Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro

I run hot and cold with Kazuo Ishiguro, I think. His early books, especially The Remains of the Day, were magnificent, and I'm still a big fan of his cold, distant, murky The Unconsoled.

But I feel like everything he's done since then has fallen flat for me, which makes me wonder if it's a change in Ishiguro or in me. I will admit Never Let Me Go has its strengths, but none of those strengths are related to the SFnal idea, or anything within a thousand miles of plausibility. The only book of his I've previously hit in the life of this blog was the Arthurian misfire The Buried Giant, which does not have as much utterly frustrating passages as Never Let, but instead meanders and wanders semi-aimlessly through itself to a muted and dull finish, endlessly refusing to engage in any of the questions it raises or tropes it borrows.

As I think about my memories of those books - and the vaguer memories of When We Were Orphans - and of what I liked about the early novels, I'm coming to think Ishiguro's protagonists are inherently passive. They may do things, but they're not the motivating forces in their worlds. And some plots work much better with main characters who actually have goals and aims and intentions - genre fiction structures deform in unpleasant ways under the weight of lumps who just sit there and let evil scientists harvest their organs because they are Sad Clones Who Cannot Love.

Nocturnes is not a genre book; it was an original collection of five thematically-linked stories published in 2009. I bought it soon after publication, but it sat on my shelves, weighed down by the weight of so much else disappointing in Ishiguro over the years. I suppose it had been long enough that the disappointment was no longer fresh, because I picked it up recently...and maybe that's what made me realize my essential problem with Ishiguro's characters.

The subtitle is "Five stories of music and nightfall." They're not stories set at particular moments - it's not that kind of microfiction, or Nicholson Baker-esque mediations - so "nightfall" is more there as flavor text than something intrinsic to the core of the stories. They are all about musicians; that's what binds them all together. And all five of the main characters are very Ishiguro-esque; they are all led around, through their lives, by others, even as they seem to think they have desires and aims.

Ishiguro is a literary writer, and the clump of loosely linked short stories is a very literary format, which means his skills and aims line up well with the expectations of the reader and the possibilities of the form. I still found the narrators oddly passive at times, but none of them are carrying the weight of a novel's plot, so it's less intrusive.

And what happens in these five stories? They're mostly about the other people the narrators encounter: a guitarist in a public-space band in Venice helps an aging crooner serenade his current wife for the last time; a dull Brit expatriate whose only distinguishing feature is his declared "perfect taste" in classic jazz visits married old college friends because he serves them as an object lesson in how they have it good; a young songwriter working in a mid-England tourist trap for the summer also gets in the middle of a spiky marriage, this time of middle-aged Swiss, with an unfinished song that triggers their respective optimism and pessimism; a jazz musician who has never made it gets expensive plastic surgery as a backhanded gift, complains unsympathetically about everything, and has a brief friendship with a world-famous star in the same rehab facility; and the story of another musician in the first-story Venice scene - a cellist who learns that his new teacher is not quite what she seems - is told at second-hand in a way that seems to act as an iris-out for the whole book.

As I said, they are all literary stories, all about people who made arguably bad decisions, people who aren't driving their own lives, people who encounter others more compelling or driven or energetic. They definitely all come from the same story-space, and they work well together as a cluster of stories. I found the whole assemblage to be pleasant but somewhat lacking, like a pop tune with a chorus that you can hum but isn't hooky enough to remember more than a day or two. 

Your mileage may vary; Ishiguro is a Nobel winner, so clearly a lot of people think he's totally awesome.

This Year: 1988

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

This is another "us" song, another one my wife loves too, another one that has meant something to the two of us for three decades now. We saw the performer live a few times, way back then, and at one memorable concert at the Beacon we were really close to the stage, on the left, and joked for years afterward that the performer was checking one of us out in the audience, but which one was it?

It was her. I think we knew that, even then.

The song is Like the Way I Do, by Melissa Etheridge. I've hit a couple of songs of obsessive love before, but this one tops them all. Even the studio version does, but I prefer an early barn-burner of a live rendition, available on a couple of Etheridge's early singles and then the deluxe edition of her first record. It's still the best single song I've ever heard from her, but it's also one of the best songs by anyone anywhere, and possibly the best ten-minute song ever.

It is not a song you would expect a couple to both like; it's a song about a bad breakup. (Pretty much all of Etheridge's first record is; it's one of the great break-up records.)

