Pamphlets of Destiny

Soft Cell were fairly important to me and continue to be so by some definition, so this seemed like essential reading; and sure enough, much of it is fascinating, particularly Ball's account of the early years. Additional points might be dispensed for Electronic Boy being a rock star autobiography free of the telltale as told to Lippy Scrungebucket or whoever in tiny letters beneath the name of the author, except I feel this one may have benefited from a more hands-on editor, or at least somebody with a strongly expressed second opinion. This isn't so much a complaint about anything bad as a feeling that it could have been better with just a little more fine tuning here and there.

Dave Ball has an amiable, conversational tone, and most of his book is engaging, although one's mileage may vary with the lists of various synths and effects boxes. A certain quota of clichés are committed, which is probably inevitable - observations in the immortal words of such and such, or the occasional sentence describing how I opened the door and who should be stood there but my famous friend Ray Reardon, the snooker champion*. However, Dave Ball is primarily a musician, and an exceptional one for what it may be worth, so it would be churlish to criticise him for failing to replace Shakespeare as our number one English language word doer, particularly where the whole is so entertaining. The problem seems to be one of focus - plenty of it for the years up to Soft Cell falling apart in the wake of their third album, after which it gets very uneven, zipping through the last couple of decades as though skipping through a DVD in search of a particular scene. I could have stood a little more detail with English Boy on the Love Ranch, the Grid, and other post-Cell endeavors; and when we come to 2002's Cruelty Without Beauty, we're half way through the account before it's even clear that they're not only back on speaking terms but have actually reformed. On this score, there's an entire chapter reproducing Dave's diary entries from crossing the Atlantic in a boat, and we don't actually discover why he was crossing the Atlantic in a boat until the following chapter. So it's a bit like having a conversation with someone who keeps playing with their phone - gems scattered here and there, but somehow it should have held together better.

It's still a great book though.

*: To be fair, this example is actually from the Cosey Fanni Tutti book.

Neil Gaiman Sandman: The Doll's House (1990)
I went bananas for the Sandman comics when they first appeared but by issue twenty - give or take a few - I was dutifully buying it each month mainly just in case it got interesting again, which it didn't. I grew to dislike Neil Gaiman's writing more and more. It feels like something done to a formula with an awful lot of the readers' buttons being pushed, although beyond this admittedly vague impression, it's difficult to really say what doesn't work for me. It feels obvious somehow, dull and bereft of surprises, except I can see the art in what he does, and even appreciate that it is art, and the man clearly knows what he's doing*, so maybe it's just me.

That being said, the early issues of Sandman still retain some of the magic to my way of thinking, and it may be significant that Gaiman has come to regard the first issues as awkward and ungainly. The art was, I thought, fucking terrible - all huge heads and leering boggle-eyed faces presumably in homage to those fifties horror comics but otherwise looking amateurish and rushed; but the story was such that it didn't seem to matter. The Doll's House continues to explore and reconfigure the mythology introduced in the first issues but with significantly improved art, and seemingly represents the pinnacle of this book, at least for me. This is the one featuring - among other things - a serial killers' convention, an idea which should have fallen flat on its stupid arse but somehow works and conveys genuine horror whilst slipping in an unexpected and pertinent commentary on transgressive narratives in general. It's probably no coincidence that the fictional publisher of Chaste, for example, shares initials with the real-life publisher of Pure - and I'd strongly advise against looking that one up on Google for what it may be worth.

The Doll's House is properly gothic - disturbing and quietly horrifying for the right reasons and told with wild flourishes of imagination and invention rather than rearranging grim clichés in different but vaguely familiar sequences for the edification of self-harming teenagers.

Of course, it couldn't last. We've already met Death incarnate as the generically cute gothic girl you can't quite work up the courage to talk to, and someone has a Cure poster on their wall in one of these issues, and William bloody Shakespeare turns up for a couple of pages with tedious inevitability; but just for a while, this thing was still worth reading.

*: The above was written about eighteen months ago, before we also knew what Neil was doing. As my opinions regarding his work remain unchanged and I never had a particularly high opinion of the guy in the first place, I'm posting this as it stands without further comment, aside from that parallels to the fictional publisher of Chaste suddenly seem even less of a coincidence.

