Sensitive alien discusses romance and prostitution: on Chester Brown’s Paying for It

My friend Ajitha – fearsome Harper Collins editor, scourge of established and aspiring writers everywhere, grammar pedant who, even during drunken conversations, grabs at faulty sentences as they issue from your mouth, rips them asunder and watches their innards drift to the carpet – gifted me Chester Brown’s graphic memoir Paying for It a few months ago. It has been one of my favourite reads of the past year and I have wanted to write about it for a while, but it is a difficult book to articulate one’s feelings about (plus the thought of having to write a grammatically flawless post was too much jittery-giving and imbroglio-making, as a Srishti author would put it before Ajitha manicured his typing fingers with red-hot pliers).

Still, here goes. Paying for It is Brown’s no-holds-barred, warts-and-all account of his years as a “john” – a man who regularly visits prostitutes. This phase of his life began in 1999, a couple of years after his girlfriend Sook-Yin ended their romantic relationship and shifted her new boyfriend into their flat, a situation that, to Chester’s own surprise, didn’t make him feel jealous or negative at all (it even improved his relationship with Sook-Yin in some ways, causing him to wonder why people idealise romantic love over other forms of love). But he had his sexual needs to think of too. Initial diffidence, nervousness about risks and dangers, and uncertainty about how to even contact sex-workers were soon overcome, and such trysts became a regular part of his life. What follows is a dispassionate, almost anthropological record of his encounters with all the women he paid for sex over the next few years.

Given its subject matter, this book can easily cause indignation or offence. There is no skating around the objectification of women, for instance – that’s what a john does when he scans advertisements and decides whether he wants someone with big or small breasts on this particular day, a brunette or a blonde, an 18-year-old or someone more experienced. Or when he gets online and reads “reviews” of prostitutes written by other johns. In most of the panels that show Chester’s first meeting with a woman, his thoughts are along the lines “Not as beautiful as Gwendolyn but still attractive, and what a body – she is stacked!” or “A bit on the chubby side – bad teeth – not ugly but not really good-looking either.” Some of this will be unpalatable if you think there’s something inherently wrong with paid sex or that it is synonymous with exploitation, but none of it means that Chester treats the women as rubber dolls rather than as human beings with feelings. (On one occasion, when he comes close to doing this, he is told off and is quick to acknowledge his insensitivity.) They talk at length, he develops an emotional connect of sorts with the women who are warm and friendly to him; there is a clear reciprocity in the relationships. And over the course of this book he repeatedly makes the point that most johns are regular guys, not the violent or psychotic caricatures you see in films (or at least no more violent or psychotic than most guys in conventional relationships are capable of being).

The drawings themselves are minimalist, always in compact rectangular panels, and usually little more than “pictures of people talking” (to use a phrase that often describes formally unambitious films or graphic novels). This has mixed results. At a practical level it allows Chester to preserve the anonymity of the prostitutes by not showing their features in vivid detail. And it encourages the viewer to focus on the text – Chester’s constant introspecting, his discussions with the women (which add up to a wide-ranging view of the prostitute-john relationship) or with his puzzled friends (including fellow cartoonists Joe Matt and Seth: the conversations between these three make up some of the drollest bits). But the style is sometimes almost too low-key. I get that this wasn’t intended to be an erotic book, but on occasion there is a disconnect between images and text, as when Chester tells us a particular encounter was amazingly good yet the pictures are silent, faraway views of seemingly impersonal coitus, and the page as a whole has all the soberness of a Pinter play. “She is adorable! This is going to be great!” he thinks to himself when he meets an attractive prostitute; another panel has him sitting on a bed, thinking “I feel all giddy and excited.” Yet in these drawings and elsewhere his face is a straight line, there is no more expression on it than on Dilbert’s face during a boardroom meeting.

Much of this probably has to do with Brown’s unusual personal traits, his apparent ability to have a good time (however he defines it) while simultaneously dissecting his own feelings and reactions: even right in the middle of sexual intercourse, a part of him appears to be observing, analysing, filing things away. (In one particularly funny scene, Chester, sitting alone at his table, feels a “tiny twinge of happiness” and later sifts through his recent memories to try to understand what caused that little twinge.) Perhaps this quality is also what allows him to matter-of-factly make revelations that may gross out some readers; at one point he gets the impression that he is hurting a woman during sex and mulls that this is a slight turn-on for him (but then decides to get it over with as fast as possible). Such passages can be discomfiting but they are truthful too, more truthful about people’s dark impulses – and about the relationship between fantasy and reality – than many writers would care to be, especially in an autobiographical work.

