Dhalgren

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It was good of William Gibson to warn the reader that the riddles in the book are not meant to be solved. A traditional novel sets up a mystery that would keep the reader guessing until it is wrapped up satisfactorily at the end, but Delany frustrates such expectations. Knowing that that’s the point removes the need to keep trying to figure out what it all means. It’s ok to let that go – there is no final answer.

Every interpretation you can lay on the book is destabilised. What looked like rape maybe wasn’t. What looked like a fatal accident may have been murder. The protagonist’s different experience of time casts doubt on his reliability as a point of view character and author. We can’t be sure if the poems he’s written have been plagiarised or not. Instead of solutions we have shifting perspectives.

The novel foregrounds its artificially. It’s an artefact that appears within itself, while also looping endlessly. A reader could be forgiven for finding such postmodern gimmicks tiresome. What saves the book is Delany’s honest account of the anxieties and compulsions of literary creation. The Kid worries over the poems he writes – deleting, rearranging, rewording – in a way that makes you understand why Delany’s prose is so immaculate. Every sentence is approached with care – surprising and virtuoso descriptions and turns of phrase abound. It is a delight to read.

The Kid’s uncertainty about whether he can be understood, and whether his sense of reality is shared with others, is placed in the context of a wider breakdown of human and natural laws. Bellona is a post-apocalyptic setting which showcases the freedoms and dangers of anarchism. Communities do emerge from the wreckage, although Delany finds the commune’s improvement projects embarrassing, preferring to dwell on how a gang of libertine ‘Scorpions’ enforce a kind of order through random acts of violence. A bourgeois family’s attempts to keep up appearances is ridiculed – Delany pointedly demonstrates that the trappings of civilisation they cling to cannot keep them safe. That cynicism may reflect the upheavals of the early 1970s, but Delany’s trust in the anarchic and sexually-liberated forces embodied by the Scorpions feels naïve nonetheless.

The best compliment you can pay Dhalgren is that it makes you want to read more Delany. He’s a Joycean writer to the extent that he cares about the poetic potential of prose fiction. And his open-minded, self-questioning sensibility in dealing with uncomfortable topics of sex, race, madness and power is particularly valuable in these censorious times. A great talent, and this long book is a good introduction to his strengths.

View all my reviews

Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn

I've replayed this game probably more than any other. Part of that is familiarity – I grew up with Baldur's Gate and know its story and systems back to front, so there are absolutely no barriers to entry when picking it up again. That, however, is not the biggest draw. It's not really build variety either. While there are plenty of classes and kits to choose from for your main character, ultimately you will still end up with a party comprising some combination of fighers, mages, healers and ulitily. What makes the game special is the personalities that come alongside those mechanical considerations. This is where Bioware really mastered how to make the player care about RPG companions.

Baldur's Gate is in some ways like an extremely complicated version of Pokemon.  You pick your six little guys and go at it. There's a big cast to choose from and you won't be able to take them all. Your party needs to be well-rounded, able to tackle the various obstacles and encounters you have to face. There is fun to be had levelling up your toons and aquiring the gear that will make them into god-like beings that can take on other god-like beings.

But it's the personalities that matter. Character and mechanics interact in ways that present the player with interesting choices. Not everyone gets along – characters with a good alignment will have trouble tolerating characters who are evil, to the point where one may leave or start a fight with another. Keldorn is an experienced paladin who can wield the most powerful sword in the game, but will not abide being in a party with Viconia, an evil drow cleric with a valuable amount of magic resistance. You can't have both in the party for very long. Generally the good companions tend to be dual or multi-classed – they trade in raw power for versatility. The evil companions are more focused on realising the full potential of their specific class, and so tend to be more simple to use out of the box. Either way, there are at least two playthroughs of the game you can do with a completely different set of tools to address its challenges.

It helps that the characters you get are fun to hang out with. This is an old game – its innovations have become part of the modern CRPG landscape, but features like party conflicts, romances and player strongholds may feel embryonic to a modern player. The companions in the first Baldur's Gate are extremly lightly sketched – being little more than a portrait, a collection of barks and a paragraph of backstory. The game was designed to transpose the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop experience into a single-player computer game, and that's about as much information a tabletop group would need before they meet in a bar and go hunt for gold and experience in a dungeon.

After the release of Baldur's Gate, the developer discovered that players were actually quite attached to the companions they had created. forgoing ones that became available later because of the investment put into those that were available earlier. When making the sequel, they made sure that companions rewarded that investment and had more stuff to say and do throughout the game. Companions talk a lot more in Shadows of Amn, not just with you but between each other. One of the joys of replaying the game is seeing the interactions that crop up between party members, some of which can be quite unexpected. Two companions can start a relationship when in your party. Korgan, in many ways a deplorable bloodthirsty dwarf, nonetheless expresses admiration for the upstanding Keldorn and his skill in battle.