Alasdair Gray Lanark (1981)
Generally speaking, I've grown a little jaded with novels featuring characters who are aware of inhabiting a work of fiction, because the conceit seems to have become so ubiquitous of late as to suggest that shitheads are getting in on the action. It's one of those post-modern tricks that fucking everyone does because it's easy, and it suggests philosophical depth without the pesky requirement of actual groundwork undertaken, and anyone pointing out the emperor's lack of clothing will usually find themselves branded a thickie. Each new example of a character turning to the imaginary camera to directly address an audience now reminds me of my stepson assuming he'll blow our minds by explaining how Deadpool, a Marvel superhero from the nineties, breaks the fourth wall. I wouldn't mind but he hasn't even read the comics, just watched some green haired YouTube gamer twat opining about them.

For anyone who didn't get the memo, or who may still be buzzing from the euphoria of this amazing discovery and the attendant honour of getting to tell the rest of us about it, fictional or metafictional characters who don't occasionally address the reader - or wink at the camera or otherwise comment on the story in which they have become involved - have been with us since before the novel was even a thing. It might even be suggested that characters who remain unaware of someone else writing their lives are the more recent anomaly in terms of literary history. I assume that at least one of you will have heard of William Shakespeare…

Anyway, I'd been wondering about all this after Lance Parkin wrote about what he termed - by his own admission, for the sake of convenience - the Gray Tradition, a genre encompassing writers such as Philip K. Dick, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and others known to turn up within their own narratives. Of course, terming it the Gray Tradition might seem akin to proposing that Don Quixote belongs to the Deadpool Tradition but, as Parkin explained, he was mostly just thinking aloud, and his model arguably incorporates more than just the basic furniture of Menippean satire, hence his efforts to map it out, whatever it is.

Lanark figures here for a number of reasons, not least being the chapter wherein Lanark meets the author who then describes some of what he's been trying to do with this book. Lanark is himself also a pseudo-autobiographical stand-in for the author. His story, one which spans from youth to old age, takes place in the city of Unthank, which may or may not be an afterlife of sorts. Lanark, hardly likely to miss the suspension of normal laws of cause, effect, and common sense, speculates that Unthank may even be Hell - although it seems to bear closer resemblance to the frozen underworld of many pre-Christian cultures, albeit with a generous helping of Kafka - but the precise nature of Unthank isn't so important as what it says about our own world.

Our own world, or at least Alasdair Gray's experience of the same, is detailed in the two central books of this four-ish part novel as the life of Duncan Thaw, a young Glaswegian who attended art school in the late fifties. Thaw paints murals - as did Gray - but finds himself at odds with his tutors, his contemporaries, and much of his social environment; and his life culminates in his painting the book of Genesis across the interior of a church scheduled for demolition. Thus, much like humanity born in the Biblical garden, the great work is doomed before it's even started.

Very few men are as nasty to their children as you are to yours. Why didn't you give me a railway station to decorate? It would have been easy painting to the glory of Stevenson, Telford, Brunel and a quarter million Irish navvies. But here I am, illustrating your discredited first chapter through an obsolete art form on a threatened building in a poor province of a collapsing empire.

Thaw's mural seems to echo both the history of Glasgow, and by association the history of human civilisation, and the writing of the novel itself; and this was the point at which I noticed just how much Lanark foreshadows Alan Moore's Jerusalem - which now strikes me as amounting to Lanark rewritten with more ornate guitar solos and very little of the actual heart or soul.

As to what Lanark is about, it's about everything, or is at least about more than can be summarised in a single paragraph; but if there's truly any overarching theme, its constitution is touched upon when Lanark argues with Ozenfant in the final chapter.

'You are a liar!' cried Lanark. 'We have no nature. Our nations are not built instinctively by our bodies, like beehives; they are works of art, like ships, carpets, and gardens. The possible shapes of them are endless. It is bad habits, not bad nature, which makes us repeat the dull old shapes of poverty and war. Only greedy people who profit by these things believe they are natural.'

It's a long book - nearly six-hundred pages - because it's about everything, stated in organic, evolving terms rather than just ticking all the salient points one by one from a list, Alan. Much of it is frankly fucking peculiar, but it's all familiar. Some of it drags, just as real life occasionally drags, but it's all part of the process, making Lanark as much of an essential read as anything can be described as an essential read; and even if whatever conclusions we draw may seem pessimistic or depressing, there's a great joy in embracing something which is at least truthful.