But then, as Robert Crumb writes in his Introduction to this book, “Chester Brown is not of this planet. He is probably the result of one of those alien abductions where they stick a needle in a human woman’s abdomen and impregnate her.” The photo of Brown at the back of the book shows someone who might be well cast as Mr Spock’s much smarter big brother in Star Trek. It is a face that suggests unfathomable reserves of wisdom as well as emotional impassivity. The head is oval, the features smooth and effete (you may be reminded of REM’s Michael Stipe or the actor John Malkovich), the thin lips are curved in a way that could mean he is amused or profoundly sad or both at the same time.

A further observation, from Chester’s friend Seth:

I often jokingly refer to Chet as “the robot”. In posing a question to him I might quip “Perhaps I should ask a person who has actual human emotions instead.” The truth is, Chester seems to have a very limited emotional range compared to most people. There does seem to be something wrong with him. He’s definitely an oddball.

(At which point I began wondering why Ajitha had so pointedly given me this book. But I’ll let that pass.)

By the time you’re halfway through Paying for It, you’ll gather that Chester is capable of examining very complex issues with a robotic objectivity that doesn’t come easily to most of us (and in the process perhaps he oversimplifies some of those issues too, not fully accounting for how tangled and messy human emotions can get when it comes to such subjects as love and sex). In a series of end-notes and appendices, he lists and addresses the arguments against prostitution, makes the case that it should be decriminalised but not legalised (the latter would make the profession subject to regulation and lead to the uncontrollable growth of the black market, with the result that some prostitutes won’t have legal recourse if they are abused or exploited) and discusses related problems such as human trafficking and sex slavery. In a particularly provocative appendix that may have you alternately agreeing and disagreeing with him as you read each new sentence, he argues with the definitions of “choice”, “consent” and “violence” presented in Sheila Jeffreys’s book The Idea of Prostitution. And he often draws on the libertarian view of property rights and personal freedoms.

What allows him, ultimately, to be clear-sighted about these things (whether or not you agree with everything he says) is his view of romantic love as something that is not in itself an ideal to aspire to, and his disapproval of the institution of marriage. Consider this exchange – which I think is one of the most central in the book – with a prostitute who calls herself “Edith”:

Chester: Love is about sharing, caring and giving. Romantic love is about owning, hoarding and jealousy. I think it’s the exclusionary nature of romantic love that makes it different from other kinds of love […] I think it encourages a certain type of thinking: the desire to own another person.
[…]

“Edith”: But there ARE some couples who are right for each other.

Chester: Yes, but people change over time. I’m not the same person I was 10 years ago, and I’m VERY different from the person I was 20 years ago. So, yeah, there are romantic couples who are absolutely right for each other at this moment in time, but those two people are going to change, and it’s tremendously unlikely that they are going to change in exactly the same ways. It’s much more likely that they’ll change into people who are unsuited to each other … no matter how compatible they were at the beginning of their relationship.

“Edith”: Yes, but you can TRY to continue to understand your partner. And if you love him or her, you’d be willing to make that effort.

Chester: Yeah, effort. Romantic love is work. Call me lazy, but I don’t want to do the work.

“Edith”: If I met the right guy, I’d be happy to do the work. It takes work to get anything worthwhile in life.

It may be notable that Brown gives “Edith” the closing word in that exchange. He comes across as rigid at times, but if you look closely he is constantly revising or reassessing his own views over the course of this book: for example, he goes from proclaiming that “the romantic love ideal is evil” to discovering that he isn’t against romantic love in itself, he has a problem when it leads to what he calls possessive monogamy. And the theme that people change over time, and that those changes must be acknowledged, surfaces in other contexts too. Take this conversation between Chester and Seth:

Seth: If you could have looked into the future [as a teenager] and seen that you would become a whoremonger, wouldn’t you have been horrified?

Chester: Oh yeah, definitely. So?

Seth: Well, don’t you owe it to the person you were then to live the life he would have wanted you to lead?

Chester: I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was a kid. Do I owe it to my younger self to drop my career as a cartoonist and go to university to study paleontology?

Extending that thought, perhaps he will feel differently about these issues in a few years from now, and write another book that contradicts this one. Even if you conclude that Chester Brown is an extraterrestrial, the signs are that he is a sensitive, thoughtful extraterrestrial with a larger capacity for self-examination than many so-called humans have. That in itself makes Paying for It well worth reading, and reading again.

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[Some earlier posts about graphic novels: Alan Moore's Watchmen, the Pao Collective anthology, Jotiba Phule the Gardener in the Wasteland, the Obliterary Journal, Ambedkar in Gond art, Tezuka's Buddha series, Craig Thompson's Blankets, Marjane Satrapi's Embroideries, Kashmir Pending, and a story about the Indian comics industry]

How I met Norman’s mother (a spot of movie tourism)

[Did this for Business Standard]

I’m not usually enthusiastic about having a camera aimed at me (though I’m not fascist about it either, like the people who believe the thing is a devil’s tool meant to suck their souls out through their eyeballs or something). Even when travelling in scenic places, I’d rather someone just took a candid shot instead of expecting me to stand in front of something and grin moronically at a lens.

