1960s, page 1 of 5

Bug Jack Barron is one of those novels you keep hearing mentioned if you read about the history of science fiction, particularly the New Wave that revolutionised the genre’s literary palette in the late 60s and early 70s. It was initially published in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds between December 1967 and October 1968 (which, if you don’t have your countercultural periodical publication frequency calculator handy, is six instalments), but the novel’s liberal use of swearing, drug use, and sex caused WHSmith, the largest magazine distributor and vendor in the country at the time, to refuse to stock its March 1968 issue, after which (because New Worlds had an Arts Council grant) “questions were asked” in the House of Commons. (Which you can read here. It’s quite short and mild and, despite the legend, Spinrad never gets called a “degenerate”. He’s not even mentioned by name.) The novel was published in book form in 1969.

It’s set a couple of decades into what was then the future (at least twenty years after Bob Dylan recorded “Tombstone Blues”, according to the novel, so after 1985). Jack Barron has a one-hour Wednesday-evening TV show, in which he invites members of the public to video-phone in and tell him what’s bugging them, after which he phones up those responsible, live on air, and gets them to explain. Things kick off when a man phones in to complain he’s been denied a place in one of the Foundation for Human Immortality’s cryogenic freezers. It turns out this is for legitimate reasons—the Foundation demands a certain amount in liquid assets to be assigned to them for the duration of a person’s freezing, but the man included his home and business in the calculation—the man, though, says he was refused because he’s black. Barron pursues the issue anyway, just to stir up trouble. The Foundation, at that very moment, are trying to get a bill passed that will grant them a monopoly on cryogenic freezing, and Barron has just enough clout (an audience of one hundred million Americans) that he can impact political decisions. This brings him to the attention of the Foundation’s president, Bennedict Howards, who tries to recruit Barron to his cause, by offering him a free place in one of their freezers.

But Barron has had an equally tempting counter-offer: politicians from opposite sides of the left-right spectrum who oppose the Foundation’s bill have realised Barron is the one man who could unite their supporters and get them into power as a coalition. So which does he want, immortality, or to be President of the United States?

So Howards ups the stakes. First of all he finds Barron’s ex-wife Sara, who left him shortly after he began his media career, feeling he’d abandoned the progressive political ideals the two shared in their student days. (Back then, Barron formed the Social Justice Coalition party, which he left so as not to compromise his TV show’s political neutrality.) Somehow knowing that Barron and Sara are still hung up on each other, Howards convinces her that if she can get Barron to sign his contract for a freezer-place, she’ll get one too. Then he ups the offer again, telling Barron that the Foundation has actually developed an immortality treatment, and that he and Sara can have it whenever they want. They just have to sign the contracts.

Barron, though, starts to suspect there’s something odd about the immortality treatment, and when Howards gets annoyed when Barron covers a seemingly unrelated issue on his show—a poor black man in the deep south who sold his daughter for supposed adoption to a rich white man for $50,000—things start getting complicated.

The novel’s style placed it firmly in the experimental, literary New Wave. Aside from the free use of the sort of street-talk (and a lot of swearing) that was probably how people spoke then anyway, there are occasional passages in a sort of Beat-style stream of consciousness (though these get a bit repetitive as the novel goes on). (I have to say I found the first chapter almost incomprehensible, but fortunately things settled down after that.) Probably the thing that would make it impossible to publish today is its racial language, though the irony is that it uses this language to say what was progressive for its day. On the other hand, its treatment of women is pretty poor. Sara, despite leaving Barron when he gave up on his progressive politics, gives up her own when offered a shot at immortality, and basically exists to worship him (“oh, this is a man”). Once she’s reinstalled into his life, she’s not involved in any of the decision-making, and doesn’t even seem to want to be.

But the novel is really about the battle of wills between two men of power, Barron and Howards, and the worlds (media and business) they represent. In this, it reminded me of Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, which is also about the contest between two world-sized personalities (Bester even gets name-checked here: “Jack could always stick a phrase in your head like a Bester mnemonic jingle.”). But Bester’s plots had far more incidents and ideas, and both of his characters really did feel world-sized. One complaint I have about Bug Jack Barron is that Howards, as a villain, is too easily needled into giving his secrets away. As soon as Barron even touches on a sensitive area, Howards breaks into a seething rage. He’s a cartoon villain, and how he ever made it to being CEO of a major corporation is hard to imagine. He couldn’t even play a round of poker.

