ABANDONATI - Book review

Garry Kilworth’s 1988 dystopian novel Abandonati is a slim volume but it packs a powerful punch.

The abandonati are the street people, homeless or mentally ill, with no place to go – the abandoned ones, unwanted castaways from our society.

The blurb inside describes it as a funny and moving fable. And it is that.

Some unspecified apocalypse has left groups of people, mostly dazed and without purpose, save scavenging for food – and hopefully, booze – in a deserted and seriously damaged vast city.

Guppy is one of the scavengers and he is not particularly bright – he didn’t even know he was named after a fish – and he is an alcoholic. ‘You just forgot things. You been boozin’ so long it’s made your brain soft. That don’t mean you’re stupid, do it? Stupid is when you pretend to know everything, and don’t...’ (p32)

He soon encounters a little but cocky guy called Rupert and a big yet docile black fellow Trader.

Rupert is convinced that the rich people have escaped to another planet, leaving the ‘dregs’ behind. He is determined to construct a space ship to follow them.

There are two short italicised sequences. One shows two spacemen landing on a planet with breathable air. They walk on purple springy grass – which is spooky for me, as many years ago when our daughter was small I made up a bedtime story about a boy called Jack who had many adventures, among them walking on purple springy grass! The other sequence again features two men, army officers in a bunker, who appear to be still fighting a war... I’m not sure whether these inserts explain the apocalypse, or are flashback vignettes; to my mind they seemed out-of-place, interrupting the flow of the trio’s journey. A minor quibble.

Before long, the reader is wrapped up with trio’s quest through the devastated city, confronting violent gangs and also a friendly bunch of folk who have found a secret cache of wine in the crypt of a church. Another group they meet are travellers – and one of their women takes a shine to Guppy with amusing consequences.

All three are endearing in their own way.

Rupert has a tendency to swear – not a lot – but it is remarked upon by the gentle giant Trader: ‘You do too much swearing. It doesn’t mean anything if you do too much’ (p67) – which is so true!

However, Guppy is the core of the book, which, among other things, is about humanity surviving despite adversity. ‘Guppy was illiterate, but he could read people like books’ (p106). ‘Guppy couldn’t hold something in his mind for very long. Other thoughts kept coming in, day by day, and evicting the current owners. Guppy’s mind was not inhospitable to thoughts, but there was limited space and only one or two could remain in residence at any set time’ (p130). ‘You can’t help loving someone who makes you think you’re special’ (p131).

There are instances of gentle humour, distress, and even a poignant death – but Guppy manages to swim through it all. This is a very moving book whose characters tend to live on after the last page. Indeed, they are not abandoned. 

PS - The cover features artwork by Dave McKean. He came to prominence with covers for DC comics. My failing, but his artwork - and this cover - do not appeal to me.

THE WANTING SEED - Book review - Adult content

 ADULT CONTENT

Anthony Burgess’s future fictional dystopia The Wanting Seed was published in 1962, the same year as his famous A Clockwork Orange.

In his 1982 Foreword Burgess states: ‘The Wanting Seed tries to show … that the response to the prospect of overcrowding and starvation might well be a culture which favoured sterility by promoting homosexuality and rewarding self-castration. But, my instinct argued, nature might respond to human sterility with sterile patterns of its own, and the solution to the population problem could be more ruthless and more logical… I cannot foresee the highly schematic world of (the book) as ever coming to birth, but I think some aspects of it – the glorification of the homosexual, for instance – are already with us.’

No date is given for the world we enter. Certainly, overpopulation has become a global problem in this world of Burgess’s future. Harry Harrison’s novel Make room! Make room! on the same subject (and filmed as Soylent Green) was published in 1966. Interestingly, Burgess uses a similar phrase on p164: ‘ “No room, no room” fluted a thin donnish person…’

‘…planetary survival dependent on the balance of population and a scientifically calculated minimal food supply; tighten belts; win through; evil things they would be fighting; long live the King’ (p53).

It was ‘a near-vegetarian world, non-smoking, teetotal except for ale’ (p38). Later, there is a revolt against this restrictive life-style: ‘Man is a carnivore, just as man is a breeder. The two are cognate and the two have been suppressed’ (p165).

Religion is side-lined, taboo, even, the Pope’s ‘an old, old man on St Helena’ (p40): ‘We were right to throw God out and install Mr Livedog in his place. God’s a tragic conception’ (p42). They use odd phrases, such as Dognose for ‘God knows’… [This is a darkly comic novel, after all!]

Great Britain as we know it has altered radically: ‘Greater London had eaten further into Northern Province and Western Province; the new northern limit was a line running from Lowestoft to Birmingham… the old designations of Wales and Scotland no longer had any precise significance’ (p8). Their trains are nuclear-propelled (p95) – another reason to stop HS2?

The culinary arts are grim: ‘served him with a cutlet of reconstituted vegetable dehydrate cold… A nut was a ‘nutrition-unit, creation of the Ministry of Synthetic Food’ (p51). Tristram was trying to ‘eat a sort of paper cereal moistened with synthelac and… he found it very difficult to spoon down the wet fibrous horror: it was somehow like having to eat one’s words’ (p57). It isn’t just food that is compliant with the dictates of the authorities: ‘Bless their little cotton-substitute socks, the darlings…’ (p153).

The main protagonists are Beatrice-Joanna, her husband Tristram Foxe and his brother Derek. Recently the State Health Service had sent her dead child to the agriculture department for decomposition – ‘useful to the State as phosphorous’ (p4).