Which in no way explains why, if you chanced to visit the Cinémathèque Française museum on a particular Friday afternoon last month, you would have found me squatting next to Mrs Bates’s skull and grinning moronically at a lens. And then doing it again, to get another angle; and then yet again, after checking the light settings and tut-tutting; all the while keeping an eye out for the museum police who frowned at photography in the premises. Nor does it explain why I then stood next to Maria the robot and made faux-dramatic poses in an attempt to replicate a famous scene from a 1926 film.

But these were special circumstances: Mrs Bates and Maria are important figures in my movie-watching career. The former is the shadowy protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which infected my life when I was 13, getting me thinking about films as art and sending me down a rabbit-hole of analytical literature about movies. The latter is one of the frosty legends of early film history, the automaton created by an evil scientist in Fritz Lang’s great silent film Metropolis. And so, having arrived in the city where people typically make a beeline for Notre Dame and Versailles, for Angelina’s hot chocolate and Berthillon’s ice creams, I prioritised a meeting with these two enigmatic ladies of the night. As Mrs Bates’s little boy Norman put it, “We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?”

Mother Bates makes her famous appearance in the climax of Psycho, in a creaky (by today’s standards) but unsettling scene in the basement, where we discover that Norman’s mummy is not a living, domineering harridan but a long-dead, carefully preserved corpse. If I had wanted my illusions to be just as well-preserved, I would have avoided going to the museum at all, so that my only mental picture of her would be as she appears in the film. There was something both comical and poignant about seeing her in a glass cage at the Cinémathèque. Bathed in a beam of yellow light, she stood out from a distance in the darkened room; the idea was presumably to make her look spooky, but it also drew attention to her as an exhibit, something that visitors could point and chortle at (or sit down next to and smile stupidly for a camera). Besides, she was unexpectedly small. (What was I expecting? A two-foot-tall skull with shark-like teeth?)

Looking at other artefacts – the starfish in the jar from Man Ray’s 1928 film The Sea Star, costumes from such movies as Jean Cocteau’s 1946 Beauty and the Beast – was a strange experience too. Props and objects that have such immediate, vivid associations for a viewer can, when removed from their familiar contexts, become banal and smaller than life. Cocteau’s film was in gorgeous black and white, but these costumes were in “real-world” colour and they seemed garish, almost vulgar when set against the images from the film, playing on a screen above. There was a series of still photos from the Beauty and the Beast set, which showed the blandly handsome actor Jean Marais applying the layers of makeup that would transform him into the imperious, tragic Beast. For anyone who has been immersed in the otherworldly milieu of Cocteau’s film, these stills are an exercise in demystification; with a movie like that, which gives the impression of having sprung fully formed from an alternate universe, you don’t want to be reminded that it was put together by a cast and crew, who were probably doing mundane things like talking about the day’s news or taking cigarette breaks in between shots.

Yet such experiences can also bring a new, more measured respect for the creative process – the processes by which everyday things are transmuted into magic and art, with long-term effects on people’s lives and personalities. (I would almost certainly not have become a professional writer if I hadn’t watched Psycho when I did.) Returning to Ma Bates: here is a wrinkled little skull replica, not particularly authentic-looking or scary when you see it in the cold light of day. Yet someone designed it keeping in mind a film’s lighting and colour scheme, and the desired Grand Guignol-like effect of the climactic revelation. They arranged it just so, placing it in a chair that would swivel around dramatically; at the crucial moment a swinging lightbulb cast shadows over it, making the eye sockets seem alive and menacing; and Bernard Herrman’s music score with its screaming violins added to the effect of the scene.

And now here she was more than 50 years later, outside of the film, in a boringly polychrome world, staring blankly at me from her glass home. It was a little deflating, but the sense of mystery wasn’t completely gone. For a moment I fancied I could hear Norman’s voice saying "I think we're all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out” followed by Mother’s cackle: “They know I can't move a finger, and I won't. I'll just sit here and be quiet, just in case they do... suspect me."

[The earlier post with the museum photos is here. And here is "Monsters I have known", my piece about horror-movie love for The Popcorn Essayists]

Meeting two frosty women and a tennis stadium in Paris

Some people go to Paris to see the Louvre, the Orsay, the Latin Quarter or the Eiffel Tower. I scoff at these plebs. My personal Mecca and Medina and Vaishno Devi and what have you converged at two of the city's less touristy venues. First, the Cinémathèque Française museum, and a darshan of two women who have haunted my dreams since my early teens.

Forget the Mona Lisa – the real enigmatic Parisian lady is the robot from Metropolis. Behold these photos wherein two men, 90 years apart, try to exercise patriarchal control over Maria, yet she remains imperturbable and sphinx-like.

