Let’s just say it, Harlan Ellison is not the finest specimen the human race has produced. He probably wouldn’t be in the top 10, either. Ordinarily I’d just ignore his personality and read his stories, like I try to do with everyone else. Three rules for happiness and inner peace: don’t research the personal life of your favourite author, don’t research the meaning of your favourite song, and don’t read the ingredients on your favourite prepackaged snack.
But Ellison makes it difficult, because his egomaniac personality intrudes into the books. You get the impression that he doesn’t enjoy telling stories so much as he enjoys being a man who tells stories. He opens the book with two introductions, and then a foreword for each of the eight stories. Ellison interrupts your reading experience to talk about himself ten times. Nobody give this man a Broadway show, or he’ll spend three hours taking bows under the stage lights.
The quality of the stories is a bit up and down, although mostly up. “Paingod” is not a great story, but it is an interesting one. It’s about a godlike being called Trente whose sole purpose is to apportion and distribute suffering throughout the universe. Spending your life making people unhappy is not good for one’s self esteem, and there’s a lot of navel-gazing philosophy, and rumination on things like duty and obedience.
“‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” is an industrious packmule of a story, carrying a lot of ideas and themes despite its short length. It sports one of fiction’s odder revolutionaries: a perpetual slacker in a world where the greatest crime is to be late. Ellison writes the hell out of this one. I was sad when it was over.
“Sleeping Dogs” is about a government intermediary having to work with a shoot-first-ask-questions-never general who has just committed genocide on an alien world. Ellison lays on the melodrama pretty thick, and the effect is over the top. Ellison seems concerned that we don’t get the point, and he repeats it so many times that soon we don’t want to get the point.
“Deeper than Darkness” is King’s Firestarter written 15 years before. A lonely drifter can create fires with his mind, and earns the interest of government spooks looking to use him as a weapon. Another story with sad violins playing throughout, but I like it more than “Sleeping Dogs.”
Ellison’s short stories are consistently better than his longer works, and his short short stories are better than his longer short stories. I come to this impression from this volume and the few others I’ve read: that he’s at his best when he keeps things brief. Sometimes the longer he goes, the less he says.
But it seems to be quite rare for Ellison to write something that’s a complete waste of time. Even his worst works seem like good ideas marred by horrible writing or stupid decisions, not irredeemable trash. I don’t really get an inner “why does this exist?” reaction from many of Ellison’s stories, and that’s certainly impressive.
Norwegian Wood is a slow book with only a little story, but I did not want it to be faster and I did not want there to be more. Someone once said that being a writer is like being a paleontologist digging up a dinosaur skeleton – and praying you don’t break anything as you transfer it from idea to paper. This book constitutes perfect paleontology. Few books are as precise and well realised.
However, parts of the Norwegian Wood skeleton are still underground. Even at the end there questions unanswered, and reasons and whyfors unexplained. Murakami must have decided that they were better off as secrets in the earth. What’s left is an understated but moving story of a young man courting a young woman in 1960s Japan. It’s a fiction book, but one feels justified in thinking that Murakami is transcribing some of his own experiences – he was a college student in Tokyo through this period.
Norwegian Wood has lots of exciting and dramatic and funny moments, all of them written in Murakami’s trademark understated style. Some writers leap and cavort for your attention. Murakami assumes he already has it. Some parts of the book feel real enough to make you uncomfortable. At his best moments, Murakami connects with the reader and makes him feel like he’s actually experiencing a love story, not just reading one.
The characters seem simultaneously realistic and exaggerated, from the disturbed Naoko to the charismatic Nagasawa to the friendly but unknowable Kizuki, whose death is the catalyst for most of the events in the book. They come across as types, but also as people. Main character Toru Watanabe is rudderless and confused, as many young people are, but he’s not uncaring. In fact, he cares too much. Away at college, away from his troubled girlfriend, he starts to feel attraction for another girl. This love triangle forces to make a choice, but that choice merely deepens problems and adds more responsibility to this young man. But that’s the way of things. Choices multiply into more choices, until eventually you’re middle aged and wondering what happened.