They are also very funny. In this playthrough I took the gnome Jan with me for the first time, who is a kind of jester figure – constantly telling meandering stories that inevitably circle back to his obsession with turnips. But there is more going on under the surface. A bit like the fool in a Shakespeare play, Jan is subtle when deploying his japes. His tall tales can be a way of puncturing the pretences of other characters while maintaining plausible deniability (just about) . If you have the knights Keldorn and Anomen in the party, Jan will be quite merciless in skewering each of them in turn – those exchanges are some of the funniest bits of writing I have seen in an RPG.

Jan's companion quest is quite short, but reveals a completely new facet to his character. When he discovers a former lover is in trouble, the jokes stop completely and he becomes a tragic romantic figure. There are nuances to many of the other characters you take with you. Jaheira has to deal with the death of her husband, but also the schemes and betrayals of her superiors in the organisation she works for. Her strong sense of direction is unmoored by her association with you, which is complicated further if you decide to become romantically involved. Eventually her stern demeanour breaks apart and she even starts enjoying a joke or two. Anomen is an arrogant wannabe knight who excels in giving exactly the wrong advice in every situation. Helping him pass his trial and resolve his daddy issues can make him into less of an idiot, and lead him to eventually apologise for his behaviour. Keldorn is a veteran of many struggles against evil, but you learn that in the course of performing his duties he has neglected his family. That leads to an agonising choice for the player – granting his request to retire and spend time with his loved ones, or retain his extremely valuable skills. I insisted he remained in my service, but had to live with the knowledge that I was effectively breaking up a family as a result.

Some of these characters were directly drawn from the developers' own D&D tabletop games – they were thought about and refined over time, which may have helped add unexpected dimensions to them. As players would have been familiar with the tropes of the genre, there was an attempt to subvert stereotypes. Korgan is an axe-wielding barbarian, sure, but he is also a poet with a talent for turning a phrase and engaging in ethical debates with his more upstanding fellow-travellers. Baldur's Gate sets the floor for what good writing and characterisation should be in CRPGs. Planescape: Torment, a game from the same era and made in the same engine, probably still sets the ceiling 20+ years on. The band between them is what we should expect from the genre.

Baldur's Gate has one advantage over Planescape in that its combat is a bit more sophisticated. The first Baldur's Gate game is a low-level D&D adventure – your party will be swinging and missing a lot, and you will be killed by wolves and bears while out in the wilderness if you're not careful. That in itself provides a certain amount of challenge and interest for the player (although I imagine some may also find it frustrating). Shadows of Amn carries on the story and banks the experience you would have gained in the first game – you now have a mid-level party with more spells and abilities at your disposal. The monsters you fight also have their immunities and quirks to contend with.

The Pokemon comparison kind of works here as well, in that what is a simple game of rock-paper-scissors matching a strong element against a weak one becomes a complicated game where your party has to counter the various abilities and buffs of your enemies. Mages are particularly tricky, throwing up protection spells that can make weapons useless and turn spells against you. The game rewards a thorough knowledge of the spell book (and there are a lot of spells in Baldur's Gate), as that is what will allow you to circumvent the problem magic users pose. Mage duels ultimately become a game of wits, where you rifle through your collection of spells to try and disrupt and defeat your opponent.

Combat in Baldur's Gate is often quite short. The game doesn't waste your time with mobs or enemies that have giant healthpools. The point of an encounter is not to provide some friction on the journey to fulfilling a quest, but to set up a challenge and ask you to work out how to resolve it. Some encounters feel impossible until you figure out a way around them. Beholders, a prestige enemy in D&D (and an excellent monster design), can be devastating, casting extremely disruptive spells at you very, very quickly. Mind Flayers, another famous D&D enemy, are even scarier, being very resistant to magic and able to kill you very fast if you engage them in melee. These are unfair fights if you fight them fairly. Finding ways to trivialise them is very satisfying. The game rewards an understanding of its systems, not just the determination to grind enough levels to make you strong enough to attempt its fiercest challenges.