From sphinx to embalmed mummy... meet Mrs Bates, looking just a little less sinister than she did in Norman's basement.

Here is my masterful impression of Anthony Perkins in the film’s penultimate shot.

Not sure what I’m doing here, but then we all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?

(About the picture quality...the room was dark and these were taken surreptitiously. I may have broken some French law.)

To a sunnier place now, and the second leg of my pilgrimage was the Roland Garros stadium, home of the French Open where Rafa Nadal has reigned for eight of the past nine years. (That reign may well end in two months given Djokovic’s current form, but no matter.) Here I am in the room where the champion has his post-match press conference.

(Beneath that sweater and coat is a left arm to rival this one here. You’ll have to take my word for it.)

Near the locker rooms, a wall with some of the players’ signatures (two Federers and one Nadal included).

Outside the legendary Court Philippe Chatrier. Unfortunately they were in the process of preparing the ground for this year’s tournament, so I didn’t get to see any red clay, just a few craters.

And finally, being swatted by Suzanne Lenglen near the court named in her honour.

If Miss Lenglen’s pose reminds you of Mrs Bates with her knife, welcome to my inner world.

Thoughts on being prolific (and Asimov’s middling mysteries)

[From my weekly books column]

As someone who isn’t always a happy multi-tasker (I find it difficult to properly work on a column or review until I’ve cleared the ones before it – not the ideal situation for a freelancer!), I’m envious of the really prolific writers – the ones who toggle effortlessly between projects. And when a writer working across a range of genres and subjects manages to be seriously good too, it can be infuriating. Consider Isaac Asimov. He was best known for his work in science fiction, but the 500-plus(!) books he wrote or edited included mysteries, limerick collections, writings on history and popular science, and even an 800-page-long guide to the works of Shakespeare.

In his chatty and hugely engrossing autobiography I. Asimov – written as a collection of essays on numerous topics, ranging from fellow sci-fi writers to Jewishness to acrophobia to new parents-in-law – Asimov shares some thoughts about his own prolificity. Someone once asked him how he got into the mood for a writing session: did he do a crossword puzzle, for instance, or ritually sharpen his pencils or go for a quick jog around the block? “Before I can possibly begin writing,” Asimov replied, tongue firmly in cheek, “it is always necessary for me to turn on my electric typewriter and to get close enough to it so that my fingers can reach the keys.” This ability to simply sit down and start working without any fuss or preamble is something that many writers would willingly sacrifice a finger off each hand for.

Asimov also claims that he was never afflicted by writer’s block because he wrote so many different types of books that if he ever got tired of one genre, he could switch to a different kind of writing for a while. “I don’t stare at blank sheets of paper. Instead, I simply go on to any of the dozen other projects that are on tap.” He makes it sound straightforward, but this approach reflects professional dedication as well as love for the actual process of writing – which is something that, believe it or not, many great writers simply don’t have.

****

Of course, this is not to suggest that everything Asimov wrote was of the highest order – inevitably, some of his work has an assembly-line quality to it. I was recently reading The Union Club Mysteries, a collection of the monthly mysteries he wrote for the magazine Gallery in the early 1980s. Gallery wasn’t a respectable literary journal (it was a “skin” publication, one of the many Playboy spinoffs), so these 2000-word stories can be considered Asimov Lite – it would be unfair to hold them up to the standards of his best work such as the Foundation series or the “Robot” stories and novels. But even by lower standards, these are largely pedestrian pieces, only occasionally salvaged by a clever idea.

Each story uses the framework of a conversation between elderly gents at the Union Club, with a polymath named Griswold relating a tale from his incredibly colourful past (he may have been a spy or an important government official, or perhaps he’s simply making things up; one can never tell). In every case, he was called upon to solve a mystery, which he invariably did – and at the end he has to divulge the solution to his clueless club buddies. For the reader, the payoff in each story is this ending, where a visual break in the text allows one to try and figure the answer out before Griswold drawls out the solution in his patronising way.

The format is a good one, but Asimov is definitely working at low steam overall. The “puzzles” usually centre on a trite detail, such as the differences between the British and American ways of writing a date (which means “6/8” could be either June 8 or August 6) or the fact that a library book has a little pocket in which something might be hidden, and too often the final revelation doesn’t justify the long buildup that preceded it. A couple of the riddles are entertaining (what's a reasonably common English word that you couldn’t be sure how to pronounce if you saw it written in all-caps? **), but on the whole these pieces are presumably meant for the reader who’s taking a break from ogling at the magazine photo-spreads. Me, I’m returning to Asimov’s wonderful memoir, or to his Black Widower mysteries which are more elaborate and satisfying than the Union Club trifles. (See, that’s one advantage of being a fan of a really prolific writer. If something isn't to your taste, there's plenty else to choose from.)

