An unacceptable state of affairs

Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached a defining moment in British politics.

Actually, let me revise that opening sentence; we reached the point some time ago, but we didn't notice it. Petty political posturing has now got more place in our politics than trying to do good. Ignoring the facts is acceptable so long as it's covered by a political attack.

If anyone hasn't seen the Observer article by Nick Cohen, I'd advise them to head over to the Guardian website and read it. For those pressed for time, Save The Children has launched an appeal to raise £500,000 for needy children in Britain, and has found itself under attack from Conservatives and their supporting newspapers.

It's the first time the charity has launched such an appeal in living memory, and it's asking only to raise the money for the essentials - 'a hot meal, blankets, a warm bed'. That they even have to launch such an appeal raises serious questions about the way this country is going. But to then attack the campaign as obscene on grounds that the chief executive of Save The Children has left-wing political links goes beyond the pale.

At the very least, the government should be conducting a serious investigation into the decline in living standards. We have people visiting an ever-growing number of food banks (and not just the unemployed - with wages frozen and benefits for working families cut, more and more employed families can't afford to feed themselves), a state of affairs associated more with post-Wall Street Crash America and the Great Depression than twenty-first century Britain. Child poverty - cut by almost a million under the last Labour government - is increasing exponentially. In Yorkshire, one in three children has gone hungry in recent months. And all Conservative MPs do is sneer and make political attacks, when they should be using the power they have to do something.

This government doesn't care about the people of this country. The rank and file of the nation could be dying in the streets and all the people in charge would care about would be lining their own pockets and facilitating the fraudulent funding of their pet projects.

I'm going to write to my MP. I don't expect a response (not least because he spends more time in court working as a defence barrister in serious sexual cases than in Westminster), but I'll be writing all the same, to both his Westminster office and his chambers in Leeds. I hope I won't be alone.

Railsea

China Miéville would appear to have a thing for trains and ships.

The evidence is clear, m'lud. Iron Council had an eponymous train that gave New Crobuzon hope against the totalitarian regime in power there. It wasn't a bit-part player. It formed the crux of the whole novel. And then there's Iron Council's predecessor in Bas-Lag, The Scar. The floating city, Armada, gave us a memorable setting made up of thousands of lashed-together ships. Like the Iron Council, Armada was a hotbed of political scheming and misdirection all based around a mode of transportation.

And Railsea combines the two.

In Railsea, trains are talked about in nautical terms. It's a world without oceans, but with a rich and varied world. We have the railsea itself, an inhospitable land punctuated by habitable islands, where burrowing megafauna dominate and humans need to travel the rails of the railsea to get from place to place. Sham Yes ap Soorap is a doctor's assistant aboard the Medes, a moletrain that goes to railsea to hunt the megafauna. And what follows from the blockbuster opening is an old-fashioned sea adventure story, complete with pirates, mythology, wild battles with impossible creatures... and a distinct lack of water.

I like China Miéville. Most people will already have twigged that. In the last two years I've read all the Bas-Lag novels, plus The City and the City and Embassytown. None of them has been a let-down; all of them have been phenomenal read, and all for different reasons. In its style and scope, Railsea has most in common with Bas-Lag - the grotesque beauty of another world eerily close to our own will be familiar to most of the initiated. Throw in an epic adventure where the little man takes centre stage and it becomes a must-read for Bas-Lag fans. It may not be in the same world, but there's a steampunk feel, as well as there being something a little 'off' about the setting.

Being for younger readers, all aspects of Miéville's usually verbose vocabulary are pared down. It's still a little spicy for the really young 'uns, and I think most readers under a certain age would still be daunted by the complexity of Miéville's prose, but as a stepping stone to his adult work I can't see a better option. Older readers will still love it, and I know that I will thoroughly recommend it to anyone who asks.

There's plenty I could say about the literary influences behind it - such as Moby Dick and Robinson Crusoe - but in truth you don't need to know about them to enjoy the book. It's just an added literary Easter egg.