Isabelle Nicou Stricture (2022)
Here's another which qualifies as a proper book, with bits I didn't understand and everything; although to be fair, Nicou's prose - or possibly Kaycie Hall's translation from the original French - is precise and clear in its description of people, events, and the ambiguous or even fantastical means by which they are associated. I'd say it's this last aspect which fosters the atmosphere of a waking dream, which leaves us unsure as to what we've just read.

Nicou's seemingly pseudo-autobiographical character is a young woman attempting to make sense of having been in thrall to her mentor, a professor of philosophy; and the existential hinterland of her musing as she strives to break free draws associations with King Lear, the science-fiction of Jules Verne, and alien abduction, amongst other examples of magical thinking. It's a cloud of shifting meaning somehow rendered in sharp focus which remains nevertheless quite difficult to describe beyond listing a few of the sign posts. Probably inevitably, reading Stricture felt a little like reading Sartre's Nausea - albeit without the undercurrent of revulsion - which possibly may say more about how little French literature I've read than it does about what Nicou was trying to do; but, for what it may be worth, I kept reading Stricture because it felt as though I was getting a lot from it, even if what that was eludes easy quantification.

Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers & others
The Human Torch and the Thing (1965)
As with the Daredevil collection I tackled back in 2022, I picked this up mainly in the name of research, and contrary to the impression given by Marvel Firsts last week, Stan and the lads hit the ground running with at least a few of the debut titles of their superhero revival. The Human Torch was apparently deemed so popular as to warrant a solo strip in the pages of Strange Tales. With half the page count of an issue of the Fantastic Four, much less juggling in terms of characters, and less pressure given that Doctor Strange was presumably held responsible for half of the sales, Johnny Storm's solo scrapes stuck to the fairly predictable formula of a succession of bank jobs and jewellery heists undertaken by traditional hoods with a few bells and whistles thrown in for the sake of the superhero theme. The heavy lifting is done by cheap gags, outrageous novelty, and the sort of peculiar twists of imagination which Bob Burden was apparently channelling in Flaming Carrot, an eighties book which I'm beginning to realise was a tribute at least as much as it was ever a parody. This was the era of Paste Pot Pete, a villain who carries a giant pot of glue around with him, a man with the power of all paste who, for example, at one point fashions a formidable pair of binoculars utilising lenses made from a special clear paste. In another issue we meet the Plantman, an individual resembling Harvey Pekar who has invented a dubious looking device with which he hopes to increase the IQ of certain plants; but the device is struck by lightning and grants him power over all plants, which he discovers when he exclaims well, fan my hide, obliging an adjacent bush to do so with its leaves. Also we have the real Sandman, a villain who turns into sand and is therefore significantly more interesting than Neil Gaiman's wispy personification of various Cure albums.

It's bollocks, but it's entertaining bollocks which gets away with it because it's for actual kids and it doesn't care, although being beautifully drawn by Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers, Bob Powell and others doesn't hurt either. Also, Strange Tales #105 brought us what I believe to be the single greatest panel of the entire sixties:

Just look at the fucking size of that piece of cake.

What's that you say? Johnny, who is technically still a child, has gone after the Wizard, a dangerous superpowered criminal, all on his own. Fuck him! I'm eating!

That said, being relatively short, the Torch's strips were at least as repetitive as old school Scooby Doo and are probably best appreciated at the rate of one a month between the years of 1961 and 1970 by persons under the age of ten. I'm unable to tick any of these boxes so I zoned out here and there, but not enough to present any sort of indictment on the ludicrous charm of these tales. Did I mention that the Beatles show up in one of the later issues?

No prizes for picking Ringo out of the line-up. The poor sod's hooter is so massive that it won't even fit in the second panel.

As with anything which Stan Lee claimed was bigger than the Bible, the Quran, the Torah and the complete works of Shakespeare blended into a single shining masterpiece, the solo adventures of the Human Torch don't quite live up to the hype, but this collection is still mostly great and goes some way to accounting for why Marvel took off as it did.

Andy Lane The Empire of Glass (1995)
Simply, I was in the mood for more Hartnell and had no memory of having read this - although obviously I did - thus allowing for the possibility of pleasure taken in trying to work out what the fuck is going on. Going back to old Who things which I thought were amazing all those years ago has bitten me on the ass more than once, but thankfully this turned out to be one of the good ones.