But, bluntly, this is a deeply sensual song, one that asks the musical question "Baby, your new lover isn't crazy enough to be as good a fuck as I was, is she?!" And who doesn't secretly, somewhere deep in their hearts, believe that they are the Best at Sex, at least with the One Perfect Person, the one they know better than anyone else, certainly better than that new...well, you get what I mean.

But, most of all, this is a sexy song, a song that you can scream along with in the car, a song that has more energy than some people's entire careers, a song that makes you feel alive and vital for the space of it's time. And it's got a rhythm that can't be beat: songs that start with a particular rhythm that you know instantly are always great, and this one does that from the jump. 

Because we've all had that moment where we want to say "Nobody aches, nobody aches just to hold you, like the way I do." And Melissa Etheridge makes that moment real and vital and loud.

Books Read: April 2023

Here's what I read this past month. At some point, once the posts go live, there will be links. Not today. though.

Nicolas De Crecy, Glacial Period (digital, 4/1)

Josh Sladek, Tik-Tok (in SF Gateway Omnibus, 4/1)

Jim Benton, Dog Butts and Love. And Stuff Like That. And Cats (digital, 4/2)

Gipi, MBDL: My Badly Drawn Life (digital, 4/8)

Michael Swanwick, Stations of the Tide (4/8)

Maximilien Le Roy and A. Dan, Thoreau (digital, 4/9)

Liniers, Macanudo: Welcome to Elsewhere (digital, 4/15)

Jordan Crane, The Last Lonely Saturday (digital, 4/16)

Jack Vance, Cugel's Saga (in Tales of the Dying Earth, 4/16)

Vaughn Bodé, Cheech Wizard's Book of Me (digital, 4/21)

Joe Daly, Scrublands (digital, 4/22)

Bong Redila, Meläg: Town of Fables (digital, 4/23)

Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (in The Complete Novels, 4/23)

Neil Gaiman, P. Craig Russell, and Troy Nixey, Only the End of the World Again (digital, 4/29)

Emily Dickinson, Selected Poetry (4/30)

Drew Friedman, Heroes of the Comics (digital, 4/30)

Gene Wolfe, A Borrowed Man (4/30)

Next month: more books!

Quote of the Week: Self-Awareness Level Zero

This shooting trip of mine started, I believe, innocently enough. Like most Englishmen, I am not accustomed to enquire very deeply into motives. I dislike and disbelieve cold-blooded planning, whether it be suggested of me or of anyone else. I remember asking myself when I packed the telescopic sight what the devil I wanted it for; but I just felt that it might come in handy.

 - Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male, p.8

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

This is a classic thriller, obviously. There's a lot of good and interesting things about it, and I'll get into them. But I need to start with the dumb, idiosyncratic stuff, because that's the way I am.

I'm the kind of reader who connects random things in his head, so both the title and the author - both Rogue Male and Geoffrey Household - confuse me, by reminding me of other things I barely remember in roughly the same way I barely remembered this book before picking it up from the shelf.

So Rogue Male keeps getting confused with Rogue Herries, which is of the same vintage, though they're otherwise utterly different. And I keep wanting to call the author Geoffrey Householder, because I remember the actor Geoffrey Holder.

As I say a lot, those are Me Problems. But, if you live in the same media stew I do, here in the 21st century, you may have similar problems, and so I name them up front.

Anyway, on to this actual book. It's a short, sharp thriller, told in the first person, published in 1939 and taking place very much in that exact time. The unnamed narrator is writing it down - we eventually learn all of the times and places where he wrote sections of the book; Household plays fair with the found-document genre - even as he is on the run and often in pretty dire conditions.

You see, this man is a big-game hunter and some sort of landed British gentry - he probably doesn't have a major title, but I bet the men in the town he mostly owns call him "squire," at least. He's of the leisured class - he'd say something more expansive, that his class is the one trained to rule or some such bullshit - and he's spent his early life mostly running around the world doing interesting stuff rather than working. He's in his late thirties as the novel takes place.

Somehow - he concealed his motives even from himself, and doesn't explain his real reason until very late - he decided to "do a stalk" for what another author of that vintage called "the most dangerous game." And that gets us into the sneakiest, most interesting part of Rogue Male: Household also doesn't say who it was that this man was attempting to get into position to assassinate. [1]

Household wrote a sequel, forty years later, that collapsed that wavefront, but I'm going to ignore the sequel. Rogue Male, itself, is perfectly poised between two Great Men, either of whom could have been the subject of its hero's stalk, and Household went out of his way to keep it poised that way.