The problem of confidence

So it's been an interesting few weeks. Here isn't the place to go into all that's happened, but it's safe to say that I'm back to square one after a week and a bit where nothing seems to have gone right. And to add insult to injury, I have a day off on Tuesday that I no longer have a plan for. If anyone fancies taking me out for a coffee in the afternoon to stop me from imploding through boredom, editing, or self-reflection, feel free.

I could write, of course. Ideas have been coming thick and fast lately, after a short break in Suffolk got the creative part of my brain working. I've completed one short story, put forward a suggestion for a collaborative project on a graphic novel, started planning a novella in my head, and started to work on another short story. After a long period off form, it feels like some progress is being made. I'm still hopeless at deciding on titles, but that's a weakness I just have to work on. But in the last week the self-reflective streak in me has dominated, thwarting my attempts to write with the little voice that tells me I'm not good enough.

If you asked members of Wrisoc whether I'm a good writer or not, I'm certain they'd reply positively. Some of that may be down to a sense of loyalty, but I certainly hope that not all of their positivity about my writing would be down purely to that. They gave me great feedback on my submission to this year's anthology after praising my two previous works I did for them highly. And the editing work they did on pieces in the past has always been good from my perspective: I've never had to make major overhauls as a result of their input.

But no amount of praise from Wrisoc will ever rid me of the whispering voices that wait for the quiet times between drafts - or sometimes even while I write. Some of the voices assert that I'm a good writer, and that I should be confident in my ability. The other voices constantly analyse my writing style and tell me that it's not what it should be, and that I should give up now. After recent events, it's the latter whisperings that surface every time I sit down to write.

The sum total of words saved this week has been nil.

Something needs to give me a kick-start. Reading Mira Grant's Feed has given me some confidence because I don't see any great difference between her style and my own, other than that mine has a more English base. Watching The West Wing is helping me to think about dialogue and quick interchanges between characters - something that's always been a problem of mine, with my dialogue often being too serious and lacking in the tempo you'd find in real-life conversation.

But without the confidence to write I'll keep on putting down a couple of hundred words and then hitting the command and 'Q' combination to come out of Word. The frustration I feel doesn't help. It contributes to the pressure I feel to produce good quality work in reasonable quantities. And it's counter-productive.

Most writers will feel this way at some point. You don't improve as a writer without being able to reflect on your writing. You can't effectively edit without seeing the flaws in your style. Sometimes we go too far. When we go through crises and feel that we've done something wrong we'll all suffer that voice being hypercritical of our writing. But I don't mind admitting that I'm really struggling to overcome my writing insecurities at the moment, or that I haven't a clue how to deal with it. Any help is always appreciated - especially if Wrisoc want to pander to my needy ego!

ECHR v The Second Amendment

The Aurora shootings have, it is fair to say, shocked the world, and sparked yet another debate about the American obsession with gun ownership. Certain segments of society over there will say I should keep my opinion to myself because I'm not American and therefore have no right to say anything about their laws and society - not something I agree with, although anything I do have to say has to be qualified by me saying any opinion formed is from the outside looking in. It's those same segments who refuse to debate whether it's right to own a gun based on their 'rights' laid down in the Constitution. I read an excellent short essay this morning on the provisions relating to the right to bear arms as laid out in the American Constitution this morning, and before  I offer my opinion on other issues I'd advise reading that. I'd also advise reading some of the reactions to that piece.

I'm going to approach the issue of American gun ownership from the perspective of an English lawyer with a background in the European Convention on Human Rights. Whilst the ECHR has no power in the US, I've always respected it as a beacon of the basic rights a human being should have, and it's high time the US looked at it and adopted at least some of its principles into their own law.

