Return of the Golux

One of the best children's books ever is James Thurber's The 13 Clocks. A prince must complete an apparently impossible quest to save a princess from an evil duke: from this standard fairy-story plot Thurber produces a wonderfully odd and engaging story written with a strange and compelling internal rhythm--the whole book is like a blank verse poem, but typeset as prose.

The Golux is a magical creature central to the story: he describes himself as "the only Golux in the world, and not a mere Device". He is also the son of a mediocre witch and a wizard "who lacked the power of concentration". The Golux is also the opponent of the Todal, which "looks like a blob of glup", "makes a sound like rabbits screaming and smells of old unopened rooms". It is "an agent of the Devil, sent to punish evildoers for having done less evil than they should," and is "waiting for the Duke to fail in some endeavor" in order to destroy him. This makes the evil Duke more than a little highly strung.

The great NYRB have just republished this book in their series of children's classics. They have used the original cover artwork by Thurber's friend, Spanish/French/American artist Marc Simont. When he wrote The 13 Clocks, Thurber was blind, an so unable to do the illustrations himself. According to Wikipedia, "the Golux is said to wear an 'indescribable hat'. Thurber made Simont describe all his illustrations, and was satisfied when Simont was unable to describe the hat."

On the left is the original Simon & Schuster hardback, and on the right the new NYRB edition.



In the UK, the Puffin edition of the book was illustrated by the great Ronald Searle.



Here is another edition which uses Simont's artwork--that's the Golux peeping out from behind the door.

Delerious Siege

Another duplicated cover image, on both Harvill's hardcover of Laura Estrepo's Delerium (2007) and Atlantic's hardcover of Steven Galloway's The Cellist of Sarajevo (2008).



What's interesting here, besides the horizontal flip of the image, is the carefully added bulletholes on the Sarajevan wall.

Workplace Madness

The workplace is widely known to be a place of constant low-level insanity. Three recent books have used this as the basis for works of fiction, and there's a certain commonality to some of the cover designs.

The first is Joshua Ferris's excellent Then We Came to the End, with a beautifully designed cover by Kam Tang.



The second is Ed Park's more overtly paranoid Personal Days, with a headless-chickens-in-the-office cover design by Al Heighton.



Finally, there's Rick Moody's novella collection The Omega Force, which I have not yet read, having been burned by Moody before. I don't know who did this cover, but I like it. (UPDATE: The cover is by the illustrator James Joyce. As someone who shares their own name with at least three well-known musicians, I know his pain.)

Trouble with Stock Images

As I'm currently reading and very much enjoying Alice Mattison's story collection, Men Giving Money, Women Yelling, and having loved her novel The Book Borrower, I thought I'd see what else she has written. In doing so, I discovered another case of ubiquitous stock imagery.



It's a photo by Felix Man, used on both Mattison's In Case We're Seperated and on the nearly reputation-wrecking posthumous collection of Philip Larkin's "secret" prose.

Pierre & Marthe

One of the artists featured in Masters of the Poster, which I discussed earlier in connection with absinthe advertising, is Pierre Bonnard. Here's his poster for the Revue Blanche.



Bonnard (1867-1947)was a major painter and graphic artist, who did a lot of book illustrations before going on to become one of the major Impressionists.



A novel I came across recently is Guy Goffette's Forever Nude (or, in the original French, the slightly less Swedish-naturist-resort-sounding Elle, par bonheur, et toujours nue, which I think translates to something like 'She, Happily and Always Naked'). It's a novel about Bonnard and the woman who became his wife and the model for his many nude paintings, Marthe de Meligny.

Here's the cover of the English version, and an excellent Penguin Guy de Maupassant story collection that uses the same image.



It's called 'Red Suspenders' in English, and I can find find very little about that particular painting, other than the fact that it is indeed a portrait of Marthe.

Here's the original French cover, with a nude painting of Marthe.




Here are several more lovely Bonnard Marthe nudes, and a rather funky early photograph of her which I think would also make a compelling cover image for this novel.