Read in terms of the time it was written, Bug Jack Barron is a study in the aftermath of 60s-countercultural hopes and ideals (Bob Dylan, in the novel, is dead), in which once-idealistic people have been led into a world of “use me and I’ll use you politics” and world-weary cynicism:

“What happened to all the no-more-war n*****-loving peace-loving happy got nothing need nothing love-truth-and-beauty against the night Baby Bolshevik Galahads. Years happened, hunger happened, and one day, age-thirty happened.”

(Asterisks not in the original publication.)

Immortality, in the novel, is the ultimate corrupting Faustian pact, the one thing that would cause anyone to give up their ideals. As Spinrad says in an LA Review of Books interview from 2012:

“The initial inspiration for Bug Jack Barron was the way the question of immortality was generally treated in science fiction—that is, no one had seriously dealt with the inevitability that it would initially be very expensive, and that it would confer enormous political power on whoever controlled it, indeed on whoever might even be able to promise it one way or another…”

Against this, he says:

“…the only such power that could stand up to the power of the promise of eternal life was the power of television to transform, control, mutate, and manipulate individual and cultural consciousness…”

The perceived importance of TV back then is captured in this diagram from a Michael Moorcock article in the same issue of New Worlds as the final instalment of Bug Jack Barron, which places television right at the centre of the “Media Web”:

(Though I couldn’t help thinking of what would be the closest UK equivalent in the day, Esther Rantzen in That’s Life! — hardly Bug Jack Barron stuff. Maybe it’s a UK/US difference.)

Nowadays, with broadcast TV flailing for viewers in the same way cinema did when TV came along, Bug Jack Barron has nevertheless attained a new prescience. Barron, alone before the camera in his small studio, sharing screen space with video-callers, feels like an influencer of a certain type, even more so when you consider his emotive stirring-up of his viewing public. Back then, the idea that a media personality such as Barron could be considered for President of the USA was satire (Ronald Reagan was Governor of California at the time); nowadays, reality is so busy satirising itself that Bug Jack Barron reads more like a how-to manual—Machiavelli’s The Prince, updated for the video age.

As a novel, I perhaps found it a little too long (entire chapters were taken up with Barron coming to a decision), and only Barron himself felt like a convincing human being, but it shows how even SF from over fifty years ago can still feel relevant.

(Another thing reading this novel caused me to check out: What happened to all those real-life companies offering cryogenic freezing what seems like only a few years back? Some are still about, yes, but some went out of business. And the freezers were turned off.)

I’ve previously written about Joan North’s The Cloud Forest and The Light Maze; The Whirling Shapes came out between those two, and so completes the trio of her gently mystical early-teen novels. (I assume I’ll never find a copy of her first published book, The Emperor of the Moon, which is so rare the only review on Amazon is from North’s own daughter wanting to find a copy!)

Published in 1968 in both the UK and US, The Whirling Shapes begins with 14-year-old Liz Blake going to live with her Aunt Paula, Uncle Charles, and their 16-year-old daughter Miranda, while her mother has to spend time in a sanatorium (it’s not said why in the book, but one reviewer says it’s a TB sanatorium). Aunt Paula is a bit of a North type: a busybody, always rushing out to this class or that event, usually to do with some faddish idea (she herself teaches the “Helen Tregonna method of dancing”), while also imposing her busyness on others: “an overwhelming sort of person”, “it never occurs to her that she could possibly be wrong about anything” . Fortunately, she’s out most of the time, so is too busy to make much of an impact on the story.

Far more to Liz’s liking is Great Aunt (but just called Aunt) Hilda, who lives at the top of the house. A retired anthropologist, her grandfather was the famous explorer Sir William Harbottle, and she’s currently writing her memoirs. Aunt Paula has already introduced Liz to the paintings of a young man called James Mortlake—all of vaguely whirling shapes, which Liz finds rather depressing. At Aunt Hilda’s she meets the man himself, and he turns out to be as morose as his art. (It’s only later revealed, and pretty much as an aside, that his father, a millionaire, shot himself when James was only four years old, after which his father’s business collapsed and his mother took an overdose of pills. Nobody seems to think of this when considering the generally dark tone of James’s art. When later speculating on why this young man paints such miserable pictures, and is somewhat miserable himself, Liz says he can’t help it, it’s just the sort of face he has!)