** Answer: POLISH

Professor Shonku and the sceptical scientists

[From my Sunday Guardian column]

Leading scientists and science writers often express irritation with what they see as unscientific, “anything goes” sci-fi writing – stories where outlandish scenarios are postulated just for plot convenience, with no heed to the laws of physics and biology. For instance, J B S Haldane and Stephen Jay Gould have written separate essays on the subject of optimum size in living creatures – the fact that a large change in an animal’s size inevitably carries with it a change in shape or form (if the new species is to survive for any reasonable period). When a creature grows in length while retaining the same basic shape, its volume will grow much more rapidly than its surface area: if it becomes thrice as tall, the surface will increase nine times but the weight will increase 27 times. Because of this discrepancy, any abnormal growth would cause problems in body functions such as respiration and digestion.

In this context, both Haldane and Gould make references to fantasy literature. Commenting on the giants Pope and Pagan from an illustrated edition of Pilgrim’s Progress, Haldane good-naturedly points out that if those monsters were ten times taller than regular humans, their body weight would be a thousand times greater, and their thigh-bones would break. “This was doubtless why they were sitting down in the picture I remember. But it lessens one’s respect for Christian and Jack the Giant Killer.”

Gould is more cutting. The creators of many science-fiction stories seem to have no inkling of the relationship between size and shape, he remarks. The miniature people of films like Dr Cyclops and Bride of Frankenstein “behave just like their counterparts of normal dimensions – they fall off cliffs or down stairs with resounding thuds, they wield weapons and swim with Olympic agility…and giant insects continue to fly and walk up walls”. But actually, a two-inch person’s experience of the texture of water and air – and the sheer business of moving about – would be very different from ours. And the wings of an insect several feet long would never be able to carry the creature’s weight.

I suspect Haldane and Gould would not have approved of the adventures of Professor Shonku, one of Satyajit Ray’s most delightful literary creations – especially the story where Shonku travels to Norway and discovers that another professor has captured a number of famous people and reduced them to a tenth of their size. But while I respect the concerns of the real-life scientists, the Shonku universe never fails to enthrall me. Even if these stories don’t stand up to the most rigorous tests applied to sci-fi, there’s no question that they are high-quality fantasy writing, marrying imagination and intelligence. The professor’s globe-trotting also gives Ray a pretext to share information – in his usual non-didactic way – about other lands and cultures with his young readers.

The most recent English translation of these stories was The Diary of a Space Traveller, which has 11 stories translated by Gopa Majumdar (who has also done fine work on Ray’s Feluda tales) and one story translated by Ray himself. Included in these narratives are an expedition to Mars, an encounter with a Chinese hypnotist, a colour-changing sphere that turns out to be a tiny living planet, and reflections on what makes a robot truly lifelike. The writing throughout is gentle and humorous, and Shonku’s references to his many eye-popping inventions (an incomplete list is here) ensure there isn’t a dull moment. Anyone who patronisingly suggests that these tales are "only for children" would do well to note the eye for detail and characterisation, as when Shonku says of his simple-minded servant Prahlad:

Sometimes slow and foolish people can show more courage than clever ones, as it takes them longer to work out the need, or reason, to feel scared [...] I remember one particular occasion very well. A gecko had fallen from the ceiling on my bottle of bicornic acid and overturned it. I could do nothing but watch helplessly as the acid slowly began to spread towards a little heap of paradoxite powder. All my limbs went numb at the mere thought of what might happen if the acid made contact with the powder.

Prahlad entered the room at this crucial moment, saw me staring at the acid, grinned and coolly wiped it off with a towel.

Since most of the stories are told the form of diary entries written by Shonku, it frequently happens that the final entry in a story begins along the lines “I’m shaken by what happened yesterday – it’s a wonder I’m alive to relate this tale”, after which the professor describes the climax to his latest adventure. For the thrill-seeking reader, this is a comforting device – it promises excitement but also reassurance that all will turn out well. These tales are fine examples of the talent for fluid storytelling that served Ray so well in his films. I discovered Shonku for the first time as an adult; I envy my Bengali friends who grew up with him.

No newts are good news: on Karel Čapek’s great satire

[Did a version of this for The Sunday Guardian]

Isaac Asimov is the writer you immediately think of when you hear the word “robot”, but Asimov was barely out of his diapers when the word was first used in a literary work – by the Czech author Karel Čapek in his 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). It comes from “robota” which means mundane labour of the sort that’s better suited to machines than to thinking human beings, and it’s central to one of the big themes of Čapek’s writing – mass production as a vessel for dehumanisation.

Čapek's 1936 novel War with the Newts can be categorised as belonging to the still-nascent genre of science fiction, but it’s also one of the most incisive political satires I’ve read. This imaginative and playful work centres on the discovery – near a Sumatran island – of an unusually intelligent species of marine newts or salamanders. An enterprising captain teaches the creatures to use tools and even to speak, and as news of their existence spreads the world responds in a variety of ways.

