The Mystery of the Sea

Bram Stoker – 1902

The Mystery of the Sea is a fascinating fusion of genres that challenges you to resist expectations based on tropes known from romance, espionage and ghost stories. It’s by far the most romantic novel I’ve ever read, given that I never read anything romantic at all. It also reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe quite a bit, in particular The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and The Gold Bug, due to the intense presence of ciphers and codebreaking, nautical adventure and claustrophobic anxiety. Most curious of all is the almost arbitrary element of the supernatural that appears in early chapters and then disappears until the climax when its return borders on deus ex machina. I can honestly say I’ve never read a book where the protagonist is suddenly able to save the day in the final act after realizing that he has psychic powers, and yet somehow it isn’t laughably off-putting.

A young Englishman named Archibald Hunter frequently visits Scotland with the intention of building a house in Cruden Bay in Aberdeenshire near the ocean. (Stoker wrote some of Dracula in Cruden Bay.) He encounters a creepy, Gaelic-speaking local clairvoyant named Gormala. He rescues a beautiful American woman named Marjory from a shipwreck in the bay. A handsome fisherman drowns in the same incident and Hunter sees his ghost amid a procession that includes many Spanish armada sailors. He finds a document that contains a cipher that he believes will direct him to a horde of Spanish gold hidden underneath his own property. Hopelessly smitten with Marjory, he proposes marriage on only their second meeting, eventually learning that she’s a wealthy American patriot and adventurer involved in the current Spanish-American war. Lots of mystery and intrigue ensues as various parties arrive on the scene in search of the same treasure, leading to the novel’s centerpiece; a harrowing and suspenseful sequence depicting Archibald and Marjory’s trek through the subterranean sea caverns below his house.

In keeping with the novel’s seeming mishmash of genre elements is its alternately progressive and nakedly racist qualities. After going to such pains to portray Marjory as a brilliant, level-headed and completely ethical heroine who keeps pace with Archibald’s knack for cryptography and secret hand-sign communication, it also – out of nowhere – presents the sophisticated Archibald as rabidly hateful of black people precisely because of their blackness, which he finds repulsive and inherently evil. The undisguised and almost psychotic xenophobia goes unchallenged, forcing us to wonder how closely it resembles Stoker’s own views, becoming a massive stain on an otherwise compelling adventure story. Poe and Melville dealt with race in a straightforward way that tended to lump racist views together with mankind’s foibles and hypocrisies in general, leaving room to see their inclusion as a critique of racism rather than a validation. But not so with Stoker, who seems fine with Archibald’s righteous glee in murdering a black villain based mostly on his irrational assumption that the man intends to defile his beloved Marjory.

Despite the crazed racism in the book’s final chapters, and the almost ludicrous eruption of the hero’s second sight just in time for it to become useful in his defeat of a ship full of mercenaries and pirates (and one black man), amazingly The Mystery of the Sea all holds together and works in the context of its own logic and the world it creates.

Psycho

Robert Bloch – 1959

While somewhat innovative in its portrayal of a serial killer as truly ill and depraved and not just a kind of spree criminal, for the most part Robert Bloch’s Psycho is a simple potboiler and murder mystery. The prose is unexceptional. Everything uniquely interesting about the criminal mind of Norman Bates is only revealed in its final pages. It’s easy to see why its concise, lurid plot and minimal locations and characters made it ideal for film director Alfred Hitchcock’s plan to make a shocking, low-budget thriller that he was going to produce independently. It was moderately successful, but far from a bestseller until after the film adaptation became a hit, making it feasible for Hitchcock to buy up copies to help keep its twist ending under wraps. The novel gleefully cheats in a way that would be impossible in a film, as conversations between Norman and his mother take place with no hint that the deranged Norman is in fact speaking for his dead mother too. Hitchcock’s version is surprisingly faithful to Bloch; the only major divergence was the decision to make Norman a slight and nervous young man who would be far more sympathetic to audiences than the pudgy, middle-aged character described in the novel, who might have been more accurately portrayed by someone like Ernest Borgnine or Rod Steiger than Anthony Perkins. The novel is a page-turner, but just as the Hitchcock masterpiece of a film caused the novel to become a top seller, the film tends to make the novel seem much better than it really is too.

