Book Review & Analysis: Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

Our Man in Havana

by Graham Greene

       You might be inclined to think the term “intelligence agency” is an oxymoron. Graham Greene, possibly the world’s most famous author of spy novels in the English language, probably thought so when he wrote Our Man in Havana.

Jim Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, Cuba. With a name and occupation like that, you couldn’t possibly be more inconspicuous. That is probably why Wormold gets tapped to be an intelligence agent by the British secret service. But politics and international intrigues aren’t Wormold’s passion. He spends his days managing his mostly empty shop and drinking daiquiris in bars with his friend Dr. Hasselbach. What actually matters most in his life is his teenage daughter Milly. For her birthday, the demanding prima donna wants a horse and a membership at a country club so she will have a good place to stable it. Wormold is strapped for cash due to lackluster vacuum cleaner sales, but he’s a bit of a pushover and gives in without having a clear sense of how he can afford this venture.

Wormold is a mediocre man with financial troubles and this makes him easy prey when a British agent stationed in Kingston, Jamaica approaches Wormold with a solution to his problems. He railroads Wormold into accepting an assignment to run an espionage station in Havana. The task is to recruit a team of agents and pay them to gather information about any suspicious activities going on in Cuba. This is of prime importance to the British government since the 1950s were a time of political turbulence on the island and they were paranoid about the spread of communism throughout the Third World.

But none of that matters to Wormold. His preoccupation is with making easy money and he does what any ordinary man in his situation would do: he juices the fools for as much as he can. The agents he recruits are either people he made up or members of the country club who have no idea they have been hired as spies. He sends the secret service a diagram of a vacuum cleaner, telling them it is a new weapon being built in Oriente province, the hotbed of revolutionary activity since the 19^th century Cuban Wars of Independence and beyond.

Back in London, Hawthorn meets with his superior officer and instead of putting two and two together to figure out that the diagram is a prank played by Wormold the vacuum cleaner salesman, they marvel at the ingenuity of the communists and decide they need to ramp up their intelligence gathering operations in the Caribbean. Occam’s razor has failed. Wormold rakes in the cash, getting all he asks for to run his agency in Havana while the secret service expose themselves as incompetent dolts.

The story pivots when fiction collides with reality. Wormold learns that one of his made up agents named Raul has just been assassinated. Since Raul is not a real person, that means a real person named Raul, who probably had nothing to do with espionage games, got killed. The gravity of the situation hits home when Wormold realizes that the intelligence he shipped off to London has been intercepted. We never learn for sure who intercepted it or who they work for, but it is certain that Wormold’s life is in danger.

The narrative offers many possible culprits for the interception, but evidence appears to point in the direction of Dr. Hasselbacher, Wormold’s drinking buddy. We can never be sure that Hasselbacher is a spy, but he has a copy of the book Wormold is using to encode and decipher written communications between his office and the agency in London, although Hasselbacher claims he only has it for leisure reading. Hasselbacher is unusual nonetheless. In an early chapter, he has a discussion with a man in a bar in which he tells the man that he is a creation of Hasselbacher’s imagination as if the old man is having a conversation with a character he wrote into a novel. Hasselbacher therefore primes the reader for the theme of fiction intruding into reality and the consequences of that dilemma. Later on we learn that Hasselbacher has spent his life feeling guilty because he killed one man while enlisted during World War I. Throughout the novel, he expresses disillusionment with the Cold War and the games played by espionage agencies which casts doubt on him being an intelligence agent. But there are other reasons why he can’t be dismissed as innocent.

Another possibility is Segura, a captain at the Havana police department who is in charge of torturing political prisoners. He is involved in one of the novel’s subplots since he wants to marry Milly, Wormold’s teenage daughter. We learn that Segura knows everything that Wormold is up to and has a list of all the espionage agents in Cuba, something Wormold decides he needs to get ahold of in the name of duty to his agency.