Soon secret temples for salamander worship arise, various existing doctrines are re-moulded to accommodate the new animals, and fashionable youngsters on Californian beaches start bathing in sea-creature costumes (“three strings of pearls and nothing else”). At the same time more practical-minded businessmen breed the newts in the millions and put them to work, even creating a syndicate for huge engineering projects that will link continents and supposedly create a Utopia on earth. This in turn leads to much speculation about newts’ rights and what languages they should be made to learn first; a German doctor proclaims the “ur-original German Salamanders” to be racially purer than other newts, an obvious reference to political developments of the time.

War with the Newts is narrated mainly in the third person, and in the style of anthropological reportage, but there are many tonal shifts and asides: from transcripts of newspaper clippings to a first-person account of the horrendous experiments conducted on the newts to a hilarious series of quotes from public figures of the time. (“They certainly haven’t got a soul. In this, they agree with men – G B Shaw”. “We can learn a lot from them, especially for swimming long distances – Johnny Weissmuller”.) The longest and most ambitious chapter “Along the Steps of Civilisation” has footnotes that are so elaborate they frequently take up most of the space on the page!

This is a very funny book in parts, and I have to admit that the humour was my first point of engagement with it (don’t miss the use of stream-of-consciousness in the chapter where a shallow young man named Abe - the son of a rich movie magnate - and his narcissistic girlfriend Li encounter the semi-literate newts on a beach). But it's also a far-reaching novel of ideas, a comment on human hypocrisies, the hegemony of some groups over others, the whimsical ways in which our civilisation – with its many differentiated races, countries, classes and communities – has been organised, and our complete disregard for (or inability to see) the lessons of history.

“Look here, Bellomy,” I said to him, “You are a decent kind of man, a gentleman as one says. Doesn’t it go sometimes against the grain to earn your living from what in actual fact is downright slavery?”

Bellomy shrugged his shoulders. “Newts are newts,” he grunted evasively.

“Two hundred years ago they used to say Negroes are Negroes.”

“And wasn’t it true?” said Bellomy. “Check!”

I lost that game. It suddenly struck me that every move in chess was old and had already been played by someone. Perhaps our history has already been played too, and we shift our figures with the same moves to the same checks as in times long past. It is quite likely that just such a decent and reserved Bellomy once rounded up Negroes on the Ivory Coast, and shipped them out to Haiti or to Louisiana, letting them peg out in the steerage. He didn’t think anything wrong with it then, that Bellomy. Bellomy never thinks anything wrong. That’s why he’s incorrigible.

As you can imagine, some of the content is polemical. I don’t think Čapek is attacking any single political, economic or social system (both capitalism and communism are grist to his mill, for example), but War with the Newts can certainly be read as a critique of systems in general, and how decadent any of them can become over time. In one significant chapter, a philosopher named Wolf Meynert makes the cynical suggestion that heterogeneity is not conducive to happiness.

Nations, professions, classes cannot live together permanently without crowding in upon each other, getting in each other’s way to the point of suffocation. Either live for ever apart – something that would only be possible if the world were big enough – or in opposition, in a struggle for life and death. [...] We have created a fiction of mankind which includes us and “the rest” in some sort of imaginary higher unity ... It was magnanimous conceit. And for this supreme idealism the human race will now pay with its inexorable disintegration.

The range of ideas covered in this book is dizzying, and difficult to process in a single reading; so sharp and persuasive is Čapek’s examination of the human condition that when hostilities finally break out between the competing species and the Chief Salamander addresses humans with the words “Hello, you men. You will work with us in demolishing your world. Thank you”, it almost seems like a reasonable request. If human beings are diabolical enough to take an innocuous creature and reshape it in their own image – well, they may as well face up to the unpleasant results.

**** 

Speaking of diabolical, the following passage put me in mind of a generation that thinks and writes in SMS/Twitter jargon, as well as the general lack of regard for grammar that one sees even in newspapers today:

Their linguistic abilities showed strange shortcomings...it was with difficulty that they could pronounce long, polysyllabic words, and they attempted to reduce them to a single syllable, which they uttered sharply and with something of a croak...In their mouths every language underwent a characteristic change, and somehow became rationalised into its simplest and most rudimentary form. It is a point worth consideration that their neologisms, their pronunciation and grammatical simplicity were picked up rapidly, partly by the human wreckage at the ports, partly by the so-called better society, and from there these modes of expression spread to the daily Press and soon became general...

P.S. The Czech have a cinematic tradition of low-key satires or allegories, including such fine films as Milos Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball and Jiří Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains. Here’s an old post I wrote on the latter. And here's a post about John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids, a "logical fantasy" that's similar to War with the Newts in some ways.