Baldur's Gate is slightly less successful when it comes to using the environment as part of encounter design. Maps are basically flat, and the main variable is the shape they come in. There are some tricks you can pull. The ground floor of the De'Arnise Keep, an early-game dungeon, allows you to snipe the trolls in the great hall from balconies. Mind Flayers are usually found in dungeons with long corridors, allowing you to block them up with summons and keep your party safe from their brain-devouring abilities. Rogues are designed to excel at underhand tactics. Attacking from the shadows behind an enemy gives you a 'backstab' damage multiplier. They can also set traps, so you can bait enemies to follow you down to an ambush and then blow them up. Both manoevers are quite fiddly to execute, however. In practice, the simple formula of having tanks in the front and mages at the back is usually enough.

One of the cool things about Baldur's Gate is that everyone plays by the same rules. If you kill an enemy that is using a valuable item, you will be able to loot it afterwards. Mages have only so many spells – exhaust them all and they become defenceless. You can stumble across enemies willy nilly and trade barbs before the fight starts if you like, but you can also be smart and scout ahead unseen, and launch a pre-emptive strike. All these tactics become essential for veterans who know the game well and play at higher difficulties. Baldur's Gate systems are robust enough to still provide a challenge in successive playthroughs.

But as I wrote at the beginning, that isn't really why I come back to these games. My latest run was done on normal difficulty and I became obscenely powerful about half-way through. Building up my team to be absolute beasts was rewarding, but the real delight came from the fondness I built up for the companions I took with me. That's what will keep me coming back for more.

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The subject matter here is so specific and personal that it almost obviates criticism. What makes the book so impressive is the sheer craft on display – Thorogood digesting almost everything comics can do and compressing it between two covers. Every single page in this book has a neat design idea or layout or storytelling detail, and I was constantly being surprised at what was being thrown at me. At one point the comic literally starts again from the beginning – the audacity on display is simply stunning. And it all works. Thorogood turns the claim that she’s the “future of comics” into a joke (and who can blame her, no one needs that on their shoulders), but I’m afraid to say the intelligence and effort on display in this book makes that bit of praise just evidently true. Read this and every other comic feels tired and lazy in comparison.

View all my reviews

Foreign Studies

Foreign Studies by Shūsaku Endō
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This 'novel' actually collects together a short story, an essay and a novella on the theme of Japanese young men studying in Europe, an experience Endō himself went through in the 1950s. In the short story, the protagonist is patronised in every sense of the word by the Catholic community in France, and while some of the metaphors employed are a bit forced, Endō captures the tension between gratitude and resentment quite well. The historical essay is even more overtly critical of the Catholic church's attempts to convert the Japanese – to an extent that's surprising for a Catholic author.

The final piece strips out religion from the scenario – the protagonist is a professor of French literature sent to Paris by his university, and while he is too shy to act on the various temptations of living abroad and away from his young family, he has no hang-ups about it. Endō is skillful in foregrounding Tanaka's faults – jealousy, pride, pettiness, irritability – while still making the reader sympathise with his situation. The thrust of the story is about being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of European culture. Successful foreign students have to somehow ignore that realisation in order to survive – trying to fully immerse yourself ultimately triggers illness so severe that the scholar has to be sent home. For me, that idea wasn't as convincing as the smaller instances where Tanaka feels forced to assume a role he is uncomfortable with. His study of De Sade becomes an obsession, partly because of Tanaka's admiration for De Sade's flamboyant rejection of the social and ethical expectations of his day, and the suffering he experienced as a result. The moments of identification with this outcast figure are the most powerful in the book.

View all my reviews

A Gorgeous Girl Like Me

A very broad comedy from Truffaut, who clearly wanted to have some fun after the dour melodrama of Anne and Muriel. It’s a vehicle for Bernadette Lafont, who plays a bawdy provincial creating trouble wherever she goes, and using her looks to try and get out of it. Lafont gives a gutsy and energetic performance, matched by quite theatrical comic turns by the rest of the cast. It’s all very silly, but at least it avoids Truffaut’s reflex of ending on a death as a way to manufacture pathos. Here the bodies pile up, and nothing is taken very seriously.

There’s a bit of fun as well with a young cinephile whose amateur footage reveals the truth in a way that individual testimony can’t. The film has a certain Rashomon quality, whereby Camille’s narration doesn’t always tally with what we see in flashback. The film starts with a student looking for the professor’s academic paper and learning it was never published. The narrative is embedded in artefacts, most prominently the tapes the professor uses to record Camille’s story. It’s not as elegant as Citizen Kane, but Truffaut may be nodding to the idea that only something as artificial as the movies can give you the final truth of the matter.

