Travelling Through Literature (But Not to South Africa)

Nearly every book that I read leaves me itching to visit the country in which it's set: Steinbeck makes me want to move to America, Murakami has me desperate to seek out the surreal Tokyo of his mind, and The Tin Drum left me contemplating a weekend break to Gdansk. I find literature to be one of the very best ways (other than actually going somewhere) to get a sense of what a place is like: even if a book isn't fully focused on the place in which it is set, something of the energy of the environment seems to seep into the fabric of the tale, into the actions and thoughts of the characters, in a way that even films often don't achieve. It's brilliant to sit and read and be transported around the globe, getting a native perspective on weird and wonderful locations, and living with characters as their habitats weigh upon their personalities.

However, after reading J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, South Africa is one place that I could certainly spend the rest of my life avoiding. Disgrace's South Africa sounds like a difficult and troubled place, and certainly not a welcoming one. The people painfully split and unable to live in harmony under the crushing spectre of recent history, the police corrupt or just plain lazy, crime rife and surely ruthlessly targetting somebody like me who likes to wander around without much of a plan, up hills and down dark alleys; I don't think Disgrace is going to be used in South African tourism advertising any time soon. It is an excellent book though, as its Booker Prize and numerous accolades atest, and a very interesting study in character, forcing you to sympathise with a man who seems like nothing more than a prick for the first fifty pages, but then quickly opens up into a complex and convincing character. I just won't be daydreaming about a holiday in the Eastern Cape anytime soon.

Zombie Mega Apocalypse

Woo hoo! A lot of editing has passed since I thought it was finished two months ago, but my new short story, Zombie Mega Apocalypse, is now finished and available for you to read. The story comes from a question that I had floating around in my mind for a while: "what would happen if we knew the world was going to end, and had a definite date for the destruction of humanity?". How would society cope? This popped into my head around the time of the riots last August, when the fragile string holding decency in place frayed and people began to disregard the law, doing whatever they wanted. In the face of this I realised just how tenuous our grip on civility is: if people decide to just do what they want, en masse, how can they be stopped? Often this question is asked with regards to positive consequences such as the overthrowing of dictatorships, but it also applies to basic human decency. For a couple of days it seemed as if England was on the verge of something very bad happening, but luckily decent people came together and eventually overpowered the thugs. But if the world was going to end anyway, what motivation would the decent have to continue their battle?

I tied in my own disillusion with our technology-riddled society, and how it has changed living on Earth into an existence far removed from our original states of being. The more I think about it, the more I think that I might be an Anarchist. Politics and society have appealed to me less and less in recent years, and I want them gone, and nature to reign supreme once more. All of this comes together in a big fat melting pot to form Zombie Mega Apocalypse. Check out the beginning below and then follow the link to read the rest:

Zombie Mega Apocalypse

Until that night, I hadn’t looked up at the night sky in years. I stepped off the train and, rather than staring at the ground and ploughing the ten minutes to my door as usual, the biting February air wrenched my gaze upwards. The low-lying crescent moon sucked at my eyes, the deep dark blue of the early evening sky magnifying its luminescence. As my eyes adjusted, I noticed stars glistening in the formerly pitch-black. It was rare to see the stars around here. I inhaled deeply and my nostrils fought through the smog to the clean winter air beneath. It was beautiful, I thought; why did I never look up at this majesty, this free gift from Earth? It struck me then that I’d lost my way in life: ten years out of university, and ten years since I’d paid attention to anything natural. When did I lose my wonder? The accident, I guess. I thought back with envy to my younger self, so mesmerised by everything, so happy, untainted by the horrors of modern society circling and snapping like sharks. At least, I think I was like that. Nowadays, whenever I think back to a younger version of myself that person is a wide-eyed innocent, never moody, never angry. Until that night I had been drifting, ignoring my surroundings, and the innocence of my younger self was long gone.

I took two trains to work, and two home. In between, I crammed onto the tube with millions of other commuters, often seemingly squished into the same carriage as them all. On my journey I listened to music, ignored existence. I thought that people walking in front of me who moved unexpectedly to the side and blocked my way, without any knowledge that I was trying to weave a high-speed path past them, were idiots. I sprinted for tubes and squeezed through the doors and up against endless bodies, even though another train would be along two minutes later. Every second counted. Everything pissed me off. I worked a boring job but didn’t quit, as every other job was just as dull anyway, as ultimately pointless as the next. I hated what I had become, how annoyed I was by this world of rubbish; hated my iPhone when it worked, but burned with rage when it didn’t, and when it eventually broke. Then I took it to the Apple shop and got a new one. That night, though, I stopped. I gazed lovingly at the night sky and recognised it as the most wondrous thing I had ever seen, could ever see; and even though I’d spent ten wasted years not looking at it, that was okay because there were fifty-odd more in which to marvel every evening until I died. The following day the news was revealed.

Read on...

Walking and Walking and Walking

When I was a young boy, my parents used to drag me away on nice family holidays to the Lake District and other places of that ilk and force me to walk: walk through forests, walk through fields (as long as there weren't cows in there, my Mum is terrified of them), walk up hills, walk on roads. I used to hate it, trudging along sulkily by myself either far in front or far behind the rest of my family. I vowed that if I ever grew to like walking I would have become an old loser and would kill myself immediately. When I started enjoying walking I was only about sixteen, so reasoned that I was probably not quite over the hill just yet, and put my cyanide capsule to one side.