To start, I'm going to go on a tangent. The US Constitution is a document it's possible to respect from afar, but when you look at it from a modern lawyer's perspective it's easy to see how the once-peerless document is no longer what it should be. For over two centuries it has stood at the heart of US law and politics. And that's the problem: it was written over two hundred years ago. Since it was written, the world has moved on. Political forces have changed, society has developed.

There's nothing to force a change to the US Constitution. Thus we see the advantage of an unwritten constitution based on convention over a single constitutional document: flexibility. Should apparatus exist within the legislature to enable the continued development of a constitutional document - say, a court who can rule on the interpretation of provisions within the constitution and suggest amendments to the legislature - then there's not so much of a problem. But this doesn't exist in the US. Hence, we see a dusty document being clung to as sacrosanct even though the world it was relevant in passed from memory a hundred years gone.

A brief comparison is required between the ECHR and the US Constitution. One is what I would describe as a living legal document, whereas the other is a dead one. The European Court of Human Rights (our Home Secretary's favourite legal chamber) rules on interpretations; over the years, as the world has moved on, the Convention has developed with it to reflect changing values in society. It's not perfect, and will be a bone of contention for years to come with politicians, journalists, lawyers, and other commentators alike. But in its sixty-some years of existence it has already fundamentally changed in substance. The Articles themselves have remained the same, broadly speaking, but if you look closer you'll see how things have changed.

The Convention in place now is not the Convention as it was enacted in 1953. The modern Convention bans capital punishment, for one. The European Court of Human Rights has pushed through rulings that have had far-reaching effect on the reading of the ECHR - on topics such as gay rights, transsexuality, torture, the right to a fair trial, and the right to life. Recent commentators have said the ECHR has moved away from its original purpose, to which I'd say the world has moved on. This isn't a world the treaty-makers of 1950 would recognise in its values. We're a more open, more permissive society; the fundamental documents need to reflect this, and the ECHR has the mechanisms for its continued development enshrined in its fabric. This can only be a good thing.

To compare: Amendments to the US Constitution are near-impossible to force through. The courts are bound by it, and have no power to make amendments. The legislature itself needs a two-thirds majority to push an amendment through, and in over two hundred years only twenty-seven amendments have been made (the most recent of which was in 1992, and a staggering fifteen of which were made before the start of the twentieth century). The fabric of the Constitution remains as it was when it was drafted - and that includes the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms.

The mini-essay I linked to should have given you an idea of what the Second Amendment is really about, and just why it appears ludicrous that so many people should hold it as sacrosanct.

A modern human right, in the Western world, is the right to life, or the right to freedom from slavery, or from torture, or freedom of speech, or any of the others enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights. It's notable that the 'right' to bear arms doesn't appear anywhere in the ECHR. What does appear is the right to life: or, to put it more bluntly, the right guns are designed to infringe. From a ECHR-centric standpoint, the 'right' to bear arms and the right to life are mutually exclusive. And I know which is more important to my mind.

Wolves of the Calla and other thoughts

In his introduction to the Dark Tower series, Stephen King discusses being nineteen and its influence on the work that follows. He's right. It's a good age to be. Indeed, it was the age I was when I read The Gunslinger for the first time, and embarked on the quest for the Dark Tower with Roland - the perfect age to immerse myself into Mid-World, given the significance of the number in King's magnum opus.

But no man remains nineteen forever. And I turned twenty - that age of maturity and professionalism - while reading Wolves of the Calla, book 5 of The Dark Tower. Perhaps it's ironic, but what I've read since I turned twenty hasn't had the quality of what I read before that date. When I was nineteen, the number associated most closely with the Tower (alongside ninety-nine).

This isn't a review. I'm not going to assess the qualities of Wolves of the Calla like I've tried to with other books. Instead, I'm going to go through why, in my opinion, this is where The Dark Tower loses its way. If you've not read the series, I'll warn you now: I'll be talking about events that are spoilers.