The misunderstandings created by class is an undercurrent in the film – the sociology professor starts off befuddled by the language his subject is using. Truffaut has a snigger at well-meaning intellectuals who try to sympathise with the lot of the downtrodden to the point of excusing criminal behaviour. Camille is a remorseless psychopath, whose irresistible charms manage to get her out of the most outlandish scrapes. Her simps are marks – sometimes it’s that simple. The professor’s assistant is a snob who calls Camille a tramp. But a bit like the friend-zoned Midge in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, she has the professor's best interests at heart, and Truffaut is enough of a romantic to end the film with her, and what might have been if Camille hadn’t bulldozed her chances.

Engine Summer

Engine Summer by John Crowley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of this book’s strengths was quite how effective it was at making me sleepy. The post-apocalypse it describes is serene, slow-moving and largely free from conflict. Although the protagonist goes on a quest, most of the jeopardy he encounters is elided. The central mystery that bookends the novel (who is the story being told to and why) isn’t in itself strong enough to propel the reader forwards. You have to trust the tale is worth telling. Thankfully it is.

There are some dated elements – many of the future societies being described have gendered assumptions that a modern reader will chafe at. This was written over 40 years ago and to a degree it shows. What’s lasting about it is the protagonist’s own yearning for knowledge and love. These (male-coded) desires are implied to have been taken to extremes and have ruined the world. But there are other ways of living proposed by the novel. Psychological and genetic engineering have produced a cat-like people who have abandoned expansionist drives, and the protagonist’s own illiterate culture, where deception is impossible and everyone says what they mean, seems to be a pleasant place to grow up.

The stories that structure these groups are imperfectly understood by the protagonist, and some of the novel’s most beautiful writing is found in evoking that ambiguity. The ending suggests that the protagonist has become a story that will in turn provide a template for a different way of living, and the love he experienced is seen to inspire the person hearing the tale to emulate it. Crowley’s hope might be that the tale does the same for the reader.

View all my reviews

A Theory of Justice

A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I won’t pretend to have read this cover to cover or have been able to follow every winding turn of the argumentation, not least because it doesn’t proceed in a linear fashion in the way something like Hobbes’s Leviathan does. Rawls helpfully points out the most salient bits in his introduction, and this does feel like a treasure trove that is to be dipped into repeatedly.

There is a lot going on here. The principles themselves are more radical than Rawls’s reputation as an establishment figure would suggest, and are the most valuable and influential bit to get your head around. The justification underlying them (the famous original position and veil of ignorance) is quite mad when you get into the analytical weeds, but as a thought experiment is interesting, and shares with the utilitarian dispassionate “view of the universe” an attempt to reason from a perspective beyond personal interests and biases. It is something we should all consider at least a little in our attempts to figure out these big questions of justice, fairness and what’s right. The idea of reflective equilibrium seems to me to be an invitation to engage in circular thinking, but I fully accept that I just might not understand it.

I do know a little bit about David Hume and Adam Smith’s ideas, and have to say Rawls’s depiction of them as utilitarians is deeply strange. But he’s a philosopher, not a historian. The way prior thinkers are twisted to prefigure his theory is amusing, but ultimately endearing. At one point he says that the original position is such a basic concept that loads of other people would have thought it up before, which is laughable . In this dense book you find your entertainment where you can.

View all my reviews

ElfQuest

The Complete ElfQuest, Volume One by Wendy Pini
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gorgeous line-art and inventive layouts make this fantasy epic a joy to read. The elves are designed to look strange and alien but alluring, and the different groups (wood elves, sun elves, snow elves) are well delineated. This also has some excellent villains – mysterious and ultimately tragic figures. The creators are clever about revealing their malevolent intentions to the reader, but not the heroes, which ups the tension of their intrigues. This is prestige comics, all the more impressive for being completely independent of the big publishers.

View all my reviews

Devilman

Devilman: The Classic Collection Vol. 1 by Go Nagai
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Very influential manga from the early 1970s. It takes a typical superhero set-up – a school kid possessed by a powerful demon who uses its power to fight a medley of other demons – and adds all the trappings of exploitation horror, including gallons of blood and plenty of nudity. The fight scenes are gruesome and inventive, including a memorable moment where Devilman employs his eyebrows to take down a foe. And the monster design is delightfully depraved.

But the book also has long exposition sections that fail to build up a believable world, and the plotting constantly strains credulity. There’s an incredible transition where a safe house inexplicably leads to an underground nightclub, which is so bizarre it’s almost impressive Go Nagai tries to pull it off. The back half of this volume also includes some weaker time-travel stories, which may have been written later and incongruously inserted in the middle of the story. Basically this is all over the place – an excuse for Go Nagai to indulge his whims and prodigious artistic talents. I liked it, but it’s a real mess.

View all my reviews