Strange things begin happening from the first night of Liz’s stay. The house is on the edge of a London heath, and looking out of the window that first night, Liz sees another house that, the next day, isn’t there. Later, the whirlwind-like shapes from James’s paintings begin to appear in reality, and a fog—only visible, at first, from inside the house—starts to surround the household and cut it off from not just the rest of the world, but reality itself. Aunt Paula and Uncle Charles disappear, and pretty soon the others find they can’t get far from the house before the whirling shapes surround them and threaten to make them disappear, too. Finally, though, the little group—Liz, Miranda, Aunt Hilda, James Mortlake, and Miranda’s medical student/poet boyfriend Tom—have no choice but to set out into the fog and find their way back to reality, before the house itself fades away entirely, and them with it.

What caused this incursion of the unreal? James’s paintings are a key part of it, as well as his insomniac wanderings on the heath, but another part is Aunt Hilda’s use of an artefact brought back from an anthropological trip, an egg-shaped thing carved from the wood of “the sacred tree of the Dingas—the Tree of Dreaming True” (the Dingas being “a very exclusive and retiring Central Indian tribe”). She had been holding this object and thinking of the house she grew up in when that very same house started to appear on the heath—the house which Liz then saw. As Aunt Hilda explains, “when I hold it in my hands, my thoughts have great power”. So, James’s depressiveness has been attracting the attention of the whirling shapes, but Aunt Hilda seems to have been the one to finally open the way from their world to ours. (The odd thing is, once things get desperate in the fog-enshrouded house, nobody thinks of using the power of this sacred artefact again. It’s utterly forgotten.)

As for the whirling shapes, they are, it turns out, “spiritual scavengers”, who “feed on dead mechanical desires”. Dementor-like, they surround their victims, chilling them both physically and spiritually, before making them disappear. They aren’t so much villains (though they’re described as the “messengers of greater and darker powers”) as simply one of the perils of the otherworld where Liz and co. find themselves—a dream-like realm of symbolic trials and archetypal landscapes.

As this is the last of North’s books I’m reviewing, it’s worth looking at the similarities between them. North evidently likes a feisty, no-nonsense but open-minded heroine, though often one more inclined to speak her mind than think about the effect of her words. This heroine is sympathetic towards others, though, and it’s one of the strengths of North’s books that although she presents us with casts of characters with widely different temperaments, they’re generally quite accepting of one another, and there’s rarely any real tension between them. Her feisty main female characters, for instance, are often paired with a slightly sorry-for-themselves older boy, but get on well. (And even busybody Aunt Paula isn’t presented as a villain, merely one of those annoying types of people you have to put up with when you’re a child.)

There are often understated aspects of loss and even tragedy lurking in the background of North’s books. The younger main characters are always parentless, even if only temporarily (as in this book), but there are also the genuine tragedies: here, the twin suicides of James’s parents, in The Cloud Forest the death of Raymond Annerlie’s brother’s family in a car accident, and in The Light Maze the sudden disappearance of Sally’s husband. These never impose themselves too much on the narratives, but it’s notable there’s always something of the sort present.

The fantasy element in her books is the presence of another realm that quite clearly represents the imagination or the inner world, but which is nevertheless a very real place, with genuine dangers. This realm is formless and changeable rather than being a solid otherworld like Narnia, and the presences within it are representative of psychological or spiritual dangers, but (as in the serpent and eagle guardian figures Liz meets in this book) also of positive forces. The general feeling is that humans, though connected to this realm, shouldn’t be interacting with it in such a direct way, and it’s only misguided or greedy people (as with the occult-tinged groups of The Cloud Forest and The Light Maze) or those with unhealthy unconscious preoccupations (James Mortlake’s gloomy art in this book) that threaten to bring that realm directly into contact with human beings, making it much more perilous. The message is that this realm, and the imagination or unconscious generally, should be treated with seriousness, respect, and disinterest rather than power-hunger or desire.

Throughout, though, North’s writing is light and gently humorous. (I particularly liked her description of Uncle Charles as looking “like a gently enquiring camel”, though there’s not a lot of that Wodehousian use of language.) Her plots take their time (perhaps too much for a modern readership—I certainly wondered why Liz and co., trapped in a fog-beset and slowly disappearing house, didn’t do something about it far earlier), and though they’re about genuine dangers, they’re never oppressive or overly dark.

In general, North’s books seem to belong to that end-of-the-sixties period of spiritual seeking, where they veer mostly towards a Buddhistic detachment from worldly passions and a moderation in all things, along with an easy tolerance of the many sorts of people to be found in the world (though, at the same time, a lightly satirical eye cast on those that North disapproves of: the faddish, the busybodies, and those who want power). But her books aren’t really part of the trend that most interests me in YA fiction as it headed into the 70s, with that greater sense of socially-conscious realism, starker drama, and darker fantasy from the likes of Alan Garner, William Mayne, Louise Lawrence, and so on. Perhaps the closest equivalent is Penelope Farmer’s Castle of Bone—though North is no way near as outright weird as that book.