So our hero went into Poland, and then made his way across borders and rough terrain to a country villa where the Great Man was. We know this must be either Hitler or Stalin. Throughout the entire book, that's the case: it is either Hitler or Stalin.

From the very first line, we know he was unsuccessful, that he was captured. Once we realize he is writing this, we understand that he survived somehow, and he very quickly gets into the "somehow." All of Rogue Male is how he survived: first from being dumped over a cliff, expected to die there. Then how he got out of this unnamed country next to Poland and back to England. And even then, how he went to ground, far from home, with foreign spies and the British police both searching for him for strong reasons.

He frankly compares himself to an animal over and over again, as he sneaks about and digs hidey-holes and lurks at night on various moors to hear snatches of conversation. He is alone nearly the entire book: that's the point. He is the Rogue Male, like an elephant cut out from the herd for bad behavior.

Household writes sharply: this is a taut, sparse book, almost novella-like in its focus and pointedness. There are no subplots; there are no other serious characters. There are a few other names, a few people who our hero interacts with, and their psychology is occasionally important. But this is a book about him, from inside his head: both what he does and how he writes about it and comes to admit the how and the why.

It's a fascinating book, and I can see why it's still read. It's the epitome of a certain kind of really tightly focused thriller, entirely bound up in its protagonist's head, and Household writes strongly and precisely to make this guy very specific but also essentially unknowable in the way real people are. He doesn't quite understand himself, but he'll tell us what he can, as he can, as quickly and correctly as possible. The result is at least a minor masterpiece of crime fiction, excellent on a pure reading level as well as more deeply about its craft.

[1] The man demurs, early in the book, claiming he just wanted to see if it was possible and saying he probably wouldn't have taken the shot, if he'd had the chance. He probably doesn't even believe that himself.

Black Hammer Reborn, Part I by Jeff Lemire, Caitlin Yarsky & Dave Stewart

Black Hammer is dead; long live Black Hammer!

Black Hammer Reborn was the declaredly "ongoing" series about Black Hammer III [1], daughter of the title character for the whole series, who took up her father's mantle after traveling to the pocket dimension way back at the end of the very first storyline, getting his giant hammer [2] and engaging in superheroic exploits of her own.

This first volume - Black Hammer Reborn, Part I  [3] - starts off with that daughter, Lucy, telling us the big story once again, though there's more closure and dates than the actual telling of the story did. The Not-Crisis was in 1986; her trip to the pocket dimension was ten years later in 1996; she "eventually helped liberate the other lost heroes." [4] But it's "now" another twenty years later, and Lucy is retired from the long-johns biz, with a schlubby husband, two recalcitrant kids, and a lousy job editing ad copy. Superheroing is handled in Spiral City by the shiny uniforms of TRIDENT, some kind of paramilitary organization: the type that always turns out to be nefarious in superhero comics.

And, of course, there's a Returned Nemesis, which is, as it must be, The One That Made Her Put Down The Hammer. (Guess who?) And, yes, She Crossed The Line back then, Doing What No Superhero Should Do (wink wink, nudge nudge), but it was Necessary To Save Us All.

I don't need to be that coy about it: it's laid out, in detail, in the very first issue collected here. Black Hammer is a lot of things, but, as I think I've said before, it's not subtle.

As seems to be required in every single Black Hammer story, Colonel Weird shows up to be wild-eyed and say things that don't make sense but will retroactively prove to have been completely true. We also have extensive flashbacks to 90s-era Lucy, featuring Skulldigger, Doctor Andromeda, and more than a few hints about the apocalyptic thing that is coming back in the main timeline. Those also allow the book to show Lucy in costume hitting things with her ginormous hammer, which is kind of the point of a book called Black Hammer Reborn.

I am sorry to say there is also an Incredibles-style "we can't use our powers, because we are Normal People now, and That Is Good" sub-plot, which looks like it will work out exactly the same way that subplot always works out in superhero comics.

Lucy only gets into her costume in the main timeline on the very last pages of this book, during the Tense Confrontation with someone I shouldn't specify. I suspect we'll learn, in the next book, that Things Were Not As They Seemed, maybe with another pocket dimension or some "Man Who Has Everything" kinda deal.