Apocalypses: A Self-Justification

I'm currently reading a short-story collection called Wastelands, from Night Shade Books. Inevitably, it's a collection of apocalypse and post-apocalypse stories. My opinion on it will have to wait until I've finished it. There have been a couple of good stories so far, but on the other hand it opens with a Stephen King story. King gives me the shits: his combination of folksy prose, half-baked ideas, determination to be disgusting whether or not it fits the mood of the story, and deus ex machina solutions to apparently intractable problems are all serious and repetitive flaws in his work.

I like the cover, though: an appropriately ruined cityscape digitally painted by Daniel Kvasznicza.



So why this obsession with the end of the world?

When I was a child, in the early ‘80s, there was an advertisement that occasionally came on television, amidst the kids’ shows on the Australian Broadcasting Commission (as it then was). My memories are a little vague—I was only young—and nobody else seems to recall the ad. It was very effective, though, and it scared the pants off me.

In this advert, sponsored by some anti-nuclear organisation, a small boy in pyjamas is looking out of his bedroom window at the night sky. One star in particular is obvious, glowing brightly in the sky. The boy starts singing “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are..,” to himself, and as he does so the star gets brighter and brighter. Then there’s a flash of white light and white noise; the boy, the room, the world all fade into darkness.

It was an effective bit of media work. Sadly, it did nothing to stop the ridiculous escalation of the arms race which was then going on. It is, however, my earliest nuclear memory. There are plenty of others.

At school we once took part in a nation-wide survey about childhood fears. What scared us the most? Bullies, spiders, teachers, the death of parents? My answer was obviously a common one; when the survey results were reported in the paper, the fear of nuclear war was the top response. Fully three-quarters of children and teenagers actually expected to die in a radioactive holocaust. I was part of a generation raised in fear of the conceivable death of everything, and still the arms race escalated.

My own childhood nuclear fear took the form of obsessive fascination. A fanatical reader, my staple diet of science-fiction included many a post-holocaust wasteland full of struggling survivors, slow death and dangerous mutants. Many of these books were rubbish, of course; schlocky blockbusters whose authors were half in love with the idea of it all (there was such potential for a hack in all those ravening mutant beasts, and plenty of opportunities for the survivalist heroes to display their machismo and rescue their helpless womenfolk). A few of these books, though, were very good indeed. Z For Zachariah and Brother in the Land still stand up well today, even for an adult audience. I even had a plan—if the war started, somehow I’d get to the middle of the city. Better to be vaporised in a fraction of a second than to survive to live in a world of nothing but ash and death and cancer and fallout. But I didn’t think this was at all odd, being an eight-year-old with a death plan. It seemed an eminently sane reaction to the circumstances.

In 1986, when I was 10, there was the Chernobyl disaster. Hundreds and then thousands of locals and soldiers died in the aftermath; people are still dying today. After this I learned of the American Three Mile Island accident in 1979, the year of my brother’s birth. There were others, too, I later discovered in my voracious nuclear readings. I borrowed books from the local and school libraries; my little head reeled with waste leaks, rems and millirems, the electromagnetic pulse (planes will fall from the air, radios and watches and computers will die, pacemakers will cease), the Strategic Defence Initiative, radiation sickness, every aspect of the nightmare. My mother had Raymond Briggs’ When The Wind Blows removed from my primary school library after it reduced me to nausea and tears--in this comic book, a couple of old dears die lingeringly of radiation sickness in post-holocaust Britain, touchingly naive about the dangers of nuclear war, having believed all the ‘Protect and Survive’ pamphlets Thatcher’s government produced. But I couldn’t stop reading these things. It was like picking at a scab; I just couldn’t leave it alone.

One day, almost proudly, I told my father that nobody had ever lived in such danger of nuclear war as we did then; he contradicted me, and for the first time I learned about the Cuban Missile Crisis, a cocked gun in the mouth of the world. He’d been studying for his uni exams in those two weeks, not even sure if he’d live to sit them. I must admit that my pride was severely dented.

Now, of course, nobody even seems to consider these things, as though the danger has somehow lessened, as though the nukes aren’t still out there, deteriorating, leaking, getting lost. But after a childhood living with the idea, and this a not untypical childhood, part of me is always expecting to see that mushroom cloud bloom on the horizon.