By one of the good ones I mean it's a respectable science-fiction novel in its own right, albeit one which just happens to make use of characters and situations from a television show; and, as with Perry Rhodan, Doc Savage, Sexton Blake or any other star of the written serial, the author gets to play with an existing universe without feeling obliged to spend half the page count explaining it because if we're reading, we probably already know what we're dealing with.

Of course, it all falls apart when you get a writer with nothing to say, no ambition beyond adding to the ugh - franchise or brand or property or whatever the well-dressed product-sponge-cunt about town is calling it this year; but happily, that isn't what we have here, and I'd say that The Empire of Glass dates from a lost golden age when quality still had the edge over quantity most of the time.

Our man travels to Venice in the early sixteenth century, and we learn a lot about Venice because Lane does his research and additionally bothers to make it interesting, which is nice. The environment of our tale is solid and well grounded, evocatively described without any hint of box ticking, and so much so as to support an ambitiously ludicrous narrative juggling alien incursions, extraterrestrial espionage, Venetian politics, Galileo, William Shakespeare's career as a spy for the court of King James, and a flying island drawn indirectly from Jonathan Swift. There's one passage where Galileo's biography shows through with more fidelity than we really need…

As he watched, entranced, a small shape like a flattened egg that glinted like metal rose up rapidly from the far side of the island, moving upward as smoothly and inexorably as the ebony balls that he had dropped from the tower of Pisa to test Aristotle's theory had fallen.

All the same, in the context of a novel which gets so much right, it amuses rather than annoys. Credibility is stretched to such a point as to border on the sort of thing Moorcock used to write, and yet everything holds, amounting to a substantially satisfying read of the kind I wish more science-fiction authors could achieve, not least a few of the better known guys, Alastair Reynolds and others.

As with John Peel's rendition of The Chase, it's been nice - even oddly life affirming - to find myself reminded of Who as something weird and exciting and not entirely predictable.

Eric Saward Revelation of the Daleks (2019)
As you may recall, Doctor Who was a children's science-fiction serial on the telly back before the advent of the video recorder, meaning that if you wanted to catch up on older episodes, you had to buy the novelisation published by Target. Happily, at least for persons such as myself who require everything to exist within the context of a neatly ordered set, Target eventually novelised everything seen on the box, even a few which would have been on the box but weren't due to the lazy, work-shy BBC sponge-monkeys being on strike that year because the tea served in the staff canteen was the wrong colour.

Anyone still reading?

Never mind.

Anyway, by the time Target went tits up, they had published all but five of the Who serials seen on the television, notably two by Eric Saward who supposedly didn't want anyone else adapting his work - although I may have remembered that wrong. It could have been something to do with the estate of Terry Nation, but really - who gives a fuck? Revelation of the Daleks was unofficially novelised by Jon Preddle back in 1992 as part of the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club's campaign to fill in those five terrifying gaps in our collections. I didn't know of this until many years later, by which point, copies of Preddle's version were impossible to find unless you count eBooks, which I don't.

Well, I'm nearly fifty-fucking-seven, older, probably wiser in some poorly defined capacity, and with a general suspicion* regarding almost everything sprung forth from Who since he came back on the telly played by an Easter Island statue in 2005; and yet my devotion was once so deeply ingrained that, even now, I still feel the need to fill those five gaps in a collection of books I may never read again because I'm no longer thirteen.

Revelation of the Daleks was an odd story, although one for which I recall some affection. I think I may have watched a VHS copy at some point back in the nineties, but I'm otherwise so unfamilar with whatever it did as for this to be an almost new thing, now that Eric has finally found time to write it.

Saward seems to be regarded as one of those problematic Who writers, probably meaning he wasn't afraid to point out when some sacred fan cow was actually a pile of shite, or at least that's how it usually works. For my money, he wrote some decent stories and did a good job of keeping things interesting during his time as script editor on the show. I've seen him criticised as a Douglas Adams knock off, which I don't quite see given the lesser level of annoying self-conscious whimsy.

Converted to prose, Revelation of the Daleks serves as a strong reminder of Who having been developed back when television was still pretty much theatre with cameras pointed at the actors. Everything here occurs within what may as well be a couple of rooms with a cast of eight or nine chasing each other from one set to the next; and if it's not exactly Shakespearean, it's closer to being a twentieth century Billy than it is to either Star Wars or Asimov's Foundation. Revelation reads very much as a telly script novelised for the benefit of thirteen-year olds or younger, which doesn't mean that it's bad so much as that certain narrative weaknesses seem amplified and they're difficult to overlook.