As usual with Black Hammer comics, I admire the skill and energy - writer Jeff Lemire is actually telling a different story this time, allowing it to move forward and everything; new artist Caitlin Yarsky does a lot of great dynamic work, and her covers are particularly strong - while not engaging with it on a visceral level at all. This is all deeply silly, paper-doll theatre, and I can't shake the feeling that only quite dull people could ever take it seriously.

There are two more Reborn collections; the "ongoing" ended last year after twelve issues. I expect I'll be back to see how it turned out, and hope for an ending this time. The side stories mostly had endings; those are pretty good superhero stories. The main 1996-era story, though, seems to be utterly insistent on never moving anything forward at any time. I'll have to see where this piece of the puzzle goes.

[1] I have convinced myself there was a Black Hammer before the main one, and can even call to mind vague panels in which he was discussed. I bet Lucy, our protagonist here, is generally referred to as "Black Hammer II," though.

[2] Remember this is superhero comics: everything is as literal as possible. "Black Hammer" is a Black person who has an absolutely ginormous Hammer, as it must be.

[3] It's the fourteenth collection, officially titled Black Hammer 5: Reborn, Part 1, for maximum confusion.

[4] Is this in some uncollected story, or is it just a gimme? No status quo in comics lasts forever, so of course they got out of the pocket dimension, eventually, somehow.

The Last Mechanical Monster by Brian Fies

Brian Fies, as a graphic novelist, seems to have two modes - I say "seems" because he's only had four long projects, so dropping them into two buckets of two each is plausible but probably awfully reductive.

Still: he's done two non-fiction books about crises in his own life, Mom's Cancer and A Fire Story. His other two books are both fictional tales with elements of super-science deeply tied to the years immediately before WWII, which is awfully specific to be random. His second book was Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, yet another Boomer's wistful "how come we never got jetpacks" lament.

And his fourth book is The Last Mechanical Monster, which explicitly calls itself a sequel to the 1941 Fleisher Brothers cartoon "The Mechanical Monsters," although the main character of that cartoon (a Mr. Superman, still the property of a large and litigious organization) is entirely absent, except for one namecheck in an old newspaper headline. It is a tale of super-science - the kind that steals from banks, is made with flashing diodes and sparking vacuum tubes, and may or may not be accompanied with maniacal laughter - and its collision with the modern world. I believed it a bit more than I did World of Tomorrow, but it's still a very artificial story.

The unnamed evil genius of that cartoon is released from prison. It's sixty or seventy years after his crimes; we don't know exactly when but let's say the early days of the twenty-first century. The Inventor - we never learn his real name; some call him "Sparky" - is not quite a hundred years old, and has not changed disposition or aims one iota in the long decades since his initial failure. He is nearly as brilliant as he was as a young man, just as dismissive of every other human being in the world, and entirely focused, in the way of a Republic serial villain, with the crudest kind of theft as the way to succeed.

So he buys some supplies with his discharge money, goes to the secret hideout where he was captured so long ago, gets into that place through a secret secondary entrance, and sets to work amid the smashed corpses of his robots.

He does have to return to Metropolis [1] occasionally, and makes a few "friends," including bus driver Ted, electronics-shop owner (and retired engineer) Lillian and librarian Helen, though he's brusque and demanding and rude to all of them, only advancing to the barest level of courtesy, sort-of, almost, by the end of the book.

His plan is a diminished version of the old plan: salvage enough to make one robot operational, use that robot to steal valuables from banks or wherever, and then Make Them All Pay!!!!! Bwah-ha-ha-ha!!!!!!!

There's an underpants-gnomes level missing step there, obviously. The Inventor never realizes it, and never would think of using his inventions to do anything else on his own. It's also a plan that was only barely plausible in 1941 and utterly impossible decades later, as another character eventually points out, without quite having understood that was The Inventor's plan.

He does get one robot working, as the title and cover reveal. It is somewhat more self-directed than expected, and doesn't steal the things The Inventor wants it to at first. It does have an impressive capacity for destruction, as we will eventually see.

I found Mechanical Monster enjoyable as a pulpy SF adventure yarn without ever quite believing in it. The Inventor is a standard character, the one who doesn't change in the slightest over the course of seventy years and then shifts when it would be touching near the end. The story is yet another Boomer love letter to the kind of SF that doesn't examine its premises, and I ran out of patience with those stories not too long into my own SF career, quite some time ago. Fies is good at this stuff, and clearly has a strong affinity for it. I hope it's hugely successful so that he can keep doing retro super-science stories for as long as he wants to, but I might not end up reading them.