Great snakes of our time

It’s considered impolite these days to refer to India as a land of snake-charmers (oh no, we’re all about the slumdog millionaires now), but that doesn't stop movie producers from commenting on the social and sartorial habits of the famed ichadhaari naag - a snake that can transform itself into a human and back again. I say this apropos a quote from a recent newspaper interview with Govind Menon, co-producer of a film titled Hisss:

The whole concept of nudity is justified because when you transform into a snake, you can’t have a dress or even a cloth or even a piece of jewellery on you!

Ah, such attention to detail, such concern for authenticity – the result, no doubt, of years of research. The nudity that Mr Menon is justifying is that of Mallika Sherawat, and his quote is a good variant on the patented ones we’ve heard from Bollywood starlets for decades. “What do you expect me to wear in a swimming pool, a burkha?” is so passé, whereas “What do you expect me to wear while turning into a snake, leather tights?” has a nice ring to it.

Hindi cinema has a solid tradition of snake movies, but in this, as in most things, you can trust Rajinikanth to have the last word. The much-hyped Robot was built on a dubious premise (why cast the superstar as a multifunctional android when he has for years been playing omnipotent human characters who do things that the most advanced robots wouldn’t dare attempt?), but it did have a spectacular climactic sequence where hundreds of evil Rajini robots arrange themselves into various menacing shapes. The final and most impressive one: a giant mechanical cobra that opens its jaws and swallows cars and helicopters whole. This truly awesome ichadhaari snake makes all the others look like measly little earthworms - Ms Sherawat, clad or not, has quite a challenge ahead of her.

[A little something about my favourite ichadhaari naag film - Rajkumar Kohli's Nagin - in this old post]

1,000; and notes on a few books

My Dashboard tells me that this is the 1000th post on this blog. Positively criminal. Someone should set limits for these things. Anyway, since there isn't much time for non-work-related blogging these days, I thought I'd make a few quick notes on some of the books I've read and enjoyed in the past few days. Longer posts on a couple of these may follow later.

- Roberto Bolaño's Last Evenings on Earth, a very involving collection of short stories by the Chilean author whose work has enjoyed quite a resurgence in recent months. A recurring theme in these stories is exile – the characters are constantly on the move or unsure of their bearings – but this is handled much more abstractly than in the straightforward “diaspora fiction” narratives we are accustomed to. (These days, the very word "exile" on a book jacket can set off alarm bells for a jaded reviewer.) Bolaño's work seems set to approach magic realism at times, but it's much more subtle: best of all is the masterful title story about a father and son who go on a very strange, meandering “vacation” together. Some of the pieces also have to do with writers and the writing process, notably "A Literary Adventure", where a low-profile writer named B becomes obsessive about the work of another, much more famous author (A). The style here is very spare and poetic.

- Long overdue: Isaac Asimov’s classic “science-fiction mysteries” The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, featuring the Earthman Elijah Baley and his robot-partner R Daneel Olivaw investigating murders together. Part of my ongoing project to devour as much sci-fi writing from the 1940s and 1950s as possible. Unfashionable as he may be these days, I love Asimov's clarity of thought and the way he combines simple prose with far-reaching ideas. His autobiography I. Asimov, written as a series of random essays on various topics, is one of the great “open and start reading from anywhere” books.

- Rahila Gupta’s Enslaved, a powerful examination of modern-day slavery, told in the form of first-person accounts by five people who were trafficked or smuggled into the UK: they include a pregnant child from Sierra Leone, a young Punjabi lady forced into marriage and a Chinese man living in fear of the criminal corporations known as triads. Gupta tells their stories very lucidly and intersperses the narratives with italicized passages that explain background, provide context and examine legal complexities in the immigration process (many of which worsen the predicament of the victimised "slaves"). A real eye-opener to the subtle forms that human exploitation can take in a highly developed country. I wasn't a fan (to say the least) of the Aishwarya Rai-starrer Provoked, which was co-written by Gupta, but this book is excellent.

- John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos: Wyndham’s sci-fi novels (which he himself preferred to call “logical fantasy”) have recently been reissued by Penguin with attractive new covers. The Midwich Cuckoos, about a group of sinister, frighteningly precocious children slowly assuming control over a quiet English village, was the inspiration for the 1960 film Village of the Damned. A little verbose at times but overall this is very good paranoia fiction, the full implications of which only gradually sneak up on the viewer. I hope to move on to Wyndham's other work soon, especially The Day of the Triffids (also filmed in the 1960s) and The Kraken Wakes. (More on the reissued novels here.)

- The Brian Aldiss-edited anthology A Science Fiction Omnibus, a collection of outstanding short stories by such authors as Clifford Simak, Kim Stanley Robinson, James Tiptree Jr, J G Ballard and many others. I want to write about this book at greater length sometime, so I’ll keep it quick for now: my favourite stories here include Walter M Miller’s “I Made You” (a frightening modern take on the Frankenstein story), Aldiss’ own “Poor Little Warrior!”, Bertram Chandler’s “The Cage” (with a closing line that gives us a succinct, cynical definition of what a "rational being" is) and especially Ted Chiang’s very beautiful “Story of Your Life”, in which a woman’s attempts to understand the language used by visiting aliens leads to her perceiving all the events of her life in simultaneous rather than sequential terms.