The strengths of the original story were arguably its big ideas regarding what's really going on at Tranquil Repose, but here - even without the Dalek connection already spunked away by the title - everything is signposted from almost the very beginning with clues so fucking obvious as to what's coming that the eventual revelation of what's really going on feels redundant. All the running around therefore seems designed to keep us busy as we wait for certain discoveries to be made - even though we've already guessed what they're going to be - and accordingly lacks drama. This leaves us with just the humour, which I assume would be the DJ, played on the box by Alexei Sayle, and which could have worked as a linking device in the vein of Lynne Thigpen's DJ in The Warriors, but didn't because the whole thing may as well have been an episode of fucking Rentaghost; and Dave Lee Travis in space is not an inherently funny idea if you've actually mistaken Dave Lee Travis for anything genuinely cool; and in case you've forgotten and were wondering, the DJ's weapon by which he blasts his foes with - sigh - concentrated rock'n'roll is also corny as fuck on the printed page, and not even in an entertainingly ironic sense, as it might have been had Saward specified that, for example, such and such a Dalek had been obliterated by the mighty force of that fucking terrible I Like It song by Gerry & the Pacemakers.

So, I'd say I'm too old to get much from this adaptation, except I routinely read all sorts of juvenile shite, most of which works just fine for me; and it's really, really difficult to work out just who it's aimed at, given that I found it in the science-fiction section at Barnes & Noble, as distinct from the children's section. It's a shame because some of it works, and a quick peak at other Sawards suggests he may simply have rushed this one to get it over and done with. An even greater shame is that a quick peak at Jon Preddle's unofficial online version leads me to suspect that he probably did a better job.

*: I say general suspicion but I actually mean uncompromising hatred.

Anthony Burgess 1985 (1978)
Hanging out on social media as I often do, there have been a couple of occasions of right-wing shitheads proclaiming that Orwell's 1984 was a warning against the evils of socialism, an observation made with some frequency during Donald Trump's first year in the hot seat, back when his Proud Boys were regularly firing up those tiki torches in protest against political correctness and the like; and it was an observation usually made within minutes of someone else pointing out that Adolf Hitler was a socialist, so it was the rest of us who were the real Nazis. Naturally, having read both Orwell's 1984 and his collected essays, I rolled my eyes.

Anyway, while the idea of socialism being the same as national socialism is obviously bollocks - the ethnic or cultural exclusivity of nationalism being in direct contradiction of socialist ideals, it unfortunately turns out the Trumpanzees were sort of right about 1984, albeit possibly for the wrong reasons; and I'm not sure how I missed it. Orwell, like Burgess - and me too, quite frankly - considered himself a socialist who despaired at the more didactic tendencies of the left, those prioritising ideology over people and whose ruthless zealotry had ultimately led to the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. So while 1984 describes an oppressive totalitarian state, it's a satire quite clearly extrapolated from everything which kept Orwell awake at night back in 1948.

Burgess' response is 1985, a book divided into two complementary parts. The first comprises essays analysing Orwell's novel in comparison with how well socialism has been coping here in the real world. Burgess concludes that 1984 was not only lousy in a predictive sense - as the majority of science-fiction tends to be - but wasn't even particularly great as satire, being riddled with contradictions and ideas which seem hysterical in relation to that which inspired them. His point is that 1984 never happened, and couldn't happen, and his argument, as set out in the first half of this book, is convincing, illuminating, and extraordinarily perceptive - possibly one of the most insightful summaries of the politics of the last century that I've read.

Unfortunately, the second part of the argument employs a fictional narrative to make its point, whatever the hell that might be. It seems to be Burgess rewriting 1984 as he believes it should have been done, but as a satire based on his own era, specifically the late seventies. The elements of parody and exaggeration are either well done, or at least make sense in the context of what 1985 is trying to do, but being as the subject is socialism pushed to a ludicrous ideological extreme by the sort of wankers who presently hang around on Twitter policing the perpetrators of wrongthink, it comes across like a fucking Two Ronnies sketch about all those unions going on strike over the spoons in the staff canteen, coupled with the usual scaremongering about Islam. Were someone to commission Richard Littlejohn to write a satirical summary of left-wing politics in Britain in the seventies, I don't actually know if it would be much different aside from the quality of the writing. 1985 is not entirely without worth, and the overeducated street gangs are sort of amusing, somewhat harking back to A Clockwork Orange, even if the impression they leave seems to rest upon the idea that everything would be better if we all just made the effort to listen to Beethoven and read a bit more Shakespeare.

