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Australians are quite notoriously stupid and selfish people. I make a habit of reading the letters in The West Australian, to angry up the blood, and over the last few weeks many of them have been harping on about how we should cancel foreign aid to assist the Queensland floods. This is not uncommon for the typical West letter writer, who is usually an octogenerian Pom who fled the United Kingdom when they started letting darkies in, so I was unsurprised.
What has surprised me is the rabid vitriol with which Australians have met the government’s proposed tax levy. Apparently people are quite happy to feel sorry for Queenslanders as long as they don’t have to do anything, but are absolutely unwilling to part with a miniscule fragment of their annual income to help rebuild. Tony Abbott, the leering populist religious zealot who will no doubt be our next prime minister, is going on and on and on about how it’s yet another “great big tax” that will “hurt Australian families.”
I challenge anyone to show me one family – literally one – that will be “hurt” by the levy. Shit, show me one person.
If you are earning under $55,000 a year, you don’t pay the levy at all. If you earn between $55,000 and $65,000, you pay 48 cents a week – or 6 cents per day. If you earn between $65,000 and $80,000, you pay $1.44 a week – or 20 cents per day. If you earn between $80,000 and $150,000, you pay $2.88 a week – or 41 cents per day. If you earn over $150,000 you pay $14.42 a week, roughly the amount you tip your Filipino maid.
I know maths is boring, but you need to stop and think about or you’ll look like a fucking nong – like, for example, the Sydney Morning Herald did when it published a whiny story about the poor Aussie battler family that will now be doing it tough because of the minimal contribution required to help families further north who have lost everything they own (including, sometimes, their loved ones).
Mr Matias works in IT and Mrs Matias has a home business making personalised luggage tags. Their combined income means the levy will cost them about $600.
This is because they are in the highest tax bracket, i.e. they are among the wealthiest 0.1% of people in the world. And yet the Herald would have us crying sweet salty tears over their terrible plight, perhaps enough to drown out the tears of those Queenslanders who returned to their homes to find them still knee-deep in mud, their possessions destroyed or washed away.
This bears clarification: people are complaining about a tax to help their countrymen who have lost everything – a tax that will, for the average income earner, add up to less than two fucking dollars a week. If that’s enough to obliterate your finances and drive your family over the brink into miserable poverty, then your razor-thin income margins likely should have been addressed earlier.
Abbott’s declaration that “mates help each other – they don’t tax each other” beggared belief, as though he thought the funds raised would be going towards a few extra bottles of cognac at the Lodge, but he quickly amended it to: “Mates choose to help each other. They aren’t forced to help each other.” Many people say they have already donated to the flood relief effort and resent being forced to donate on top of it. This is bizarre to me, particularly in light of the calculations above (again: less than two fucking dollars a week). This is why it seems, to me, to be a facade argument along the lines of “we don’t want boat people coming here because they jump the queue/leaky boats put their lives in danger.” I suspect that the grim reality is that most Australians are happy to give lip service to flood victims, but with squeal like stuck pigs if expected to make any kind of actual, tangible donation, no matter how negligible and unnoticeable it is – like, say, LESS THAN TWO FUCKING DOLLARS A WEEK. FUCK YOU AUSTRALIA, YOU NATION OF WHINY SELF-ENTITLED SHITHEADS.
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende (1979) 445 p.
Most of us have seen the movie, but I don’t believe the book was ever published in Australia. I read a copy in my primary school library (must have slipped through the net) and then never ever saw a copy again, until I picked this one up in London.
Bastian Baltazhar Bux, a fat and bullied schoolchild (whom I visualised as Uter from the Simpsons, since the book is German) steals the Neverending Story from a bookstore and hides out in his school’s attic to read it. It tells a tale of how Fantastica, a fabulous land of magical creatures and marvels, is slowly being consumed by the Nothing: a growing black cancer that causes things to simply stop existing. Atreyu, a ten-year old warrior from a tribe of Native American analogues, is sent on a quest to discover the source of this terrible scourge. Along the way he’s lucky enough to make friends with FALKOR THE MOTHERFUCKING LUCKDRAGON, easily the most iconic and awesome creation of the series.
Reading along, Bastian is disturbed to find many apparent references to himself in the text, and (I doubt I’m giving anything away) eventually finds himself sucked into it. The second half of the book is considerably different from the first, with the Nothing defeated, and instead focuses on Bastian’s own struggles in Fantastica. Despite being more character-driven and thematically deeper (the battle for the Ivory Tower, pitting Bastian against Atreyu, is particularly good) I think the first half is more engrossing.