In the Days of the Comet

H.G. Wells – 1906

"I wish at times,” said I, with a gesture at the heavens, “that comet of yours or some such thing would indeed strike this world–and wipe us all away, strikes, wars, tumults, loves, jealousies, and all the wretchedness of life!”

The novels of H.G. Wells were probably the biggest political influence on me since I started reading them in my early teens. Their common factor that stayed with me was the readjustment of perspective caused by the extraordinary situations Wells conjured, that combined with his Freudian apprehensions about the human condition as well as his beautiful prose. I loved the fact that the Martians in The War of the Worlds were defeated not by human cunning or technology but by mere germs in our atmosphere whose impact no one could foresee. I loved the portrayal of a future society in The Time Machine where human beings have diverged into the caveman-like Morlocks and the beautiful but dumb Eloi. The Island of Dr. Moreau (my favorite of all) forces you to question what right humans really have to regard themselves masters of all life on earth. And When the Sleeper Wakes demonstrates that not even centuries of technical advances can cure people of their hunger for messiahs.

In the Days of the Comet tells the story of a willful young working-class man in Victorian England, William Leadford, as he wrestles with personal and economic problems while a comet, at first only faintly observed in the night sky, makes its way steadily towards earth. I expected a presentation of society at large, but the story keeps close to William’s personal story as the external forces steadily close in; not only the comet but civil strife and even looming war between England and Germany. After being casually indoctrinated into socialism by his friend Parload, William begins to conflate his personal hardships with the injustices of the world. When he loses his job at a pottery bank and his fiancée Nettie rejects him for a wealthier man above her class, he swears revenge and purchases a gun. He witnesses violence between a local mining company and its oppressed workers. He identifies society as the Secure versus the Insecure, a Darwinian battlefield of predators and prey. Just as all crises converge – William stalking Nettie and her lover, enemy ships approaching the English coast – the comet gets close enough to illuminate the land all night long. Moments away from William committing murder, the comet breaches the earth’s atmosphere and begins to disintegrate, dousing all life on Earth in a mysterious “green vapor” that temporarily knocks them unconscious. The gas turns out to have not just transformative but curative effects on the human body’s nerves and brain. Humanity wakes up from this brief trance filled with feelings of compassion and connection with all living things. Greed and jealousy are universally left behind as primitive and childish, and societies around the world begin rebuilding systems and structures that edify rather than crush the human spirit. To William’s great surprise, Nettie wants to return to him while also staying with her current husband. He turns her down out of feelings of propriety, which he eventually comes to dismiss as an outmoded moral prejudice, entering into a polyamorous relationship between Nettie and her husband and William and his wife Anna. This is where the story abruptly ends, with an ambiguous interjection by the narrator reacting with shock to the elderly William’s memories of professed sexual freedom, suggesting either that the effects of the comet’s vapor wore off or possibly that the story we’ve been told was imagined or invented by William. I’m not sure I interpreted the finale correctly, or how I feel about its implications. I was along with Wells for the ride, fascinated by his radical propositions, so I felt a little let down if indeed the tale of the comet’s quickening effect on humanity is false. I say that even though I acknowledge that this would be in line with Wells’ relentlessly grim outlook on the nature of Man. I thoroughly love In the Days of the Comet for its beautiful language and ideas, but I can’t deny being disturbed by Wells’ suggestion that even the heights to which humanity can climb are only temporarily accessible at best.

The World of Dreams

Havelock Ellis – 1911

Although he provides many examples of his own dreams, Havelock Ellis doesn’t offer a lot of new or personal insights about dreams in general, except for a few brief asides at the end of some chapters. The book is more of a survey of dream research and theories up to that point.