At the moment, every time I take a step I feel as if it's my ten-thousandth in a row, and I imagine shooting pains and cramp enveloping my legs as I stagger onwards, my trainers flapping uselessly from my blister-ravaged feet. The reason for this is the mental torture (in a good way) of Stephen King's The Long Walk. I discovered it at the peak of my interest in The Hunger Games, when I was reading any article I could find on the subject, and came across The Long Walk in a piece about dystopian fiction. Interestingly, the parallel dystopian society in The Long Walk is almost completely ignored, with only tantalising glimpses into its opression beyond the fact that any government dissenters are quickly disposed of. The novel instead centres exclusively around the Long Walk itself, an annual walking competition in which a hundred volunteers stagger in a straight line down the USA. The rules are simple: you must stay above 4mph at all times; if you slow down for thirty seconds you are warned; you get three warnings, and next time you slow down you get a "ticket", or are shot in the head in the parlance of our times. The last man standing wins "the Prize", whatever he desires for the rest of his life.

The dystopia is used only as a sideshow, the main attraction being the endurance challenge of the competition, the mental battle that duels with the fatigue of constant walking to produce a hellish concoction. It's a fascinating story of how, when your life is on the line, a will to survive overtakes tiredness. You live on the road with these boys as one by one they go insane, suffer intense cramps, or simply drop dead after pushing their bodies to the max, and the intensity of the thing warps your mind. I've always thought of Stephen King as a bit of a pulp writer until now, but after The Long Walk I've come to appreciate what a truly great writer he is, and think I'll look into some of his other novels. I'm sure there are a lot of things he can teach me about horror. And as for the Long Walk, at the moment I feel like it's something I might want to have a little bash at, a twenty-four hour version, just to see if I can do it, to appreciate all the more the emotion of the novel. It reminds me of when I wanted to pretend to be homeless for a while and I've doen that, so maybe if I can set aside a weekend and a few days recovery, my own Long Walk may be in my future.

The Retiarius: Ladyboy of the Gladiatorial Arena

Not as hard as he looks, apparently

I've always thought that retiarii, the gladiators who carried nets to catch their enemies and tridents to spear them, seem like really hard thugs, so I was surprised to find out that these fish-men were instead considered the lowliest and girliest form of gladiator, often reduced to opening tournaments for comic relief. Because retiarii were often paired with stronger, sword-weilding gladiators, their MO was to move quickly, dodging blows while looking for an opportunity to net and spear their prey. As they had to duck and dive they wore little armour, and this fact made them stand out as being less masculine in a society where it was strangely thought that the more armour you wore, the tougher you were. Also, the crowd were unhappy with the manner of evasion and tactics the retiarii displayed in the arena, believing that it was far more sporting for gladiators to simply go toe-to-toe and slug it out to the death in a raw test of strength.

Unlike nearly all gladiators, retiarii didn't wear helmets as they couldn't afford to compromise their vision, and this meant that the cloak of anonymity and mystique that hid famous gladiators did not cover them, and they had more in common with the naked slaves sentenced to fight to death in the arena than with their peers. Consequently, they were seen openly as slaves, rather than warriors, and were forced to live in the scummiest of quarters. The emperor Caligula made it a habit to sentence any losing retiarius to death should they survive their contest. There's a whole wealth of brilliant information out there about the different types of gladiators and how and why they fought, which is why I was disappointed when I went to Rome and there was no museum to tell me all about them, just a decaying Colliseum ravaged by time. I was forced to get my knowledge from the brilliant tv series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which I'm sure is as historically inaccurate as it is exciting, and that would make it very inaccurate indeed. The retiarius always seemed to me like a fascinating character in the way it imaginatively subverted the original stock gladiator, maybe a forerunner in imaginative combat characters that would eventually lead to men with stretchable arms and electric shock powers in Streetfighter 2, but it sadly turns out that they were just scrubbers, shunned for their use of cunning and pace in the face of brute strength.

Mockingjay in Negative

On to the final book of the Hunger Games trilogy, and that insatiable desire to devour pages at warp-speed to get to the end of the story completely waned, and I finished reading the story at something like my normal reading pace. Whatever that indefinable quality that the first two had that made me desperate to keep flipping pages vanished just as mysteriously as it appeared. I still thought the final book was very good, but at times it didn't seem as if Suzanne Collins was enjoying herself that much, like she just wanted to get through it, and it only really got compelling when she managed to twist the tale around to a Games-type scenario for the last hundred or so pages. Everything else was interesting, but a lot of it could have been summarised. These are the pressures of deadlines, I guess, it's hard to keep the writing as tight as possible when there are publishers badgering you night and day to finish.

What struck me as most interesting about the finale was the negativity of much of the book, and the state of society when the trilogy finished. Surely books like this, in Harry Potter style, are meant to finish with sickly-sweetness and high fives all around, and everybody living happily ever after, but the Hunger Games is a lot more realistic, ending with the impression that no matter what you might change, things will eventually creep back to being just as awful over time. The mood throughout the final book really surprised me, and cemented the series' reputation for me as a cut above most teen-type fiction. I was left feeling glad that there weren't any more books in the series, and as if I'd probably never read anything else that Suzanne Collins writes, but I'll never forget the excitement that the Hunger Games has given me, and I look forward to the day when society takes it on as a serious idea, and I get to watch a load of celebrities running around a forest killing each other instead of sitting in a jungle and eating rats.