About the author

A long time ago, I had a blog of political polemics. Then life happened and I stopped writing.

Yet the desire to write never went away, and so this blog was born. Of polemics we already have a sufficiency, however. One only has to read a news site. Instead, I am trying my hand at reflections on the cultural artefacts I ‘consume’: books, games, movies, and so forth.

The name of this blog expresses my capacity as an ordinary consumer, and hence merely a ‘casual’ critic. I cannot boast of a degree in art history, cultural studies or English (or any other) language. Nor am I a paid reviewer. I do believe though that most authors create an artefact because they want their audience to actively engage with it, rather than merely consume it passively. Writing reviews is my way of entering into dialogue with a text, as well as an opportunity to be creatively active myself. If people enjoy reading the end product, then so much the better.

About the blog

The function of this blog strongly informed its form. I ended up on Write.as because of the minimalist aesthetic and the deliberate absence of social media plug-ins, Fediverse integrations excepted. There is no SEO, and no trackers. It does mean that the blog lacks some features that readers will have come to expect, most notably the ability to comment and a navigation menu or archive.

To help find your way around, Write.as uses hashtags. Clicking a hashtag will generate a page listing all the posts with the same hashtag. I do my best to label all reviews, and my most common hashtags are at the end of this page.

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How to navigate

Every post has one or more tags (‘#’) associated with it to help categorise it. Instead of using menus, you can click on a tag to retrieve all posts with the same tag. You can do this from within any blog post, or you can use the list below.

Mediums #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Type #fiction #nonfiction

Fiction genres #fantasy #literature #SF #speculative

Non-fiction categories #history #politics

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,” s_aid Karl Marx. And while he had the proletariat in mind rather than the aristocracy, the words might have been the motto of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy. Published between 1946 and 1959, Gormenghast gets classed as prototypical fantasy. Nowadays, it might have been labelled magical realism, suffused as the entire series is with the logic of dreams, where time, space and fate all bend in service of the story.

All three books follow Titus Groan, Seventy-Seventh Earl, first as child, then as youth and finally as a young man. Yet the main character of the novel is not Titus, but the eponymous castle of Gormenghast. Gormenghast is the ur-castle of our European collective imagination: so vast, complex and ruinous that even its lifelong inhabitants cannot fathom it. It is miles of crumbling ramparts and towers, battlements and courtyards, corridors and chambers, arrested in a permanent state of slow decay. Think the castle from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, except if it was 20 times larger and designed by M.C. Escher. It would eat Hogwarts for breakfast.

As labyrinthine as the castle are the rituals of the House of Groan. They are the sediment of contingent decisions and events of generations of Groans, ossified into strictures that lock the castle’s inhabitants down in time in the same way the physical castle contains them in space. It is the rituals and the castle together that hold the essence of the House of Groan. Any living members of the line are incidental. As a metaphor for any old, impoverished, anachronistic aristocratic English family, stuck on a decrepit estate surrounded by mouldering artifacts of a glorious past, it could not do any better.

The novel’s imaginative force is buttressed by the exquisite quality of the writing. Fusing form with substance, Peake’s writing is as ornate, meandering and overabundant as Gormenghast itself. His characters are archetypes in the Dickensian mould: hyper-real cyphers for roles that we all recognise (the Professor, the Nursemaid, the Servant), but written with enough depth and pathos to make them come alive as individuals. The narrative meanders like a river delta, with manifold branches that have no bearing on the plot. At one point there is a 60 odd page diversion about a party, which is as brilliant as it is pointless. Gormenghast is a gothic cathedral of words, not meant to be read as a story, but to be experienced aesthetically as the literary equivalent of stained glass and gargoyles.

Gormenghast does of course have a story, or stories, but it is Titus Groan’s coming-of-age and his quest to self-actualise as an individual, free from the oppressive heritage of Castle and Line, that is the thread through the trilogy. Abstracted from the gothic grandeur of its setting, this is a standard narrative: boy grows up, discovers love, does violence against his enemies, wrestles with the strictures of his parents, and sets out to find himself. Titus is not a traditional hero: he is often passive, irresolute or irrational, especially when contrasted to the self-sufficient Muzzlehatch or the ruthlessly calculating Steerpike. This does not much vary the traditional pattern of a coming-of-age narrative, as the universe helpfully makes up for Titus’ deficiencies by ensuring the necessary characters are in the right place at the right time.