I recall loving The Neverending Story when I was in Year 5, and it’s definitely a great book for kids, but I don’t think it holds up well for a returning adult. This doesn’t mean it’s not a good book; I’ve just outgrown the target audience for it. It’s more a fairytale than a fantasy, full of bizarre people and places that display great imagination on Ende’s part, but which don’t fit together as a cohesive whole – a world of whimsy and imagination rather than a fully realised world. That’s exactly what it’s intended to be, of course – the value of imagination, stories and creation is a major theme of the book. As I said before, the best way to describe it is as a fairytale rather than a fantasy.
A good book, but one that I’d rather read to my hypothetical son than one that I’d read for myself.
The Scar by China Mieville (2002) 795 p.
I read Perdido Street Station in 2009 and gave it what you might call a “conditional thumbs up.” It was a first novel, after all. The biggest problems it suffered from were sluggish pacing and purple prose, but it presented an interesting enough world that it was still worth my time.
I was hoping that The Scar would have addressed these issues, but it hasn’t, really. Mieville still likes to slather up the page with excessive description (particularly with characters’ thoughts) and the book is less than a hundred pages shorter than Perdido Street Station. To its credit, it does get the story started much faster, but then it slows down dramatically towards the end. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse.
The novel opens with the main character, Bellis Coldwine, fleeing her home city of New Crobuzon after being wanted for questioning by the dictatorial government. Her ship is attacked by pirates and taken to a floating city called Armada, which is comprised of hundreds of ships lashed together, and which is travelling towards some unknown destination. Bellis is treated well, assimilated into Armada’s society and given a job, but is told that the “press-ganged” can never leave the city. The prisoners aboard her own ship gladly enter Armadan life, but she is less enthused, in a city that is more equal yet less free than New Crobuzon.
The Scar is a clever thing, a seafaring adventure that takes us to new locales (unlike Perdido Street Station, which took place entirely within New Crobuzon) while still giving Mieville room for his true passion: a city to construct, explore, and bring to life. Armada is arguably a rip-off of Neal Stephenson’s floating city in Snow Crash, but it doesn’t take a genius to come up with the idea, and it’s what you do with it that counts. Armada is just as fascinating and well-developed as New Crobuzon, and by the end of the book it feels like a living, breathing city.
I think what I enjoyed most about The Scar was that it takes place elsewhere, injects a bit of variety, shows us more of the intriguing world of Bas-Lag than just New Crobuzon. We visit Salkrikaltor, the half-submerged city of the crays, and the island of the mosquito-people (one of the highlights of the book), and hear about plenty more simply from the stories and backgrounds of all the disparate people who have been drawn together on Armada. Mieville is excellent at world-building, and slips details in here and there, never just telling the reader things outright. This makes for a deeper and more fascinating fantasy world than authors who treat their novels like encyclopedias. Bas-Lag is certainly one of the most original fantasy worlds in contemporary literature, and even if Mieville was a truly awful writer (which he isn’t, not by a long shot) he’d still have my respect for breaking free of the Tolkien tradition and doing something interesting.
The characters of The Scar, unfortunately, are not a sympathetic bunch, but rather a motley collection of whiny bitches and cockney idiots. The character I ended up liking the most – and even this is a stretch – was the vampire lord Brucolac, one of the rulers of Armada, whose role in the story is similar to that of Moby-Dick‘s Starbuck. (There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.) I recall Perdido Street Station having much more likeable characters.
The other thing that irked me, which was also a problem in his first book, is Mieville’s habit of telling rather than showing – particularly when it comes to characters and dialogue. Some of the conversations in this book are so littered with adverbs and excessive emotion that, were they translated to stage, they would be a textbook example of bad acting and hammy melodrama.
I found myself wondering why this bothered me so much, along with his florid prose, given that it’s par for the course in most fantasy. I resolved that it’s because in most other respects Mieville is an above-average writer. His books are much better than typical hack fantasy, but occasionally you can see through the cracks in the veneer, and it’s disconcerting.
Overall, was The Scar better than Perdido Street Station? Marginally, yes. Once again, the sheer creative genius of Mieville’s world is enough to outweigh the flaws in his writing, and I’ll read some more of his books down the track.
Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve (2001) 293 p.