Here are a few passages that I liked:

“In dreams, planes of existence that in waking life are fundamentally distinct are brought together, so that events belonging to different planes move on the same plane, and even become combined. Acting and life, the picture and the reality, are no longer absolutely distinct. Art and life flow in the same channel.”

“In our dreams we are brought back into the magic circle of early culture, and we shrink and shudder in the presence of imaginative phantoms that are built up of our own thoughts and emotions, and are really our own flesh.”

“I have cultivated, so far as I care to, my garden of dreams, and it scarcely seems to me that it is a large garden. Yet every path of it, I sometimes think, might lead at last to the heart of the universe.”

The Sirens of Titan

Kurt Vonnegut – 1959

“At first glance, the laboratory-gowned scientist seemed to be a perfect servant of nothing but truth. At first glance, one was convinced that nothing but truth could please him as he beamed at his test tube. At first glance, one thought that he was as much above the beastly concerns of mankind as the harmoniums in the caves of Mercury. There, at first glance, was a young man without vanity, without lust – and one accepted at its face value the title Salo had engraved on the statue, Discovery of Atomic Power.

And then one perceived that the young truth-seeker had a shocking erection.”

Empathy and cynicism meet and meld in The Sirens of Titan, which is Kurt Vonnegut’s second novel but the one in which he truly found his voice. The satire is often unbearably brutal and there are moments of powerful grace and humanity. Though not a solipsistic writer, Vonnegut’s inner conflict is never concealed. He sees life as futile and human beings as horribly flawed, but at the same time he finds so much redemption in the smallest instances of sharing and kindness between any two people. It’s a philosophical battle that never quite gets settled in his greatest books, which is what makes them so potent. An eccentric millionaire, Winston Niles Rumfoord, builds a spaceship and blasts off with his dog to explore the universe, getting sucked into some kind of wormhole or vortex that transforms him into a multi-dimensional being who can see the future, at least well enough to seem omniscient to most mortals, allowing him to remake society in his image, orchestrate interplanetary wars, and unify the world under a new religion called The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, the sole tenet of which is that all events are complete accidents, not the will of the Almighty. Meanwhile, another rich man, Malachi Constant, lives a completely frivolous life and becomes a pawn in Rumfoord’s agenda to demonstrate the absence of divine justice in the cosmos. And just when we think that Rumfoord is essentially a demigod, we find that he is not only at the mercy of natural forces but also of an alien race known as the Tralfamadorians, who have manipulated human history for no other reason than to make them able to produce and deliver a replacement spaceship part for one of their messenger robots stranded on Titan, a task that takes hundreds of thousands of years. (One other point of interest about the book is that it describes a future society where citizens accept handicaps to minimize any kind of physical or intellectual advantages they may have other others, a concept that will become the main premise of Vonnegut’s later famous story “Harrison Bergeron.”) The plot is not dependent on twists and turns, but there are several that bowled me over. More than the story, though, are various isolated scenes and subplots that really surprised and moved me. The Tralfamadorian robot, Salo, alone for millennia, has developed compassion and a profound sense of loneliness. Salo is crestfallen to find that Rumfoord, the only other intelligent being on the Saturn moon, has no interest in his friendship and only resents him as a fellow tool of the Tralfamadorians. This leads to Salo committing suicide by disassembling himself by a lakeshore. Chrono, the estranged son of Constant, is a surly brat on Earth but after being on Titan for many years, he goes feral and leaves his family to live with the native bluebird flocks, wearing feathers and learning their language, and even building votive structures in their honor all over the landscape. Near the end of his life, the repentant Constant undertakes cleaning and maintaining these shrines as a means of bonding with his son. Most striking of all, for me, is the tale of Unk and Boaz marooned in the deep catacombs of Mercury, (thereby – by Rumfoord’s design – surviving the disastrous Mars-Earth war). There is a native species in these caverns called ‘harmoniums,’ creatures that have no higher functions or thoughts beyond existing and who are fueled by vibrations. Dazzled by their simple beauty and the music they produce, Boaz bonds with the harmoniums, letting them feed on his own pulse, and ultimately chooses to remain alone with them on Mercury rather than escape with Unk. Whether foolish or heroic, or both, the willingness of characters to risk self-destruction to experience a bit of genuine warmth, kindness or tranquility is a phenomenon that Vonnegut returns to often. As he writes in The Sirens of Titan, “It was all so sad. But it was all so beautiful, too.”