Like Atlan, the previous volume in the saga of Cija’s constant imperilment, The City (1966) was published simultaneously with a realistic novel from Gaskell, this time All Neat in Black Stockings, the tale of an innocent young woman who falls for a womanising window-cleaner (filmed in 1969 as an Alfie-like comedy that left the darker aspects out). Cija’s adventures, on the other hand, are basically a continuation of the previous books. First, there’s that disparaging tone which always clamps onto something to complain about, as the book opens with Cija finding herself on “The dirtiest quay I’ve ever been on. And a scum of dirty ice over almost everything…” Almost immediately, she’s sold into a brothel, but escapes that for a life of domestic drudgery. It’s only then she realises where she is: back in the city of her birth, in the realm of her Dictatress mother and High Priest father, who are vying for control of the land. Her father, of course, wants Cija dead, because he’s supposed to be celibate, so can’t have a daughter walking around. If that weren’t imperilment enough, she’s kidnapped by a tribe of ape-men, who seem to be intent on fattening her up to feed to their children, until one of the tribe, Ung-g, becomes protective of her and is forced to flee with her into the surrounding jungles. The two witness a pair of Tyrannosaurs mating, concluding in the female eating the male. It’s a savage moment that could well be Gaskell’s ultimate vision of the relationship between the sexes, if it didn’t turn out that Ung-g, despite not being human, is the most ideal mate Cija has yet encountered:

“It has taken primaeval man, an animal of the forests, to show me how tender tenderness can be.”

But the idyll doesn’t last. Cija is found by her father’s men and taken to his volcano fortress where, she’s told, she is to be sacrificed. (Her father, it turns out, has got round the demand for celibacy by taking a bejewelled crocodile as a consort—a crocodile that, despite being a reptile, has breasts.) Needless to say, Cija is once again rescued from her peril, reunited with her mother, and, just as she realises she’s pregnant with Ung-g’s baby, is told her husband Zerd is due to arrive any moment…

Although this was the last volume in the Atlan saga for just over ten years, it doesn’t show any signs that this was meant to be a conclusion. (The story of the four books has, for me, shown no overall shape, despite this being the volume where Cija comes home.) All the same, there’s something of a thematic resolution in Cija being faced by two of the most extreme examples of maleness so far—and the series has, really, been all about Cija’s very difficult relationships with men. On the one hand we have Ung-g, an almost wordless semi-human who’s nevertheless protective of Cija and tender towards her; on the other, there’s her father, who wants to kill her. Mother-figures don’t fare much better, either. There’s the brothel-madam Rubila, then the woman who takes Cija in as a servant of sorts, whom Cija actually refers to as Mother (and whose actual daughters say they know she hates them), and then her Dictatress mother, right at the end, who we know has already used her quite coldly in her own plots. The Atlan saga is, frankly, a nightmare of personal relationships.

One of the things that’s kept me reading these books—apart from the difficulty I have in not finishing something I’ve started—is learning how this bizarre series (which must have seemed even more bizarre at the time it was published) was received, in the days before fantasy became a publishing phenomenon. How did the reviewers understand it? As literature or schlock? Well, there was this kind of review, from Patricia Hodgart in the Illustrated London News:

“The City, third in a series of horror-comic Gothic romances, has the same kind of sick jokiness as Pop art. Here be dragons, but her heroine, Cija, survives them all—alligators, octopuses, sadistic priests, the lot—only to become pregnant by an almost human ape who has rescued her. Crudely written indigestible stuff, for monster-lovers only.”

But also this kind, from Wendy Monk at the Birmingham Daily Post:

“The richness of the author’s imagination comes into its own when the outcast empress goes into the jungle with an ape… Miss Gaskell’s sleight-of-hand just manages to deceive until the end of the game; only it is not the end, for we shall meet Cija again.”

But overall, I’m more inclined to agree with Susan Hill (who I’m assuming is the same Susan Hill who wrote The Woman in Black), in the Coventry Evening Telegraph:

“Miss Gaskell writes with her imagination in full flood, but I’m beginning to find Cija rather a bore.”

Nevertheless, with only one volume left, I’ve got this feeling I’m going to end up finishing this saga anyway, if only to see what a gap of ten years might make of Gaskell’s fantasy world. The final volume, Some Summer Lands, came out in 1977.