After re-reading The Death of Grass last year I resolved to revisit a lot of my old favourites in 2011, partly for my own enjoyment and partly so I can review them. Being one of my favourite books of all time, Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines seemed like a good starting point.
Mortal Engines is a steampunk-industrial-post-apocalyptic young adult adventure novel which should be listed in the dictionary alongside the word “swashbuckling.” It takes place thousands of years in the future when towns and cities have become mobile, roaming across the face of the planet, from enormous behemoths like London (where much of the novel takes place) to tiny sail-powered hamlets with only a few people on them. Europe has become a muddy wasteland called the “Great Hunting Ground,” as cities chase down and prey upon smaller cities and towns, dragging them inside and dismantling them for fuel, and either enslaving or assimilating their population. It’s implied that these moveable cities once served a useful purpose, “when there were all those earthquakes and volcanoes and glaciers pushing south,” but then became so ingrained in society that, for most city-dwellers, the very idea of becoming a “static settlement” or setting foot on the earth is repulsive.
This is a bold concept that always comes across as faintly ridiculous in synopsis, but Reeve is wonderful writer, and suspends our disbelief quite neatly in the opening pages, as London pursues and consumes a small mining town called Salthook.
The mining town saw the danger and turned tail, but already the huge caterpillar tracks under London were starting to roll faster and faster. Soon the city was lumbering in hot pursuit, a moving mountain of metal which rose in seven tiers like the layers of a wedding cake, the lower levels wreathed in engine smoke, the villas of the rich gleaming white on the higher decks, and above it all the cross on the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral glinting gold, two thousand feet above the ruined earth.
Traction Cities are not just an interesting idea that he has slapped down on the page. Reeve doesn’t explain how such gargantuan vehicles are possible (because, of course, they aren’t) but he provides enough gritty detail in his writing that they feel real. That is, as William Gibson pointed out long ago, the key to successful science fiction.
He fought his way out of the elevator terminus and hurried towards the Guild of Historians’ warehouse, through tubular corridors lined with green ceramic tiles and across metal catwalks high above the fiery gulfs of the Digestion Yards. Far below him he could see Salthook being torn to pieces. It looked tiny now, dwarfed by the vastness of London. Big yellow dismantling machines were crawling around it on tracks and swinging above it on cranes and clambering over it on hydraulic spider legs. Its wheels and axles had already been taken off, and work was starting on the chassis. Circular saws as big as Ferris wheels bit into the deckplates, throwing up plumes of sparks. Great blasts of heat came from furnaces and smelters, and before he had gone twenty paces Tom could feel the sweat starting to soak through the armpits of his black uniform tunic.
Following Salthook’s consumption, Tom Natsworthy, the quintessential English orphan and hero of our story, is sent down to work in the city’s Gut. Here he meets his hero Thaddeus Valentine, Head Historian and fabled adventurer of London, a friendly and charming man who is searching the eaten town for historical relics. Keen to impress his idol, and Valentine’s beautiful daughter Katherine, Tom is given the chance when an ugly scarred girl attempts to assassinate him. Tom gives chase through the Gut, corners and confronts the girl… and this is where Reeve subverts some expectations, and Tom finds himself betrayed by Valentine, pushed down a waste chute and stranded in the Out-Country with the scarred assassin, Hester Shaw.
This sets up the rest of the novel: Tom and Hester pursue London across the Great Hunting Ground, while Katherine attempts to solve the mystery of why Hester tried to kill her father, and where London is headed. Prey is becoming scarce – these engines are indeed mortal – but there are rumours that London has come into possession of some great and terrible weapon.
At just under 300 pages, this is not a long book, but it is epic – a voyage by land and air and sea, across plains and swamps and oceans and mountains. There are pirate towns, a flying city, Himalayan mountain fortresses, dashing spies, cyborg warriors, weapons of mass destruction and all-round swashbuckling adventure. There are, most of all, airships! And unlike most steampunk authors, Reeve actually has a good reason for including them, since how else would you travel between moving cities? A nice touch is the wonderfully quirky names his ships often have, like Iain M. Banks’ Culture ships: the 13th Floor Elevator, the Jenny Haniver, the Garden Aeroplane Trap.
Reeve is a former illustrator, and one of his greatest gifts as a writer is his knack for beautifully visual prose; the David Mitchell or Michael Chabon of the young adult genre. And, while we’re on the topic of visuals, let’s take a moment to appreciate that cover: a gritty, rusty, grimy peek into a world of monstrous industrialism. Apparently Peter Jackson is currently working on filming Mortal Engines. I’m almost positive that means live-action rather than animation, which is a shame.