The Godfather

Mario Puzo – 1969

Possibly one of the most mediocre novels ever to be turned into a masterpiece of a film, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather was nevertheless a bestseller that captured the public’s imagination, largely due to Puzo’s ingenious idea to fuse recently exposed details about the American mafia in nonfiction books like The Valachi Papers and Gay Talese's Honor Thy Father with the trashy roman à clef novels of Jaqueline Susann and Harold Robbins. It’s not great literature, and even Puzo himself, (like director Francis Ford Coppola), was not especially happy about his name being synonymous with mafia epics over the more serious, personal works that he took pride in. But it’s easy to see why the book lent itself to a screen adaptation. The characters are well-drawn, with the family dynamic being loosely patterned on The Brothers Karamazov. Without Coppola’s involvement in the film, it would likely have been a more routine Hollywood affair like Airport or Love Story. Speaking as someone who has seen the movie a hundred times and read the novel once, I can only say that the latter seems incredibly soapy, artless and puerile in comparison. Coppola was generous in sharing credit with Puzo for the adaptation, even insisting on the phrase “Mario Puzo’s” above the title on screen, but it’s apparent that Coppola is primarily responsible for everything great about the film, including Brando, the music of Nino Rota, Gordon Willis’ cinematography, and the huge cast of newcomers that he discovered. It was Coppola who outmaneuvered Paramount chief Robert Evans’ relentless interference. Evans, who wanted another Love Story, pushed for Robert Redford or Ryan O’Neal to play Michael Corleone instead of Al Pacino, and generally needled, harassed and second-guessed Coppola the whole way. When the time came for a sequel, one of Coppola’s requirements was that Evans be kept away from him; (pretty much the last time Coppola would have the clout to make such a demand). The point is that I believe Coppola retroactively made the Puzo novel seem better than it was. For every “make him an offer he can’t refuse,” there are endless paragraphs that dwell on the sordid details of minor characters’ lives, like Lucy the bridesmaid who doesn’t know what to do about her abnormally spacious vagina. The writing is ridiculously misogynistic. Dwelling ad nauseum on Johnny Fontaine’s entire sexual history or on Sonny Corleone’s massive phallus and animal libido, Puzo’s prose comes off like the work of a terribly insecure and unattractive man with minimal experience with women trying to sound like he knows everything about them. Worst of all, probably, is the fact that Puzo allows no space in this 450-page novel for reflection or to critique the milieu he depicts. He describes the behavior of all these reprehensible people in almost a journalistic way, with a dearth of feeling about it all, which got translated faithfully into the film, which in turn led to the impression that both Puzo and Coppola were glamorizing the mafia. This is why Coppola made sure that the sequel was unambiguous in showing Michael, (despite being an impressive Machiavellian strategist), as a soulless shell of a human being due to the evil he had wrought, all thinly justified with a pretense of concern for “family.” The finale of The Godfather, Part II shows Michael completely alone, having killed, exiled or alienated all of his loved ones. Puzo’s novel contains no moments even remotely comparable in depth, poetry and pure decisiveness in its treatment of themes. This, combined with the absence of any style or beauty in Puzo’s writing, makes The Godfather pretty underwhelming, in my opinion.

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Henry Farrell – 1960

It’s not great literature by any means, but it’s an interesting, light read as kind of a fan-fiction mashup of A Streetcar Named Desire and Sunset Boulevard, leaning towards the sordid instead of pathos or poetry. Possibly because the 1962 movie is so famous and is such a strict adaptation, the book reads like a novelization of it, not incredibly graceful or visceral, just efficient in its juicy storytelling.