This device works within the setting of a Castle, where it creates the sense of Gormenghast acting as a character in the story. It works considerably less well once Titus escapes the Castle at the end of the second book. The third novel is built on the same dream logic as the first two, but without the presence of the Castle as a focal point, both the plot and the story seriously tax the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. The areas Titus explores are equally isolated from a wider world as Gormenghast is, yet without any obvious reason for this. Characters reportedly move hundreds of miles, yet by cosmic coincidence arrive at the right place at the right time. Unlike Gormenghast, these locations do not function or exist in their own right, they are there simply as canvas for the plot. The same applies to most of the characters in the third book, and in particular the women. The novels clearly show their age here, with the female characters being defined by their relationship to Titus and the function they fulfill as part of his development. And while male characters manage to exhibit a range of virtues and flaws, the women are almost exclusively either vain, insecure, or both. Among these, Titus’ sister Fuschia has the most developed and interesting narrative arc, which makes its premature termination in book two all the more disappointing.

Despite these signs of age, and the narrative sprawl of book three, Gormenghast is a totally absorbing read. The work it requires on the part of the reader to navigate its labyrinthine narratives and linguistic crenelations are what make it a rewarding, if not exactly easy, experience. As the Countess warns Titus before his escape: once you are of the Castle, it will stay with you forever.

#books #fiction #speculative

Warning – contains spoilers

What happens after the revolution? It is a question that is somewhat of a liability for the Left, with a tradition of unsatisfyingly vague answers tracing back all the way to Marx’ (in)famous quip that his job wasn’t to write cookbooks for the post-revolutionary society. It may therefore come as a bit of a surprise to see this question taken up as the central theme of a series in, of all places, the Marvel universe.

Loki season 2 picks up from the end of Loki season 1, where we saw ‘He Who Remains’ killed at the hand of Sylvie (implausibly the only female Loki variant we ever see), and a sacred timeline shattering into infinite fragments. ‘Our’ Loki finds himself in an unfamiliar timeline, now one of many, and quickly discovers that HRW wasn’t lying about the universe tearing itself to shreds now that the Sacred Timeline is no more. Unbeknownst to the Powers that Were at the TVA, they had a ‘Temporal Loom’ in the basement which had the job of keeping the known universe together. Unable to cope with the manifold new timelines, it is in danger of falling apart, taking the universes with it. It is up to Loki, assisted by like-minded TVA employees, to fix this piece of pseudoscientific technobabble and keep the universe together.

Compared to season 1, the surface level plot of Season 2 is less compelling. The Temporal Loom is conceptually unconvincing, and like most other series dabbling in multiversal physics, one shouldn’t scrutinise the (temporal) logic too closely lest it falls apart faster than you can say ‘event horizon’. Cinematographically Season 2 also leans less into the ‘70s bureaucratic vibes of the first season, instead confining the action mostly to the slightly odd maintenance department and a Star Trek-esque control centre.

Just like season 1, however, Loki season 2 contends with themes more interesting than its unconvincing plot. Season 1 wanted to make us think about the balance between individual freedom and the greater good. Season 2 harkens back to that tension a bit, but shifts its main focus to what you do the day after a revolution. For revolution is what the death of HRW brings about: a complete rupture in how the universe operates, and who is in charge of it.

What season 2 wants to get across is that while revolutions may be difficult, what happens after is harder. Viewers familiar with revolutionary history will find no shortage of familiar challenges that beset the new regime at the TVA. There is the old-guard counter-revolution, led by General Dox and breakaway elements of the TVA, whose numbers for reasons of complex multidimensional physics range between 3 and infinite, but are always exactly what the plot requires. There are opportunists seeking power, represented by the double-crossing Ravonna Renslayer and Miss Minutes. But both of these are mere distractions to the biggest challenge: how to make sure that after the rupture, society (in this case reality as represented by the Temporal Loom) doesn’t fail to reproduce itself.