The anthology also includes John Steinbeck’s wicked “The Short-Short Story of Mankind”, a condensed history of our species. I'll close this post with these memorable lines that end the story:

Right from the cave times we’ve had to choose and so far we’ve never chosen extinction. It’d be kind of silly if we killed ourselves off after all this time. If we do, we’re stupider than the cave people and I don’t think we are. I think we’re just exactly as stupid and that’s pretty bright in the long run.

But serially

(What men want; and other thoughts on daily soaps)

Looking for ideas for my weekly Metro Now column on the foibles of mankind, I saw a feature story about how increasing numbers of Indian men want their brides to be like the women they see on TV soaps. Apparently, in matrimonial ads around the country, eager young bachelors are putting in specifications that read: “She should be like Tulsi in Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi or Saloni in Saat Phere” (this is of course in addition to the usual “traditional yet modern, fair but homely, virgin yet whore” litany).

Given that India has one-sixth of the world's population, this new trend carries huge implications for the future of the family unit. Based on what little I've seen of the Ekta Kapoor variety of daily soaps, these are the qualities I imagine the average Indian male now looks for in his life-partner:

– Her range of facial expressions must include Pursed-Lip Discontentment (when the saas-ji is praising another daughter-in-law), Simpering Complicity (the innocent girl being bullied around by more dominant family members), Evil-Vixen Smirk (when a nasty plot has succeeded) and Frantic Eye-Roll (when a plot is being unmasked).

– She must wear twice her own weight in jewellery at all times, even in the kitchen and the bedroom. Laden with family heirlooms passed down over 20 generations (most of whom are still living characters on the show), arms covered with gleaming bangles, she should resemble the robot in Metropolis, or at least an extra from a 1950s cult sci-fi movie. This means that in addition to carrying cups of tea hither and thither on trays, she can double up as a security guard: if a burglar enters the house, all she has to do is stun him senseless with the reflective glare from her 7,000-carat necklace.

– She should be able to walk in slow-motion, like the heroines (and all other characters, for that matter) of these shows.

There are two reasons why everyone on a daily soap must walk in slow motion. First, because it creates a Dramatic Effect (though people with IQs above 8 might disagree with this idea), and second, because when a new episode has to be produced every day, you need to stretch things out. It would be too much to expect the poor writers to actually work on a 25-minute script daily (what are they, bloggers?), so other dramatic devices must be used. Thus, whenever a character says anything spectacular on a soap (and of course, these people only ever say spectacular things; you'll never hear an uncomplicated "saaso-ji, pass the garlic prawns please"), it will be said in a room containing 20 others, and we will be shown elaborate reaction shots of each of these people (Evil-Vixen Smirk, Frantic Eye-Roll, etc). Or a reaction shot of a single person replayed five times, with the camera twirling drunkenly around the room, and thunder-claps on the soundtrack. This is an efficient way of prolonging a five-minute scene for a week and thus cutting down on extraneous costs (because all the money must go on the really important things – the clothes, hairstyles and bangles).

Come to think of it, maybe the new lot of bride-seekers have the right idea. If we all modeled our family lives on daily soaps, world problems would end immediately – everyone would be too busy simpering at each other in slow motion to worry about the big issues.

P.S. This business of slow-motion brings me to some general observations about the Indian daily soap, which differs markedly from its western equivalent. In the US too, daytime soap operas are generally regarded as the nadir of human achievement, but if you go beyond knee-jerk snobbery it’s possible to appreciate the professionalism with which they are made. For instance, key roles are usually played by actors with some experience in theatre (even if it isn’t Grade-A theatre), each scene is rehearsed as a scene in a play would be, and then shot in a continuous take, with the action simultaneously captured from different angles so that the footage can later be edited for maximum dramatic effect.

In Indian soaps on the other hand, I doubt that actors have to ever memorise more than a couple of sentences at any one point (which is just as well, because in most cases their previous acting experience has been restricted to saying “After using Fair & Lovely, I found a wealthy and loving husband who will only beat me twice a week”). Scenes appear to be filmed not in lengthy takes but in five-second installments and the emphasis is on reaction shots, which are probably put together separately. (I imagine that when the actors come in to work each day, they are clothed, made up and then asked to stand in front of a stationary camera and twist their faces and roll their eyes in as many different ways as possible. This stock footage can later be interspersed with the freshly filmed material whenever required.)

P.P.S. One of the many things you don’t know about me is that I’m something of an expert on the history of American daytime television, so expect more posts of this sort.