All posts tagged Parker

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers (1923)

His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.
(Chapter 1)

‘Hate anything tiresome happenin’ before breakfast. Takes a man at such a confounded disadvantage, what?’
(Chapter 1)

Lord Peter’s library was one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in London.
(Chapter 2)

‘Worse things happen in war. This is only a blinkin’ old shillin’ shocker.’
(Chapter 2)

‘I don’t think much of your burglary, Bunter,’ said Lord Peter. ‘Competent, of course, but no imagination. I want imagination in a criminal.’
(Chapter 5)

‘When anybody comes blackmailin’ you, Gerald, or your first deserted wife turns up unexpectedly from the West Indies, you’ll realize the pull of havin’ a private detective in the family. ‘Delicate private business arranged with tact and discretion. Investigations undertaken. Divorce evidence a specialty. Every guarantee!’
(Wimsey mocking his hobby to his brother Gerald, Chapter 9)

Parker and Lord Peter were at 110 Piccadilly. Lord Peter was playing Bach and Parker was reading Origen when Sugg was announced.
(Origen! The very highbrow references which sit oddly beside Wimsey’s upper-class attitudes)

The surest and simplest method of making a thing appear to have been done is to do it.
(A murderer’s advice, Chapter 13)

Posh

I knew Lord Peter Wimsey was posh – obviously that’s indicated by his title – but I didn’t realise quite how much of a posh caricature he was:

‘Good-night, sir—good-night, dear lady—it’s simply rippin’ of you to let me drop in like this.’

Wimsey’s comedy, stagey upper-classness is really rammed home on every page, what with his loyal butler, his fastidiousness about clothes and cuisine, his comically upper class family with a village fete-opening dowager duchess for a mother, and so on and so on. Indeed every time he opens his mouth it’s to drop his h’s in the classic upper-class huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ manner.

‘Six bloomin’ medicos contradictin’ each other in the box, an’ old Impey elocutin’ abnormal cases from Glaister and Dixon Mann till the eyes of the jury reeled in their heads!’

And everywhere the effortless confidence of the natural-born aristocrat to handle any situation and any person, no matter how unpleasant, without losing his poise.

‘I don’t, fathead,’ said Lord Peter, with the easy politeness of the real aristocracy.

Peter’s profile

Lord Peter Wimsey is the second son of Mortimer Wimsey, the 15th Duke of Denver, deceased, and his wife, now the Dowager Duchess of Denver. She resides at the family home, the Dower House, Denver Castle, along with her eldest son, Gerald, who inherited the title and became the sixteenth Duke of Denver. His appearance?

The fingers were long and muscular, with wide, flat joints and square tips. When he was playing, his rather hard grey eyes softened, and his long, indeterminate mouth hardened in compensation. At no other time had he any pretensions to good looks, and at all times he was spoilt by a long, narrow chin, and a long, receding forehead, accentuated by the brushed-back sleekness of his tow-coloured hair. Labour papers, softening down the chin, caricatured him as a typical aristocrat. (Chapter 3)

The name?

‘We always have a Peter, after the third duke, who betrayed five kings somewhere about the Wars of the Roses, though come to think of it, it ain’t anything to be proud of. Still, one has to make the best of it.’ (Chapter 4)

Peter had ‘the finest education’ – Eton and Balliol – and now resides at 110 Piccadilly West, in an apartment overlooking Green Park. He is attended by his loyal butler, Mervyn Bunter, as fastidious about Lord Peter’s clothes and shoes, ties and buttonholes and cane and hat, as Jeeves is for Bertie Wooster’s. For which he is paid the princely salary of £200 per annum.

Their relationship is explained a bit when we learn that Peter was a Major during the war and Bunter was his sergeant and batman. And even more, that Wimsey has shell-shock, and has vivid waking nightmares of life in the trenches, when Bunter has to calm him down, see him back to bed, and administer a sedative…

As to that cane:

‘I measured it with my stick—the gentleman-scout’s vade-mecum, I call it—it’s marked off in inches. Uncommonly handy companion at times. There’s a sword inside and a compass in the head. Got it made specially.’

Wimsey is a member of the Marlborough Club. He smokes a pipe.

With no work to occupy him, Lord Peter’s hobby is collecting rare books. But his real interest is an amateur activity as a freelance investigator or detective, a dilettante who solves mysteries for his own amusement, Wimsey is an archetype for the British gentleman detective. As the provincial solicitor Mr Wicks puts it, he is ‘a distinguished amateur of crime.’ And his mother:

The Duchess was always of the greatest assistance to his hobby of criminal investigation, though she never alluded to it, and maintained a polite fiction of its non-existence. (Chapter 1)

His motivation?

‘It’s a hobby to me, you see. I took it up when the bottom of things was rather knocked out for me, because it was so damned exciting, and the worst of it is, I enjoy it—up to a point. If it was all on paper I’d enjoy every bit of it. I love the beginning of a job—when one doesn’t know any of the people and it’s just exciting and amusing. But if it comes to really running down a live person and getting him hanged, or even quodded, poor devil, there don’t seem as if there was any excuse for me buttin’ in, since I don’t have to make my livin’ by it. And I feel as if I oughtn’t ever to find it amusin’. But I do.’ (Chapter 7)

These classic detectives tend to have a dim police officer as a foil: for Sherlock Holmes it’s Inspector Lestrade, for Hercule Poirot it’s Chief Inspector Japp. For Peter, its Inspector Sugg at Scotland Yard, narrow, unimaginative, inflexible and always wrong. Wimsey has even coined a term, ‘Suggery’, to describe obtuse, clue-missing dimness (Chapter 10).

On the plus side, Wimsey is good friends and works well with a completely different type of copper, young Detective Charles Parker.

To an outsider

Late in the story, Parker secures the services of a medical student, Piggott, who he takes to Wimsey’s apartment where he is overawed by the luxury. Here’s how he sees Wimsey:

The friend was embarrassing; he was a lord, to begin with, and his clothes were a kind of rebuke to the world at large. He talked the most fatuous nonsense, certainly, but in a disconcerting way. He didn’t dig into a joke and get all the fun out of it; he made it in passing, so to speak, and skipped 189away to something else before your retort was ready. He had a truly terrible man-servant—the sort you read about in books—who froze the marrow in your bones with silent criticism. (Chapter 10)

Quotes and literary references

Agatha Christie had an erratic education and did not go to university. Dorothy L. Sayers very much did go to university. Outstandingly clever at her boarding school, she won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, graduating with first class honours in medieval French.

(Despite her examination results, she was ineligible to be awarded a degree, as Oxford did not formally confer them on women. When the university changed its rules in 1920, Sayers was among the first to have her degree officially awarded.)

This is important because the Wimsey stories differ from Christie and others in the field, not just because Wimsey is such an extraordinarily posh upper-class caricature – but because he and other characters, and the narrator, continually drop cultural references left, right and centre.

It starts with the way Wimsey is a bibliophile i.e. a collector of rare original editions of rare and ancient books. In fact the opening scene of the first novel depicts Wimsey en route to an auction of precious books and briefing his butler about which ones matter to him:

‘The Folio Dante nor the de Voragine—here you are—see? ‘Golden Legend’—Wynkyn de Worde, 1493—got that?—and, I say, make a special effort for the Caxton folio of the ‘Four Sons of Aymon’—it’s the 1489 folio and unique.’ (Chapter 1)

Other quotes and references include:

what Lord Beaconsfield described as a masterly inactivity

The golden mean, Sugg, as Aristotle says, keeps you from bein’ a golden ass.

‘you know, dear—just the proverbial way of putting things—like ‘a saint abroad and a devil at home’—only the other way on, reminding one of the Pilgrim’s Progress.’

‘He’s tough, sir, tough, is old Joey Bagstock, tough and devilish sly’ from Dickens

Sayers has Freke cite ‘Sludge the Medium’, the dramatic poem by Robert Browning. A little later Tennyson appears, then Shakespeare (OK, Christie regularly quotes the obvious Shakespeare). But even her dim socialite characters are relatively well-read.

‘One demands a little originality in these days, even from murderers,’ said Lady Swaffham. ‘Like dramatists, you know—so much easier in Shakespeare’s time, wasn’t it? Always the same girl dressed up as a man, and even that borrowed from Boccaccio or Dante or somebody. I’m sure if I’d been a Shakespeare hero, the very minute I saw a slim-legged young page-boy I’d have said: ‘Odsbodikins! There’s that girl again!’’ (Chapter 7)

And the quotes aren’t just throwaway show-off references, they are frequently part of the woof and web of the character’s thoughts, for example the way the quote from Coleridge’s Xanadu crystallises the wider thought process going on in his mind:

He [Wimsey] traced out this line and that line of investigation—rivers running into the sand. They ran out from the thought of Levy, last seen at ten o’clock in Prince of Wales Road. They ran back from the picture of the grotesque dead man in Mr Thipps’s bathroom—they ran over the roof, and were lost—lost in the sand. Rivers running into the sand—rivers running underground, very far down—

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

At the breakthrough moment of the plot, Wimsey quotes the early Christian theologian Tertullian, entirely appositely.

Lord Peter Wimsey was not a young man who habitually took himself very seriously, but this time he was frankly appalled. ‘It’s impossible,’ said his reason, feebly; ‘credo quia impossibile,’ said his interior certainty with impervious self-satisfaction. (Chapter 8)

Later, after he cross-questions the medical student Piggott, Wimsey remarks that he remembers everything, ‘like Socrates’s slave’, a reference to Plato’s dialogue Meno.

In other words, the quotes aren’t bolted onto the narrative, but are a natural expression of how it thinks, of How Wimsey thinks. Of how the highly literate Sayers thought.

Even the unflamboyant professional, Parker, has surprisingly highbrow tastes.

Parker was sitting in an elderly but affectionate armchair, with his feet on the mantelpiece, relaxing his mind with a modern commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians. (Chapter 7)

Music

And not just quoting literature, nursery rhymes, folk songs and limericks; also music.

Lord Peter finished a Scarlatti sonata, and sat looking thoughtfully at his own hands. The fingers were long and muscular, with wide, flat joints and square tips. When he was playing, his rather hard grey eyes softened, and his long, indeterminate mouth hardened in compensation. At no other time had he any pretensions to good looks, and at all times he was spoilt by a long, narrow chin, and a long, receding forehead, accentuated by the brushed-back sleekness of his tow-coloured hair. Labour papers, softening down the chin, caricatured him as a typical aristocrat.
‘That’s a wonderful instrument,’ said Parker.
‘It ain’t so bad,’ said Lord Peter, ‘but Scarlatti wants a harpsichord. Piano’s too modern—all thrills and overtones.’

This is the high culture that an expensive education buys you.

Freud

He roused himself, threw a log on the fire, and picked up a book which the indefatigable Bunter, carrying on his daily fatigues amid the excitements of special duty, had brought from the Times Book Club. It happened to be Sir Julian Freke’s Physiological Bases of the Conscience, which he had seen reviewed two days before. ‘This ought to send one to sleep,’ said Lord Peter; ‘if I can’t leave these problems to my subconscious I’ll be as limp as a rag tomorrow.’

Intellectual

Sayers goes out of her way to make Wimsey seem like an upper-class fool and yet, at other moments, he is given intensely intellectual cerebrations (i.e. ways of thinking).

And then it happened—the thing he had been half-unconsciously expecting. It happened suddenly, surely, as unmistakably, as sunrise. He remembered—not one thing, nor another thing, nor a logical succession of things, but everything—the whole thing, perfect, complete, in all its dimensions as it were and instantaneously; as if he stood outside the world and saw it suspended in infinitely dimensional space. He no longer needed to reason about it, or even to think about it. He knew it.

There is a game in which one is presented with a jumble of letters and is required to make a word out of them, as thus:

C O S S S S R I

The slow way of solving the problem is to try out all the permutations and combinations in turn, throwing away impossible conjunctions of letters, as:

S S S I R C

or

S C S R S O

Another way is to stare at the inco-ordinate elements until, by no logical process that the conscious mind can detect, or under some adventitious external stimulus, the combination:

S C I S S O R S

presents itself with calm certainty. After that, one does not even need to arrange the letters in order. The thing is done.

Or take the elaborate passage in Chapter 5, where Wimsey lays out all the possible scenarios which could explain the murder, in terms of five carefully worked-out hypotheses. But it isn’t just a brief paragraph, it goes on for page after page, it’s massive. And note how the posh huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ dropping of g’s and other upper-class mannerisms have completely disappeared. It reads like a textbook of logic. Here’s just part of it:

‘Yes,’ said Wimsey. ‘Then Possibility No. 3 is knocked on the head. There remain Possibility No. 1: Accident or Misunderstanding, and No. 2: Deliberate Villainy, of a remarkably bold and calculating kind—of a kind, in fact, characteristic of the author or authors of our two problems. Following the methods inculcated at that University of which I have the honour to be a member, we will now examine severally the various suggestions afforded by Possibility No. 2.

This Possibility may be again subdivided into two or more Hypotheses. On Hypothesis 1 (strongly advocated by my distinguished colleague Professor Snupshed), the criminal, whom we may designate as X, is not identical with Crimplesham, but is using the name of Crimplesham as his shield, or aegis. This hypothesis may be further subdivided into two alternatives.

Alternative A: Crimplesham is an innocent and unconscious accomplice, and X is in his employment. 97X writes in Crimplesham’s name on Crimplesham’s office-paper and obtains that the object in question, i.e., the eyeglasses, be despatched to Crimplesham’s address. He is in a position to intercept the parcel before it reaches Crimplesham. The presumption is that X is Crimplesham’s charwoman, office-boy, clerk, secretary or porter. This offers a wide field of investigation. The method of inquiry will be to interview Crimplesham and discover whether he sent the letter, and if not, who has access to his correspondence.

Alternative B: Crimplesham is under X’s influence or in his power, and has been induced to write the letter by (a) bribery, (b) misrepresentation or (c) threats. X may in that case be a persuasive relation or friend, or else a creditor, blackmailer or assassin; Crimplesham, on the other hand, is obviously venal or a fool.

The method of inquiry in this case, I would tentatively suggest, is again to interview Crimplesham, put the facts of the case strongly before him, and assure him in the most intimidating terms that he is liable to a prolonged term of penal servitude as an accessory after the fact in the crime of murder— Ah-hem! Trusting, gentlemen, that you have followed me thus far, we will pass to the consideration of Hypothesis No. 2, to which I personally incline, and according to which X is identical with Crimplesham.

This goes on for page after page – and even after the main disquisition is over, there’s a further discussion in similar tone and detail of whether Wimsey or Parker should go down to Salisbury to visit Mr Crimplesham.

‘Very well,’ said the detective, ‘is it to be you or me or both of us?’
‘It is to be me,’ said Lord Peter, ‘and that for two reasons. First, because, if (by Possibility No. 2, Hypothesis 1, Alternative A) Crimplesham is an innocent catspaw, the person who put in the advertisement is the proper person to hand over the property. Secondly, because, if we are to adopt Hypothesis 2, we must not overlook the sinister possibility that Crimplesham-X is laying a careful trap to rid himself of the person who so unwarily advertised in the daily press his interest in the solution of the Battersea Park mystery.’

Notice anything about the style? Gone are all the dropped h’s and upper-class affectations. Instead this is the plain prose of pure logic. It’s a revelation that this is what Wimsey, and Sayers, can be like when they want to.

Plot summary

Lord Peter Wimsey is on his way to an auction of antique books when his mother calls to say that an architect (actually a builder) named Thipps, has just found a naked corpse in his bath, in an apartment in Battersea. Intrigued, Wimsey gets his valet, Bunter, to go to the auction in his place while he takes a cab to Battersea.

Sure enough there is a naked man in Thipp’s bath, naked apart from a gold pince-nez on a chain. The police investigation is led by Inspector Sugg for whose slowness and obstinacy Wimsey has a healthy contempt. It’s Sugg who wonders whether the body is that of the well-known City financier Sir Reuben Levy, who has been reported missing from his house on the same night.

The investigation into Sir Reuben’s disappearance is being led by Inspector Charles Parker who is a friend of Wimsey’s.

Although the body in the bath superficially resembles Sir Reuben’s it quickly becomes clear that it is not him, and it initially appears that the cases may be unconnected.

Now Thipps’s flat is near a teaching hospital, St Luke’s, which suggests the possibility that the body might have been put in Thipp’s bathroom as a student prank. But this is contradicted by the surgeon and neurologist Sir Julian Freke, in charge of St Luke’s, who says no corpse is missing from his dissecting room.