Wolves of the Calla follows a plot most of us would be familiar with, because it's most clearly inspired by The Magnificent Seven (with a shout-out being made to this by Eddie Dean of New York in the next volume, Song of Susannah). Our ka-tet of Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and Oy come to the Callas, small towns dogged by raiders who take their children for purposes unknown. The ka-tet meets Father Callahan, formerly of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, and agree to defend the towns and stop the Wolves - those who raid the towns.

For almost seven hundred pages it's as good as The Dark Tower gets (Wizard and Glass aside). There's the mix of SF, horror, westerns, and fantasy that made the world so haunting and believable. It touches our own world a number of times, with characters slipping through more of the doors we saw in The Drawing of the Three. And there's the growing sense of drawing close to the Tower itself, with the whole story taking place on the threshold of End-World, where the Tower stands.

It's another slow-burn building to a climax (with pacing for the most part that worked brilliantly in Wizard and Glass - my favourite of the series), but unlike previous volumes that climax ends in disappointment. The battle with the Wolves is all over - after hundreds of pages of build-up - inside twenty rushed pages. There's no excitement there. Again, returning to Wizard and Glass: book 4 ended with a triple climax, one a thrilling battle where there's a real sense of danger to the characters, an emotional climax that leaves you shattered, and then to top it off another emotional climax that gives you a punch to the gut and makes you want to jack it in - but you have to because you're already so invested in the characters and the world. Wolves of the Calla has none of those things. We can pretty much guarantee the ka-tet's survival, and even the emotional climax and resultant cliffhanger with Eddie and Susannah falls flat and hurried.

I think it falls flat because the whole ending sequence feels cheap. The Wolves are robots, which is believable enough in Mid-World. But they carry lightsabres and grenades called 'sneetches' - and if that latter sounds familiar, I'll add that they're the Harry Potter version. It jars. It cheapens. And then there's the final punch to the gut: a novel called 'Salem's Lot by a certain Stephen King comes into the possession of the ka-tet, making Callahan realise he's a character in a book.

Whilst I'm not against a writer giving himself credit (especially after a project he's invested thirty years of his life in nears its conclusion), but the effect of this cheapens not only the whole conclusion of this book, but overshadows the whole series. Suspension of disbelief is required for immersion in another person's world; when that person reminds you that someone wrote it, the characters you've grown to love seem to become so much less than they were.

King later inserts himself into Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower as a key character. I don't think it's an act of ego, like many other writers who have put themselves in their own work; rather, it's a writer acknowledging how much the series took from him. But the effect is to go within an ace of ruining the last three books. Immersion is lost when you're reminded that a book is fiction.

It's a shame. King as a character isn't that bad. He's not a hero (far from it), and he's not painted in a positive light. But I wonder how much his inclusion is as a result of rushing through the conclusion of what should have been one of the finest fantasy series of all time following his near-fatal accident in 1999. I'll always enjoy the first four books. They were books written by a writer who wanted to write them, and who had allowed the stories to mature and tell themselves. King himself doesn't like plotting, and from Wolves of the Calla on they have the feel of a writer going against his instincts by doing just that.

However, they're still worth a read. Some people will love the final volumes. As for me, I'll always be disappointed with how they turned out, and I hope The Wind Through the Keyhole is a return to form for The Dark Tower.

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)

"The problem with death is that it's so damned permanent" - Ray Bradbury

This week saw the passing of one of the great visionaries of modern literature, and possibly the last of the great SF writers from the field's true golden age.

Ray Bradbury was a writer everyone had at least heard of, even if they hadn't actually read anything of his. I didn't read any of his work until the end of 2010, when I read Fahrenheit 451 for Law and Literature. But I knew of him and his influence. Fahrenheit 451 had been on my to-read list for upwards of two years before reading it. I'd heard of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. I knew of Bradbury's place in the pantheon of great SF writers, alongside the Isaac Asimovs and Arthur C. Clarkes of the world.