[1] No character ever says the name, but we see it on signs.

Blood of the Virgin by Sammy Harkham

Literary fiction is identifiable in any format: the story of unhappy people told with care and grace and close attention, from outside.

It's not necessary that it be set in the recent past, but that helps: sometime just long ago to be before the working lives of the audience, but still familiar - say, fifty years or so.

It's not required that the main characters be married, but they probably are. They probably have young children - a baby, preferably, to have someone they need to care for, to care about, who is not old enough to be another character. If they're married, they fight. They probably separate, at least temporarily, at least physically. At least one of them sleeps with someone else during the story. And there are conflicts between their married lives and the work of at least one of them - probably the one whose work life is closest to the creator, the one who does something vaguely artistic.

Sammy Harkham's Blood of the Virgin is a major literary graphic novel: it does all of the things expected of the genre, and does them well. It has a novelistic heft and scope, even including very loosely related flashbacks to earlier people and times. There may be something slightly obvious about it: it does hew really closely to the conventions of its genre. But it's a strong entry in that genre, a book that has a good version of the core story to tell and that tells its story with energy, passion, and a precise eye. More importantly, it's not a genre that comes up all that often in comics to begin with, so it looks fresher and more exciting as it is that it would have as a movie or a prose novel.

Seymour edits movie trailers for a cheapie horror-movie production company; it's the fall of 1971. He's twenty-seven; he's had this job three years; he's ambitious in the sense that he loves movies - unabashedly loves horror movies - and that he wants to keep doing them, to get closer to the core of filmmaking. I don't know if he has grandiose artistic visions that he wants to see on screen; I get the sense that, at this point, he has changes he wants to ring on established ideas and that his ideas will keep iterating, keep developing, as he works and learns and gets better.

Assuming he gets those opportunities. Assuming he takes them and does well.

He's written a script - "Blood of the Virgin" is his title, of course. There's a hole in the company's schedule that script can slot into. As usual with a business like that, the hole is right now. Seymour has to finish the script immediately, and then dive into being one of the on-set producers for that movie, during the hectic three weeks it films. All of that is a big opportunity, a chance to move up in the business, to get public credits and be part of something real. But it's also a hell of a lot of frantic, demanding work, right now.

Time is money. Nowhere more so than the movie business. Nowhere more so than in marginal, low-budget businesses.

Harkham gives a great view of the contingent, improvisational, scrambling nature of low-budget filmmaking: Blood of the Virgin is about a lot of things, but central to most of them is what it's like to make a movie. To be in a location for that day, chasing shots, wrangling actors, fighting with effects, tracking time as the sun inexorably chases across the sky. Planning and strategizing, directors and producers and moguls and assistants, figuring out what they need and what they can get done and what might need to be abandoned. (And "what" always includes "who.") The big parties afterward, where everyone goes a little crazy, where they all mix more freely. We see all of those scenes, different times during the course of the creation of this movie, as Seymour tries to handle his new responsibilities and to do them the ways he thinks movies should be made.

Meanwhile, his marriage is...well, I don't want to overstate it. In the annals of literary-fiction marriages, Seymour and Ida are pretty good. They snap at each other angrily only some of the time; they talk past each other only as much as any couple does. They have real affection for each other, when there's time around hectic movie shoots and a demanding baby. They fuck other people for the usual literary-story reasons, but not often, and pretty far into the book. They are not "doomed" in any way: they can get through this if they want to.

Harkham here is putting it all on the page; this is a big story stuffed with ideas and characters and insights and ideas. There are pages jammed with panels, filled with dialogue, and pages of long quiet late-night drives - it's set in LA, so freeways are at least a minor character. It's a hugely ambitious book that largely lives up to its ambitions: there are probably a half-dozen themes I haven't even touched on here. It's a big book, a rich one, that tells its story well and has a big, compelling story to tell. It is literary fiction, and we can use more of that in comics: the ambition, the depth, the scope.

This Year: 1987

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

Some of the songs in this series are about me, and some aren't. This one, I think, isn't. Or maybe I thought it would be about me, but my life didn't go that way.