Making matters worse, Wormold learns of a plot to assassinate him. He becomes suspicious of an English businessman named Carter who he encounter both at a banquet and one night when Wormold invites him out to go drinking and whoring in the sordid backstreets of Havana. It is in this second half of the novel that Wormold proves himself to be more than just an everyday man. He outsmarts both his assassin and Segura. Ultimately he humiliates the secret service when they catch on to his deceptions, figuring out that he is doing little more than exploiting them for money by making up nonsense.

Much of the novel’s meaning revolves around Wormold falling in love with Beatrice, an assistant spy who is sent to Havana to help him run his office. Initially the agency in London chooses her because she speaks French and Cubans speak Spanish so the ignoramuses decide she will be the best choice for Wormold’s secretary. Through their collaboration and conversation we learn that she doesn’t take Cold War espionage any more seriously than Wormold does. They agree that international politics are just games played by adults who are little more than children who never grew up. The big political issues aren’t what is important. What really matters is how the little people of the world run their day to day affairs, at least until the big powers intrude into their lives. That’s when action must be taken. This is Voltaire’s idea that satisfaction only comes from tending one’s own garden, but Greene adds his own twist by saying sometimes necessity calls for engagement.

This novel is a comedy in the Shakespearean sense of the word, meaning it ends with a marriage rather than a death as it would in a tragedy. The marriage of Wormold and Beatrice plays off against the failure of Segura in his pursuit of Wormold’s daughter Milly. In the latter case, Milly and Segura are linked in that they both represent facets of class consciousness and class mobility. Milly wants to rise above her station in with her pursuit of the horse and membership at the country club while Segura represents class mobility through politics. Being notorious in Cuba for torturing prisoners, Segura is an unsympathetic character. But at the end, he tells Wormold of his family’s poverty and his father’s involvement in activism. The secret he reveals makes him a slightly more sympathetic character in the end. But still, he is repulsive to Milly who uses him just like Wormold uses the British secret service. Their marriage is an impossibility.

In the former case, Wormold, the divorcee, falls in love with Beatrice and the two make plans for a new life after being relocated to their homeland of England. Neither of them are interested in class mobility and find happiness together in building a relationship around satisfaction with what they have. Their success in marriage contrasted with Segura’s failure in courting Milly indicates the values expressed by the story. To paraphrase Hawthorn when he tells his boss why he chose Wormold for the position of spymaster, Womrold is the kind of man who minds his pennies while letting the dollars take care of themselves. For the agency, this means he won’t interfere in the business of his superiors, but in the parameters of the story, it means he has what it takes to survive and find success and do his job despite all the absurd conflicts of world governments. Graham Greene confronts us directly with what he believes is important in life.

Our Man in Havana parodies the trope of the spy as superhero. The idea of Western governments locked in a battle between good and evil with communism gets deflated and turned upside down by portraying the intelligence agency as being managed by dunces engaged in a political game that nobody can win. Jim Wormold is an ordinary man who turns the whole system inside out with mistakes. By day he is a mediocre vacuum cleaner salesman, but by night he masters the danger he got sucked into. His motivations are humble. He simply wants to buy his daughter the birthday present she wants. After the whole situation blows over, he finds solace by returning to a life of humility in marriage where politics are of little relevance.

The novel is a little improbable. It’s a fantastic story that isn’t easy to believe, but this shortcoming is overshadowed by the message the story delivers. Besides, the plot twists are gutsy and unpredictable, never short of suspense. The characters are also well written and built almost entirely through effective dialogue rather than description. On the other hand, some of the characters are introduced for no specific purpose like Beatrice’s office assistant for example. What’s great about the characters is how Greene makes all the main players sympathetic in one way or another. Even Carter gains some sympathy as being just an ordinary man being used as a tool in a spy game; his social awkwardness, insecurity, and shyness around women make him out to be more of a victim than a villain. The only characters without sympathetic qualities are Hawthorn and the other superior officers in the spy agency.