A Follow-Up

This is just a quick follow-up to the post which first looked at Mark Sarvas' Harry, Revised. I'm in the midst of reading this now, and it's really good: the hero is surprisingly engaging, given that he's a moral coward, pole-axed by grief, a user of prostitutes, unfaithful to his wife, off in his own world and motivated mostly by selfishness. The cover featured in that post is even more well-done than I first thought, as that very Penguin edition of The Count of Monte Cristo actually features in the plot in one very funny scene.

So, given how perfect that cover design, by gray318, was, what did the Australian publishers of Harry, Revised decide to use on their edition?

A boring picture of a shirt.

Gee's Apocalypses 1

Maggie Gee is one of those talented writers who manage more in the way of critical than commercial success. She's also a literary writer who has produced a number of science-fiction stories and managed to get away with it, since those same critics invariably refuse to accept that she's written science-fiction, and instead resort to calling these stories 'fables' or the like. However, she has done at least three variations on the end-of-the-world novel. The most recent of these is The Flood, a rising sea-level book which I can't comment on as I haven't read it, though I do really like the cover.

Here it is in the hardback and slightly less good paperback versions.



In the late '90s she wrote The Ice People, a global-cooling sudden-Ice-Age story that also looks at a metaphorical Ice Age descending on the relationships between men and women. This has recently been re-released. The covers below are, in order, the original hardback, the original paperback, and the new paperback.





The Ice People is a book that works better in its parts than as a whole: I really wanted to like it more than I did. The emotional freeze between the sexes didn't really convince, being heavy-handededly managed, and there's a significant bit of society-changing technology introduced into the storyline which has some very obvious dangers, which not a single person in the book's world ever even considers until it's too late.

The newest edition's cover is interesting because it both improves on the original paperback's horrible Vic-20-style graphics, and because it is so reminiscent of another science-fiction novel look at the gender divide. This is Philip Wylie's The Disappearance, which begins with every woman in the world being suddenly moved into one parallel universe, and every man into another, creating two Earths with only one gender, unable to reconnect. The original novel came out in 1951--this is the a reprint by the Bison Frontiers of the Imagination series.



By the way, if new Ice Age books do appeal, and you're interested in comics, try Nicolas de Crecy's Glacial Period. This is an odd and charming little graphic novel about a group of archaeologists and their genetically engineered talking sled-dogs digging down through the ice to rediscover the treasures sealed up in the buried Louvre.




The original French edition of this book was one of four graphic novels actually sponsored by the Louvre.

Getting back to Maggie Gee, her third apocalypse novel is The Burning Book, a nuclear war story. We'll look at that in a future post.

An Apocalypse for Actors

A different kind of end-of-the-world book this time: a 1950s TV play by the excellent but mostly forgotten Marghanita Laski.

Laski (1915-1988) was a prominent and talented left-wing author and journalist from a prominent and talented family of left-wing Jewish intellectuals. Fortunately for fans of excellent writing, the great Persephone Books have resurrected several of her novels, including the feminist time-travel/subtle-horror story The Victorian Chaise-Longue, which has the traditional subdued, elegant Persephone cover.



For our purposes, though, we're looking at the published script to her 1959 TV drama, The Offshore Island. Due to the limitations of recording technology and the fact that it was a BBC production, and they had a policy of wiping out what recorded shows they had at the time, and for years afterwards, I can only assume that the TV film is lost forever, and only survives in the form of this book.



The blurb above gives you the basic idea: a handful of Britons who have survived the nuclear apocalypse are getting on with what life is available to them in a relatively unscathed pocket of land, when a group of American soldiers arrive. Needless to say, things get much worse very quickly.

It's also interesting to read the publisher's note on the front page: it captures the mood of the early anti-nuclear-weapons movement, and indeed Laski was an early and fervant support of CND.



The Offshore Island is a little dated, but it's still a powerful little piece of theatrical writing.

Quentin Blake Addendum

Can't believe I forgot this one: the current Penguin cover to Evelyn Waugh's darkly brilliant The Loved One is by Quentin Blake.