I like sad songs; I've said that before. Sometimes I think I like that that sadness enough that I don't really care what they're sad about - I'm looking for the feeling, the emotion, to sink into that song and come out the other side. (There are some minor-key songs that I have on sad-songs playlists that are, objectively, not actually sad at all, but they sound sad, which is the most important thing.)

For 1987, my song is from Guadalcanal Diary, a great but now basically forgotten jangle-pop band with a string of excellent work in the '80s. [1] The song is 3AM.

It's about alcoholism, mostly. And I have my obsessive qualities - oh, do I ever! - but I've never really flirted with addiction, and I never drank all that much.

Well, maybe I should walk that back. I listened to this song mostly in my college years, and I definitely used alcohol to cope then. Big party? Big anxiety about going to a party? Make sure to "pre-game" enough ahead of it. So maybe then-me was smarter than I give him credit for: maybe he saw where that road could lead.

3AM is a slow, hazy song, like the feeling at the end of a long, long night full of various substances. Or maybe the next day, when you're fragile at best and broken at worst. It allusive and quiet - when you're drunk or hungover, you never want to - or maybe can - get too specific about anything.

It's another song with blurred characters - there's the singer, and "you," and an occasional "him." They're not all the same person, but they're all on the same path. They might be able to change, but none of that is in the song: the song is about giving in and wondering what happened and going with the flow and just being in that state.

Never mind, it's always 3AM.

[1] The other Guadalcanal Diary songs I thought about including here were the bouncy, goofy, lovely "....Vista" and two dark visionary driving rock songs, "Pray for Rain" and "Michael Rockefeller."

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Some Jobs Just Can't Be Automated

Dora Molloy - Fainting Dolly to her friends - was unquestionably an artist in her particular branch of industry. It was her practice to swoon in the arms of rich-looking strangers in the public streets and pick their pockets as they bent to render her assistance. It takes all sorts to do the world's work.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Sam the Sudden, pp.122-23

Quote of the Week: A Masterful Example of the Prehistoric Subtweet

Writers are only rarely likeable. They bring nothing to the party, leave their game at the typewriter. They fear their contribution to the general welfare to be evanescent, even doubtful, and, since the business of publishing is an only marginally profitable enterprise that increasingly attracts people who sense this marginality all too keenly, people who feel defensive or demeaned because they are not at the tables where the high rollers play (not managing mergers, not running motion picture studios, not even principal players in whatever larger concern holds the paper on the publishing house), it has becomes natural enough for a publisher or an editor to seize on the writer's fear, reinforce it, turn the writer into a necessary but finally unimportant accessory to the "real" world of publishing.

 - Joan Didion, "After Henry," in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, pp.560-61

Sam the Sudden by P.G. Wodehouse

I tend to read a P.G. Wodehouse book three or four times a year: he wrote about a hundred of the suckers, and they're pretty consistently wonderful, all sunny and amusing and fun. And I write a post here about everything I read.

So you might be getting pretty tired of me monologuing on about Wodehouse if you've been hitting this blog for any length of time, and I apologize for that. But I do enjoy Wodehouse, and I'm going to keep reading his stuff, even as I get into the quirky obscure books. (Does that make them more or less interesting to the random uninterested reader I've just imagined? I don't know.)

Thus I came to Sam the Sudden, a 1925 novel that was known as Sam in the Suburbs in the US for several decades. It is, as you might guess, about a man named Sam.

Sam Shotter is the usual one-off Wodehouse protagonist: young, male, not rich but mildly aristocratic, educated at one of England's finest schools and possessing all of the traditional 19th century fine-school virtues. Sam is also, as is reasonably common in Wodehouse, possessed of a very rich uncle, John B. Pynsent, who is also the magnate of an American business empire. Sadly, Sam is somewhat headstrong, or perhaps given to (positive, generally commendable) manias, which have and will cause him trouble.

Initially, it causes that uncle to send him away from New York, off to London to work for Lord Tilbury's publishing empire - the two magnates have a growing connection that Sam may help to cement - but in London he finds the young lady who he has already fallen hopelessly in love with, because he saw a newspaper cutting with a photo of her in a remote Canadian hunting cabin one winter.

Yes, it is a pretty goofy set-up.