When it came to the dystopia workshop for Law and Lit, I could easily have got away with not reading anything. The other options were all books I'd read: 1984, Brave New World, and The Road. Of those, I could talk about 1984 until the cows came home from a night out in Newcastle. But instead, I chose to use it as an excuse to read Fahrenheit 451. It was a good decision.

Bradbury was never a prolific novelist. His strength lay in his short fiction, and that strength shone through in the short novel that will probably be remembered by many as his seminal work. There's a tightness to the lyrical prose that you just don't get from someone who isn't an expert short story writer. And it's a joy to read.

For anyone who doesn't know, Fahrenheit 451 is ostensibly a book about censorship. Set in a future where books are banned, Guy Montag is a fireman, responsible for burning books that people may hoard in their homes. Most entertainment in this future world is provided via the television, and is focussed on the attention-deficient masses. Bradbury himself went on record arguing that the book is about the rise of new media and its affect on reading (and, given the way things seem to be going in entertainment for the masses, I'm not going to argue with the author's interpretation of his own work). However you want to read it, Fahrenheit 451 is a thought-provoking novel that should be read at some point in a person's life - the earlier, the better.

When it came to the two-hour Monday afternoon workshop, I ended up in a group that discussed The Road (as only one of two people in the whole group of around 16 who had read it at any point, even if it had been two years previously for me) rather than Fahrenheit 451. But I was determined to read more of Bradbury's work. Earlier this year, I dipped into his short fiction for the first time. The Illustrated Man is a collection linked together by Bradbury himself, with a prologue to the collection that focusses on the Illustrated Man, who has a series of tattoos on his body which tell the the stories contained in the collection.

As a framing device, it's OK at best. But the stories it frames are far from merely acceptable. Again, there's that satisfying tightness to Bradbury's prose. His style isn't jarring like other tight, precise prose, however. It flows with lyrical abandon. Every writer should read it and take notes.

The stories themselves range broadly through the SF spectrum. But there's always a sense of bleakness to them which counters the occasional whimsy of the prose and characters superbly. It can be seen in 'The Veldt', initially a charming tale seemingly about the fantasies of children which takes on a darker edge. This isn't the cosy 1950s SF people seem to expect - it's far more compelling than that. And it gives me a spur to pick up more of his short fiction (once I'm caught up with Interzone and the anthologies I've started and haven't finished).

So where does Bradbury rate for me amongst the great SF writers? Better than Vonnegut? Better than Asimov? To look at his works as a whole, it's worth noting that he was prolific, but never as prolific - or over as long a period - as Isaac Asimov, and his technological and scientific influence never reached as far as Arthur C. Clarke. Bradbury's career had a distinct peak in the 1950s, unlike other writers of his time who produced cornerstone works of SF over several decades (again, just look at Clarke - Childhood's End in the 1950s, 2001 in the 1960s, Rendezvous With Rama in the 1970s, and The Songs of Distant Earth in the 1980s). But he still stands as one of SF's greats, the last of the Golden Age writers to pass on to the publishing house in the sky. He'll be missed, even as his works are cherished by future generations.

The Gunslinger

My first thought was, he lied with every word,

That hoary cripple, with malicious eye

Askance to watch the workings of his lie

On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford

Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored

Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

-Childe Rolande to the Dark Tower Came, Robert Browning

I can think of only a handful of openings to books that are so memorable that they stick with me for more than a few hours. The Day of the Triffids is one. Dune (or at least the chapter heading) is another. And having had a flick through the first few pages of Endymion, I think that could be another.

There can be no doubt that the opening of The Gunslinger is among these ranks, just for the questions it raises in the mind of the reader. 'The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed'. Who is the man in black? Who is the gunslinger? Why is the man in black fleeing? Why does the gunslinger follow? It's the perfect example of an opening hook.