I first read Mortal Engines in early high school, and it’s clearly aimed at an audience of 10 – 15 year olds, but I still enjoyed it as much as the first time around. Mortal Engines contains just as much character development and thematic depth as any proper novel (certainly more than many fantasy or sci-fi novels written for adults); the only difference is that he conveys his characters’ thoughts with a few perfect, concise sentences, rather than lengthy introspection (unlike, say, China Mieville). Nor does he limit the death toll because of his readers’ tender age; quite a few major characters are killed, and entire cities destroyed, and even that is nothing compared to what happens in the later books.
An exceptionally well-written and endlessly creative adventure tale, the kind of thing you would read under the covers with a flashlight when you were a kid, but which is no less enjoyable as an adult. I look forward to revisiting the rest of the books in the series: Predator’s Gold, Infernal Devices and A Darkling Plain. Taken as a whole, the series is easily in my top ten list of favourite books – maybe even my top five.
On a final note, Mortal Engines was based on a short story called Urbivore, which is available online. The prose is a little stilted and it’s clearly the work of a younger man, but it serves as a decent introduction to Reeve’s writing style, and to the fabulous world of Traction Cities.
Mortal Engines at The Book Depository
Jupiter’s Travels by Ted Simon (1979) 363 p.
I heard about this book, as I’m sure many people did, from Long Way Round. Ted Simon’s epic four-year motorcycle trip around the world in the 1970s was the inspiration for Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman to take off on their own trip, although Simon did it with considerably less experience and equipment and no support crew. He left London in 1973, rode across six continents and fifty-one countries, and returned home in 1977.
Simon had always been a writer and a journalist, not a rider (in fact, he had neither bike nor license when he decided to ride around the world) and this motorcycle adventure is considerably more verbose and ruminating than Ewan and Charley’s Eurasian jaunt. Long Way Round felt like hearing stories at the pub; Jupiter’s Travels is unmistakeably a traditional travelogue, full of deep reflections about cultures and societies and religion and politics. This makes it a more difficult book to read, which is not a bad thing; Simon seems to come up with genuinely interesting and truthful observations more often than most travel writers, who get caught up in the exoticism of it all and act as though every sunset, conversation and moment of reflection is a grand epiphany (although Simon is not always immune to this either).
Spanning a four-year voyage but with less than four hundred pages, Jupiter’s Travels shows some days in close detail, while at other times granting entire nations only a sentence or two (most countries in Central America) or skipping over them entirely (Afghanistan, Iran). This stands out at times, but for the most part Simon handles it fairly well, never giving anything of importance short shrift. His arrival in Brazil, where he is arrested on suspicion of being a spy and undergoes a terrible imprisonment, is given nearly fifty pages, and is one of the most interesting parts of the book.
One of the disappointing parts of the book was Simon’s arrival in India, where he comes up with an odd philosophy comparing himself to the Roman god Jupiter. I don’t know what it is about India, but no place on Earth seems less appealing to me, and whether in fiction or non-fiction, I detest reading about it. I met plenty of hippies in South-East Asia who enjoyed telling me about what an amazing, spiritual place it was, but to my eyes (and from the accounts of more ordinary travellers) it looks like the filthiest place on Earth. And as an atheist, I really couldn’t care less about all the gods. But then, that’s my problem, not Ted Simon’s.
Jupiter’s Travels is, overall, a solid piece of travel fiction, though I suspect Simon’s more traditional style of travel writing might put off readers who came directly from the simple meat-and-potatoes ghostwriter of Long Way Round.
The enigma that had bothered me in Sydney was beginning to resolve itself. If Australians allowed themselves to be represented worldwide as a nation of beer-sodden boors and hysterical Amazons, it must be through sheer lack of imagination. Like most people everywhere they spent most of their time just getting by, but there was no collective dream or mythology that told them what it was they were supposed to be doing. In that respect they were far behind the Aborigines they had decimated and despised.
Yet many signs indicated that the time might not be too far away, when Australians would agree on a better reason for living than to eat a pound of beef a day. When that day came, I thought this would become one of the world’s best places to be.
The faces of the old men told me there had been something once that was lost and could be found again.
– From “Jupiter’s Travels,” by Ted Simon
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