In fact the body in the bath is eventually identified as the inmate of Chelsea workhouse who’d had an unpleasant accident (some scaffolding fell on his neck) and died a lingering death…

One red herring follows another, the biggest one being when Wimsey advertises in The Times for the owner of the pince-nez and gets a response from an elderly solicitor in Salisbury who he travels down to visit, with the comic effect that the old man refuses to believe Wimsey’s who he claims to be, until Wimsey is vouched for by his younger colleague. For a while one or either of them are suspects…

Another red herring relates to Thipp’s maid, Gladys Horrocks, who is discovered to have slipped out with her fancy man, Williams the glazier, and gone to a nightclub in Soho, which leads unimaginative Inspector Sugg to immediately arrest her.

And another one concerns a brash and confident American businessman based in London, one Mr John P. Milligan, who is a fierce business rival of Reuben’s and, at one stage, considered a suspect for this reason – despite the fact that he is charmed by the old Duchess into making a donation to the fund to restore her local parish church, and even to attend one of her village fetes.

We learn that bunter has an informed interest in cameras and uses the latest one that Wimsey buys him to take photos of fingerprints on suspect surfaces, then blow them up for analysis. A handy hobby for a gentleman detective’s man-servant.

A recurring comic thread is the loud, fearless abuse emitted by Thipp’s deaf old mother at anyone who goes near her.

There’s a long, long verbatim description of the inquest into the body in the bath, as attended by Parker and Wimsey’s mother, the Dowager Duchess.

Slowly out of the fog of details, and Wimsey’s own flippant attitude, clarity emerges until all the evidence starts to point towards the surgeon, Freke. Wimsey’s mother fills us in on some crucial backstory when she tells her son that Freke was in love with a young woman named Christine Ford, of a good country family, but that she fell in love with young handsome Levy and eloped with him, infuriating Freke, well… we have our motive, even though it happened 20 years earlier.

Slowly a series of circumstantial details create more links between the two cases, the unknown body in the bath and the mysterious disappearance of Levy.

It is Wimsey who connects the two but rather than go straight to the police, instead he goes to visit Freke in his capacity as nerve specialist, and tell him about the symptoms of his ongoing shell shock or PTSD, picked up in the recent war. This is another long dramatic scene because Wimsey manages to hint, through his answers to Freke’s extended questioning, that he (Wimsey) knows Freke is guilty. it leads up to a genuinely tense moment as Freke casually advises injecting a tranquiliser, and actually has a hypodermic in his hand and is about to stick it in Wimsey’s arm, when the latter grabs his hand in a vicelike grip (sic) and decides he won’t have the injection after all. Just as well; later, Freke confirms that it contained a lethal poison.

This is swiftly followed by another set-piece scene, in the cemetery where the dead man from the Chelsea workhouse was allegedly buried, which is the setting for his ghoulish disinterment. Various officials supervise the digging up of the coffin, its moving to an outbuilding, the bringing of a lamp and opening of the coffin, investigation of the body. The body is, as Wimsey predicted, not that of a pauper but of Reuben Levy.

But what really matters about the scene is the deliberately dramatic style Sayers writes it in, more Dickens than 1920s, with its gravel crunching underfoot and uneven headstones looming up out of the swirling fog, and the abrupt transition from the placid third-person narrator of most of the novel to a bracing second person.

The vile, raw fog tore your throat and ravaged your eyes. You could not see your feet. You stumbled in your walk over poor men’s graves.
The feel of Parker’s old trench-coat beneath your fingers was comforting. You had felt it in worse places. You clung on now for fear you should get separated. The dim people moving in front of you were like Brocken spectres.
‘Take care, gentlemen,’ said a toneless voice out of the yellow darkness, ‘there’s an open grave just hereabouts.’
(Chapter 12)

The identification of Reuben’s body, swapped for that of the pauper, clinches Freke’s guilt and so Wimsey tips off old Sugg who goes to make the arrest. In fact the cops are only in the nick of time because Freke, realising the game was up, was writing a complete confession and then planned to commit suicide by injecting the same poison he had intended for Wimsey.

Instead Freke is arrested and taken to prison, while Parker brings Wimsey the long suicide note the guilty man had written – which has the happy dual purpose of explaining every single detail of Freke’s cleverly-laid plan and thus tying up all the loose ends in a bow.

Except that, maybe it’s me but, I didn’t understand it. Even after carefully reading the ‘confession’ twice I have no idea why Freke went to the enormous trouble of lugging the corpse of the injured workhouse inmate up onto the roofs of the apartment block adjoining his hospital, and no idea at all why he then, for the lolz, decided to haul it through the open window of one of them, which he discovered was a bathroom.

What an idiot! The River Thames runs about 200 yards away from Prince of Wales Road where the hospital and Thipp’s apartment block were situated – why not dump it in there, last resting place of thousands of drownees and suicides. Why draw attention to a mysterious death right on his own doorstep?

In fact I don’t understand why he didn’t just murder Reuben and dump his body in the river. Why the whole elaborate and painstaking swapping of him for the body of the pauper, especially when Reuben was Jewish and so circumcised, while the body in the bath wasn’t.

If you understand why Freke did this and how the whole plot hangs together, please drop me a line to explain it, but until then I find the actual plot puzzlingly stupid. Good thing I don’t read detective stories for the plot but for the style, characterisation, themes and ideas and social history. The plots are nearly always pants.

Cast

  • Lord Peter Wimsey
  • Bunter – his valet
  • The Dowager Duchess – his mother – ‘She was a small, plump woman, with perfectly white hair and exquisite hands. In feature she was as unlike her second son as she was like him in character; her black eyes twinkled cheerfully, and her manners and movements were marked with a neat and rapid decision’
  • Gerald ‘Jerry’ Wimsey, sixteenth Duke of Denver – ‘a good, clean Englishman, sturdy and conventional, rather like Henry VIII in his youth’ – ‘The Duke considered his cadet rather degenerate, and not quite good form; he disliked his taste for police-court news’:

‘I do wish you’d keep out of the police courts,’ grumbled the Duke. ‘It makes it so dashed awkward for me, havin’ a brother makin’ himself conspicuous.’
‘Sorry, Gerald,’ said the other; ‘I know I’m a beastly blot on the ’scutcheon.’

    • Soames – family butler
  • Mr Thipps – working class builder living at 59, Queen Caroline Mansions, Battersea, opposite Battersea Park, who finds the dead body of a naked man in his bath
    • Gladys Horrocks – his maid
    • William Williams – Gladys’s ‘young man’, a glazier
  • Mr and Mrs Appledore – Thipps’ disapproving neighbours in the Mansions
  • Sir Reuben Levy – City financier, self-made man, a Jew, who disappears mysteriously from his house the same night the body is found in Thipps’s bath
  • Lady Reuben Levy née Christine Ford
    • Mrs Pemming
    • Miss Mabel
    • Mr Graves, valet
  • Inspector Sugg – obstinate unimaginative copper, Wimsey’s foil
  • Constable Cawthorn
  • Sir Julian Freke – directs the surgical side of big new St Luke’s hospital in Battersea, situated right behind Mr Thipp’s block of flats – in addition, known in Harley Street as a distinguished neurologist with a highly individual point of view, as expressed in the recently published book, Physiological Bases of the Conscience – ‘He was not only a distinguished man, but a striking figure, with his wide shoulders, upright carriage and leonine head’ – and Wimsey perceives him as: ‘A man taller than himself, with immense breadth of shoulder, and wonderful hands. A face beautiful, impassioned and inhuman; fanatical, compelling eyes, bright blue amid the ruddy bush of hair and beard’
    • John Cummings – Freke’s man-servant
  • William Watts – the dissecting-room attendant at the hospital
  • Dr Grimbold – police doctor
  • Detective Charles Parker – happy to work with Wimsey – ‘Mr Parker was a bachelor, and occupied a Georgian but inconvenient flat at No. 12A Great Ormond Street, for which he paid a pound a week’
    • Mrs Munns, who did for him by the day
  • Mr John P. Milligan – American businessman – London representative of the great Milligan railroad and shipping company – in some sense a rival of Reuben Levy
    • Scoot – his secretary
  • Mr Crimplesham – ancient solicitor in Salisbury – his pince-nez is found on the corpse in the bath
  • Mr Wicks – junior in Crimplesham’s office
  • Lady Swaffham – friends of the Duchess
  • Mrs Tommy Frayle – especially dim friend of the Duchess: ‘Dear me!’ said Mrs Tommy Frayle, with a little scream, ‘what a blessing it is none of my friends have any ideas at all!’
  • Mrs Freemantle – ‘wife of an eminent railway director, and celebrated for her ignorance of the world of finance. Her faux pas in this connection enlivened the tea parties of City men’s wives’
  • Mr Piggott – medical student
  • Mr Levett – represents the Home Secretary at the disinterment
  • The Master of the Workhouse
  • Dr Colegrove – the Workhouse doctor

Bookish

I thought it was just Agatha Christie who did this but Sayers, too, lards the book with characters who themselves refer to detective fiction, crime novels and so on. So I’m beginning to think it’s a feature or rule of the detective story genre itself that its characters are constantly referring to detective stories.

‘Look here, Wimsey—you’ve been reading detective stories; you’re talking nonsense.’ (Chapter 2)

‘No, I ain’t,’ said Lord Peter, sleepily, ‘uncommon good incident for a detective story, though, what? Bunter, we’ll write one, and you shall illustrate it with photographs.’ (Chapter 2)

‘I looked for any footmarks of course, but naturally, with all this rain, there wasn’t a sign. Of course, if this were a detective story, there’d have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before the crime and a beautiful set of marks which could only have come there between two and three in the morning, but this being real life in a London November, you might as well expect footprints in Niagara.’ (Chapter 4)

‘In this case, the method of inquiry will be to pump the respectable gentleman in Balham, and if he should happen to be a single gentleman with a deaf housekeeper, it may be no easy matter to impugn the alibi, since, outside detective romances, few ticket-collectors and ’bus-conductors keep an exact remembrance of all the passengers passing between Balham and London on any and every evening of the week.’ (Chapter 5)

‘The neuroses, you know, are particularly clever criminals—they break out into as many disguises as—’
‘As Leon Kestrel, the Master-Mummer,’ suggested Parker, who read railway-stall detective stories on the principle of the ’busman’s holiday. (Chapter 6)

Sherlock

And none of these authors can seem to escape the overarching shadow of Sherlock Holmes. They feel compelled to namecheck him, as if warding off an evil spirit. Here’s Wimsey giving a running commentary on himself as he cancels plans to go to a rare books auction and instead gets dressed to investigate a new case.

‘Exit the amateur of first editions; new motive introduced by solo bassoon; enter Sherlock Holmes, disguised as a walking gentleman.’ (Chapter 1)

Here he is joking with Detective Parker:

‘I give you full credit for the discovery, I crawl, I grovel, my name is Watson.’ (Chapter 4)

Here’s his servant, Butler, complaining to Lady Levy’s servants:

‘Many’s the time I’ve sat up till three and four, and up again to call him early to go off Sherlocking at the other end of the country.’ (Chapter 4)

Wimsey himself, again:

‘Y’see,’ said Lord Peter, balancing a piece of duck on his fork and frowning, ‘it’s only in Sherlock Holmes and stories like that, that people think things out logically. Or’nar’ly, if somebody tells you somethin’ out of the way, you just say, ‘By Jove!’ or ‘How sad!’ an’ leave it at that, an’ half the time you forget about it.’ (Chapter 7)

And:

‘Hurray!’ said Lord Peter, suddenly sparkling. ‘I’m glad I’ve puzzled Parker. Gives me confidence in myself. Makes me feel like Sherlock Holmes. ‘Perfectly simple, Watson.’ (Chapter 9)

‘What’s the matter?’ asked the Duke, getting up and yawning.
‘Marching orders,’ said Peter, ‘back to town. Many thanks for your hospitality, old bird—I’m feelin’ no end better. Ready to tackle Professor Moriarty or Leon Kestrel or any of ’em.’ (Chapter 9)

And:

Lord Peter settled down to a perusal of his Dante. It afforded him no solace. Lord Peter was hampered in his career as a private detective by a public-school education. Despite Parker’s admonitions, he was not always able to discount it. His mind had been warped in its young growth by ‘Raffles’ and ‘Sherlock Holmes‘, or the sentiments for which they stand. (Chapter 11)

The constraints of fiction

‘And in short stories,’ said Lord Peter, ‘it has to be put in statement form, because the real conversation would be so long and twaddly and tedious, and nobody would have the patience to read it. Writers have to consider their readers, if any, y’see.’

Antisemitism

I have – maybe rather tiresomely – pointed out all the instances of what I take to be antisemitism in the novels of Agatha Christie, her repeated use of anti-Jewish tropes and stereotypes, even after the Second World War when you would have thought everyone would have been more sensitive on the issue.

Disappointingly, something similar is true of Sayers. Why is the City financier a Jew? There were plenty of Gentile millionaires. Why is he a self-made man who prompts contempt in a more aristocratic person like Freke? And why is he depicted as marrying the good Gentile girl Christine Ford, stealing her from Freke? To be charitable, it speaks to the way detective stories are made of clichés and stereotypes. To be less charitable, it shows that Sayers was happy to deploy antisemitic tropes, pandering to the values of the day, in order to give her story recognition and popularity.

The anti-Jewish animus is conveyed in a long speech given to the posh Dowager Duchess explaining the rivalry between Sir Reuben Levy and Julian Freke over the girl Christine:

‘Christine Ford, she was then, and I remember so well the dreadful trouble there was about her marrying a Jew. That was before he made his money, of course, in that oil business out in America. The family wanted her to marry Julian Freke, who did so well afterwards and was connected with the family, but she fell in love with this Mr Levy and eloped with him. He was very handsome, then, you know, dear, in a foreign-looking way, but he hadn’t any means, and the Fords didn’t like his religion. Of course we’re all Jews nowadays, and they wouldn’t have minded so much if he’d pretended to be something else, like that Mr Simons we met at Mrs Porchester’s, who always tells everybody that he got his nose in Italy at the Renaissance, and claims to be descended somehow or other from La Bella Simonetta—so foolish, you know, dear—as if anybody believed it; and I’m sure some Jews are very good people, and personally I’d much rather they believed something, though of course it must be very inconvenient, what with not working on Saturdays and circumcising the poor little babies and everything depending on the new moon and that funny kind of meat they have with such a slang-sounding name, and never being able to have bacon for breakfast…’ (Chapter 3)

But it isn’t just the Duchess’s view. Here’s Wimsey’s man, Bunter, buttering up Sir Reuben’s valet:

‘I agree with you, Mr Graves—his lordship and me have never held with being narrow-minded—why, yes, my dear, of course it’s a footmark, this is the washstand linoleum. A good Jew can be a good man, that’s what I’ve always said.’ (Chapter 4)

And here’s Wimsey himself, towards the end, explaining Freke’s long, long-standing resentment of Levy.

‘People are opinionated about side-issues, you know. I see red if anybody questions my judgment about a book. And Levy—who was nobody twenty years ago—romps in and carries off Freke’s girl from under his nose. It isn’t the girl Freke would bother about—it’s having his aristocratic nose put out of joint by a little Jewish nobody.’ (Chapter 10)

I know Bunter and Wimsey are broadly sympathetic to the Jewish character, I’m just left wondering why Sayers had the murdered financier be a Jew if she wasn’t catering to the crudest, melodramatic stereotypes.

A little feminism

‘Some blighter said hell knew no fury like a woman scorned. Stickin’ it on to women, poor devils. Sex is every man’s loco spot—you needn’t fidget, you know it’s true—he’ll take a disappointment, but not a humiliation.’

‘Stickin’ it on to women, poor devils.’ Well, it’s a gesture towards understanding how women were blamed in this culture. There’s not much of this kind of thing though. (In 1938 Sayers gave an address to a Women’s Society satirically titled ‘Are Women Human?’ which I hope to get round to reading and summarising, as an accompaniment to Virginia Woolf’s classic A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.)

The Great War and PTSD

It’s not only Wimsey who has prolonged shell shock or post-traumatic stress disorder. In the waiting room of Dr Freke, he sees:

By the fireplace sat a soldierly-looking young man, of about Lord Peter’s own age. 212His face was prematurely lined and worn; he sat bolt upright, his restless eyes darting in the direction of every slightest sound.

And then gets talking to a refugee from revolutionary Russia:

‘And you, monsieur? You are young, well, strong—you also suffer? It is still the war, perhaps?’
‘A little remains of shell-shock,’ said Lord Peter.
‘Ah, yes. So many good, brave, young men—’
(Chapter 11)

Credit

‘Whose Body?’ by Dorothy L. Sayers was published in 1923 by T. Fisher Unwin.

Related links

Related reviews

  • 1920s reviews
Leave a comment
by Simon on October 27, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Detective stories, Novel
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on October 27, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/10/27/whose-body-dorothy-l-sayers/

The Waves by Virginia Woolf (1931)

‘When we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.’

All for a moment wavered and bent in uncertainty and ambiguity…

‘The Waves’ is an experimental novel made up of highly poetic, sometimes almost abstract and visionary monologues, delivered by six characters, depicting their lives over 30 years or more as they grow from children through maturity to old men and women. The six are:

  1. Bernard (fancies himself a novelist; never goes anywhere without his notebook in which he jots down notes for novels which never get written)
  2. Susan (wants to be a rural materfamilias like her mother)
  3. Rhoda (nervous, anxious)
  4. Neville (fancies himself a poet)
  5. Jinny (party-loving Londoner)
  6. Louis (fancies himself heir to Egypt and all the ages; acutely self-conscious of his Australian accent and his father a banker in Brisbane)

Early on the image of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five appeared in my mind (Julian, Dick, Anne, George and their dog Timmy) and I never quite managed to lose the association. This book is about the Sensitive Six.

Here’s how it opens, to indicate the schematicness of the structure, and the stilted, hieratic nature of the prose.

‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’
‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’ said Susan, ‘spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.’
‘I hear a sound,’ said Rhoda, ‘cheep, chirp; cheep chirp; going up and down.’
‘I see a globe,’ said Neville, ‘hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.’
‘I see a crimson tassel,’ said Jinny, ‘twisted with gold threads.’
‘I hear something stamping,’ said Louis. ‘A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.’

In her great novels, ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To The Lighthouse’, and to a lesser extent in ‘Orlando’, the narrator – or the characters the narrator describes – are continually noticing small details in the world around them: the toot of a car horn, a bird arcing in the sky, a fragment of dress someone’s wearing, the tinkle of cutlery. Quite often the pressure of all these details pressing in on the characters’ senses becomes too much, sensual overload giving rise to a sort of hysteria which I thought I detected in ‘Jacob’s Room’.

In a sense ‘The Waves’ represents the triumph of this detail-noticing approach over conventional plot or characters. The text consists of nothing but random details, hundreds and hundreds of them, described in isolation like jewels hanging in space.

There is the stable clock with its gilt hands shining. Those are the flats and heights of the roofs of the great house. There is the stable-boy clattering in the yard in rubber boots… That is the close-clipped hedge of the ladies’ garden… The ferns smell very strong, and there are red funguses growing beneath them… That is a wood-pigeon breaking cover in the tops of the beech trees… The lady sits between the two long windows, writing. The gardeners sweep the lawn with giant brooms… Listen! That is the flop of a giant toad in the undergrowth; that is the patter of some primeval fir-cone falling to rot among the ferns…

From the start there’s no indication how old the characters are or where any of this is happening: it is a set of free-floating and deliberately random observations which is, to begin with, quite disorientating.

Children

In the event, the initial level of abstraction can’t be maintained for long – the speaker’s speeches become longer and start to contain circumstantial details. We learn that they are all together in one place and are children waiting for ‘lessons’ to begin. ‘My mother still knits white socks for me and hems pinafores and I am a child,’ says Susan. We learn who they all are because Louis very bluntly tells us:

‘My father is a banker in Brisbane and I speak with an Australian accent. I will wait and copy Bernard. He is English. They are all English. Susan’s father is a clergyman. Rhoda has no father. Bernard and Neville are the sons of gentlemen. Jinny lives with her grandmother in London…’

But they don’t speak like children at all. They talk in the fixed hieratic style of adults reciting the words of a play. Around the same time Woolf produced this experimental drama-novel other writers were doing something similar. T.S. Eliot tried to revive plays in verse starting in the early 1930s with ‘Sweeney Agonistes’. W.H. Auden wrote plays in verse starting as early as ‘The Orators’ in 1932. Woolf’s characters, also, speak like characters on a stage, standing facing an audience, reciting the words of a poetic play. Woolf herself referred to it not as a novel but a ‘playpoem’. No pre-school child talks like this:

‘Now the stricture and rigidity are over; and I will continue to make my survey of the purlieus of the house in the late afternoon, in the sunset, when the sun makes oleaginous spots on the linoleum, and a crack of light kneels on the wall, making the chair legs look broken.’ (Neville)

They are children talking in adult terms, using adult language.

Starting time and place

We learn that the children are all together in a country house named Elvedon. They are supervised and catered to by an extensive staff. It is the Edwardian decade because one of the girls refers to Queen Alexandra, wife of King Edward VII, who reigned 1901 to 1910.

Structure

There are no chapters, as in ‘Orlando’, or parts as in ‘To The Lighthouse’. Instead the text is broken up into nine long sections in Roman text, each one preceded by ten short descriptive sections printed in italics. After a while I realised the italicised sections describe the transit of the sun across the sky during a single day. Not just that, it is the sun rising over the sea, over a seascape, necessarily characterised by waves. So each time we cut back to one of these passages the sun is just rising or is half-way up the sky or stands at noon etc, shedding its light on the sea and its endless waves, and that these also change appearance and character at these different times of the day.

These sections are highly formalised, almost all of them opening with the same key words, ‘The sun…’ and containing some reference to the endless waves.

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky…

The sun rose higher. Blue waves, green waves swept a quick fan over the beach…

The sun rose. Bars of yellow and green fell on the shore, gilding the ribs of the eaten-out boat and making the sea-holly and its mailed leaves gleam blue as steel. Light almost pierced the thin swift waves as they raced fan-shaped over the beach…

The sun, risen, no longer couched on a green mattress darting a fitful glance through watery jewels, bared its face and looked straight over the waves. They fell with a regular thud. They fell with the concussion of horses’ hooves on the turf…

The sun had risen to its full height. It was no longer half seen and guessed at, from hints and gleams…

The sun no longer stood in the middle of the sky. Its light slanted, falling obliquely. Here it caught on the edge of a cloud and burnt it into a slice of light, a blazing island on which no foot could rest. Then another cloud was caught in the light and another and another, so that the waves beneath were arrow-struck with fiery feathered darts that shot erratically across the quivering blue…

The sun had now sunk lower in the sky. The islands of cloud had gained in density and drew themselves across the sun so that the rocks went suddenly black, and the trembling sea holly lost its blue and turned silver, and shadows were blown like grey cloths over the sea. The waves no longer visited the further pools or reached the dotted black line which lay irregularly upon the beach.

The sun was sinking. The hard stone of the day was cracked and light poured through its splinters. Red and gold shot through the waves, in rapid running arrows, feathered with darkness.

Now the sun had sunk. Sky and sea were indistinguishable. The waves breaking spread their white fans far out over the shore…

So it is not just about the passage of the sun through the sky, it is about the interplay between the slow-moving, inevitable sun and the ever-changing sea, the endless waves which, clearly, give the book its title. Right at the end, the text concludes with the briefest of these italicised passages, just one short sentence:

The waves broke on the shore.

So although the prose sections take us through the growth from childhood to adulthood of the six main characters, in some sense their entire lives are compassed within the frame not even of 24 hours, but in the 12 or so hours from the sun rising to the sun setting, as if part of some larger, natural cycle.

No dialogue

I thought the style would loosen up and the characters would get to talk to each other, but they don’t, at all. There is no dialogue. The characters never interact. To all intents and purposes they might be lined up on a stage, facing the audience, declaiming their parts and never facing or interacting with any of the others. Talking of complete lack of interaction…

Aspergers syndrome?

Lack of awareness of others or how to interact with other people are classic symptoms of being on the spectrum from Aspergers syndrome to full-blown autism. Here are the symptoms of Aspergers:

  • difficulty understanding social cues, body language, and facial expressions
  • difficulty relating to others
  • difficulty making eye contact
  • difficulty responding to people in conversation
  • difficulty staying on task and understanding or following directions
  • unusual speech patterns
  • formal style of speaking that’s advanced for their age
  • repeating words, phrases, or movements (‘it is not you, it is not you, it is not you’)
  • hypersensitivity to lights, sounds, and textures
  • sensitivity to loud noises, odours, clothing, or food textures

These are exactly the traits demonstrated by all six characters throughout this strange book.

Section 1. Childhood (13 pages)

We meet the six children, all for some reason living in the same house and sketchily follow a day in their lives, playing in the garden, sitting through lessons. There are several key moments: one when Susan sees Jinny kiss Louis which throws her into a rage. One when Bernard convinces the others the gardeners are after them with their shotguns and persuades them to all runs away and hide in terror. Rhoda is described as floating flower petals on the water in a basin, pretending they’re ships, and this image recurs throughout her sections in the rest of the book.

Then (rather abruptly) they are being bathed and put to bed.

Section 2. School days (29 pages)

They set off for their first days at school, by train, so there’s a description of a railway station and a train arriving. The gaggle of children, the Edwardian formality made me visualise The Railway Children, which is set in 1905, so the children would have worn similar clothes.

Train journeys have for a century and a half been the pretext for random observations, fragments seen out the window cf The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin. Woolf utilises it to the maximum, here as they head to school and even more at the end of the section, where Susan, Jinny and Rhoda all describe the fleeting images they see through the speeding carriage windows.

There a white church; there a mast among the spires. There a canal. Now there are open spaces with asphalt paths upon which it is strange that people should now be walking. There is a hill striped with red houses. A man crosses a bridge with a dog at his heels. Now the red boy begins firing at a pheasant. The blue boy shoves him aside…

The boys arrive at a private school with its quadrangles, statue of the founding father, promise of Latin lessons, the lobsided headmaster, Crane. The girls go to a separate school. At this point you start wondering whether it’s a problem that they all sound alike and that they all sound like Virginia Woolf i.e. no attempt is made to give them childish turns of phrase or to distinguish between them – the opposite, these children are all gifted with Woolf’s lyrical turn of phrase and describe Woolf’s great theme, ‘identity’.

This great company, all dressed in brown serge, has robbed me of my identity. We are all callous, unfriended. I will seek out a face, a composed, a monumental face, and will endow it with omniscience… (Rhoda)

Here’s Louis reacting to the sight of Dr Crane entering the chapel:

I rejoice; my heart expands in his bulk, in his authority. He lays the whirling dust clouds in my tremulous, my ignominiously agitated mind… (p.23)

Although they are given different opinions the opinions are secondary to the style, and the style is all the same. Yes, I think this is a flaw, a failing. Woolf substitutes any feel for how children actually think and speak, with her own lyrical but sometimes ponderous, almost pompous phraseology.

From discord, from hatred… my shattered mind is pieced together by some sudden perception. I take the trees, the clouds, to be witnesses of my complete integration. I, Louis, I, who shall walk the earth these seventy years, am born entire, out of hatred, out of discord. Here on this ring of grass we have sat together, bound by the tremendous power of some inner compulsion. The trees wave, the clouds pass. The time approaches when these soliloquies shall be shared. (p.26)

There’s a service in the chapel. Cricket, of course. Bernard already wants to become a novelist, God help us. He is described as turning everything into stories – except that Woolf doesn’t turn everything into stories. There are hardly any stories in her novels, just page after page after page of lyrical descriptions. Louis envies the other boys, the ones with eminent fathers who dominate sports and clubs. Neville develops a hatred for the sign of the cross and becomes passionately devoted to the Latin poets, Catullus, Horace, Lucretius. Susan hates her school and would like to bury it.

Here, as in ‘Orlando’, Woolf claims a character (Bernard) is always bubbling over with stories, just as she claims various people in ‘Orlando’ (notably Nicholas Greene) are bubbling over with stories, and yet… there are never any stories. Not one, not one anecdote, tale or joke, nothing you could retell to anyone who hasn’t read the book. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Woolf couldn’t tell a story – with a beginning, middle and an end – to save her life.

It is extremely symptomatic that Bernard is good at setting scenes but that even he acknowledges that his so-called ‘stories’ always fizzle out, ‘tail off absurdly’ (p.34). What Woolf really means when she talks about ‘stories’ is the unstoppable flow of her own dizzyingly acute observations. But listing thousands of acute details and insights is very much not telling a story. In fact it’s the opposite of telling a story. A story is a sequence of linked events in the shape of a narrative. That doesn’t appear in any of Woolf’s novels.

I can sketch the surroundings up to a point with extraordinary ease. But can I make it work? (Bernard)

No. No he (and she) can’t make it work. Instead the tsunami of details never ends. They flood her mind and her text with a stricken profusion, a thousand snapshots, a million moments brilliantly lit.

Passing the open door leading into the private garden, I saw Fenwick with his mallet raised. The steam from the tea-urn rose in the middle of the lawn. There were banks of blue flowers.

When I wake early… I lie and watch the brass handles on the cupboard grow clear; then the basin; then the towel-horse. As each thing in the bedroom grows clear, my heart beats quicker.

I catch sight of something moving – a speck of sun perhaps on a picture, or the donkey drawing the mowing-machine across the lawn; or a sail that passes between the laurel leaves…

Then their school days are over, and they look back at what they’ve learned. Susan gives a half page impression of London which triggers memories of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘Orlando’ before she catches a train back to her country home. And then the perceptions of Jinny, Rhoda, Louis and Neville on their respective train journeys home. Neville is 18.

Section 3. University (21 pages)

University, Cambridge of course (because that was the Bloomsbury University). Bernard ponders how he is multiple selves (the great theme described at the end of ‘Orlando’). He models himself on Byron (amazingly, given that Byron died 80 years previously). He tries to dash off a letter to his girlfriend but is crippled by self consciousness. It is thumpingly clear that what he means by a ‘story’ is in fact a thousand and one cluttered details with not the slightest sense of a narrative. In the same way Louis and Neville both fancy themselves poets but can’t write a line (see ‘The Bloomsbury Error’, below). They punt up the river and eat fruit from a bag, watching the cows in the meadows.

Susan was sent to finishing school in Switzerland but now she’s gone back to her parents’ farm where she lives a rural life, walking out to see cows and pick mushrooms. She wants to get married and have babies, like her mother.

Jinny lives in London and lives for elegant society parties, large lit rooms full of gilt chairs and being swept off her feet by handsome young men.

Rhoda also lives in London but struggles to make sense of her life, to hold her selves together, lacking the rural conviction of Susan or the society confidence of Jinny.

Section 4. Dinner for Percival (25 pages)

Bernard is engaged and catches a train to London, then stands in the busy street. All six are reuniting for a farewell dinner for their mutual friend Percival (who we haven’t seen much), ‘a hero’, who is leaving for India. Each of the six imagines Percival acting with godlike decision in India, to sort out ‘the Oriental problem’. They all genuinely believe this Percival would have been a great governor who would have ruled India widely and benevolently: ‘He would have done justice. He would have protected.’

Section 5. Percival’s death (10 pages)

News comes that Percival is dead. He was playing some game out in India when his horse threw him and he died on the spot. The Sensitive Six each give their responses which are, predictably, hyperbolic and immoderate:

  • All is over. The lights of the world have gone out.
  • We are doomed, all of us.
  • All palpable forms of life have failed me. Unless I can stretch and touch something hard, I shall be blown down the eternal corridors for ever.
  • I am alone in a hostile world. The human face is hideous.

And so, immoderately, on.

Section 6. Success and babies (11 pages)

Louis has become a successful businessman. He loves his office, his desk and his telephone. He’d like to write poetry but is too busy advancing trade around the world. He and Rhoda are lovers. To do this, he has had to deal with the identity problem and from the many men inside him, make one.

Susan is married with babies. She feels replete, complete, and waxes lyrical about getting them to sleep in her country farm.

Jinny, the London party girl, is now past 30. She seems to be describing her life to a man she’s met, including gossip about loads of society figures, but also a lyric delirium about her body and her wish to go off in a ship over the sea.

Neville delivers an impassioned monologue to a woman he has a troubled relationship with, they walked round London together but then she abandoned him at the Tube but later that night arrived at his front door, so…

Section 7. Middle age (16 pages)

If you can’t think what to do next, send your characters abroad. Bored of middle-aged life, Bernard travels to Italy, to Rome. He is middle-aged and has, at last, acknowledged that he has no real talent, that all those clever hopes come to nothing.

I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found that story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories? (Bernard)

In other words, there is no final statement, there is no Masterwork all these observations are building towards. The observations themselves, in all their brilliant fragmentation, are the work. Or at least, they are in Woolfworld.

Meanwhile, Susan is very content with her rural life bringing up two children in a world of butterfly nets and home-made jam, and visiting the rural poor, especially the dying in their cottages.

Jinny appears to be single but forces herself to rejoice in London life, in the energy and excitement of the Tube and buses and the hectic streets.

Neville feels himself getting old. He’s lost the old anger and bitterness. Now he reads Shakespeare and drifts from party to friend’s house, all passion spent. His section feels more than usually demented, stricken, mad.

Back to Louis who is a successful businessman, well turned-out in spats and a gold-handled cane. He tells us Rhoda left him so he’s taken up with a slatternly Cockney mistress. He is still attracted to his first love – poetry – and fantasises about writing the one Great Poem which will make sense of everything.

Rhoda has been scared all her life, copying the others to give the right appearance of living normally. Now she is in Spain, on a pilgrimage to go by donkey to the top of a mountain where she hopes she’ll be able to see Africa.

Section 8. Lunch at Hampton Court (19 pages)

They all meet up to have lunch at a restaurant in Hampton Court. Unexpressed jealousies and resentments like stags clashing antlers.

Neville despises Susan for waking up every morning to the same husband, when he has a succession of different women, sensations and conversations every season.

Louis wants everyone to notice his smart clothes and success and yet feels the perennial outsider.

Jinny wants them to acknowledge her fascination with people and life.

Rhoda is terrified of the simplest things and imagines her bed at night falling over the edge of the world. She’s the most mental of the lot:

After all these callings hither and thither, these pluckings and searchings, I shall fall alone through this thin sheet into gulfs of fire. And you will not help me. More cruel than the old torturers, you will let me fall, and will tear me to pieces when I am fallen. Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now. (Rhoda)

And indeed, right at the end of the book, in a throwaway remark, Bernard indicates that Rhoda kills herself: Woolf’s avatar, in this respect. She jumped out the upper story of a house to her death, as Woolf tried to when she was 13…

As I talked I felt “I am you”. This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome

Then they all go for a wistful sad walk by the river, arm in arm and hand in hand.

Section 9. Bernard’s recap (40 pages)

Oddly and disappointingly a lot of this final section consists of a recapitulation of stuff we’ve read before.

Woolf has finished with all the other characters, we see and hear them no more, but for Bernard. This section consists entirely of Bernard’s voice and lugubrious reminiscences. It consists of him addressing someone over a meal in the West End, a barely known stranger he remembers boarding a ship to Africa with years ago and has recently bumped into, a virtual stranger to tell his life story and the story of the six characters to. So the text finishes with Bernard ‘winning’ and his version of events being the crowning and defining one. Shame. I preferred the women characters, Susan, Rhoda and Jinny. Tant pis.

Early on in his 40-page monologue, Bernard complains that he’s fed up of telling ‘so many stories’. This is a bit rich seeing as how nowhere at all has there been an indication of him producing even a half-decent anecdote let alone a full-blown story.

He also says he is sick of flamboyantly beautiful phrases, which is maybe Woolf being ironic against herself, seeing as Woolf is praised above all for her lyrical (and often delirious) prose style, and this book consists entirely of fine phrases almost completely bereft of plot, event or psychology. (I say bereft of psychology because, despite a handful of superficial differences, all the characters think and speak exactly like Virginia Woolf.)

Anyway, all Bernard does, at great length, is recapitulate many of the scenes we have already had described to us, described in the childhood, school and university sections. But a scene is not a story, it is just a scene. Repeatedly telling us that Rhoda liked stirring flower petals in a basin and Neville like the Roman poets is not a story, it is creating images which, through repetition, acquire a kind of talismanic power. (Woolf does it in her factual works, as well, for example the image of the officious beadle who shooed her off a lawn in Cambridge which is repeated throughout ‘A Room of One’s Own’ and even in ‘Three Guineas’ to become a kind of looming symbol of the patriarchy.)

And on and on it goes, by far the longest section of the book and essentially a recapitulation of everything we’ve heard before. Tragically, as I’ve mentioned, as he gets towards the end of this bald list of impressions and mild events, he says ‘that’s enough of stories’ and the reader thinks ‘what stories?’ His idea of a story seems to be that Percival died when his horse threw him. Not a scintillating story, is it? Not the most complex of narratives. Woolf is the great writer of anti-stories.

Another one of his cracking stories, so good he repeats it half a dozen times, is that once, Percival invited him to accompany him to Hampton Court but he said no. That’s it. Not the ‘Thousand and One Nights’, is it? It’s more of a motif, a (very small) incident which Bernard keeps remembering and which comes to haunt him. But a story it is not.

This long final section not only recapitulates many of the events (to over-describe them), the feelings and intuitions of the previous chapters, it makes great play of repeating certain memories which have become recurring motifs – like Jinny kissing Louis, Rhoda sailing her flower-petal boats, Bernard turning down Percival’s invitation to go to Hampton Court – and alongside this, repeating certain key phrases. Presumably the intention is to give them a kind of poetic or psychological charge, but I found it just made them more and more inconsequential, like the harmless words of a lullaby.

  • The mind grows rings… the being grows rings… The being grows rings, like a tree…
  • Life is pleasant, life is tolerable. Tuesday follows Monday… Something always has to be done next. Tuesday follows Monday… I put on my hat, and went out to earn my living. After Monday, Tuesday comes… Life is pleasant; life is good. After Monday comes Tuesday, and Wednesday follows…

Empty rhythmic lulling, like the waves which wash across the empty beach, slowly wearing the mind down into utter indifference.

Right at the very end, on the last few pages, Bernard describes an epiphany he had in the countryside, leaning on a gate looking out over a valley, when he felt like his ‘self’ disappear completely, with the result that he blundered on through the countryside, a man without a self.

Now, here, in this restaurant off Shaftesbury Avenue, he begins to doubt the reality of the here and now. And then wonders if any of them are real. Who is he? Maybe he’s not one of them, Bernard, but all of them, Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, Louis?

As I talked I felt ‘I am you’. This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome…

It’s the same theme which surfaced towards the end of ‘Orlando’, the suggestion that our so-called identities are almost infinitely malleable and interchangeable.

On the very last page of the book Bernard explains that no matter how old and tired you are, each day the waves come and lift you to start the day again, dawn, rising from your bed, breakfast and the whole day to be faced again. Again and again we are lifted and propelled forward by the endless waves.

And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back.

For the waves endlessly driving us forward are life, and the only enemy of all of this, of this long, dense, verbose, lyrical, empty-headed text, is death. So down with death and on with life, and its endless waves.

Sex

There is no sex. The six characters go through puberty, adolescence and young adulthood without developing genitals, bodily hair, breasts, discovering masturbation, orgasms or having sex. None of them lose their virginities, they just marry and have children without the apparent involvement of sex at all.

Woolf was a Victorian lady. Like most of her class and generation she was too well bred to mention sex. But she also had a personal aversion to it, as well. Victoria Glendinning’s biography of her husband, Leonard Woolf, tells us that every time he broached the subject early on in the marriage, presumably with kissing and touching etc, she began to have a panic attack, beginning to display the symptoms of her full-blown madness. Understandably, he backed off and after a while, stopped trying, and so the marriage was never consummated.

Hence the strange absence of any sexual drive in any of her novels. The entire thing repelled her, was alien to her, she knew nothing about it, and so couldn’t write about it. Hence the impression all her books give of valuing a certain kind of billowing, purely verbal lyricism above anything to do with the body.

(Hence also her revulsion at James Joyce’s novel ‘Ulysses’ with its vivid descriptions of physical activities – not just the sexual ones, but peeing and defecating. She realised ‘Ulysses’ was a great book but couldn’t overcome the revulsion of her class at the vulgar goings-on of plebeians, and the revulsion peculiar to her against any descriptions of human corporeality. Taken together this explains why she couldn’t get past its ‘obscenity’. It’s a big blind spot.)

On the broader issue of physicality, none of the six characters have any physical oddities or ever become ill. That would drag the narrative down into the realm of the physical and, on one level, all of Woolf’s works are attempts to fly above and deny human physicality.

Mental illness, dissociation and fragile identity(ies)

I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am. (Bernard)

Woolf was stricken throughout her life with mental illness, nowadays through to be bipolar disease, striking her down with sustained periods of depression shelving into mania and madness. It’s fairly obvious that a lot of the heightened and often dissociated perceptions which litter her books derive from her own experience of altered psychological states, what Bernard calls his ‘states of detachment.’

Am I not, as I walk, trembling with strange oscillations and vibrations of sympathy… (Bernard)

There is nothing to lay hold of. I am made and remade continually. (Bernard)

Woolf triumphed by turning her illness into a style, into a worldview. Still, some passages stick out as more than usually deranged, vividly describing the alienated, dissociated effects of mental illness.

I flicker between the set face of Susan and Rhoda’s vagueness; I leap like one of those flames that run between the cracks of the earth; I move, I dance; I never cease to move and to dance. I move like the leaf that moved in the hedge as a child and frightened me. I dance over these streaked, these impersonal, distempered walls with their yellow skirting as firelight dances over teapots. (Jinny)

‘That is my face,’ said Rhoda, ‘in the looking-glass behind Susan’s shoulder – that face is my face. But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here. I have no face. Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. (Rhoda)

There is no single scent, no single body for me to follow. And I have no face. I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin can, here on a spike of the mailed sea holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat. I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors, and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back. (Rhoda)

Is it significant, maybe, that these shimmering states of mind are assigned to the girls? No. Bernard feels just the same if not more so. In fact all six characters routinely feel like this. Sometimes the descriptions dwindle down to something approaching a catalogue of symptoms more than anything else:

I choke. I am rocked from side to side by the violence of my emotion. I imagine these nameless, these immaculate people, watching me from behind bushes.

I hate looking-glasses which show me my real face. Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

Unstoppable images

More and more bubbles into my mind as I talk, images and images. (Neville)

So many times it feels as if Woolf is barely in control of the never-ceasing bubbling up of images and similes which throng her mind, all the characters plight of being incurably ‘aware, awake; intensely conscious of one thing, one object in particular’.

I feel at once, as I sit down at a table, the delicious jostle of confusion, of uncertainty, of possibility, of speculation. Images breed instantly. (Bernard)

The bubbles are rising like the silver bubbles from the floor of a saucepan; image on top of image. I cannot sit down to my book, like Louis, with ferocious tenacity. I must open the little trap-door and let out these linked phrases in which I run together whatever happens, so that instead of incoherence there is perceived a wandering thread, lightly joining one thing to another. (Bernard)

Endless lists, lists, lists of things seen, random collocations:

People holding forth under chandeliers in full evening dress, wearing stars and decorations, some spray in a hedge, or a sunset over a flat winter field, or the way some old woman sits, arms akimbo, in an omnibus with a basket… (Neville)

Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter – all are stories. (Bernard)

A view over chimneypots; cats scraping their mangy sides upon blistered chimney-stacks; broken windows; and the hoarse clangour of bells from the steeple of some brick chapel. (Louis)

Sometimes it feels claustrophobic, makes you want to put down the book and run out into the fresh air in order to escape the relentless bombardment of her text. And in some places the characters express the same sense of borderline hysteria:

I am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do – I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate… (Rhoda)

So Woolf’s texts are matrices of these never-ending perceptions oppressing characters who can never switch off, never lose themselves in action or laughter or any physical activity, trapped in consciousnesses endlessly enmeshed and enmeshing themselves:

Thus we spin round us infinitely fine filaments and construct a system. (Neville)

And always watching themselves like hawks, afflicted with never-ending bombardment of brilliant and oppressive images till they feel like they’re going to burst.

I tremble, I quiver, like the leaf in the hedge, as I sit dangling my feet, on the edge of the bed, with a new day to break open. (Jinny)

There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the centre resists. Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. (Rhoda)

Identity(ies)

Which of these people am I? It depends so much upon the room. (Bernard)

Who am I, who lean on this gate and watch my setter nose in a circle? (Susan)

What am I? There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything?(Bernard)

The characters are continually assailed by the fragility of their own identity, rarely if ever feeling their ‘true’ selves, struggling to define what a true self even is.

In the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when, holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather, I was wafted down tunnels. (Rhoda)

I am the ghost of Louis, an ephemeral passer-by, in whose mind dreams have power, and garden sounds when in the early morning petals float on fathomless depths and the birds sing. I dash and sprinkle myself with the bright waters of childhood. Its thin veil quivers. (Louis)

I feel insignificant, lost… I will let the others get out before me. I will sit still one moment before I emerge into that chaos, that tumult… The huge uproar is in my ears… We are cast down on the platform with our handbags. We are whirled asunder. My sense of self almost perishes… (Neville)

I am more selves than Neville thinks. (Bernard)

The woods had vanished; the earth was a waste of shadow. No sound broke the silence of the wintry landscape. No cock crowed; no smoke rose; no train moved. A man without a self, I said. A heavy body leaning on a gate. A dead man. (Bernard)

The ‘message’ of the last part of ‘Orlando’ is not that we are male or female, or even made up of aspects of male and female mingled, but instead that we have scores, hundreds, maybe thousands of selves, which all appear, mix and mingle continuously. Same here. It is Woolf’s central theme and message, expressed again and again and again:

‘What am I?’ I ask. ‘This? No, I am that.’ Especially now, when I have left a room, and people talking, and the stone flags ring out with my solitary footsteps, and I behold the moon rising, sublimely, indifferently, over the ancient chapel – then it becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many. (Bernard)

I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am. (Neville)

Alone, I rock my basins; I am mistress of my fleet of ships. But here, twisting the tassels of this brocaded curtain in my hostess’s window, I am broken into separate pieces; I am no longer one. (Rhoda)

To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self. (Bernard)

The Bloomsbury Error

Bernard, Louis and Neville are convinced they are going to be Great Novelists and Poets because of the depth and sincerity of their perceptions, just as Lily Briscoe in ‘To The Lighthouse’ is convinced she will be a great painter because of the vividness with which she perceives things.

Wrong. Just because you feel things deeply doesn’t mean you can express them well. The latter, especially being a poet and an artist, are matters of technique rather than feeling. It’s not clear that John Singer Sargent perceived things particularly strongly, it was his technique which makes him a master painter. (I think of Sargent because the old Granada paperback of ‘The Waves’ which I own has a painting by him, The Black Brook, on the cover.) Ditto what made T.S. Eliot the giant poet he was, wasn’t his depth of feeling (though he harboured terrible depths of feeling) but the dazzling effectiveness of his phrasing. It’s not about feeling, it’s about technique, craft, skill.

What makes reading a bunch of Virginia Woolf novels back to back a bit tedious is her unchanging, unevolving, naive conviction that deep feeling must inevitably lead to the ability to write Great Novels or Great Poetry. It is a fundamental error but one she apparently held and makes all her characters hold.

It is boring reading Bernard and Louis and Neville going on and on and on about how wonderfully intensely they feel things and yet, when they try to get them down on paper, their stories or attempts at poetry just fizzle out. It’s because they’re making the fundamental Bloomsbury Error of confusing deep feeling with artistic ability. It’s not clear that Picasso had particularly fine and sensitive feelings, in fact all the evidence suggests the opposite. Yet he had breath-taking technique which made him the artist of the century. QED.

Death and travel as basic narrative devices

The only significant things which happen in a Woolf novel are death and travel. Having run out of ideas what to do with Jacob in ‘Jacob’s Room’, she packs him off to Italy and Greece, ending up in Constantinople. Unsure how to end it, she simply has him killed off in the Great War.

The meandering mellifluousness of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ builds to an unexpectedly harsh climax with the suicide of Septimus Smith, which overshadows the book’s ending and Mrs Dalloway’s party. Arguably it’s a regrettable stain on an otherwise charming Cath Kidston drawing room of a book.

The dominating event in ‘To The Lighthouse’ is the death in the intermezzo of Mrs Ramsay, which completely changes the flavour of the book and dictates the events of the final part (the journey to the lighthouse undertaken as a sort of penance).

At a loss what to do with Orlando, Woolf has the bright idea of packing him off to Constantinople, ostensibly as British Ambassador and it’s here, abroad, that the decisive event of the book takes place, Orlando’s transformation from a man into a woman. (‘Orlando’ is by way of being the exception that proves the rule, in having no death of a major character; in fact part of the joke is that the central characters very much don’t die but live for hundreds of years.)

Here, in ‘The Waves’, first she bumps off the rather obscure character Percival, who all the others loved but whose voice we never hear; then she sends Bernard off to Rome, admittedly a minor excursion; but then, towards the end, in a throwaway remark we learn that the attractive character Rhoda has killed herself. So it was these deaths and excursions which triggered the reflections that death and travel are Woolf’s only two narrative devices.

Secondary characters

For me, the secondary or tertiary characters in a Woolf novel have a special interest, the characters which peep round from behind the curtain of the main narrative. It’s especially true of the servants, the unspeaking lackeys whose reliable labours enable the privileged lives of the main characters. As I argued in some of my reviews of E.M. Forster, I think part of the reason these classic novels are so enduringly popular derives from the way they provide the reader with the lovely, consoling, escapist fantasy that we, the readers, while we are immersed in the narrative, are living just such a pampered, privileged life – surrounded by cooks and cleaners and maids and servants to cater to our every whim, our only worries which shoes to wear with this skirt and who to invite to dinner. They’re the literary equivalent of the Sunday Times Luxury section.

There’s another aspect of the supporting characters which is how many there are. All of her novels rotate around a handful of main characters, as most novels do, but in each one I’ve been struck by the sheer number of tertiary characters she bothers to identify and name. Here’s a list of tertiary characters in ‘The Waves’:

  • Two gardeners sweeping the lawn with brooms
  • Miss Hudson the teacher
  • Miss Curry, another teacher
  • The cook
  • Florrie, a maid
  • Ernest, a male servant
  • Mrs Constable, who bathes the children
  • George, a servant with bandy legs who carries Bernard’s suitcase
  • The housemaid cleaning the steps
  • The boot-boy made love to the scullery-maid in the kitchen garden
  • The stableboy
  • The railway guard blowing his whistle
  • The headmaster, Old Crane
  • Mrs Crane, his wife, fan of French memoirs
  • The boy who Susan leaves her squirrel (in a cage) and her doves to
  • The fat woman, presumably the matron at the boys’ school
  • Teachers at the boys’ school: Mr Barker, Mr Wickham
  • Older boys, the ‘boasting boys’, at the boys’ school: Larpent, Smith, Archie, Hugh, Parker, Dalton, Fenwick, Baker, Roper
  • Teachers at the girls’ school: Miss Lambert, Madame Carlo the music teacher, Miss Matthews, Miss Cutting and Miss Bard
  • Lady Hampton, wife of General Hampton, one of the boys’ school governors (?)
  • Boys at university: Simes, Billy Jackson, Canon, Lycett, Peters, Hawkins, Larpent, Neville
  • Mrs Moffat, Bernard’s cleaner at university
  • Miss Johnson, Louis’s secretary
  • Louis’s business associates: Mr Burchard, Mr Prentice, Mr Eyres
  • Bernard’s parlourmaid
  • Bernard’s hairdresser

Conclusion

Despite dwelling at length on what I take to be its shortcomings and limitations, the overall impression of reading ‘The Waves’ is strange and haunting. It is an awesome book and Woolf was a great, great writer.

Credit

‘The Waves’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1931. Page references are to the 1977 Granada paperback edition, although the text is easily available online.

Related links

Related reviews

2 Comments
by Simon on April 7, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in English literature, Novel
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on April 7, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/07/the-waves-virginia-woolf/

Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard (1971)

All summer the cloud-sculptors would come from Vermilion Sands and sail their painted gliders above the coral towers that rose like white pagodas beside the highway to Lagoon West. The tallest of the towers was Coral D, and here the rising air above the sand-reefs was topped by swan-like clumps of fair-weather cumulus. Lifted on the shoulders of the air above the crown of Coral D, we would carve sea-horses and unicorns, the portraits of presidents and film-stars, lizards and exotic birds. As the crowd watched from their cars, a cool rain would fall on to the dusty roofs, weeping from the sculptured clouds as they sailed across the desert floor towards the sun.

Those who come looking for classic Ballard – all car crashes and multi-story car parks – will be disappointed. The nine stories Ballard wrote about Vermilion Sands are, for the most, part, among his earliest – in fact Prima Belladonna, the first story in the series, is also the first short story he ever had published – and they all reek of early period, fin-de-siecle-cum-surrealist dreams rather than the hard psychoses of the modern world which he became famous for later on.

The idea is that Vermilion Sands is a holiday resort of the very near future, but a desert resort on the model of Palm Springs in southern California. So no sea, no beaches, no sunbathing and all that vulgar paraphernalia. Instead the town is surrounded by a vista of endless rolling dunes, sand-lakes and quartz reefs, among which grow the mysterious ‘sound sculptures’ and out of whose dark grottos fly the ominous sand-rays.

Perfectly at home with this nearly other-planet-like landscape, the denizens of this alternative reality are all well educated and middle class, all seem to work in the arts (we meet an increasingly predictable series of artists, singers, film makers, architects, painters and fashion designers), and indulge strange dreamy fantasies which involve making singing sculptures, tending plants which emit music, selling houses which shape themselves to their owners’ moods and, in the most characteristic story, The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D, use gliders to carve faces and shapes out of clouds for the entertainment of the jaded inhabitants below.

The stories appear to take place in the present or near future:

  • in Venus Smiles the narrator references the Expo 75 and the Venice Biennale as contemporary events; later he tells us that the artist Lorraine Drexel hobnobbed with Giacommetti and John Cage (making her a very 1950s character)
  • in The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista the architect who is shot dead is described as having hung out in the 1950s with Le Corbusier and Lloyd Wright, and then moved on to Vermilion Sands, ‘1970 shots of him, fitting into the movie colony like a shark into a goldfish bowl’, and since we know he was shot soon after arriving at the resort that sets his murder in the Seventies, and the story is being told some ten years after the trial (p.194)
  • in Say Goodbye To the Wind the lead female character Raine Channing, was a world famous model in the 1970s and the ‘now’ of the story is barely ten years later (p.132)

But the stories take place in a location which is not the same earth or the same present as the rest of us inhabit. Everyone is comfortably off and lazy. All the houses have balconies and verandas where the characters do a good deal of daydreaming and musing. Everyone takes the endless dunes, the singing sculptures, and the flying manta rays for granted.

Ballard is often heralded as the prophet of late-twentieth century urban psychoses but these stories really reveal the late Victorian in him, the man in thrall to a Tennysonian love of euphony, given to long lazy paragraphs describing pre-Raphaelite women who sleepwalk through the dunes under the shimmering moonlight, combined with an 1890s, decadent, Oscar Wilde intoxication with jewels (jeweled eyes, jeweled insects) and the uncanny attraction of the macabre. In these stories Ballard is more of a Symbolist than a modernist.

Standing with one hand on the cabin rail, the brass portholes forming halos at her feet, was a tall, narrow-hipped woman with blonde hair so pale she immediately reminded me of the Ancient Mariner’s Life-in-Death. Her eyes gazed at me like dark magnolias. Lifted by the wind, her opal hair, like antique silver, made a chasuble of the air.

In a short preface Ballard says the stories are his best guess at what ‘the future will actually be like’, a snapshot of ‘the day after tomorrow’ – but I think we can take that with a pinch of salt: the future will obviously look very much like the world of today, only more crowded and polluted; that’s certainly how the future has turned out for the last 40 years that I’ve been experiencing it.

In the 1970s they told us that by the year 2000 there’d be colonies on the moon or even Mars, and we’d all be living in the Leisure Society where the only challenge would be deciding whether to fill your spare time by being an artist or a poet. Forty years later the Space Age is over, everyone works harder than ever, and the world is just more crowded and polluted.

What the Vermilion Sands stories really are is a mental realm where Ballard could go to indulge the most rococo and whimsical of his decadent fantasies, untroubled by any constraints of realism or logic. He is closer to the mark when, later in the Preface, he says that the stories consciously celebrate ‘the neglected virtues of the glossy, lurid and bizarre.’ They are exercises in the strange and the fantastical, the weird and surreal, all told in the calm, bejewelled prose of a latter-day Oscar Wilde.

Memories, caravels without sails, crossed the shadowy deserts of her burnt-out eyes. (p.21)

References in the text to Vermilion Sands

And what they tell us:

Vermilion Sands is my guess at what the future will actually be like.

Vermilion Sands is a place where I would be happy to live. I once described this overlit desert resort as an exotic suburb of my mind…

Vermilion Sands has more than its full share of dreams and illusions, fears and fantasies, but the frame for them is less confining. I like to think, too, that it celebrates the neglected virtues of the glossy, lurid and bizarre.

Where is Vermilion Sands? I suppose its spiritual home lies somewhere between Arizona and Ipanema Beach, but in recent years I have been delighted to see it popping up elsewhere — above all, in sections of the 3,000-mile-long linear city that stretches from Gibraltar to Glyfada Beach along the northern shores of the Mediterranean, and where each summer Europe lies on its back in the sun. That posture, of course, is the hallmark of Vermilion Sands and, I hope, of the future — not merely that no-one has to work, but that work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work. (Preface)

‘tourist haunts like Vermilion Sands’ (The Singing Statues)

Ten years ago the colony ‘was still remembered as the one-time playground of movie stars, delinquent heiresses and eccentric cosmopolites…

All the houses in Vermilion Sands, it goes without saying, were psychotropic…

‘Darling, Vermilion Sands is Vermilion Sands. Don’t expect to find the suburban norms. People here were individualists.’ (Stellavista)

… to Vermilion Sands, to this bizarre, sand-bound resort with its lethargy, beach fatigue and shifting perspectives

The Recess

the Recess is referred to in several places as a worldwide economic slump which reduced most people to working a few hours a day (Referred to in The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista and the Cloud Sculptors), but this is as airily vague and meaningless as everything else in the stories.

Vermilion

This is the colour vermilion.

1. Prima Belladonna (1956)

Steve Parker keeps a shop of singing flowers, Parker’s Choro-Fauna. A lot of effort is put into explaining the complexity of singing plants and, in particular, the way they need tuning and Steve does this using the monstrous Khan-Arachnid orchid, a difficult bloom with a range of 24 octaves. When he’s not fussing about these rare and expensive musical plants, Steve hangs out with his pals Tony and Harry, drinking cool beers on his balcony.

What is maybe most characteristic about the story is the notion that it is set during ‘The Recess’, a decade of economic stasis. There’s no socio-economic explanation of this, it just reinforces the sense of slow, lazy, easy-going torpor which hangs over the story.

Into their relaxed, passive lives arrives the stunningly beautiful Jane Cyracylides, long and lean with golden skin and disconcerting eyes which seem like insects. The boys ogle her from their balcony and then one day she comes to the shop.

Tony gets to know here and discovers Jane’s astonishing singing ability, an ability which, if not restrained, badly upsets the flowers in his shop. She starts to make a living singing in nightclubs and becomes famous so Tony is thrilled when they become an item, cruising round together and hanging at the beach.

One day he is awoken by music from the shop, strange, it’s locked up and should be quiet. He goes in to discover the Khan-Arachnid orchid in mad tumescence, rearing up to over nine feet tall and sucking into its core the willing body of Jane Cyracylides. When he tries to pull her free she pushes him away. Later, when he re-enters the shop, the Khan-Arachnid has returned to its normal size and Jane is nowhere to be seen. Has it eaten her?!

2. Venus Smiles (1957)

A broadly comic story. The narrator – Mr Hamilton – is on a small committee which commissioned a sonic sculpture for the central square of Vermilion Sands and awarded the gig to Lorraine Drexel. Unfortunately the finished product looks like a radar aerial with a car radiator grill broken in two so the bars stick up like a big metal comb. And the sound it emits instead of being calm and reassuring is a high pitched whine, a sitar-like caterwauling. The crowd gathered to see the unveiling starts booing.

Quite quickly the statue is withdrawn and ends up in the narrator’s own front garden, and Lorraine Drexel leaves town, laughing. This is because she knows what’s coming next. Which is the statue starts growing, and sprouting more and more sound cores which start broadcasting various classical lollipops like Mendelsohn’s Italian Symphony or Grieg’s Piano Concerto.

Hamilton chops it up with a hacksaw but the parts only grow back. They call in an expert, a Dr Blackett, who spouts some typical half-plausible pseudo-scientific explanation about the sculpture extracting its new content from oxygen in the air and its metal core, creating a dynamic form of rust.

Hamilton wakes up to find the thing smashing through his bedroom window and stretching all over his garden, caterwauling umpteen different pieces of classical music. His colleague on the Art committee, Raymond, comes round with an oxy-acetylene kit and they spend a day chopping the monster singing sculpture up into thousands of tiny pieces. They pay a local contractor to take it away to a steel mill and get it all recycled.

But the sculptress Lorraine Drexel reads about it in the press and sues. The case spends months dragging through the courts and the final verdict is delivered in Vermilion Sands’s new courthouse. They lose the case because the judge doesn’t believe – despite the eye witness testimony – in a growing singing sculpture.

But as they leave the courthouse, Hamilton feels a vibration in his feet. He leans to the floor and hears music. He walks to a window and looks out at some of the unfinished parts of the courthouse. Yes, there are new struts and stanchions growing out from the building even as he watches and new ‘sonic cores’ forming, from which emits louder and louder music.

The sculpture! Its melted-down parts have been mixed with other metal and sent off to construction jobs all over the city. Not only buildings but cars and planes, all the artifacts of modern technology will start budding soundboxes and singing!

3. Studio 5, The Stars (1960)

Studio 5, the Stars is an address – studio 5 is a house half way along a road in Vermilion Sands called The Stars.

It’s a good-humoured joke that the narrator is Paul Ransom, editor of Wave IX, a poetry magazine all of whose works are produced by modern VT technology – punch in your requirements of stanza form, genre, style, metre and so on into an IBM machine and it coughs out as many lines as you like.

Into his life wafts a late-Victorian beauty, the mysterious figure of Aurora Day (much like the slender and mysterious beauties Leonora Chanel and Jane Ciracylades in the other stories), given to mysterious sleepwalking in her billowing white gown or feeding the white fish in her pond or stretching on her divan, her ‘beautiful body uncoiling like a python.’

She is a real poet in that she writes the old fashioned way, with a pen. Once she learns Ransom is editor of a poetry mag she sends her pink Cadillac round every morning so that the hunchback chauffeur can deliver her latest compositions, and in the evening the tapes on which she has written her texts comes roiling and blowing across the sand from her house across the dunes, Studio 5.

But this is just the start. When Ransom rejects her poems, she magically co-opts the entire issue he’s sent to the printers, deleting all the computer-generated poems and replacing them with hers. Far more dramatic, when Ransom gets over burning the tampered copies, he lifts his glass to find a quote of poetry engraved on it, and poetry engraved on the steps of his, and on the doors, and on the walls, and on the floors. Then he looks at his arms and realises they are live with hand-written verse and when he looks in the mirrors he sees that his face it is covered in poetry.

He vaults the balcony, lands on the sand and runs over to Aurora’s house. There she is lazily feeding her fish and asks him if he knows the Greek myth about Melander, goddess of poetry, and Melander, the only true poet of the day who kills himself to prove his devotion to the art of poetry. As she tells it him, Ransom realises there are paintings of the two characters all round the walls. Is she… is she the goddess Melander?

Quickly the plot develops. Ransom utterly gives in to Aurora’s demand that the next edition of his magazine be filled with original, hand-made poetry. But when he gets home he discovers his lovely IBM poetry-making computer has been trashed. He phones the other 23 poets in Vermilion Sands and same has happened to them. How the devil is he going to fill his magazine?

One alone among the other poets isn’t fazed, the good-looking youth Tristram Caldwell. He not only offers to submit some of his verse but comes over and introduces himself to Aurora. Over the next few days they become inseparable. He suggests they go on a sand-ray hunt, sand-rays being things like bats which fly about above the ‘reefs’ but have a sharp and fatal sting.

To cut a long passage short, Tristram fools Aurora into going into a mazy grotto of the reefs and there whipping the sand-rays into such a frenzy that they appear to attack and kill Tristram. Aurora runs off screaming and is driven away the goatish chauffeur who Ransom has, by now, realised must be a reincarnation of the Greek god Pan.

Ransom a) tries to follow them but their big Cadillac loses him b) drives to Aurora’s house only to find it empty, deserted and feeling as if it has never been inhabited (as in a thousand clichéd ghost stories) and c) gets home to find Tristram lazing on his divan. What!

It was a scam by Tristram. He learned how seriously Aurora took the Melander story and how she had cast him as the tragic devotee. So he staged the entire sand-ray hunt in order to fulfil her psychological need. Only he among the little hunting party knew that they are in the ‘off’ season for the rays, and so their blades aren’t poisonous.

And the punchline of the story? Ransom is still stressing about how to fill his next issue when he gets a call from one of the poets who, strange to say, has had a moment of inspiration and has knocked out quite a decent sonnet. And then another phone call. And another. Somehow, Aurora’s presence, or her (probably) commissioning the hunchback to smash up all the poetry computers, has had the desired effect. The poets have learned how to write again.

4. The Singing Statues (1961)

Another story about a beautiful willowy woman who enters the life of the male narrator and entrances him.

In this case he is Milton, an artist, a maker of sonic sculptures and she is Lunora Goalen (what, not the Lunora Goalen, yes!! the Lunora Goalen!!), rich patron of the arts with apartments in Venice, Paris, New York (funny how some things haven’t changed in 60 years), doyenne of the news magazines and celebrity columns and society pages.

Lunora has rented a luxury house in the resort. She has dropped into the art gallery where Milton was just adjusting his latest sound sculpture which looks like an enormous totem pole with wings at the top. Out of the wings come sounds. Milton happens to be inside when the rich client strolls his way and – knowing the musical range of his sculpture is actually pitifully thin – he grabs the microphone and as Ms Rich arrives in range, singes the Creole Love Call which is transmogrified by the computers into a haunting melody which enchants Lunora and she buys it on the spot, turning and walking out to climb back into her white Rolls Royce, leaving it for her sharp-eyed assistant Mme Charcot to make out the cheque to the flustered gallery owner.

Next day they get an angry call complaining that the sculpture only seems to emit a dull booming noise. Milton drives out to the luxury house (like ‘a Frank Lloyd Wright design for an experimental department store’) and pretends to be doing maintenance when he is in fact installing a tape of classical music. This should fix the problem for a day or two.

On successive nights he sneaks back across the dry lake climbs over the wall into the garden, sneaks up onto the unrailed terrace and instals a new tape. Then spends increasing amounts of time looking down to the ground floor where Lunora is sleeping on an open-air divan, topless.

On the climactic day he is rung up by Mma Charcot who insists he comes straight away. Lunora is distraught, her hair undone, dishevelled, crouching beside the sculpture. Milton crouches down beside her and takes her hands in his but Mme Charcot sniggers, it is not him she cares for – it isn’t even the sculpture – it is herself she is in love with.

Appalled, Milton turns and walks away. Next day Lunora, her secretary and chauffeur have gone, When he revisits the house it is cold and empty, the muted statuary standing around like corpses. Months later, in preparation to make a new statue, Milton goes out among the actual living sound sculptures, among the sand dunes and reefs of the desert, and there discovers the sculpture he had sold her, chopped up into pieces and scattered around the sand, some of the fragments still making a sad, whining lament.

5. The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista (1961)

Talbot and his wife Fay are looking for a house to rent in Vermilion Sands. The resort is now past its prime and these new buyers are aware of the history of movie stars and celebrities who populated it in its prime.

The story is based on the idea of Psychotropic Homes – these are homes built in a kind of bioplastic which respond to their owners’ moods and personalities. This immediately leads Ballard into a comic tour of totally unsuitable homes, such as the mock-Assyrian ziggurat whose previous owner had St Vitus dance and so which was still nervously jitterbugging even years after he’d left. Or the converted submarine pen which was the home of an alcoholic and whose vast concrete walls still reek of gloom and helplessness. You get the idea.

Anyway they finally take a nice house with a pool and it’s only when the estate agent ‘turns it on’ (you turn on psychotropic houses) that he reveals it was the home of 70s movie star Gloria Tremayne, who was the defendant at the Trial of the Century, accused of shooting dead her architect husband, Miles Vanden Starr. Now we learn that Talbot, who’d already told us he was a lawyer, was actually a junior defence lawyer on Gloria’s team. Lots of guff about how mysterious and aloof and Greta Garbo she was.

To cut to the chase, Talbot and Fay find themselves beginning to act out the characters of its previous inhabitants. In particular, we learn from Fay’s comments to him, that Talbot has become obsessive, vengeful, permanently angry. One day the house tries to kill her by melting and bending down the ceiling in the living room where she’s sleeping to crush her onto the sofa. Her screams waken Talbot who comes running in to save her.

Next day she’s gone, a note on the memogram saying she’s gone to stay with her sister. Two months later she demands a divorce. Talbot goes on a bender, drinks too much, raves the car back across the lawn, smashing into the automatic garage, throws his coat in the swimming pool, necks a bottle of whiskey and wakes up sprawled across his bed to witness a strange sight.

A pressure zone enters the doorway, but no person, The pressure zone crosses the bedroom towards the bed, there’s a pause, then a convulsion in the air and the house goes into spasm, has a fit. The room he’s in starts to contract, within moments the door and control panel are covered in melting blob, huge veins stand out on the walls. Luckily his lighter is in his pocket and Talbot holds it up to the ceiling which starts to fizz and melt apart and he’s able to pull himself up into the from above, though that is melting and bending, the swimming pool has been upturned and draining.

He realises the house is reliving the moment Gloria Tremayne went into his bedroom to shoot Starr. The spasm was the house re-enacting Starr’s death spasm, the contraction was his lungs and heart ceasing to work, his life force contracting as the room contracted around Talbot.

Talbot makes it to the control panel and turns the house off. Hours later the police leave deciding there’s nothing they can do to prosecute a house for murder. The estate agent looks in horror at the wrecked, erupted shell of the desirable property he sold Talbot only a few months previously, then leaves.

For the time being Starr will remain. He can’t afford to move and the house is turned off. But one day… one day, he will turn it back on… the threat being that he will subsume himself in the damaged psyche of the murderess.

6. The Screen Game (1962)

Paul Golding is an artist, well, an artist in the Vermilion Sands sense, meaning he rarely actually paints anything. He’s co-opted by his friend Tony Sapphire into painting the sets for an avant-garde movie being produced by the millionaire playboy Charles van Stratten (two ex-wives and a controlling mother who mysteriously died in an ‘accident’) who owns a massive house out across the sand lakes.

There’s a cast of distractions including the outrageous director, but the point of the story is to introduce us to the beautiful, slender and (inevitably) troubled young woman at the heart of it. Emerelda Garland used to be a famous actress, darlings, but had a breakdown after her mother died. Now van Stratten (who is, of course, devoted to her) has organised the filming solely to recreate the milieu of her glory years and try and effect a cure.

As an typically eerie and oblique aspect of this cure the narrator is tasked with building a series of twelve enormous screens, which are painted with the signs of the zodiac and are to be moved around what seems to be an enormous chessboard on a terrace below the producer’s summer house.

As the story progresses, Golding produces many more screens than are required and he and his friends develop a strange complicated ‘game’ of moving them around, creating strange patterns and mazes.

Emerelda does indeed find walking among their ever-changing patterns and mazes somehow consoling, although Golding finds it disconcerting that she is followed everywhere or surrounded by an eerie troop of scorpions and spiders with jewels embedded in their heads, jewelled insects which foreshadow the jewelled world created in The Crystal World. (Leonora Chanel is referred to on almost page of her story as having ‘jewelled eyes’, which, we eventually realise, means small decorative jewels stuck around her eyes.)

The climax comes one morning when Charles himself deigns to come down from the summer house and play ‘the screen game’, by now a complex process using the 40 huge screens Paul has painted. But suddenly an abandoned sonic sculpture down on the empty beach sets up a wailing and they realise something is wrong.

Charles starts tearing apart the screens which form the protective carapace the mad Emerelda has made for himself. But when he penetrates to the core and strips away the screens shielding her, exposing her to the harsh sunlight, her entourage of jewelled insects, scorpions and spiders, protects her by leaping onto Charles’s body and covering his face, and stinging him to death as he runs away down the sand embankment screaming in time to the sonic sculpture’s mournful wail.

7. Cry Hope, Cry Fury! (1966)

The first-person narrator, Robert Melville, goes sailing on his sand-yacht across the bone-dry dunes of the sand-sea, in hunt of the eerie sand-rays which fly just out of reach. When one of the tyres of his sand yacht gets a puncture he sets off on foot but the razor sharp sand cuts his feet. Back at the yacht an enormous ray flies overhead till he shoots it dead and it falls out of the sky wrecking his sails and knocking him unconscious.

When he comes to he is being rescued by a much larger sand-yacht under the command of the windswept beauty, Hope Cunard, who tends him in her cabin as they cruise over the smooth dry sand lakes towards her luxury home on the bone dry Lizard Key. Here Melville meets Hope’s small and characteristically troubled entourage, namely her pockmarked half-brother, Foyle, and her secretary Barbara Quimby.

Hope is, of course, a painter, she paints portraits. In a nod to his sci-fi audience Ballard invents a kind of paint which, once you’ve set the basic parameters, you leave out on the canvas in front of the subject and it automatically takes the shape of whatever you intend to paint – similar to the computer programs for making poems in Studio 5, The Stars.

The subject of painting does two things. One, it brings out a profusion of references to artists, including Monet, Renoir, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Balthus, Gustave Moreau, the surrealists as a group and ‘the last demented landscapes of Van Gogh’, as well as literary references to Coleridge’s poem The Ancient Mariner and one of the Surrealists’ holy books, Maldoror. Two, it triggers a glut of sensuous, decadent description, of the desert, the gleaming sand, the sand-rays wheeling above the rock spires and so on. And, of course, the human body as a junction or meeting point of the organic and the crystalline.

Sometimes at night, as she lay beside me in the cabin, the reflected light of the quartz veins moving over her breasts like necklaces, she would talk to me as if completely unaware p.103

It emerges that Hope had a tempestuous affair (underneath the psychological flim-flam there’s quite a lot of Mills and Boon about a Ballard story) with a tall dark stranger who is identified in the story with the Flying Dutchman. He even left a jacket behind with a tell-tale bullet hole in the chest.

Hope lets a portrait of herself and Melville be painted but over the following days it twists and distorts into the macabre figure of a skull-faced woman in a blonde wig and a pig-faced mannequin. The narrator thinks this is a reflection on the weird psychic processes at work in the isolated house, but at the climax of the story we learn that the two other occupants – Foyle and Barbara – have been dressing up in costumes and standing in front of the self-painting paintings, nothing weird and psychic about it at all, it’s a twisted attempt at humour and control.

The climax come when the Flying Dutchman or some such young man does indeed arrive, but Hope has been driven into a state of hysteria and fires a pistol at him, wounding him in the wrist and he and Melville both make their escape, running across the piazza and onto the man’s sand-schooner.

8. The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D (1966)

This might be the best, the most representative of the stories. Major Raymond Parker has been invalided out of the air force after an accident, hence the crutches. He is building gliders in a disused garage. two freaks pass by, the hunchback Petit Manuel and tall artist Nolan. They’re joined by playboy Charles van Eyck and form the cloud-sculptors of Coral D. a) Coral D is the fourth and largest of the four large coral towers outside vermilion Sands b) cloud sculptors glide among the clouds and release scythes of silver iodide to carve and sculpt them into the shapes of celebrities, presidents and actresses.

Till the day when beautiful reclusive heiress Leonora Chanel (daughter of one of the world’s leading financiers) is driven up in her white Rolls Royce, accompanied by her secretary Beatrice Lafferty (it does feel as if Ballard is writing the same story again and again and again).

As we get to know her we realise Leonora is a monster of egotism. She puts on a massive party at her huge villa and invites the cloud sculptors to perform. Van Eyck and Nolan are vying for her attention and outdo each other. Parker quickly starts an affair with Miss Lafferty and they jointly observe what happens next which is

1. That night there is some kind of argument or fight up on the terrace and Nolan goes running off into the night. We learn that he has in fact already had an affair with Leonora and painted a very unflattering portrait of her. Out of the shadows emerges smooth playboy Van Eyck who now tries his chances with Leonora.

2. Next day there is another party (easy to get the fact there are two, a bit confused) and this time the clouds darken into a storm. First Manuel begs to go up, in order to impress Leonora who had not tried to hide her revulsion at the hunchback. He goes up and his glider is smashed to bits in a storm cloud. Parker and Lafferty go and recover his body which means they are out in the desert when the storm turns into a real tornado and – apparently driven by the vengeful Nolan in his glider -heads straight for Leonora’s villa, where it wreaks tremendous damage.

Emerging from their hidey-hole, Parker and Lafferty tour the ruined, devastated villa, with its wreckage of party chairs, marquee and smashed champagne glasses. They find Leonora dead among her peacock feathers, her face covered by shreds of the many portraits of herself she’d commissioned over the years. And Van Eyck hanging strangled in the wires of the party lights.

9. Say Goodbye to the Wind (1966)

The narrator, Mr Samson, keeps a fashion boutique jokily called ‘Topless in Gaza’, the snazzy sci-fi angle being that the clothes are all bio-clothes, animated clothes, which shape and mould themselves around the owner and are also prone to hysterical fits (much like the sensitive plants and the sensitive houses and the sensitive musical sculptures).

One day a glamorous former supermodel, Raine Channing, turns up at the shop (just as Lunora Goalen turns up at Milton’s art gallery and Jane Cyracylides turns up at Tony Parker’s flower shop) and buys a carful of clothes. This is paid for by her secretary Mme Fournier (same figure as the Mme Charcot who handles everything for Lunora) and has an aggressive chauffeur (as did Lunora and Aurora Day).

Basically, Raine was used and moulded by her svengali, fashion designer Gavin Kaiser. Now she imagines he is coming back to get her and her behaviour becomes increasingly unhinged, particularly her habit of wafting from her hotel room through the empty streets to the abandoned nightclub and dancing by herself to the one record left on the old-fashioned gramophone.

At the climax of the novel the narrator is watching her, when someone creeps up behind him and biffs him on the head. When he regains consciousness he is in a hand-tailored biomorphic golden suit which almost immediately starts contracting and strangling him to death. there’s a couple of sentences of over-the-top description of this Poe-esque fate before strong hands grip him and a macho man cuts open the constricting fabric. It is none other than Jason Kaiser, brother of the dead Gavin Kaiser who has rescued him for obscure reasons.

Five miles away they watch the headlights of Miss Channing’s chauffeur-driven car as it disappears into the night, just like all the other psycho-goddesses in every other one of these stories, disappears back into the shadows of Ballard’s obsessive psyche.

Ballard’s goddesses

Hope Cunard stepped through the open window, her white gown shivering around her naked body like a tremulous wraith. (p.102)

Into all this Emerelda Garland had now emerged, like a beautiful but nervous wraith. (p.65)

Almost all the stories rotate around women of a particular type. Each of Ballard’s narrators meets and falls under the intoxicating influence of glamorous female figures with golden skin and mysterious pasts, former movie stars, reborn goddesses, alluring divas from myth, beguiling heiresses, elusive millionairesses:

  • Jane Ciracylades – mysterious and sexy woman who has a superhuman singing ability
  • Aurora Day – a witch with magic powers who can project poetry quotations into solid objects and onto human skin and murders (she thinks) her lover
  • Leonora Chanel – ‘this beautiful but insane woman’, millionairess who inspires the cloud sculptors, spurring them on to death and destruction
  • Gloria Tremayne – former actress who shot her husband and went mad
  • Emerelda Garland – former actress who had a collapse after her mother died and ends up trying to shoot her lover
  • Hope Cunard – millionaire heiress owner of mansion on Lizard Key who tries to shoot the narrator and her former lover
  • Lunora Goalen – neurotically self-obsessed millionaire art collector who has a breakdown by a sculpture
  • Raine Channing – former teenage supermodel who tries to kill the narrator by dressing him in constricting bio-fabric

These femmes fatales involve the narrator in their strange and dreamlike psychodramas which spiral up towards some kind of often violent climax before they abruptly disappear. He uses the stock phrase – ‘I never saw XX again’ – in so many of these stories it becomes a trademark, a cliché. ‘Of course I never saw her again’ (Gloria); ‘That was the last I saw of Aurora Day’ (p.180) and so on. They come; they entrance and beguile; they disappear – like women in a (very male) dream.

In fact the basic structure – glamorous woman enters life of man with an interesting speciality (animated clothes, musical plants, cloud-carving gliders, computer-generated poetry), after some fencing they ‘fall in love’ i.e. go to bed, before the plot moves to some kind of climax to which she is central and then the woman disappears as abruptly as she arrived – reminds me of the basic template of the James Bond stories (Bond’s interesting speciality being that he is the sexiest spy in the world). The Bond books began appearing only a few years before Ballard’s (first Bond novel 1953, first Ballard short story 1956).

There’s another point worth making: almost all the women are topless or scantily clad at some point; there are quite a few bare bosoms about. Lunora Goalen sleeps topless every night out on the desert terrace where Milton the sound sculptor spends hours watching her. When you see the contemporary illustrations for Ballard’s stories in contemporary sci-fi magazines, you see why coming up with a steady supply of nubile, slender and topless or diaphanously dressed women was required to keep the fans happy.

Cover of the October 1963 issue of Fantastic Stories showing an illustration of The Screen Game – jewelled insects, moveable screens painted with signs of the zodiac and – of course – a slender, half-naked young woman

Some of this – the recurrence of film stars and the entire story about making an avant-garde movie (The Screen Game) – sheds light on Ballard’s later obsession with real-life movie stars like Greta Garbo, Jayne Mansfield and especially Elizabeth Taylor in Atrocity and Crash.

These later texts are usually read as deconstructions of the mediascape in a consumer capitalist society, of the way Hollywood iconography and huge advertising hoardings mediate, focus and exploit primal human longings (for sex, for a better, perfect life) for profit. But a simpler interpretation is that Ballard himself had a deep devotion to the figure of the goddess, the muse, the Perfect Woman, which has more to do with Tennyson and the pre-Raphaelites than the hectic commercial world of the 1960s.

It’s characteristic that even though some of his male narrators sleep with these other-worldly muse figures – as Steve Parker does with Jane Cyracylides and Robert Melville with Hope Cunard – little if anything is made of the sex, as such. It is more important as a symbol of the often oblique psychological bond between the narrator and the goddess-figure.

But even that is not quite accurate, because there is actually little if any psychology in a Ballard novel. Or, to put it another way, Ballard’s novels are full of psychology but it is Ballard’s psychology – the characters are little more than ciphers in the strange trance-worlds Ballard creates, as their generally anonymous names clearly signal – Ransom, Golding, Milton, Talbot, Melville, they’re all dream figures acting out Ballard’s compulsive scenarios, again and again and in Vermilion Sands it’s striking how many of these obsessions are more or less the same one – being entranced by a beautiful, sexy, but mad and dangerous young woman.

As a footnote, they all arrive in very nice cars, and they all have chauffeurs:

  • Leonora Chanel – white Rolls Royce, chauffeur and secretary (p.11)
  • Lunor Goalen – white Rolls Royce, chauffeur and secretary (p.75)
  • Aurora Day – pink Cadillac and chauffeur (p.154)

Once I’d noticed this, I couldn’t help thinking about Lady Penelope, driven about in her pink six-wheeled Rolls Royce by the faithful Parker in Thunderbirds (which was broadcast 1965-66).

Ballard’s buzzwords

There’s a lot of detail and imagination in all of the stories – a lot of sci-fi gags, like the houses which change shape or the mutant plants which can make music or the eerie sand sculptures and so on – but, in the end, I found it a struggle to read the book right to the end. The atmosphere, which starts off as dreamy symbolism, ends up becoming too one-dimensional, the effects too shrill and tinny.

I began to notice the way he throws around the adjective ‘insane’ a lot – insane wishes, insane people, insane ideas, insane landscape, insane logic,

  • fighting the insane air, Manuel piloted the glider downward…
  • For a moment the ambiguous nature of my role, and the questionable morality of abducting a beautiful but insane woman, made me hesitate. (p.67)
  • Convinced at the time of this insane logic, I drove my fists through the canvas… (p.105)
  • I raised my hands to my face, in horror saw that the surface of my skin was interlaced by a thousand tattoos, writhing and coiling across my hands and arms like insane serpents. (p.163)
  • The fragments of Aurora Day’s insane poems caught the dying desert light as they dissolved about my feet… (p.181)
  • I stood up, wondering what insane crisis this psychotropic grand mal duplicated. (p.205)
  • ‘The place must have been insane.’ (p.207)
  • There’s a subtle charm about the house even in its distorted form, like the ambiguous smile of a beautiful but insane woman. (p.208)

And bizarre:

  • the portraits recapitulated in reverse, like some bizarre embryo, a complete phylogeny of modern art… (p.98)
  • a character’s shirt makes him look like ‘some bizarre harlequin’ (104)
  • She seemed to be concealed in this living play-nest like a bizarre infant Venus (p.134)

And demented:

  • We barely noticed the strange landscape we were crossing, the great gargoyles of red basalt that uncoiled themselves into the air like the spires of demented cathedrals. (p.52)
  • In the wardrobe the racks of gowns hung in restive files, colours pulsing like demented suns. (p.136)
  • I woke on Raine’s bed in the deserted villa, the white moonlight like a waiting shroud across the terrace. Around me the shadows of the demented shapes seethed along the walls, the deformed inmates of some nightmare aviary. (p.141)

Yes, nightmare:

  • What had begun as a pleasant divertimento… had degenerated into a macabre charade, transforming the terrace into the exercise area of a nightmare. (p.69)
  • Kicking back the door I had a full glimpse of these nightmare figures. (p.106)
  • The macabre spectacle of the strange grave-flora springing from cracked tombs, like the nightmare collection of some Quant or Dior of the netherworld… (p.130)
  • The cloud if insects returned to the summer house, where Dr Gruber’s black-suited figure was silhouetted against the sky, poised on the white ledge like some minatory bird of nightmare. (p.71)

And macabre. And grotesque. And hell.

  • The livid colours of Hope’s pus-filled face ran like putrefying flesh. Beside her the pig-faced priest in my own image presided over her body like a procurator in hell. (p.107)
  • I remembered the clothes I had seen on a woman killed in a car crash at Vermilion Sands, blooming out of the wreckage like a monstrous flower of hell, and the demented wardrobe offered to me by the family of an heiress who had committed suicide. (p.137)
  • Three nights later, tired of conducting my courtship of Emerelda Garland within a painted maze, I drove out to Lagoon West, climbing through the darkened hills whose contorted forms reared in the swinging headlights like the smoke clouds of some sunken hell. (p.67)

And nightmares. And Bosch.

  • My pig-snouted face resembled a nightmare visage from the black landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch. (p.105)
  • With his beaked face and insane eyes, his hunched figure hung about with the nets of writhing rays, he looked like a figure from Hieronymus Bosch. (p.177)

There’s a tired business mantra that if everything’s a priority then nothing’s a priority. Same here. If everything is ‘insane’, if eveythingis a ‘landscape from hell’ then, eventually, nothing is.

My point is that it’s too easy and glib to chuck around extreme adjectives like that. It devalues them and they quickly lose their evocative affect.

The obsessive repetition of the same basic structure – mysterious glamorous woman entrances naive male protagonists against the backdrop of the endless dunes, sand reefs and sonic sculptures – gets pretty boring after the fourth or fifth iteration. The details of things like the psychotropic houses and the moments when the house tries to kill Fay, then the narrator, are weird and hallucinatory, the details of the gliders flying among the clouds and sculpting them into shapes and faces is wonderful, but:

  1. the human plots which he concocts amid the sand-seas and reefs of quartz are often shallow and disappointing
  2. Ballard’s language is too often cranked up to maximum all the way through; there’s little light or shade, the whole thing does indeed become ‘glossy, lurid and bizarre’ to such an extent that, in the end, it runs the risk of ceasing to register or matter

Maybe literature is something to do with restraint, and the reason Ballard is hard to take seriously as a literary figure is because, although his novels are brilliant (the three disaster novels are breath-taking and ‘Atrocity’ and ‘Crash’ are all outstanding visions), nonetheless Ballard’s writing – considered solely as written prose – is so ridiculously over the top.

In the silence of the villa I listened to [the shadows of the demented shapes] tearing themselves to pieces like condemned creatures tormenting themselves on their gibbets. (p. 141)

Edgar Allen Poe on acid.

Credit

‘Vermilion Sands’ by J.G. Ballard was published by Jonathan Cape in 1973. Page references are to the 1985 J.M. Dent paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

Related links

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on January 29, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Science Fiction, Short stories
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on January 29, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/01/29/vermilion-sands-j-g-ballard/

Burning Chrome by William Gibson (1986)

So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics.
(Burning Chrome page 218)

Burning Chrome is a collection of ten short stories by William Gibson. They include his first published work, Fragments of a Hologram Rose, published in 1977, and then all the stories he wrote up till 1986.

In 1984 Gibson had published his debut novel, Neuromancer, set in a future world dominated by digital techologies, in which he made great use of the ideas of cyberspace and the matrix of digital information. What made it really distinctive, though, was how all this was viewed filtered through a film noir, street level culture which mixed the tough guy crime stories of Raymond Chandler with 1980s punk culture – in which this brave future was not supervised by Arthur C. Clarke-style, clean-suited technocrats, but was at the mercy of international corporations, Japanese yakuza gangs, ninja assassins, dealers selling all manner of futuristic drugs, holograms used for viewing savage knife fights or holoporn showing the obvious – in other words, a future seen from a street-level view of crime and rackets and dealers and pimps and whores, all summed up in the word, ‘the biz’. And all conveyed in an amphetamine-driven, drug-crazed, super-charged prose, dense with a dizzy combination of street slang and tech terms.

Neuromancer was followed by Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive which, together, are now said to comprise Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy, so-called because in this America of the future, the entire East Coast has become one vast, continuous urban sprawl.

The stories in this collection include several which share the Sprawl world, including one which actually features the female protagonist from Neuromancer, Molly (and where we learn her surname is the rather cartoonish Million – Molly Millions).

And then there are ‘the rest’, a miscellany of non-Sprawl science fiction stories, most of them set in the future, or a future, just not necessarily the Sprawl future.

Sprawl stories

Fragments of a Hologram Rose (1977) first published work

It’s very short (7 pages) and it is very fragmentary. We get the protagonist’s back story in scattered fragments. We have Hints of the Damaged Future, hints that Japanese business and culture was taking over America – the kit Parker uses to get into ASP is made by Japanese corporation, Sendai; more importantly, when a teenager his parents indenture him to a the US branch of a Japanese corporation, with its barracks and corporate hymns. He runs away. He flees to a California which has declared itself independent of the USA, under a chaotic ‘New Secessionist’ movement. Up to a point these can maybe be seen as extrapolations of trends Gibson saw in his own time.

The story already contains key themes, namely the protagonist, Parker, works on Apparent Sensory Perception (ASP) programmes. As in the Sprawl stories, you plug your brain into the player, play the tapes and you are there: the recording completely floods your sensorium.

And also, what I by now realise is another major theme, which is a surprisingly sentimental lost-love trope. The girls in Gibson (well, young women) are always slender as gazelles and tough as silicon razor nails. Sex is an olympic workout. His women can hold their own against gangsters and dealers. BUT, beneath this leather-jacketed veneer of modernity, the men are always loving and losing them, in a sentimental ‘I’m not going to cry’ tough guy way descended from Hemingway and Chandler.

Parker has woken at 3 in the morning (that’s another trope: it’s always the middle of the night, or the darkest hour before dawn) and is rummaging through her belongings and his memories. He finds the hologram of a rose which he unsentimentally flushes into the waste disposal unit. His last memory is watching her going off in a taxi leaving him standing there in the pouring rain. Sob.

Johnny Mnemonic (1981)

Super cool and fast moving, this concerns Johnny Mnemonic, so-named because memory banks (a hard drive) has been neurally inserted into his brain, so that he can store vast amounts of data which a) he doesn’t understand b) he cannot himself access.

The stored data are fed in through a modified series of microsurgical contraautism prostheses.’ (p.22)

Only clients with the password can access it. He is a storage facility or, as he himself puts it: ‘a nice meatball chock-full of implants.’

As so often the story features a meeting with a drug dealer, Ralfi, in a lowlife café. The dealer has brought a neural disruptor so, although Johnny has packed a sawnoff shotgun in an adidas bag, he is paralysed, while the dealer indicates that the hired muscle he’s brought, Lewis, is going to hurt him.

Enter a typically lean, mean, streetwise chick, who identifies herself as Molly Millions (‘She was wearing leather jeans the colour of dried blood’) and, as Lewis leans forward to hurt Johnny, flips her hand past his, somehow lacerating his wrist down to the artery. Lewis clutches it and runs off. We later learn Molly has four-centimetre-long razor retractable blades installed under her fingernails. (She has also had her eyballs replaced with digital lenses.) The neural disruptor goes off and Johnny is free.

Molly grabs his hand and runs him along to her hiding place, a disused part of the lofty ceiling of a vast mall made of geodesic domes, overseen by an outlandish gang named the Lo Teks who dance and perform on a high-wire dance floor they call the Killing Floor.

In case this is all too mundane, Gibson throws in the participation of a cybernetic dolphin, a relic from the war (you know, that war) which is kept in a rundown zoo, but features, among its other hi-tech devices, a SQUID, being a Superconducting Quantum Interference Detector, which they use to extract the data in Johnny’s head which caused Ralfi to come after him. They reward the dolphin, whose rather dull name is Jones, by shooting him up with heroin, yes, this cybernetic dolphin is a junkie.

They use Jones’s skills to extract and place the data in a construct which they leave on a shelf in the backroom of a gift shop.

And here is another classic element of the Sprawl world: the power of multinational corporations, the real rulers of the world, controllers of entire economies, and that most of these multinational corporations are Japanese.

The Yakuza is a true multinational, like ITT and Ono-Sendai. Fifty years before I was born the Yakuza had already absorbed the Triads, the Mafia, the Union Corse. (p.22)

Burning Chrome (1982)

A seminal story for several reasons.

  1. It has all the familiar ingredients: Automatic Jack and Bobby Quine are two ex-soldiers (fought at the Battle of Kiev in the same failed war against Russia mentioned in Neuromancer). Jack, the narrator, is injured/wounded – his arm was lasered off while flying a microlight. Future technology gives him a replacement cybernetic arm, powered by nerves.
  2. There’s a sexy chick, Rikki, who within a sentence of appearing in the story, is pulling a ‘frayed khaki cotton shirt’ over her pert, twenty-something breasts. Jack falls in love with her, then loses her.
  3. Jack and Bobby are criminals who hack into business information in cyberspace for gain.

In terms of storytelling technique, it is classic Gibson in the way it’s based in a ‘present’, after the bank job, the heist, the caper – in which the narrator a) looks back on everything that’s happened b) dwells on falling in love with the woman and losing her – and intersperses this with chunks of exposition, which tell the actual story i.e. how Jack and Bobby enter cyberspace to break into the highly defended vaults of ‘Chrome’, a terrifyingly violent criminal who launders money for organised crime, as well as running a bar-cum-brothel, the House of Blue Lights.

Chrome: her pretty childface smooth as steel, with eyes that would have been at home on the bottom of some deep Atlantic trench, cold grey eyes that lived under terrible pressure. They said she cooked her own cancers for people who crossed her, rococo custom variations that took years to kill you. (p.196)

Same technique is used in New Rose Hotel, where the narrator is in a ‘present’, after a big criminal caper has taken place – looking back at both the build-up to the crime, and lamenting his abandonment by a sexy, feisty woman (Sandii). (She took the money and went off to Hollywood in hopes of becoming a ‘simstim’ star.)

But the most important aspect is that, by way of describing how Jack and Bobby steal all Chrome’s assets in cyberspace, it gives extended (and useful) explanations of key concepts in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe – cyberspace, the matrix and ice.

Bobby was a cowboy, and ice was the nature of his game, ice from ICE, Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. The matrix is an abstract representation of the relationships between data systems. Legitimate programmers jack into their employers’ sector of the matrix and find themselves surrounded by bright geometries representing corporate data.

Towers and fields of it ranged in the colourless nonspace of the simulation matrix, the electronic consensus-hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchange of massive quantities of data. Legitimate programmers never see the walls of ice they operate behind, the walls of shadow that screen their operations from others, from industrial-espionage artists and hustlers like Bobby Quine.

And I can’t resist quoting the final paragraph in this sequence because it’s a classic example of how Gibson’s mastery of a certain type of speed-fuelled prose can turn what is, basically, the boring reality of criminals hacking into computers, into soaring prose poetry.

Bobby was a cowboy. Bobby was a cracksman, a burglar, casing mankind’s extended electronic nervous system, rustling data and credit in the crowded matrix, monochrome nonspace where the only stars are dense concentrations of information, and high above it all burn corporate galaxies and the cold spiral arms of military systems. (p.197)

A bit later, the narrator tells us there are some 15 million legitimate console operators around the world, doing the daily trudgework of maintaining these vast castles of data. But we never meet them in Gibson’s stories. We only meet the lowlife, edgy, drug-fuelled hackers and hustlers.

On one level, Gibson is just the latest in a long line of American noir writers who make crime sound impossibly glamorous.

P.S.

Automatic Jack is referenced in the second of the Sprawl trilogy, Count Zero. In that novel Bobby the hacker has ended up in the 14th-floor nightclub owned by a dude named Jammer, and can’t take his eyes of the man’s cool new cyberspace deck, so Jammer hands Bobby a set of trodes:

He stood up, grabbed the handles on either side of the black console, and spun it round so it faced Bobby. ‘Go on. You’ll cream your jeans. Things ten years old and it’ll still wipe as son most anything. Guy name of Automatic Jack built it straight from scratch. He was Bobby Quine’s hardware artist once. The two of ’em burnt the Blue Lights together, but that was probably before you were born…’ (Count Zero, p.230)

Other stories

The Gernsback Continuum (1981)

The first-person narrator is hired to take photographs for a book of photo-journalism documenting the futuristic buildings of the 1930s, what the woman consultant to the project calls ‘American Streamlined Moderne’, what the publisher calls ‘raygun Gothic’, the book to be titled, The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was.

To cut a long story short, on his cruises round provincial America looking for these architectural indicators of a future which never happened, he starts to hallucinate himself into the alternative future where they were built, soaring domes, spires and arcologies linked by high-level walkways, the sky full of flying silver vehicles, and on the ground around him tough-guy blonde 1930s men named Chuck, their arms around wasp-waisted plastic women of the future, both out of the old movies Metropolis and Shape of Things To Come.

Obviously – inevitably – this being Gibson, the narrator is popping various types of drug all the time and at first dismisses the visions as ‘amphetamine psychosis’. If this were J.G. Ballard the narrator’s mind would eventually disappear into this alternative universe, while their body remained here, catatonic.

But, throughout the story, he has been anchored in reality by constant phone calls to a colleague who spends his life writing up the weird beliefs of Americans – Elvis is alive on Mars, UFOs took my husband – and who is totally blasé about the narrator’s visions and, indeed, the opening sentence tells us that it was all an ‘episode’ which is now fading.

In other words, it doesn’t go for the full-on psychosis and so comes over as rather a conventional 1950s-type story.

The Belonging Kind (with John Shirley, 1981)

I wonder what collaboration brings for Gibson. He collaborates quite a lot. In this case the setting is very Gibson – a perpetual night-time of clubs and bars, back alleyways, littered with broken glass and graffiti, the shabby single room of a low-paid single man.

Coretti is a shabby, badly dressed ungainly loner. He goes to a bar. A notably attractive woman (they generally are: Gibson’s stories froth over with femmes fatales) lets him chat her up. When she leaves, he follows her and is thunderstruck when, half way across a night-time road, she changes shape: her dress changes, her hair changes, the shape of her body subtly alters. She becomes a different woman.

From a distance he watches her visit other bars, chatting friendly to other strange men, echoing their conversation, fitting right in. He becomes obsessed. He loses his day job, takes a cheaper labouring job, loses that, doesn’t eat, lives only to track her down.

Finally, in the early hours (the characteristic Gibson time of day) he finds her in a bar, chatting in her easygoing manner to a man. They leave and get into a cab, at the last minute Coretti flings himself inside, but the other two don’t even notice. And when she goes to pay the river Corettit is stunned to see her reach inside her own body, through a pink slit like a fish’s gill, to bring out wet notes which dry as she hands them over.

Coretti follows the couple up to a hotel room in which he is not that surprised to discover a dozen or so other people perching on beds, sofas, chairs. Motionless, their eyes covered by a thin filament of flesh. They are, he realises, roosting. They are some kind of alien life form which lives to blend in. Maybe they started off feeling normal, eating and drinking like other folk. Then got to realise they feel restless, outside, different. Stop eating. Exist off alcohol metabolised at bars, maybe…

He realises he is one of them. The story ends with Coretti, also, pulling wet money out of his gill, paying for whatever he needs, sitting passively in bars wearing whatever is required, whatever is required to fit right in.

Hinterlands (1981)

A strange and disturbing story about a strange and disturbing phenomenon. At some in our future a Russian spaceship, an Alyut 6, en route to Mars, simply disappears. Two years later it reappears, its pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Olga Tovyevski, out of her mind. Several other ships disappear at the same location. It becomes clear it’s the departure point of some kind of Highway, which is what Americans call it, while the French call it the subway and the Russians the river.

Over the years an entire space station is set up to a) despatch probes and individuals through the Highway b) ready to receive them back. The success rate is low. Of those who return 20% are dead on arrival, 70% are mad, gone, lost – only 10% or so alive and capable of speech or communication, although often badly damaged.

Why keep on doing it? Because the second or third returnee came back with metal into which was coded information including a cure for cancer. After that humanity had to continue sending people into this…. thing… junkyard? curio shop, whatever it is.

The narrative follows the protagonist, Toby, preparing to greet a new returnee, Leni Hofmannstahl. The space station has an entire area nicknamed ‘Heaven’, which is full of grass and plants and the sound of trickling water, built on the advice of psychotherapists to provide the most calming environment possible for returnees, though it rarely works.

And, being Gibson, there is a psychic element, an interference with minds, which is that the greeter (himself) mind melds with a ‘controller’, becoming one via a device nicknamed a ‘bone-phone’ i.e. an implant in his brain.

Toby’s controller, Hiro, has genned up on Leni’s entire profile, knows her inside out, while Toby is carrying the entire arsenal of drugs know to humans to try and calm Leni. But when he enters the probe, now safely docked in ‘Heaven’, Toby immediately sees that she is ‘gone’. And in a very florid way. She is pinned in her pilot’s chair and, somehow, has persuaded the ship’s onboard medical unit to flay her right arm and pin it to the plastic work surface, skin unwrapped, nerves and tendons revealed, expertly dissected. She bled to death.

That night Toby is in bed with his squeeze, Charmian. We learn that they have been recruited from the ‘rejects’, the astronauts who bob around in a probe in the right area but, for reasons unknown, are not chosen, are not taken, who feel the crushing weight of rejection, often try to commit suicide, their brains are rewritten, ‘kinked’, adjusted, and then they are used as ‘surrogates’, almost-rans, half way towards the returnees, who an operator using the ‘bone-phone’ can meld and control. The price they pay. Clutching his woman in the dark, crying, empty drug wrappers clenched in his fist.

Red Star, Winter Orbit (co-written with Bruce Sterling, 1983)

A Russian space station – Kosmograd – has been orbiting earth for decades (since the turn of the century, apparently). It is armed, so there’s a squad of six soldiers and a KGB officer aboard.

The narrative describes the rebellion of the twenty or so civilian cosmonauts aboard the station, led by Korolev, himself badly injured in some kind of ‘blow-out’ twenty years previously, against the KGB man Yefremov, when they intercept Kremlin order that the station is to be abandoned and its orbit left to decay till it burns up in the earth’s atmosphere.

As so often, half the interest of the story is the ‘hints’ it drops of the fictional future. In this future the Russians have won. The Treaty of Vienna gave them control of the entire Earths oil supply, then there was some kind of nuclear meltdown in Kansas, with the result that, for three decades, America has been ‘gradually sliding into isolationism and industrial decline.’ (p.110) In some kind of attempt to gain extra power they have resorted to sending enormous balloons up into the outer atmosphere to collect energy.

And yet the story reveals that the Soviets themselves have failed. There was some kind of attempt to do mining on the moon, which failed. And we learn that Korolev, the protagonist – Colonel Yuri Vasilevich Korolev – had been the first man on Mars, back in the day. Now, as the KGB try to organise abandoning the Kosmograd, he is set to become the last man in space. Gloomily, Yefremov tells Korolev that the entire human endeavour to ‘escape’ into space has failed.

Kosmograd was a dream, Colonel. A dream that failed. Like space. We have no need to be here. We have an entire world to put in order. (p.107)

New Rose Hotel (1984)

In the early hours it starts to rain and the protagonist lies in bed in his cheap hotel going back over recent events trying to figure out where it all went wrong and how the chick he thought he’d clicked with, got away. That’s the classic shape of a Gibson Sprawl story.

This one is interesting because it expands on the basic Gibson idea that the future will be controlled by vast multinational conglomerates, and competition won’t be so much for resources as for knowledge.

Although the protagonist takes his time piecing together the sequence of events which brought him to this cheap hotel, by the end of the story the plot is clear.

The narrator is an expert at kidnapping the scientists whose inventions fuel the vast multinationals. He is hired by a man named Fox (‘point man in the skull wars, a middleman for corporate crossovers’) to work alongside another freelancer named Sandii to kidnap a genius named Hiroshi Yomuri from Maas Biolabs GmbH who had him, and hand him over to another corporate client, Hosaka.

Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who’s come here to identify the planet’s dominant for of intelligence. The alien has a look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged. The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form. (p.129)

Anyway, Sandii, the narrator and Fox put together the kidnap and, sure enough, Yomuri disappears from a street in Vienna, popping up again in the secure facility the narrator has arranged for him in Marrakesh. Our chaps notice a number of other top Hosaka scientists flying in to confer with him. Then – disaster.

Sandii has double crossed them. She was paid by Mass to carry out the kidnapping, but had installed a diskette at the new hideaway which released some kind of Meningococcal infection. It killed Hiroshi and all the other Hosaka researchers. Score Maas. Hosaka’s anger knows no limits. He and Fox immediately go on the run, but he sees Fox get thrown off the balcony of a shopping mall, falling to the ground and breaking his back.

Now the narrator is holed up in the cheapest, obscurest hotel he can find, trying to cover his tracks, knowing assassins are on his trail and going over it all in his mind, wishing Sandii was still with him, wishing she still loved him, wishing she was holding his hand.

The Winter Market (1986)

The narrator, Casey, is another young buck at home in the louche worlds of sex and drugs and rock’n’roll. He goes on eight-hour-long bender when he learns that a recording star he’s been working for has died. But this is more complex than it seems.

We are in the future and people can record and edit other people’s experiences using ‘neuroelectronics’ – accessing and experiencing levels of consciousness which most people can only access in dreams, dream experiences. These can then be edited to create what are in effects ‘albums’, full of ‘tracks’, which recreate – which let you experience – other people’s lives, thoughts and feelings.

The narrator is a kind of ‘record producer’ of this kind of content, and the story looks back, soulfully and sadly, on his working relationship with a particularly fucked-up woman he met in a bar, Lise, who is only able to move because her withered body is fitted into a carbon exo-skeleton.

She is an epitome of the doomed artist, but in a leather jacket and addicted to speed (or ‘wizz’, as Gibson calls it.) Breaking his own rule, Casey, shares a circuit with her i.e. jacks into her consciousness, and emerges seconds later weeping with shock at the huge awesome night-time infinitely sad depths of it.

So he uses some studio downtime to make a rough recording of her, plays it to his boss who is stunned, who passes it up to a record company who snap it up and send out smooth-talking, suited PR people (all a riff on a 1980s view of the record biz), give her a contract, Casey is given a promotion and bonus to edit her stuff together into the classic album which becomes known as Kings of Sleep.

But she is a doomed artist, doomed, man, too sensitive for this world and so we learn that she has ‘crossed over’, used neuroelectronics to transfer her entire mental activity into a construct, an AI, a ROM stored in some corporate headquarters. Her body is cremated. Casey is gutted.

His story is told via conversations with his good friend Rubin, an internationally famous artist who makes art works out of the sea of junk by then surrounding 21st century society.

there’s drugs, there’s heavy drinking, there’s finding yourself in no-hope bars in the early hours, watching the other losers, there’s future tech – it’s a whole world, a Gestalt, the Sprawl scenario.

The relentless leather jacket, rock chick, mainline drugs, 12 hour drinking binges, late-night bars, rock’n’roll  altered states milieu remind me of a favourite track by Jesus and Mary Chain, Coast to Coast from 1989.

Here I come, here I come
On a road
Under a sky
Coast to coast

Dogfight (co-written with Michael Swanwick, 1985)

Another lowlife on the run, this time it’s Deke, a career thief, caught and kicked out of Washington DC, put on a greyhound out of town, fantasises about travelling forever, maybe down to the warzone in Florida (sic) he gets out at a 20 minute stopover station, stumbles on gamers playing a 3-D fighter game based on First World War biplanes zapping each other – Fokkers & Spads – and is entranced.

He walks back to a shopping mall and steals the (commercially available) game and the kit to play it on, scams himself into a cheap hotel (ain’t no other kind in Gibsonland), unwraps, plugs in and plays it.

Bit later he tries to sell part of the kit to a girl down the hall, Nance Bettendorf, but she freaks him out with 3-D images she can project (in this case, of a rat). She has a ‘brainblock’ put on her by her parents who both work (which is, in this dystopian future, very ‘greedy’ of them) a chastity block, so no sex for Deke, then, although she wears skimpy clothes which ride up to show here crimson panties.

She’s a student (again, apparently, a rare thing in this future) and is completing a virtual reality assignment. Having rich parents, she can afford all the right kit:

‘Image facilitator. Here’s my fast-wipe module. This is a brainmap one-to-one function analyser.’ She sang off the names like a litany. ‘Quantum flicker stabiliser. Program splicer. An image assembler…’ (p.175)

These to oddballs, outsiders, loners, sort of knock up a rapport. Deke stays with her while he practices his skills at the game, his aim being to take on the dude he saw in the Greyhound station and make some money. When Nance tells him she has some ‘hype’, a mind-focusing drug, Deke has no scruples about attacking her to steal it – and seeing as she has panic attacks if anyone touches her, his assault-cum-rape is as cruel as can be.

Having prepared for weeks, Deke walks back into the Greyhound rest room ready to take on all the gamers, until the legendary Tiny Montgomery walks in. Well chugs in in his wheelchair. (Tiny Montgomery is, incidentally, a character in a song by Bob Dylan written in Woodstock and part of the Basement Tapes which, incidentally, came to mind when I reviewed the early work of New York photographer Diane Arbus.)

So the story climaxes in a 3-D battle of First World War planes controlled by the minds of the champion, Tiny, and the challenger, Deke. During the extended description of the interactions of synapse, drugs, nerves and technology, it becomes clear that both Deke and Tiny are drug-addled, screwed-up veterans of American wars in South America, Chile, Bolivia, both – seemingly – shot down and damaged, before ending up on the underside of Yank society, hanging round Greyhound stations with the other vets and losers.

As the first full flush of victory, and the drug, begins to wear off, Deke realises all the other liggers disapprove of the way he’s destroyed Tiny. Flying the digital planes was all Tiny had keeping him together. Having lost, he is crushed. Plus Deke remembers having ruined Nance’s life, to steal the drug which meant so much to him. The story ends in a mood of complete desolation.

Pattern recognition

The characteristic protagonists are men, young men – 22, 24, 28.

They take drugs – amphetamine, cocaine, and a variety of invented future drugs such as ‘hype’. A lot of the characters hang out in bars and drink to excess.

Old or young, they are often damaged – like Korosov with his shattered body, or Automatic Jack with his prosthetic arm, or Tiny Montgomery stuck in his wheelchair, or Lise with some degenerative disease which requires her to be supported by an exoskeleton. Or psychologically damaged like the receivers Toby and Charmian, or Deke and Tiny, the war veterans.

Most of the stories feature a young woman, generally thin, great figure, great boobs, but able to hold her own on the street, epitomised by Molly with the razor nails, or the mystery alien woman in The Belonging Kind, Sandii, and Rikki.

Generally, the young, lowlife, criminal male protagonist carries a torch for this cyberbabe. Generally, she leaves and breaks his heart and he spends a lot of time raking over the reasons why. Some of the stories are written more or less as letters, directly addressing this woman, who leaves, dumps, drops the writer: e.g. Rikki at the end of Burning Chrome, or Sandii in New Rose Hotel, or Lise in The Winter Market.

The male protagonists are generally criminals, most often computer hackers – Jack and Bobby the hackers in Chrome, Johnny Mnemonic who runs off with someone else’s data, Deke the thief, the kidnapping (corporate extraction) experts in New Rose Hotel – and the stories recurrent focus is on lowlife, criminal milieus, gangs, drug dealers, ninjas, assassins, all written up in fabulously street-smart, tech-savvy, turbo-charged prose.

Other William Gibson reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on March 11, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Adventure, America, Science Fiction, Short stories
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on March 11, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/03/11/burning-chrome-william-gibson/