Having myself been in a labour union for two decades, and having come to conclude that said labour union didn't always have the best interests of its membership at heart, I see where Burgess is coming from because no system is immune to corruption from nest-feathering infiltrators; but ramping up the satire to the point at which it begins to resemble a Franklin cartoon in The Sun doesn't seem like a great solution; unless it's actually a parody of 1984 which targets what Burgess sees as Orwell's essentially conservative rhetoric, although even in such a case, it's still barely readable. So it's a game of two halves, Brian, one of them wonderful - perhaps even essential - and the other, a waste of everyone's time and coincidentally representative of exactly the sort of hyperbole which helped get Thatcher into power.

Unfortunately, even though everything Burgess says regarding 1984 is spot on, Orwell nevertheless wrote the significantly better book.

Horace Walpole The Castle of Otranto (1764)
This is a very important novel, so I've been told, having originated the gothic tradition which led to Frankenstein and arguably to the entire science-fiction genre, amongst many other things. Brian Aldiss reckons it owes a lot to Piranesi, but I don't know who that is and don't feel sufficiently enthused to find out. The element which made The Castle of Otranto such a massive chart-busting smash back in the late 1700s was its fusion of realism with spooky or otherwise supernatural elements. Walpole was the first to do this, apart from a few other writers who sort of got there first, albeit with perhaps less emphasis on atmosphere.

It begins well, and even grips, as a wedding is postponed due to the groom having been crushed by an inexplicable giant helmet of the kind generally belonging to a suit of armour rather than to a male generative member. The father of the deceased has certain concerns regarding his familial claims to the castle of the title which will come to seem tenuous in the absence of a male heir and the grandchildren he was accordingly expecting. With this in mind, he decides to tell his wife to fuck off and become a nun so that he can marry the conspicuously younger woman who would have been his daughter-in-law had her fiancé not been crushed by a huge helmet. A series of supernatural occurrences follow - ghosts, a painting coming to life, and most notably an appearance of the former owner of the helmet - all representing fearful omens regarding our man's claim on his castle. Then a load of other people show up and talk about romance, inheritance, marriage and so on, which I found fairly difficult to follow and reminded me of eighteenth century novels which spend hundreds of pages debating what a certain young lady meant by leaving her handkerchief in the drawing room knowing it would almost certainly be discovered by some viscount she intends to shag.

The strangest thing for me was that The Castle of Otranto reads like a novel that wants to be a play performed on a stage with a full cast, much like certain examples of Who fiction reading like novels pretending to be telly. Walpole apparently admitted to the influence of Shakespeare in a later edition, presumably because it would have been pointless to deny it; and while we're here, I'm almost certain I recall old Billy including ghosts, fairies, and other supernatural beings in a few of the plays what he wrote.

I'm not widely read once we go back past the turn of the last century, but I've read enough to know the form, and enough to recognise the difference between that which is written in an archaic style with which I am unfamiliar, and that which simply could have been better. Gulliver's Travels was published forty years before The Castle of Otranto, for one example, and quite frankly pisses all over it - although to be fair Gulliver's Travels pretty much pisses over more or less everything which has been written since in most respects. The Castle of Otranto clearly has it's place and isn't entirely lacking in charm, mood, or merit, but as a landmark of literary history, it's kind of underwhelming.

I'd really loved The Hobbit, so I had high hopes when I picked up Lord of the Rings from the town library and read it, with great concentration, in the space of three weeks.

I thought it was fucking dreadful, but I didn't really trust my original impression, so I renewed it and read it all again. Was my first impression all wrong? No - it was rubbish.

All the characters in it are boring. Everything they do is either egotistical, ill-advised, pointless or in some way accepting of a shitty situation. The only vaguely interesting characters are Gandalf (an old man who is sort-of-Jesus) and Sauron, who arguably doesn't exist at all - the book would make just as much sense if he was a shared hallucination.