Anyway, Sam ends up living in one-half of a semi-detached out in Valley Fields, a London suburb. In the other half is that young lady, Kay, and her uncle, who runs a weekly paper for Tilbury and is now Sam's boss. Believed to be in Sam's half of the house is a lost treasure, stolen by a criminal who later died in darkest South America, though not before giving clues to its location to several of his still-London-resident compatriots.

The plot goes from there, with the miscreants trying to find the hidden treasure via burglary and trickery, Sam trying to win Kay by being manly and never hesitating for a second on his every last nutty impulse, and Tilbury, before long, trying to get rid of this lunatic foisted onto his well-run collection of profitable enterprises. They can not all succeed, but there is the usual happy ending, for exactly the characters you expect will be involved.

This is not a major Wodehouse novel, but Sam's nuttiness does suit Wodehouse's style of plotting quite well - the narrative does have to make excuses for itself once or twice in reference to his actions, but that's mostly for humorous effect and secondarily out of still-ebbing 19th century feeling. This isn't exactly the way Wodehouse would go in future, but it shows him trying different ways to add complexity and humor and craziness to his plots, and succeeding pretty well. It's thus quite pleasant for readers who do know where Wodehouse went in the '30s and later.

Strange Planet by Nathan W. Pyle

So this is the first book collecting Nathan Pyle's "Strange Planet" comics, in which large-headed Beings do all of the things normal humans do but, and this is the funny bit, they describe it in slightly more convoluted, Latinate language.

It's one of those jokes that seems super-obvious once someone else has made it, and yet no one made that joke quite that way before. So it's the obviousness of being really funny and relatable rather than the obviousness of "I've seen this before."

That first book, unsurprisingly, is named Strange Planet. I'd previously read the follow-up, equally unsurprisingly named Stranger Planet, and talked there about the joys and nuances of the series. This book is just like that, only more so, since it has the earlier cartoons, which tend to be more fundamental and universal.

I don't think I mentioned this the first time, but it's a major part of the appeal: the formalistic language gives Pyle coverage to bluntly state things that are more philosophical or usually left unstated, to make clear the default assumptions of life in a generally light, amusing way.

For example: a lifeguard is talking with a Being in a pool, explaining:

"I am observing you to prevent you from perishing."

"All day?"

"No - just while you are here in liquid."

"There are many other ways I could perish."

"I cannot assist you with those."

As before, this is A Thing, and it's all that one set-up. Some readers won't be interested in that particular joke, which is fine. But it's a really good joke, and Pyle has spent a lot of time working out a lot of smart, funny variations on it. He seems to, after these two books, have turned to making massive amounts of merchandise based on his Licensable Characters as well, for those who want "Imagine Pleasant Nonsense" on a onesie for their shorter beings.

Chivalry by Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran

Stories about old people who are happy and content being old, who stoutly resist fantastic temptations otherwise, are I think always the products of much younger people. Actual old people are much less sanguine about looming death, I find, less likely to smile indulgently at mantlepiece pictures of themselves in their younger days, sigh contentedly, and turn their faces away from mysterious elixirs and fabulous potions.

Neil Gaiman was barely thirty when he wrote the short story "Chivalry" in the early 1990s. It's a light, mostly humorous story. But it's very much the humor of someone quite young looking at someone else who is quite old, at a light, humorous distance.

Chivalry was turned into a graphic novel recently - just about a year ago - by Colleen Doran, who apparently scripted this version as well as doing all of the art in a variety of styles. (Lettering is by Todd Klein. There's no sign Gaiman did anything for this edition other than say the word "Yes" and sign some manner of document.)

Lots of Gaiman stories have been turned into individual GNs over the past decade or so - I count a dozen on the "other books" page here, plus multi-volume adaptations of American Gods and Norse Mythology - but he's probably written close to fifty stories in prose [1], so the well will not go dry any time soon.

This is one of the lighter - I'm pointedly not saying "lesser," but we're all thinking it - stories, though Doran brings a formidable, and frightening, level of art firepower to this piece, depicting some pages as medieval illuminated manuscripts and explaining in an afterword the extents she went through to find photos of the actual rooms of the real house Gaiman was thinking about for his protagonist back thirty years ago. (One might think that's all rather more effort than Chivalry required, but it's not for us to say, is it? The final product is indeed lovely throughout.)

So: pensioner Mrs. Whitaker finds the Holy Grail in her weekly trip to the Oxfam shop in the high street. She knows exactly what it is, and that it will look nice on her mantlepiece. Soon afterward, the parfait gentil knight [2] Galaad arrives, asking politely if he may have it, since he's on a quest from King Arthur, with a fancy scroll to say so.

