A Literary High - 2021 Round-Up

 

Here we are again, another year of reading against the dark background of the pandemic, failing democracies and world leaders fiddling while the world burns, oh, and an engagement (my own). Reading is a fine way of grounding oneself while such events come and go, perhaps the best way. It's been a year of either starting or finishing off trilogies. I completed the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, finally reading Cixin Liu's Death's End (2010), which proved to be not only the best book of the year, but also one of the greatest science fiction novels I have ever read. I read two novels of Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy - Suldrun's Garden (1983) and The Green Pearl (1986), both were excellent and also made me want to read more fantasy. I began Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy with Red Mars (1992), which I also rated as Sublime, joining Colm Toibin's The Magician (2021) and Don DeLillos' Zero K (2016) as among the best books I've read this year. 

In hindsight it was quite a good year for reading, with other notable books being Walter Tevis' brilliant novel The Queen's Gambit (1983) and Curtis Sittenfeld's alternate history novel, Rodham (2020). It was also great to read two Iain M. Banks books, with the short story collection The State of the Art (1991) compelling me to read The Culture novel The Hydrogen Sonata (2012), which was both excellent and a lot of fun. There's always a book that doesn't measure up, and although regular readers will know that I am not a harsh critic, the Alfred Bester novel, Tiger Tiger (1956) was absurd and bloated science fiction, and a very disappointing read. As for the year ahead? I look forward to completing the trilogies I began and my aim will be to read more classics. Reading The Magician about Thomas Mann has reminded me that there's a whole range of classics I've never read, Mann himself and also the Russian greats. I just need to prepare myself for all of the extremely long names and intense existential themes, which shouldn't be a problem, as it will be light reading compared to the daily news...

Tiger Tiger (AKA The Stars My Destination) - Alfred Bester (1956)

 

Rating: Mediocre

I picked up a copy of this novel, a 1967 edition, from a second hand bookstore in an old house situated on the main drag of a small country town in Tasmania a few years ago. Then a while later I coincidently read online that it contained one of the best 'escape from an impossible situation' scenes in literature. Now that I've read Tiger Tiger I have to say that I don't necessarily agree, it wasn't that spectacular. I chose the novel as a potentially great holiday read, and at first it lived up to that need. Tiger Tiger is certainly a rollicking read, with some impressive pacing and the main protagonist, Gully Foyle, is a wild character bent on revenge. The novel is set in the twenty fourth century, a time when, inexplicably, the ability to teleport (they call it jaunting), has transformed human society. Basically humans can travel by thought (an influence on The Church song of the same name?), which certainly opens up some fascinating narrative possibilities.

What ultimately let's Tiger Tiger down is that the novel's over the top nature becomes wearying around two thirds of the way through. It's like listening to two Queen albums at once. The prose is too florid, the twists and turns too frequent and the whole idea of humans being able to teleport by the power of thought alone becomes increasingly ridiculous. I don't necessarily need literary fiction to be particularly realistic, let alone science fiction, but it really started to grate after a while. Tiger Tiger does have quite a spectacular ending, which really sticks it to 'the man', but by that stage I think I had eye strain from rolling my eyes too much. Ultimately Tiger Tiger doesn't come across as a parody of the 1920s - 1940s era of pulp science fiction, or even as a homage, but as an attempt to emulate its style, perhaps in order to appeal to the teenagers of the 1950's, who after all would have still been science fiction's main market. The sometimes unfortunate depictions of female characters bear this out. I'll mark this one down as an entertaining enough holiday read that stands as a period piece for the curious.