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.

A Sport and A Pastime

A Sport And A Pastime by James Salter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Salter’s terse, precise, photographic style is the standout feature of this slim novel, and it’s used to narrate the increasingly fevered imaginings of a love-affair that is mostly a piece of erotic fantasy. Dean is a college dropout and a wastrel, stringing along a working class girl in France and burning through his father’s money. It’s obviously reprehensible, but Salter’s unnamed narrator is nonetheless bewitched and obsessed with the intensity of Dean’s devotion to the pleasures of the moment at the expense of taking any responsibility. But life can’t just be a sport and a pastime – Dean’s fate suggests a final judgement on the risks of living fast, while his hoodwinked lover, eager for marriage and a family, ends up with the happy ending.

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Lady Chatterley's Lover

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Some crude language aside this isn’t qualitatively different from Lawrence’s other English novels, except that his ideas are more baldly stated. Mellors and Connie are more depressed by the collieries and the mechanisation of modern life, and more cynical about the pursuit of money and success. The ending is also less ambivalent – Lawrence providing his couple with the promise of a romantic and sexual union that will sustain them in the “tragic age” they live in.

The book is most successful in depicting the pressures placed on the couple by class and the need to conform – extricating themselves from their loveless marriages is legally onerous and socially ruinous. The novel’s climax is their decision to go through with it regardless, which is what makes it a winning and resonant love story.

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Normal People

Normal People by Sally Rooney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sally Rooney’s writing is almost preternaturally easy to read and digest, and I finished this in three days. It starts off as a YA Romeo & Juliet story, but things get more complicated and quite a bit darker when the star-crossed lovers go to university and contrive in various ways to not end up together. Some of this feels like the author pushing her characters around to maintain tension in the story, a way of establishing beyond doubt that these two people belong together by showing how unhappy they are apart. But that drama keeps you reading, so the artifice is forgivable. Rooney’s debut focused on four characters rather than two, and had more surprising and affecting revelations in store for them. This book is more controlled, but also more conventional. Through their love the two misfits feel able to relax into themselves and stop worrying about being weird. That’s sweet. Conversations With Friends had some harder truths in store for the reader, which makes it a finer achievement.

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Women In Love

Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although a sequel to The Rainbow, this is a very different beast and can largely be read on its own (there are occasional references to previous events in Ursula’s life only to underline how far she has moved beyond them). Ursula shares the stage with her sister and the two men that love them, and each other. The central tension the book explores and ends on is whether marriage is partnership enough, or if other company is required for a fulfilled life. Happily Lawrence’s increasingly chauvinistic attitude is still reigned in here, and his avatar character’s lecturing is ridiculed and mocked, not least by the woman who loves him. It is that ambiguity and multipolarity that makes this a great novel. I think The Rainbow is greater still, laying out its thesis a bit more convincingly, but both books are triumphs and well worth reading.

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The Rainbow

The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lawrence’s investigation of how ‘the relations between women and men’ had become ‘the problem of today’ required him to go backwards over 60 years and summon up all his powers as a poet to describe a state of nature where the sexes existed in harmony. It’s a powerful evocation, even if it isn’t very convincing. What’s striking about the Tom Brangwen love story is how little communication there is between the couple. Whereas Ursula three generations later feels entitled to question her lover’s politics and life choices. Ursula escapes the wild but mute passion that her grandparents shared (symbolised I think by the horses that block her way in the final chapter). She is stubborn and articulate and seeks wider horizons, for which the rainbow is an ill-fitting metaphor. Lawrence’s achievement is in successfully realising these very different modes of romance and family life, even if he doesn’t quite explain them. But he is a poet, not a sociologist – and the language the story is told in (with all its old-fashioned euphemisms in the love scenes) is wonderful.

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