Gaiman, as usual, is not doing the collision of high and low speech thing, as other writers might. Galaad is high-toned, and Mrs. Whitaker is sensible and middle-class, not some comic-opera Cockney. They have polite, friendly conversations, with no hint of drama or conflict. Mrs. Whitaker simply wants to keep the Grail; it looks nice where it is.

Galaad returns several times, with more-impressive gifts to entice Mrs. Whitaker. What he does not do is listen to her, ascertain what she wants, and try to deliver that - that would be a more serious story, and not the one Gaiman apparently wanted to write in 1992. Galaad just wants to find the thing that will get her to agree to a swap, and he does, in the end, since this is a light fantasy story.

The prose "Chivalry" was a pleasant quiet thing, all about what wonderful characters the plucky elderly British ladies of the war generation were, basically a love letter to Gaiman's grandmother's cohort. The graphic version keeps the tone and style, and adds a lot of very pretty art, some of which is incredibly fancy and detailed. It is still a very light, fluffy thing, which only very slightly connects to actual life, but this is a very good visual version of the thing this story always was.

[1] It's difficult to count, since his collections differ by country and mix in a lot of poetry, and he's also done a lot of chapbook and small-press publications over the years. When you're the subject of a rabid fandom, you can publish in all sorts of complicated expensive ways and people still buy as much as they can.

[2] OK, Gaiman doesn't actually phrase it that way. But it is still true.

After Henry by Joan Didion

Didion's fifth book of nonfiction was another collection of magazine pieces, like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, after the focused examinations of Salvador and Miami.

Most of the essays in After Henry are dated from 1988-90, implying this was a somewhat focused collection of work, at least focused in time.

I've been reading Didion's non-fiction, in the gigantic 2006 omnibus We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, over the past couple of years. And so now I've finally hit the point where her writing career started to overlap with my publishing career - this is a book I could have conceivably seen and reviewed for my employer at the time.

I didn't, of course. I was very junior in 1992 and Didion was very important. Even more so, she was tightly associated with The Competition, so I doubt "we" even made a play for the book. But it's a might-have-been, and Didion's essays are so full of contingencies and suppositions and radically different opinions that alternative history becomes almost real when reading her.

After Henry breaks down into four sections. In a very Didion way, three of the sections have only a single essay; the bulk of the book is in the remaining section, and that is titled, as it must be, "California." Despite the fact that nearly all of the essays in this book were written after she had moved to New York.

The title essay is about her longtime editor, Henry Robbins, who died suddenly in 1979. This is the only undated piece in the book, so I'm led to assume it was original in 1992. Why write about him a dozen years later? Well, everything with Didion is about the past and stories and what people talk about and don't talk about - I can't say what sparked her to write that essay at that moment (though I'm pretty sure someone asked her that question, on the publicity tour, so there's probably at least one answer, out there in the world), but doing so is very in character.

Saying what the other essays are "about" is trickier; Didion tended to start in one place and wander around the nearby territory when writing non-fiction. Essays start out "about" something specific - the Central Park Jogger, Peggy Noonan, Patty Hearst - but turn out to be more expansive, really "about" things like racial tensions and views of truth in New York, how Ronald Reagan was managed and how California molded him, and a sideways review of Hearst's book as well as related musings about the California-ness of her story.

I may be snarkily saying that Didion made everything about California. She did: that was her lens for viewing the entire world; she's the kind of writer that contextualized death squads and political turmoil in El Salvador by noting that several California counties were larger than that entire country.

Didion's essays, as always, examine a situation or time without exhausting it, without claiming to nail it all down for the reader. The longer pieces here, in particular, fall into sections that can feel like separate essays, as if the larger assemblage is really several beads on a string, organized and related but not one thing in any central way. She has a point of view, and a catastrophizing mindset at all times, but that mostly bubbles along below the surface here - she was older, and more settled, and not thinking the chaos would rise up and envelop her the way she had twenty years before.

This is, I think, considered one of her minor works: it has insights, and good writing, and some gems of essays, but it doesn't add up to anything. It's not a cultural signpost like Slouching or an in-depth view into a particular world like Miami. It's, instead, some things that the middle-aged Didion thought worth investigating in the years around 1990.