Darkening Island is one of Priest's lesser known works. Events since its publication have made the work appear more sinister than was intended. When first published it received praise for being progressive and anti-racist, but when re-released and re-reviewed a few decades later the same magazines considered it very backwards and racist. The description on Wikipedia certainly makes it sounds like a Daily Mail nightmare:

'First published in 1972, it deals with a man's struggle to protect his family and himself in a near future England ravaged by civil war brought about by the failings of a Conservative government and a massive influx of African refugees.'

Fugue focuses on the changes to the protagonist's character over the course of the disaster by telling the story achronologically. The narrative jumps around between time periods to show us the different 'versions' of the character, contrasting their different perspectives. This novel does not compare well against the other Priest novels I've read: it's a very early work, his second novel, from when he was just starting out as a writer.

And then we come, over 3 years later, to The Prestige, which was made into a film by Christopher Nolan and is therefore Priest's most famous novel.

(Spoiler for the movie ahead)

The action takes place in two time periods: the majority of the book tells the story of a rivalry between two Victorian stage magicians, while the frame-story, narrated by the magicians' grandchildren, explores the legacy of the feud to the present day. This novel is obsessed with doubles, and the very structure of the novel reflects this: each time period gets two narrators, each telling their side of the story.

The book is very different to the movie, which builds up to a Big Reveal where the magicians explain their secrets to each other. A magician never reveals his secrets: there is no Big Reveal in the book. 

I'm getting tired, and feel if I write any more about The Prestige I may spoil some of the differences between the book and the movie, or spoil too much of the movie, so I'm going to leave it there. It's a very well constructed novel, still packed with surprises for those who have seen Nolan's adaptation. 

I own copies of 3 more Priest books, which I've already owned for over 3 years: The Dream Archipelago (1999), The Separation (2002), and The Islanders (2011). I wonder how long before get round to reading these.

Paradise Lost (Again)

I've been re-reading 'Paradise Lost', because it's damned good. I felt like writing something about it again, because when I wrote about it two years ago I was still very giddy about how good it is, was still hyper from the discovery that reading a poem could be an immersive cinematic experience, and the thing I wrote back then is very unsatisfying to re-read: my 'ZOMFG I cant tel u how awsum it is' fanboying makes me cringe.

So I started to write about it again, thinking that re-reading it two years on I would be able to do it more justice, perhaps a little calmer, perhaps with some more analysis. For those that don't know: 'Paradise Lost' is a 17th century epic poem by John Milton, which tells 'Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe, with loss of Eden'. It is a retelling of the the War in Heaven and creation myths from Judeo-Christian mythology. And it's so good: one of the greatest works of English literature.

There was going to be more to this. I was going to go through the whole thing in a series of posts, perhaps one for each chapter/book that makes up the epic, discussing the scenes and including a few choice quotes.

But I can't do it. I just fanboy over it too much. I want to quote the whole thing. Here's Satan rising out of a lake of fire in the early pages:

'Forthwith upright he rears from off the pool
His mighty stature; on each hand the flames
Driven backward slope their pointing spires, and rolled
In billows, leave i' the midst a horrid vale.'

And then there's the speeches. And the fight scenes. And the sex scene. And the montages (yes, montages: it's a cinematic poem). It's just so good.

ZOMFG I cant tel u how awsum it is.

Best of 2016 (So Far)

My five favourite books of 2016 so far:

'If On A Winter's Night A Traveller' by Italo Calvino is now one of my favourite books of all time, joining the illustrious company of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Star Maker, the Hebrew Bible, and Paradise Lost. A postmodern second-person narrative (You, the Reader, are the protagonist) which explores the acts of reading and writing, and contains ten unfinished novels within it.

'The Revolt of the Angels' by Anatole France. Satirical fantasy that plays with Christian mythology: a Guardian angel in 20th century France spends too much time in a library, studying science, philosophy, and history, which convinces him to join the fallen angels, who have been recast as somewhat comically inept radical left-wing revolutionaries ("we shall carry war into the heavens, where we shall establish a peaceful democracy"). Jokes at the expense of government, hard-left politics, war, religion, and more.

'The Birds' is one of Tarjei Vesaas' two most famous works (the other is 'The Ice Palace'). Vesaas is not well known is the English-speaking world, but is considered one of Norway's greatest writers. The English editions are published by Peter Owen Modern Classics, a family-run independent publisher. So many hipster points for this book. The protagonist is a man with learning difficulties who lives with his sister, and struggles to cope when their situation changes. It's such a beautifully humane story.

'Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come' by Norman Cohn traces the development of apocalyptic faith - the belief in a perfect future where good has triumphed over evil - from the ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Vedic mythologies, through Zoroastrianism to Judaism and Christianity.

'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' is one of those popular books that you'll probably hate if you're already knowledgeable about the subject. As it is, history is not my strongest subject, so I only found the early chapters on evolution and 'Out of Africa' migrations intensely irritating (I had covered this subject enough during my degree, so reading these chapters felt like a waste of time). It is, of course, a very brief history: an introduction to human history, focusing on general trends and major developments. As an introduction to the topic, it is exemplary.

As If Through A Dense Forest

'The pleasures derived from the use of a paper knife are tactile, auditory, visual, and especially mental. Progress in reading is preceded by an act that traverses the material solidity of the book to allow you access to its incorporeal substance. Penetrating among the pages from below, the blade vehemently moves upward, opening a vertical cut in a flowing succession of slashes that one by one strike the fibers and mow them down—with a friendly and cheery crackling the good paper receives that first visitor, who announces countless turns of the pages stirred by the wind or by a gaze—then the horizontal fold, especially if it is double, opposes greater resistance, because it requires an awkward backhand motion—there the sound is one of muffled laceration, with deeper notes. The margin of the pages is jagged, revealing its fibrous texture; a fine shaving—also known as "curl"—is detached from it, as pretty to see as a wave's foam on the beach. Opening a path for yourself, with a sword's blade, in the barrier of pages becomes linked with the thought of how much the word contains and conceals: you cut your way through your reading as if through a dense forest.'

We do not need paper knives any more: the pages of our books come ready separated. I recently purchased a 1901 omnibus edition of 'Sartor Resartus' and 'Heroes & Hero Worship' by Thomas Carlyle. (It is the 2nd oldest book I own: the oldest is an 1896 edition of The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade.) However many people owned this book before myself, in the 115 years of its existence, none of them read 'Sartor Resartus' to the end. (All the pages of 'Heroes & Hero Worship' have been separated.) They gave up at chapter 10, 'Pause', as though they took its title as an imperative and never returned to finish the job. Cutting through a book, unlocking its words, being the first person to read its virgin pages, as though they have been waiting for me for over a century, has been a fun novelty. It also amuses me to have a big kitchen knife on my bedside for this purpose, because who owns a paper knife these days? I quoted Italo Calvino above, because DAT WRITING.