Norwegian Wood is a love story, but Murakami sublets narrative space to lots of other ideas. He gets in some shots at student activists, who want to overthrow the system until they graduate and need the system to supply them with a job. He gives Toru a funny roommate who is so likeable that I was saddened when he disappeared from the story. Music is often a prominent feature of this writer’s books, and you could put together a pretty comprehensive 60s compilation album from songs mentioned in Norwegian Wood.
Ultimately, you could view Norwegian story as a symbolic tale of a man facing two paths…and two girls. One is his past, the other his future. The ending is cruel for everyone involved, especially the reader, as he is cut out of one crucial piece of information about what happens to Toru.
But again, that follows from life. We can roll the dice and make decisions…and never know whether we chose correctly or not. I like Norwegian Wood a lot, maybe because it feels like I’m reading about myself.
A deathwalker prowls the night paths, killing and disappearing like a nightmare with sharp teeth. The Slaughter King is a murderer in the legal sense, but that word seems wrong. “Murder” means the killing of man by man. The Slaughter King does not seem to be human, and after he’s finished with his victims, neither do they.
A London policewoman is following The King’s body trail. Unless progress is made soon, the Met will remove her from the case. The killer seems to have links to the Neopagan community, radical feminists, and even the industrial music subculture. Alannis Kirk hopes she can weave these threads into a rope strong enough to hang him. Along the way, she falls in love with a young woman called Sansiega, who possesses insider knowledge on The King. Or, she seems to fall in love. A big part of the book is Alannis’s own motivations, and – when down on the wire – how much better she is than the man she’s stalking.
This is Simon Whitechapel’s first book, and his only attempt at writing a novel (to my knowledge). One one hand it is an archetypal small press novel, featuring unfettered chaos and misanthropy etc, but on the other hand it might be the most “normal” book by this author. There’s not really any of the existential surreality that The Eyes hints at and Gweel declaims like a manifesto. Although nobody would mistake this for a mainstream thriller, your brain can definitely make sense of The Slaughter King.
The story isn’t such of a much. Its twists and turns are illogical and the ending isn’t very satisfying. What The Slaughter King successfully doubles down on is its dark and compelling atmosphere. It’s violent, but more than that, there’s a real sense of inbound doom. The King is bad, but as revelations come to light about his true motivations, he seems like more like a pawn of a corrupt and rotting institution. Ben H Winters wrote a book called The Last Policeman, about a policeman trying to solve a murder when he knows the apocalypse will come in six months. That sums up The Slaughter King to me. Whether The King escapes or goes free doesn’t seem to matter, as the world trying to catch him is fragile and ridiculous — a card tower made of 52 jokers — and destined for imminent collapse.
The book is grisly in that superdescriptive way that makes you feel like you’re reading a medical textbook. The first blow was carefully calculated to maim but not kill, to be massively painful, but not so massive as to pass shortly into numbness: a slash delivered through the flesh of the upper right thigh, ploughing apart the dermis and epidermis, the waxy yellow subcutaneous fat and the deep fascia as it sliced through the rich red fibre bundles of the superficial muscles, the tensor fasciae latae, the rectus femoris, the iliacus, the psoas major, the pectineus and adductus longus, the gracilis, cutting the wet tubery of the veins and arteries, the descending lateral circumflex, the oxygen balas’d arteria profunda fermoris, the vena saphena longa, almost grazing the femoral surface at its deepest point. The Slaughter King has lots of lesbian sex, too. These sequences are lavishly described and endlessly creative, but there are a great many of them and they seem of small thrust to the plot. After the second or third I found myself speed-reading through them.
The Slaughter King is a flawed but definitely interesting book. If there were Simon Whitechapel trees on every streetcorner with copies of The Slaughter King hanging off every branch, I’d have no trouble recommending it, but finding an out of print book from twenty years ago might not be worth the trouble for some people.