In its way, the opening line embodies The Gunslinger in its entirety as an opening hook. For this is the opening volume of The Dark Tower, Stephen King's crowning achievement. It's a seven-volume epic spanning much of time and space. It stands at the very heart of King's work, acting as the lynchpin of all his creations. Few of King's works can be said to be essential reads, but if you've ever picked up any of his works you should give The Dark Tower a go. And The Gunslinger is where you'll be starting.

Compared to what follows, The Gunslinger is a slim volume. At 236 pages, it's hardly heavy going (by comparison, Wizard and Glass, book 4, weighs in at a hefty 840 pages). But it packs in plenty. Editions available now are that bit thicker than those available before 2003, when King embarked on a tidy-up and expansion of the book. It's supposedly a bit easier to read - King himself has stated that the original version is 'difficult' to read, and urges readers to give the second book a go where the story 'really finds its voice' - and the discrepancies with later books have been tidied up. For instance, Farson is no longer a town, but a man, as it was in Wizard and Glass.

He's right in saying that the tone of the story is a little different to the volumes which follow. But if he's being honest, he'll have to look at it and admit that, in the context of the journey as a whole, it works. The Gunslinger starts with Roland of Gilead, the last gunslinger, pursuing the man in black on a solitary quest for the Dark Tower, which stands as a nexus of time and space in the heart of all realities. He's been alone for a long time, though quite how long for we're never told. His former friends and allies are long dead, and he appears to have sacrificed his humanity for his quest for the Tower. There's a distance between Roland and the rest of humanity because of this solitude, one which comes across nicely because of the way the story is written. King's style isn't his usual colloquial, easily-relatable style. It's tighter (betraying the novel's origins as several short stories originally published in Fantasy and Science Fiction), whilst also being oddly dreamy. Told from Roland's perspective, a transparent wall is erected between him and the rest of the world.

What really drives home Roland's distance from - and indifference to - the rest of humanity happens in the opening part. He comes to the town of Tull, a place the man in black recently left. The man in black left a surprise for Roland: that of a man resurrected after succumbing to his addiction to devil-grass. In Tull, Roland encounters a woman who becomes his lover - not that he's any closer to her than he is to the rest of humanity - and a woman who preaches hatred. The man in black has set the trap for the gunslinger, and the trap is eventually sprung, leading to Roland dispassionately shooting down every person in the town. There's no remorse on Roland's part. The horror on the reader's part isn't that Roland gunned down every man, woman and child of Tull; it's that he does it without emotion. At this point, he's little other than a monster in a man's clothing.

It's only when Roland meets Jake, a boy from New York mysteriously transported to Roland's world , that Roland's walls start to come down. With human company, he becomes relatable, just as he is relatable as a flawed but oh-so-human teenager in the flashbacks to his youth which start to intersperse the journey. But he's still the same gunslinger who killed Tull. Events later in the book inspire the same horror - the same feeling of Roland being a complete monster - as the death of Tull.

But Roland's inhumanity is somewhat suited to the book, which is ultimately the scene-setter for the other six volumes. In setting up Roland as something both less than and more than a man it provides scope for the changes that would come about in future volumes. But it's also nicely self-contained. The Gunslinger works as a standalone novel in a way none of the others can manage - partly because they follow on, but also because this alone of all the Dark Tower novels has a distinct beginning, middle and end.

So where does The Gunslinger rate for me? Of all the Dark Tower novels, it's perhaps the only one I'm prepared to dip in and out of. I like the distance King manages to put between Roland and the reader because it makes the action so much more compelling. His motives remain a mystery, and therefore we're always left wondering what he'll do next. He seems to flit between humanity and monstrosity (always veering to the monster side of things when it comes to others and big decisions). And that's without mentioning the setting and the pseudo-Wild West feel to the whole thing. There's this constant feeling of a world similar to ours, but just dislocated enough from reality that it jars and becomes unsettling.

 With the exception of Wizard and Glass, The Gunslinger is my favourite Dark Tower novel. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to read a modern fantasy series with a difference.