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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Half-Life 2

Who needs choice, anyway? One of the core values of great games is supposed to be providing the player with a range of tools and options to choose from in accomplishing a goal. And yet Half-Life 2 is quite prescriptive. You are on rails throughout – there is only one way through a level. And there is very overt signposting about what you need to do to overcome the obstacles in the way. Here's an infinite stash of rockets because you're going to be using rockets now. The crates have a bunch of grenades in them? It's grenade time.

The game is so expertly tuned to provide the player precisely what they need at precisely the right time that it always feels quite artificial. Immersion is elusive when the guiding hand of the developer is everpresent. The overarching narrative nods to this, in that Gordon Freedman is a pawn used by the G-Man to intervene in a mysterious inter-dimensional "Great Game", where you're supposed to tip the scales in the struggle between the rapacious alien Combine and the human resistance. Valve's Portal games make the metaphor more explicit – the player is literally in a designed maze where their lack of agency is very evident, and the goal is to realise the disturbing nature of this situation and escape. It's a more satisfying commentary on the constrained freedom games have to provide a player.

All that aside, it's very easy to get swept up in Half-Life 2's narrative. The original Half-Life was set in a claustrophobic underground base where the goal was survival and the lesson was not to trust the authorities to save your ass when disaster strikes. The soldiers aren't there to rescue you, but to kill you. Half-Life 2 transposes that sense of oppression onto an entire city. You are in a police-state ruled by Breen, a human puppet of an alien empire, and you quickly join forces with the clandestine resistance. Breen is a very satisfying villain. His propaganda broadcasts have a dark humour to them, but you discover that he has in part bought into the Combine's project, seduced by their offer of wonderous scientific discoveries. The fact that the resistance are the ones who have cracked the secret of local teleportation and the gravity gun shows up Breen's arrogance and his uselessness. He is a weasel, and an effective goad for the player to carry on fighting.

This is a very fun game. Half-Life 2 is a fairground ride where you do one exciting thing after another. Even if there is only one solution, executing it is still very satisfying. The choices you make are smaller and more immediate – which weapon do you prefer to use, will you run in or crouch around, how much do you want to mess around with the gravity gun and the environment around you. The challenges are well paced, with calmer exploration sections giving you a breather from the fights. The majority of the game is not particularly hard, although I did struggle a bit with the rocket fight against the striders towards the end. The finale is very confident – you breach the citadel and lose all your weapons bar the gravity gun, which becomes a one-click kill machine. The thrills and spills are put behind you as you traverse (and get carted around) an entirely new non-human environment. It's an inversion of Half-Life's difficult Xen section – and a great capstone to a great game.

Capitalist Realism

It’s an audacious rhetorical move to blame the failure to conceive of a realistic alternative to capitalism on capitalism itself, although in fairness Mark Fisher doesn’t absolve the anti-capitalist movement of blame either. Fisher’s aim here is to give an account of how the spectrum of political possibility shrunk in the 80s and 90s to exclude alternatives to capitalism, and also identify areas where the workings of capitalism become absurd and unrealistic, as a way to wedge open new possibilities. The second effort is less successful than the first, mainly because there is already a well-established understanding of what “market failure” is and the need for regulation and state provision to correct it, which Fisher doesn’t engage with at all. The problem may be that in adopting Deleuze and Guattari’s expansive definition of capitalism as this all-encompassing and mutable system, the problem becomes so ill-defined as to be impossible to convincingly argue against. Capitalism becomes the evil animating all other evils, and if you don’t already subscribe to this demonology, this book will not persuade you.

Which is a shame, because the two issues Fisher investigates are important. His account of mental health, and particularly the role of social media in making it worse, is prescient. And the distortions created by targets in public services is now well accepted. But politics can confront these problems without demanding the end of capitalism (or to put it in Fisher’s terms, capitalism can metabolise these critiques and neuter them).

It is very telling to me that at the end of the book, Fisher argues for the resuscitation of the concept of the “general will” – as if the conflicts in society can all be resolved if such a thing can be found. In fact, Rousseau, who first suggested the idea, thought it could only be realised in very small republics where everyone knew each other personally, and large states would have to settle for Hobbesian oppression to crush the clashing interests of individuals. In the very last pages Fisher proposes that the question of collective management is to be resolved “practically and experimentally”, when arguably the failure of collective management in the 20th century is the single greatest cause for alternatives to capitalism to appear so unrealistic in the 21st. With that short aside, Fisher skips over the main issue, which is that anti-capitalists have failed to come up with practical way to collectively manage our resources that can convince a large enough majority to try the experiment again.