With reality falling apart around him, the dilemma Loki is faced with is that, if the new order cannot sustain itself, it is better to put the old order back in place, or to let the whole thing burn down and see what rises from the ashes. Loki’s allies at the new TVA, as well as latterly HRW, represent the former view, whereas the latter is represented by Sylvie taking a clear “it is better to die free than live enslaved” line. Caught between these two poles, Loki desperately tries to find a third option that would make the new order viable, but without putting the TVA back in charge or purging all realities but one.

In dealing with this question of whether it is better to have freedom even if it leads to chaos and death, or accept control and sacrifice for the greater good, Loki treats both sides thoughtfully and with sympathy. It would have been so easy to cast Sylvie as the fanatical revolutionary, willing to sacrifice everyone on the alter of ideological purity. Instead, the series shows how for someone like Sylvie, who has suffered enormously at the hands of the old order, it is better to let it all burn down and just see if something will rise from the ashes. For a good part of the season, her position seems more plausible than Loki’s, who is now cast as the reformer desperately trying to salvage elements of the old order to give the new order a fighting chance, but with very limited success.

The season finale resolves the tension through two surprising twists that make for a remarkably satisfying ending. First, after making the entire show a quest for a fix to the Temporal Loom, we discover that regardless of the efforts made, the Loom cannot be fixed because HRW designed it to fail. Turns out his prophecies were less about omniscience and more about his own handiwork. In a move whose logic echoes that of ruling elites throughout time and space, HRW designed the Loom to be a spacetime boobytrap precisely to defeat a revolution like the one Sylvie and Loki accomplished. It turns out the whole search for a version of HRW who might put matters right was a red herring all along.

Yet when all seems lost, it turns out that the way forward is not a technical fix, or even a compromise with the old order. Instead, we see Loki realise that he himself can take the place of the Loom and embrace his facet of the God of Stories, weaving the strands of all the realities together to keep them alive. Downside for Loki: he needs to sit on a multidimensional throne for, most likely, eternity, to keep the show on the road. The symbolism here is obvious: the alternative to either burning it all down, or putting the old ruling class back in charge, is for the revolutionaries (i.e., all of us) to do the constant work to keep the new society alive. Because Loki’s solution is not a single act, but a commitment to actively sustain the new order for eternity. Of course, a real post-revolutionary situation would not have such a singularly neat (if cosmic) solution. But that doesn’t diminish the message that we can have our better world, provided we are prepared to build it every single day after the revolution comes.

#tv #fiction #SF

Notes & suggestions

• Vincent Bevin’s If We Burn is a very good overview of (quasi-)revolutionary movements in recent years that were more in line with Sylvie’s approach of burning the old world down without worrying about what might come after.
• Ursula K. le Guin deals with the question of what makes a good revolution and how it is then sustained both in The Dispossessed and the related The Day before the Revolution.

#books #fiction #speculative

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, is an observation attributed to Marxist critic Frederic Jameson. And indeed, our culture is rife with stories that tell of the end of the world, often as a result of capitalism, yet rarely do we see stories about capitalism’s transcendence. Post-apocalyptic stories walk a fine line between serving as a warning, and expressing our fears that the trolley can no longer be switched to a track where it will not kill all of us. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake sits within the latter category, being less a warning and more a bleakly cynical tale of human powerlessness.

We see the world of Oryx & Crake through the eyes of Snowman/Jimmy. Snowman is the last surviving human, an obsolete relic from a vanished civilisation. Through Snowman, Atwood shows us that an individual human is a contradiction in terms. Devoid of relations with other humans or a shared humanity, Snowman is a subject without purpose, who doesn’t so much survive as merely exist. His only role is to look after the ‘Crakers’, a group of post-human humanoids who have inherited the Earth, and who could probably have done without Snowman’s guidance if it wasn’t for the dangerous trash humanity has left behind.