The evils in the book are so paltry, a few little hairy-footed people can defeat them by the power of daggers and resting their heads in each other's laps. There are a load of side-stories that don't go anywhere, save for Pippin coming back with some sort of potion to throw the naughty humans out.

Sauron could motivate armies to fight, but surely that was going to happen all the time anyway in a feudalist crapsack world where there's nothing to do but wage wars, especially when the main enemies are orcs. Mount Doom is the kind of hacky bullshit name you'd expect from a Scooby Doo cartoon, not a classic novel. The battle scenes, intended to be epic, are so badly written they end up conveying nothing much at all - the sentence he hit things with a sword conveys all the weight of a Tolkien fight scene. Then there's all the fucking awful singing and poetry, which are at least picked out in italics so you can skip past them with a minimum of effort.

Finally, the moral heart of the story, as I recall, is that it's a complete waste of time doing anything, going anywhere or trying to change, because all we should be doing is living in holes, eating sausages and smoking pipes. Now come on, that's piss poor!

'I should like to save the Shire, if I could - though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don't feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.'

'Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more. The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.'

'He deserves roasting. If I had got this at once, we might all have been safe in Rivendell by now.'

The Shire-hobbits referred to those of Bree, and to any others that lived beyond the borders, as Outsiders, and took very little interest in them, considering them dull and uncouth. There were probably many more Outsiders scattered about in the West of the World in those days than the people of the Shire imagined. Some, doubtless, were no better than tramps, ready to dig a hole in any bank and stay only as long as it suited them.

There was trouble away in the South, and it seemed that the men who had come up the Greenway were on the move, looking for lands where they could find some peace. The Bree-folk were sympathetic, but plainly not very ready to take a large number of strangers into their little land. Middle-earth is full up, they protested.

In truth there was too, much more song,
Rendering the tale so overly long,
The author methinks sought to add a touch of class,
But really it's just a pain in the arse,
For no cunt wants to read that shit,
Unless they're mental, at least a bit,
Tis like unto being stuck in a lift with some wanker,
Who doth sup his ale from pewter tankard,
All the while singing a-hey-nonny-plughole,
One finger lodged so surely in his lughole.
Pootle-pottle-poo and a ninny-nonny noo.

All hobbits were, in any case, clannish and reckoned up their relationships with great care. They drew long and elaborate family-trees with innumerable branches. In dealing with hobbits it is important to remember who is related to whom, and in what degree.

'We are become Middle Men, of the Twilight, but with memory of other things. For as the Rohirrim do, we now love war and valour as things good in themselves, both a sport and an end; and though we still hold that a warrior should have more skills and knowledge than only the craft of weapons and slaying, we esteem a warrior, nonetheless, above men of other crafts.'

A lot of fans are basically fans of fandom itself. It's all about them. They have mastered the Star Wars or Star Trek universes or whatever, but their objects of veneration are useful mainly as a backdrop to their own devotion. Anyone who would camp out in a tent on the sidewalk for weeks in order to be first in line for a movie is more into camping on the sidewalk than movies.

Extreme fandom may serve as a security blanket for the socially inept, who use its extreme structure as a substitute for social skills. If you are Luke Skywalker and she is Princess Leia, you already know what to say to each other, which is so much safer than having to ad-lib it. Your fannish obsession is your beard. If you know absolutely all the trivia about your cubbyhole of pop culture, it saves you from having to know anything about anything else. That's why it's excruciatingly boring to talk to such people: They're always asking you questions they know the answer to.

At the Music Machine they were chugging along through their impressive ska set when Ian Curtis announced a special guest during an instrumental break whilst all the band members were doing a jazz improv piece. Imagine my surprise when the special guest turned out to be celebrity spider Shelob!

She grabbed the microphone stand and roared out Slade's Get Down and Get With It with the band tearing into the song displaying incredible gusto. I swear Stephen Morris' drum kit caught alight from all the heavy pounding, he ended up playing a set of oil drums with lump hammers. By this point Ian Curtis was completely naked and hurling his stools at Shelob, he somehow managed to fit an entire fire extinguisher into his anus, much to the approval of the mainly teddy boy audience. After this they performed the entire Slade catalogue with Shelob wading into the crowd wearing a giant necklace made of television sets.

If I remember correctly the concert ended up later than usual by a month or so due to the airforce bombing us out of the venue. They don't do gigs like that anymore.

'Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.'

The black rider flung back his hood and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter.