by Neil Gaiman
Like it or not, and when it came out some people did and some people didn’t, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is a love story, and the novel puts an Earth back for there to be a love story on. Underneath all the glitter, Arthur and Fenchurch, and the unlikely circumstances of their meeting, their love and the travails thereof, is the true subject of the book.
And as we grow older our reading of books changes. As a young man, writing a book about Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I remember picking up on the awkwardness of chapter 25, and Douglas’s rhetorical question as to whether or not Arthur Dent has . . .
“. . . spirit? Has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?”
Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter, which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.
I took it, at the time, as Douglas’s contempt for and discomfort with his audience, and was uncomfortable with it. Rereading it a quarter of a century later, I found myself reading those paragraphs as worried bluster, as if Douglas was scared that he was out of his depth, and was trying to respond to critics or to friends ahead of time. I still suspect that, had there been time to rewrite, to rethink, to revise, that strange breaking of the fourth wall and the author-reader compact might never have happened.
I do not think it would have been a better book for not having been finished in a hotel bedroom, while Sonny Mehta watched videos in the room next door. After all, it is part of its charm that So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish reads as if it has been not so much plotted as stumbled upon or backed into. It is surrealist in the way that only a book extracted from the author without pause for inspection, for second thoughts or thousandth thoughts, can be. Characters appear and fade, dreamlike. Reality is frangible. The novel circles one event: a couple making love naked in the clouds, in perfect flying magical dream-sex, an event that is practically a poem.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish has, beneath the elegant veneer, the simplest, easiest, most traditional of plots: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl, makes love to her in the clouds and sets off with her to find God’s Final Message to His Creation. And does. After all, for a book suffused from start to finish with gloom and melancholia, a book in which the universe itself is fundamentally perverse, when it is not actually malicious, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is often peculiarly upbeat: chapter 18, for example, gives us, triumphantly, something unseen in the Hitchhiker’s universe until now: transient and barely recognizable, but it’s there: joy.
He hadn’t realised that life speaks with a voice to you, a voice that brings you answers to the questions you continually ask of it, had never consciously detected it or recognized its tones till it now said something it had never said to him before, which was “Yes.”
* * *
This was my introduction to Pan Books’ 2009 reissue of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
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Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones
Don’t read this introduction.
Read the book first.
I’m going to talk, in general terms, about the end of this book, and I’m going to talk about Diana Wynne Jones, and they intertwine (one made the other, after all), and it’ll be better for all of us if you’ve read the book before you read my introduction. It’s out of order and jumbled up, but that can’t be helped.
If you need an introduction before you start reading, here’s one: This is the story of the Dog Star, Sirius, who is punished for a crime by being incarnated as a real dog, here on Earth. It’s a detective story, and an adventure; it’s a fantasy, and sometimes it’s science fiction, and then it breaks all the rules by twining myth into the mix as well, and does it so well that you realize that really, there aren’t any rules. It’s an animal story for anyone who has ever had, or wanted, a pet—or a human story for any animal that has ever wanted a person. It’s funny, and it’s exciting and honest, and it has some sad bits too.
If you read it, you’ll like it.
Trust me. Come back when you’ve read the book.
* * *
Welcome back.
Diana Wynne Jones wrote some of the best children’s books that have ever been written. She started writing them with Wilkins’ Tooth (a.k.a. Witch’s Business) in 1973, and she continued writing them until she died in March 2011. She wrote about people, and she wrote about magic, and she wrote both of them with perception and imagination, with humor and clearness of vision.
We met in 1985, at a British Fantasy Convention, and we met before the convention started because we had both got there early, so I introduced myself, and I told her that I loved her books, and we were friends that quickly and that easily, and we stayed friends for over a quarter of a century. She was a very easy person to stay friends with, smart and funny and wise and always sensible and honest.
At her best, Diana’s stories feel real. The people, with their follies and their dreams, feel as real as the magic does. In this book, she takes you inside the head of someone learning to be a dog, and it is real, because the people are real, and the cats are real, and the voice of the sunlight feels real as well.
Her books are not easy. They don’t give everything up on first reading. If I am reading a novel by Diana Wynne Jones to myself, I expect to have to go back and reread bits to figure everything out. She expects you to be bright: she has given you all the pieces, and it is up to you to put them together.
Dogsbody isn’t easy. (It’s not hard, either. But it’s not easy.) It begins in the middle, at the end of a trial. Sirius, the Dog Star, is being tried in a court of his peers. It’s five pages of science fiction, and just as we’re getting used to it we are thrust, like Sirius, into the mind, what there is of it, of a newborn puppy, and we are in a dog’s-eye-view look at the world.
The magic of Dogsbody is that it’s a book about being a dog. And it’s a book about being a star. It’s a love story, and Diana Wynne Jones wrote very few love stories, and normally in those she wrote, the love was flawed and imperfect. But the love of this dog for this girl, and of this girl for her dog, is a perfect and unconditional thing, and we know this is true as soon as we meet Kathleen. We learn about her life—the politics of the family she’s in, and the greater politics that put her there.
Had Diana simply written a story about Kathleen and her dog from the dog’s point of view, one that felt as right as this one does, that would have been an achievement, but she does so much more than that: she creates a whole cosmology of effulgences—creatures who inhabit stars, or, perhaps, who are stars. There is something called a Zoi that must be found before Sirius runs out of time. Then she adds the Wild Hunt, the hounds of Annwn, the Celtic underworld, to the tale, while never losing sight of the humanity at the heart of it.
I remember reading Dogsbody to my youngest daughter, almost ten years ago.
When I finished it, she didn’t say very much. Then she looked at me and put her head on one side and said, “Daddy? Was that a happy end? Or a sad one?”
“Both,” I told her.
“Yes,” she said. “That was what I thought. I was really happy, but it made me want to cry.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “Me too.”
It also made me try to figure out why and how Diana had made the ending work so well, triumphant and heartbreaking at the same time. I wanted to be able to do that.
Three weeks ago, I was in England, in Bristol, in a hospice, which is a place that provides care for people who are going to die. I sat beside Diana Wynne Jones’s bed.
I felt very alone, and very helpless. Watching someone you care for die is hard.
And then I thought of this introduction. I had been looking forward to writing it, looking forward to talking to Diana about the book, and now it would never happen. I thought, If Diana was a star, I wonder which star she would be, and I imagined her shining in the night sky, and I was comforted.
Once, long ago, people thought that heroes were placed in the
night sky, as stars or as constellations, after their death. Diana Wynne Jones was my hero: a brilliant writer who wrote satisfying book after satisfying book for generations of readers; the kind of writer whose work will be remembered and loved forever, and who was as funny and smart and honest and wise in person as she was on the page. She will shine for a long time to come.
(My friend Peter Nicholls, who was Diana’s friend too, told me that he thought she could be Bellatrix, the Female Warrior, who is the star in the constellation Orion’s left shoulder, and I think that is a fine suggestion. Diana was a warrior, even if her weapon was not a sword.)
This is one of her best books, although many of her books are good, and all of them are different in their own respective ways. I hope it made you happy and sad.
* * *
This is the introduction to Dogsbody, by Diana Wynne Jones, and was written in 2011.
* * *
Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore
One measures a circle starting anywhere, said Alan Moore quoting Charles Fort, at the beginning of his exploration of Victorian society, From Hell. The circle here is temporal, and the circle is geographical. It is a circle made of black dogs and November fires, of dead feet and severed heads, of longing and loss and lust. It is a circle that will take you several miles and six thousand years.
I am sitting in a room in the Netherlands, in an anachronistic Victorian castle, writing an introduction to a book called Voice of the Fire, by Alan Moore. It is not the best introduction to this book, of course. The best introduction is the final chapter of the book, written in a smoky room in November 1995 by Alan Moore in the voice of Alan Moore, dry and funny and much, much too smart for our own good, written in a room piled with the books he has used as research, written as a final act of magic and faith.
One measures a circle starting anywhere. Not, of course, everywhere. One circle, one place. This is Northampton’s story, after all.
If this were a linear narrative we would follow Northampton, voice by voice, head to head and heart to heart, from a stopping place in a pigpen for a half-witted youth, through Ham Town to a bustling medieval town to now. But the narrative, like the town, is only linear if you want it to be, and if you expect to get a prize for getting to the end you’ve already lost. It’s a carousel ride, not a race, a magical history tour, no more evolutionary than it is revolutionary, in which the only prizes are patterns and people and voices, severed heads and lamed feet, black dogs and crackling November flames which repeat like the suits of a deranged tarot deck.
When the book was published, in 1996, it made less impression on the world than it should have: it was a paperback original, which began, with no explanation, with the personal narrative of a half-witted man-child, at the end of the Stone Age—his mother has died, his nomadic tribe has abandoned him, he will face the evil and trickery of those smarter than he is (everyone is smarter than he is), and he will also discover love, and learn what a lie is, and the fate of the pig in the Hobman’s hoghouse. He will also tell his story in the most idiosyncratic narrative since Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (or, perhaps, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing story “Pog”), using a tiny vocabulary, the present tense, and an inability to tell dreams from reality. It is not the easiest of starting points, although it is a tour de force, and it sets up all the elements that will recur through the book. The shagfoal are here, huge black dogs that run in dreams and darkness, and the hair severed from the dead head of the woman beneath the bridge, and the foot of the boy’s mother protruding from her grave, and the final, heartbreaking bonfire. It is November, somewhere near the day that will come to be known as Guy Fawkes Night, when, to this day, effigies are burned on bonfires while children watch.
Some of the joy in this book lies in watching a master storyteller take the voices of the dead as his own: the nameless psychopathic girl who visits the town-tattooed Hob, with her stolen name and stolen necklace of copper, could be coiling through a Bronze Age detective story; her comeuppance is another burning on another bonfire, one unexpected and cruel and appropriate. The girl is as dangerous, and as certain of her own intelligence and superiority, as a traveling underwear salesman, who will make his own sacrificial bonfire on Guy Fawkes Night, of his car and his sad life—he talks to us in the voice of a chipper spiv, lying to us and to himself the while, and for a moment we get a glimpse of Moore as an English Jim Thompson, and the outcome, like the outcome for one of Thompson’s characters, is never in any doubt. A Roman detective, here to investigate a counterfeiting ring, his brain and body being eaten by lead poisoning from the lead-lined Roman aqueducts (our word plumber, of course, comes from the Latin for “one who works with lead”), learns that lead is poisoning the empire in another way. The head is that of the emperor, stamped on a circular coin. The circle will be measured and compared and found wanting.
Assume, while you read, that the history is good history. Moore’s suggestion for the secret of the Templars may not be the truth (nothing in this book is true, not in the way you’re thinking, even if it happened) but it fits with the facts (giving us another severed head, along with Northampton’s Templar church), just as Frances Tresham’s poor head gives us his history along with his life. The stories are boxes that contain mysteries—most of which are unresolved, while all solutions we are given open the door to larger problems and difficulties. Or to put it another way, Voice of the Fire is truth, of a kind, even if its truths are fictional and historical and magical, and so the explanations one gets are always partial and unsatisfactory, the stories, as with the stories of our lives, are unexplained and incomplete.
It is a pleasure to read, and to reread. Start where you like: the beginning and the end are both good places, but a circle begins anywhere, and so does a bonfire.
Do not trust the tales, or the town, or even the man who tells the tales. Trust only the voice of the fire.
* * *
This was my introduction to the 2003 edition of Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire. It was the first thing I wrote after a bout of meningitis, and I remember how scared I was to put words to paper again.
* * *
Art and Artifice by Jim Steinmeyer
Over a decade ago, I found myself invited to a “retreat,” at which several great minds in their respective fields—futurologists, cyberneticists, musicians and suchlike—and, inexplicably, me were gathered together to discuss the future, imagine the way things would change in the years ahead. We got some stuff right and lots of things wrong. One of the other people there was Jules Fisher, who really is one of the top people in his field, that of theatrical lighting, and a former magician, and we wound up talking about magic and theater. Some months later, out of the blue, he sent me a copy of Art and Artifice, in its original limited-print-run form, and I am still grateful.*
There is a magic to illusion. It’s the magic you get sitting in the audience watching the girl (or the donkey) vanish or fly, from watching someone walk through a wall or produce a hatful of coins from the air. Your disbelief is suspended, the natural order of things is changed, the world is, for a moment, reimagined. And that thrill is too easily punctured by explanation—someone who has just seen, and been awed by, a miracle will feel cheated and cheapened by seeing it revealed as a trick, part optical illusion, part sliding panel, part bald-faced lie. It’s why magicians guard their secrets, get huffy and upset when anyone reveals anything; they don’t want it to take the magic away.
But there is another magic, equally as valid, and it’s the awe of understanding how something was done. The sheer giddy delight at mechanics, at the way that human intellect and imagination can be employed to dupe or trick or befuddle an audience, the intersection of science and showmanship and the power of the imagination. The way that a cliché like “They do it with mirrors” barely begins to cover what someone like Charles Morritt actually did. It’s the point where “How it was done” becomes, not the secret of magic, but part of a different language entirely. And nobody describes that ingen
uity, the delight of putting it together combined with the aesthetics of invention, better than Jim Steinmeyer.
Penn and Teller have a routine called “Liftoff for Love,” where Teller is put into a cabinet, the cabinet is broken into sections and moved across the stage, the head section is opened to reveal Teller’s head still inside, and it’s reassembled again. It’s the sort of illusion that used to turn up on TV when there wasn’t anything else on. Then they do it again, with a transparent set, and you watch Teller shooting through trapdoors, scooting back and forth beneath the stage, popping his head up once again, like a man in a maniacal ballet, and it becomes utterly magical—the energy, the deviousness, the work that goes into the illusion is more impressive than the illusion itself.
This book is like that.
This book of essays is not a book for people who want to know How It Was Done, as much as it is a book for those who want to know Why Anyone Would Want to Do It in the First Place. It’s a book about the joy of the chase. This is Steinmeyer at his best, on the trail of a long-forgotten illusion the secret of which an Edwardian magician took to his grave, figuring one clue out from the writings of someone who looked without seeing or wrote without thinking, another clue from half-an-anecdote in a book of reminiscences, taking his knowledge of the history and technology of magic, and then making the process of the illusion, the backstage stuff with half-bricks and pipes and gaffer tape, become even more magical than the illusion itself.
With Hiding the Elephant Steinmeyer took the public on a journey through the history of theatrical magic. Art and Artifice is a backstage tour; it’s the perfect book for those who appreciate detective work and the thrill of the chase, those of us who are excited by the description of Devant’s Mascot Moth or Morritt’s Donkey and wish we could have been there then to marvel and exult and to wonder how the hell it was done. The descriptions are clear, the mysteries excellently unraveled. Steinmeyer’s combination of enthusiasm and erudition is a joy.
