Flicker by Theodore Roszak
I still haven’t come up with a name for that genre of books/films I like so much, where the main character is researching the life of some obscure, forgotten artist (or writer, or filmmaker), or is tracking down some legendary-but-now-lost film (or book, or artwork), and whose quest leads them into dark, often supernaturally horrific territory — previous examples covered in this blog being John Carpenter’s Cigarette Burns, and Ramsey Campbell’s The Grin of the Dark — but Theodore Roszak’s Flicker was the one that, for me, came first, back sometime in 1992 I think it was, when I found it listed in the Andromeda Bookshop catalogue.
(…Brief pause to reminisce about those Andromeda Bookshop catalogues. It’s another thing the internet has done away with — both the need to browse through catalogues and the pleasure of doing so. But those A5 zine-sized little booklets, packed with listings of new books, classic re-releases, rarities and oddities in the sf, fantasy and horror world, complete with intriguing little plot synopses and recommendations, were such a joy to read, simply because of the surprises and treasures they always had in store. I never kept any of them, which is a pity, as they could well have formed, by themselves, a mini-history of late 20th century fantasy publishing. One book catalogue I haven’t been able to bring myself to throw away, though, is from Mick Lyons’ Kadath Press, at the time one of the few (if not the only) UK distributors of Arkham House, Necronomicon Press, and other US publishers of classic weird fiction reprints and associated marginalia. Looking through that catalogue at times felt like leafing through the Necronomicon itself — full as it was of dark secrets and macabre promises of eldritch enlightenments… Okay, so-called “brief pause” over, and back to the book…)
In Flicker, Roszak’s hero Jonathan Gates becomes fascinated by the films of Max Castle, an initially promising exponent of German Expressionism back in the silent days, who later moved to Hollywood and, after a disastrous attempt at a Biblical epic (The Martyr) that went hugely over budget and was never finished, lapsed into pulpy shockers with titles like The Ripper Strikes, The Ripper Returns, Revenge of the Zombie and Kiss of the Vampire. But Castle’s films turn out to have a peculiar dark power that goes beyond their tawdry imagery, something Gates soon learns is all down to “the Flicker” — a way of manipulating the very fundamentals of film itself to hide a second, secret film within the shadows and lights of the first. But Castle didn’t just use these visual tricks to add a little frisson to his films’ chills — for he was born into a secretive religious order known as the Orphans of the Storm, and once Jonathan Gates discovers them, we start to enter Da Vinci Code territory (though, as the novel was written well before Dan Brown’s, perhaps I should say Holy Blood and the Holy Grail territory); we’re soon in the all-too familiar company of Templars, Cathars, a secret order of Catholics (“Oculus Dei”), and the Gnostic gospels of the worshippers of the god Abraxas. H P Lovecraft even gets a mention.
The great thing about this sort of plot is the way it tangles its inventions up with the real history of the culture it’s dealing with — Max Castle, like a dark Zelig or Forrest Gump, pops up behind the scenes of a few key classics, such as Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon, as well giving Louise Brooks her first, uncredited, silver screen appearance. Just as Lovecraft would drop the odd real book title into his lists of forbidden tomes (Margaret Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe, for instance), this all adds to the authenticity of the invented films. Flicker was pretty much responsible for starting my interest in going back and watching the film world’s great classics, as well as convincing me to read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (in a neat, filmic twist, a book I never really understood till I saw it adapted in Apocalypse Now).
And it seems Flicker is going to be made into a film itself in 2008.
In Search of a Distant Voice by Taichi Yamada
I was prompted to buy In Search of a Distant Voice because Amazon recommended it to me and, for once, they seemed to have actually found the sort of thing I might like. The recommendation came because of the Haruki Murakami books I’d bought from them, and I thought Yamada’s novel sounded a bit Murakami-ish, so gave it a go.
I was wrong about that “a bit”. It feels totally Murakami-ish, right from the start:
“Tsuneo got up at four-thirty in the morning. He was in the Otemachi Multi-Office Government Complex in Tokyo, in the rest station on the third floor of Building One. Four-thirty was pretty early, it’s true, but that’s how it goes.” (p. 1)
The studied casualness of that “pretty early, it’s true, but that’s how it goes” sounds almost like a parody of the sort of stylistic tic Murakami employs, like a doctor’s bedside manner, to set his readers at ease, as if he’s trying to let you know that he’s just this, you know, normal kind of guy who somehow had this plain weird thing happen to him. In his homeland, Murakami is known for his casual tone. Though not the first to do so, he’s noted for using the most informal Japanese word boku, rather than the traditional, and more literary, watashi, as his narrator’s word for “I”. (I can’t speak Japanese; this comes from Jay Rubin’s book, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words). I don’t know how much of an impact Murakami has had on the culture of his homeland, aside from being very popular, so it’s difficult to tell if Yamada, in writing like this, is simply adopting a commercial style. Of the few other contemporary Japanese writers I’ve read, Banana Yoshimoto (yes, that’s a name, not a fruit drink) is another one who sounds very Murakami-ish. (Funnily enough, the only other contemporary Japanese author I’ve read, and the only one who doesn’t sound like Haruki Murakami, is the unrelated Ryu Murakami.) But aside from the style, one thing that links Haruki Murakami with these two is the dreamy strangeness of their plots, which was what I was after anyway, so I’m not going to complain about Yamada’s Murakami-ness. (The translator, Michael Emmerich, has also translated the aforementioned Banana, so maybe that has something to do with it.)
In Search of a Distant Voice is about Kasama Tsuneo, a young man working for Japanese immigration, who one day starts to hear a woman’s voice in his head. Tsuneo has a bit of a mystery in his past — something happened eight years before, in Portland, Oregon, which sent him running back to Japan desperately determined “to be normal”. Once he’s got over the shock of hearing this voice, and once he’s decided he’s not mad, he tries talking to it.
There are a few moments in the book which tread that wonderful line between dark and comic, moments both excruciating and disturbing, as Tsuneo tries to work out if the woman’s voice belongs to a real person (and not a dead or hallucinated one), but this dangerous tone isn’t kept up, and for most of the time the book doesn’t quite know (or let the reader know) what sort of story it’s telling. For instance, there’s an obvious mystery about Tsuneo — just what happened to him in Portland? — as well as about the woman — who is she? — and as, at the end, all is revealed about Tsuneo’s past, I expected to have the other mystery resolved, too. I don’t want to give the ending away by saying this, but I think I’d have enjoyed the book more if I had been prepared for the way it leaves some things unresolved. Now, I don’t mind unresolved. It can create quite a subtle and emotional depth to a story. But if you get unresolved when you’ve been led to expect resolved, that emotion tends to be frustration, which isn’t either subtle or enjoyable.
Having said that, I liked the book enough (after mentally readjusting my view of what it was, having finished it). At worst, it suffers from being a short novel with only the depth of a short story — though in that it could have been worse: too many books nowadays are much longer and don’t even have that depth (grumble, grumble, where’s my cardigan…) Read for atmosphere alone, as a sort of mood piece, or as a sort of Kafka-esque portrait of modern man in search of a soul, it has nevertheless intrigued me enough to give Yamada’s other novel, Strangers, a go.