Derek is Beatrice’s secret lover, even though he pretends to be homosexual. Homos get priority for all the prime jobs in the Establishment. Tristram is informed that his expected promotion has been blocked in favour of ‘a castrato, a pretty strong candidate’ (p32). ‘… being homo, do you see, wipes out all other sins…’ (p77).

‘For generations people had lain on their backs in the darkness of their bedrooms, their eyes on  the blue watery square on the ceiling: mechanical stories about good people not having children and bad people having them, homos in love with each other, Origen-like heroes castrating themselves for the sake of global stability’ (p184).

And a new corps has been formed: Population Police; Peppol. Dressed in a black uniform, cap with shiny peak, badge and collar-dogs ashine with bursting bomb, which proved on closer inspection, to be a breaking egg’ (p60). And its first Metropolitan Commissioner is Derek – ‘brother, betrayer, lover’.

Assisting the Peppol were the auxiliaries, greys. There are certain telling scenes that send a chill, bearing in mind the prevalent gender activist issues: ‘ “Mind your own business. Woman,”’ (the grey) added with scorn… Very much a woman, mind her own business, socially and biologically, she shrugged…’ (p65).

Beatrice’s sister is married to Sonny, an outspoken God-fearing man living in the countryside, well away from the Peppol patrols. His wife says of him: ‘He may be sane, but sanity’s a handicap and a disability if you’re living in a mad world’ (p151).

By Part Four, things are not going well. ‘Electricity, like other public utilities seemed to have failed’ (p163). Maybe there is hope, however, as someone observes: ‘When the State withers, humanity flowers’ (p167).

Towards the end of the novel, Tristram is conscripted into the army. Annexe Island B6 was a ‘limited area anchored in the East Atlantic, intended originally to accommodate population overflow, now compactly holding a brigade’ (p227). Burgess’s time in the army seems reflected in many observations here. ‘Nobody sang, though. The fixed bayonets looked like a Birnam Wood of spikes’ (p251).

In conclusion, stating nothing that can’t be found in the book blurb: ‘We in Aylesbury are at least civilised cannibals. It makes all the difference if you get it out of a tin’ (172).  Even if the tins are supplied by China…

In this world there is no social media and no smartphones; they use wrist micro-radios (p44). ‘The new books were full of sex and death, perhaps the only materials for a writer’ (p270). Indeed, there is sex and death in this book – but, despite all, there is hope also.

The book’s title is a play on The Wanton Seed, a refrain from the folk-song of that name; Burgess states that the ambiguity is appropriate.

Editorial comment:

Burgess has a tendency to name-drop, possibly by scanning his book-shelves: there’s Linklater, Wilson (his real surname), Adler, Westcott, Asimov, Heinlein, Evans, Ross, Meldrum – and the playful Ann Onymous! A good number of them were science fiction writers: ‘what the old SF writers called a time-warp’ (p241). He was using the then accepted abbreviation, rather than the trendy sci-fi which superseded ‘SF’.

Leslie Thomas called Burgess a ‘writer’s writer’ and I can see why. Certainly, his vocabulary is vast – and dotted with four or five words I’d never before encountered!

THE LAST DAY - Book review

THE LAST DAY

Andrew Hunter Murray

 

Published in 2020, this is labelled as ‘fiction’ rather than ‘science fiction’.

It’s 2059 and the earth has stopped rotating. The Slow began some thirty years earlier. So a good half of the planet is in perpetual night, like the dark side of the moon, with all that that entails. One half an endless frozen night, the other unabated burning sun. Crop failures and mass emigration are just two issues. Britain was fortunate to be in the constant sunlight and was apparently undergoing the Great British Resurgence, according to the authorities. 

The heroine, Ellen Hopper is a scientist who is called back to London by a dying associate, Thorne. Here, she learns that everything is not what it seems; there are secrets that people are willing to kill over. She enlists the help of her ex, David, a journalist.

The story moves along at a fair pace as they track and trace clues to the Big Revelation.  I don’t know why the author persisted in referring to her as Hopper rather than Ellen when he refers to David by his name, but it grated for me.

The conclusion suggests the possibility of a sequel to further explore Murray’s changed world.

It was okay, but don’t believe the hype.

Doris Lessing - R.I.P.

Doris Lessing, the Nobel prize-winning author of The Golden Notebook, among more than 50 other novels, has died at her London home aged 94.

Fifty books is an achievement, but it’s for the breadth of the work that she should be measured: novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. She was able to cross genres with relative ease.

The first novel of hers I read happened to be her debut, The Grass Is Singing (1950), an unflinching powerful account of colonial Africa.

Her most popular novel sequence or series was Children of Violence – Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage, A Ripple from the Storm, Landlocked and The Four-Gated City.

She was equally at home with short stories – and wrote many – and science fiction, with her 5-book series, the Canopus in Argos Archives; two of the latter were adapted for the opera by Philip Glass and Lessing wrote the librettos. A number of her books were filmed, including the dystopian Memoirs of a Survivor.


Mischievously, in 1984 she wrote two novels under the penname Jane Somers and they were initially turned down by her own publisher. She hadn't told them she was the author. ''I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.' If the books had come out in my name, they would have sold a lot of copies and reviewers would have said, 'Oh, Doris Lessing, how wonderful.'" They were published, eventually, showing that her writing skill won through past the gatekeepers. Under the pseudonym, the two books achieved instant remainder status, selling around 3,000 and 1,500 copies respectively. Of course when she came clean, their sales were a different story. Reminds anyone of J.K. Rowling?
She was born in Iran, brought up in the African bush in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia, as was) – where her first novel was set. She was a London resident for over fifty years.

She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature when she was 88, in 2007.