Jimmy is Snowman’s pre-apocalyptic incarnation. Flashbacks tell us of Jimmy’s childhood, teenage years and adolescence. It is in these chapters that we discover the world before the fall. It is a world already ravaged by climate change, with American society split between those living a nasty, brutish and short existence in the ‘pleeplands’, and those, like Jimmy, who are fortunate enough to live in the highly competitive but at least vaguely secure Compounds of a handful of biotech megacorps. We don’t see a lot of the world beyond the United States, but the implication is that is riven by war, plague, and famine.

However, the bleakness of Oryx & Crake does not lie in the actions of the unscrupulous corporate giants whose actions threaten to destroy the world. If anything, the megacorps have a somewhat cartoonish feel to them, with names like HealthWyzer and RejuvenEssence. They are also by now a fairly worn trope, and although Oryx & Crake predates cultural products such as WALL-E or The Outer Worlds, we had already seen this representation in Snowcrash, Fallout or Bladerunner. Instead, the cynicism comes from the fundamental lack of agency of almost everyone in the book, creating a pervasive feeling of inertia and fatalism.

The inertia is most pronounced for Snowman. Although he eventually goes on a pilgrimage, it is difficult to be invested in the outcome of anything that happens to him, because he serves no other role than acting as the story’s narrator. The ambiguity about his fate at the end of the book evokes indifference rather than any sense of dramatic tension.

The same holds true for the Jimmy chapters, because in the end Jimmy is a fundamentally uninterested and uninteresting character, and those two things are not unrelated. Jimmy’s is a stereotypical story of emotionally deprived childhood, detached adolescence and damaged early adulthood. Jimmy neither cares for nor is interested in the world he inhabits, apart from his imbalanced friendship with the titular Crake and his bizarre and unhealthy obsession with a child seen in a pornographic video, who turns out to be the titular Oryx. Like Snowman, Jimmy doesn’t really have a purpose in life and so more or less drifts through it rather than exerting any real agency.

The same lack of agency is evident in all the other characters in the novel, who are also disappointingly one-dimensional, from the emotionally distant mother and the disinterested but jovial father, to the corporate goons and the overwrought artists of Jimmy’s university years. Apart from Jimmy’s mother, none of them exhibit much interest in the world they inhabit, or any desire to act upon it.

The only character with a real sense of purpose is Crake, and this is something Jimmy senses when they first meet. Crake is a boy/man with a vision, and this alone makes him different, mysterious, enviable and above all, powerful. Crake is also a sociopathic genius, as evidenced by his effortless hacking of his uncle’s bank account as a child and his inevitable ascendence to the most prestigious university and employer.

It is this position of Crake as the only character with any real capacity and will to act which turns Oryx & Crake’s message into one of fatalistic cynicism. For what hope is there of averting the apocalypse if the only people who can change anything are superhuman geniuses who believe that humanity is the virus? The book presents no alternatives to the mad scientist theory of history: its mundane characters are powerless and uninterested, its bright intellects are corrupted, and the denizens of the pleeplands are as useless as the proles in Orwell’s 1984. What little collective action the book presents is only there as background, and in any event is totally ineffective.

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe Atwood’s warning is about the dangers of collective inertia. But with Crake presented as the only counterpoint, it is unclear what lesseon we are then expected to take away from this story. The pervasive sense of futility also makes the book generally quite boring. Jimmy/Snowman is just not very compelling as a character, nor is the support cast, which makes it difficult to care about anyone in the book, or what happens to them, including the billions of humans who ultimately die, though generally off stage. On top of that, Crake’s role in the story is telegraphed with a 12 foot neon sign as soon as he is introduced, making the sequence of events quite predictable. One doesn’t introduce a mad scientist in Act I if one doesn’t intend to use them.

This is not to say that Oryx & Crake doesn’t provide some interesting food for thought: on the nature of being human, the point of the arts and culture, or the capitalist death drive. But on the whole, its characters and plot are too superficial to be compelling, and its world is neither an effective warning nor an imagining of an alternative to our current trajectory. We remain trapped in the neoliberal frame where there is no alternative: the trolley has only one track, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.