As a novel, it succeeds with the kind of ironic humor you find in Alfred Hitchcock combined with the character arcs and ethics you find in Shakespeare. References to Shakespeare are laced throughout the narrative too. The book used by the agency for code writing and code cracking is one in which an author updates Shakespeare’s plays using modern language and prose while characters make references to Shakespeare throughout. It would be interesting to hear how a scholar with more expertise in Shakespeare than me would interpret these references.

I fear that Graham Greene’s message in Our Man in Havana might fall flat in our age when people are more politically engaged then ever while simultaneously being more ignorant about how governments work. Somehow, political discourse these days has more to do with being loud, ideological, and popular on social media than being right. Managing what’s right in front of us has become less important it seems. The style of the novel is somewhat dated too. But that isn’t a reason to avoid it since it advocates for a worldview that should at least be taken into consideration. And this is done in such an entertaining way. At least it offers a good break to those who are weary of overblown postmodern maximalism where conflicts are impossible to resolve.

 

Book Review & Critical Analysis; Explosion In a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier

Explosion In a Cathedral

by Alejo Carpentier

       “You say you want a revolution, well you know, we all want to change the world,” sang John Lennon at the end of the 1960s. In the same song he sang, “But if you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell you, brother, is you have to wait,” and “If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.” He was wise in warning the radicals of his generation that the anti-war movement could turn violent, thereby undermining the cause of peace. His warning went over some peoples’ heads. After the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, urban guerilla groups like the Weather Underground and later, The Symbionese Liberation Army, the Angry Brigade, and the Baader-Meinhof Gang amongst others, emerged. The Peace Movement took a turn towards violence and bombings on college campuses, fighting with police, kidnappings, and armed robbery became a marginal part of the New Left. A full scale revolution never happened, but any student of political movements will tell you that if it had, it would have followed the same old patterns of violence that often result from political upheavals.

Let’s go back to the French Revolution. What started as an uprising against the French monarchy turned into the Reign of Terror in which the revolutionaries turned on one another. The mass slaughter of anyone not considered purely revolutionary enough began and the murderous rampage continued until the Napoleonic Wars brought order back to France...by turning the revolutionaries into soldiers so they could invade and slaughter the people of other nations. It’s debatable whether France, Europe, and the colonies overseas would have been better off if the French Revolution, fought in the name of human liberation, had never happened. This is the historical controversy in which Alejo Carpentier’s novel Explosion In a Cathedral is set.

The novel begins in an unnamed city which the discerning reader will recognize as Havana, the capital of Cuba. A wealthy merchant has just died and his estate gets inherited by his two children and their cousin. The oldest child, Sofia, is the matriarch of the trio of teenagers. Her brother is named Carlos and their cousin, Esteban, is a sickly boy who suffers from chronic asthma attacks. Note how the novel begins with a transition between the older and younger generations. The stodgy and distant deceased father represents the Old World and the commercial project of Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean. The trio of teenagers who inherit the estate and the business, represent Cuba’s move away from colonialism towards the goal of national liberation that later resulted in Cuba’s Wars of Independence.

The three kids are ill-equipped to run a business. They are intelligent and curious. They read avidly from books that are imported from overseas and Esteban sets up his own physics laboratory where he attempts experiments without any guidance from a trained scientist. Instead of managing the inherited business, they use shipping crates to build mountains and bridges inside the mansion where they live. They become insular and cut off from the outside world just like a colony is cut off from the fatherland, using what resources they have to build their own society, but ultimately becoming isolated and naive regarding the world outside.

They remain hermetically sealed inside the house until one night, a man shows up. His name is Victor Hugues and he runs a bakery in Port au Prince, Haiti. He has come to do business with the teenagers’ father, only to learn that the elder merchant has died. He sees the opportunity and takes the kids under his wing. He is a benevolent man who helps them organize their house, their warehouse, and their lives. Hugues is of an indeterminate age, but probably in his thirties. As altruistic as he might appear, you have to wonder why a man of his age would move in with three teenagers as if he were one of them. One night during a hurricane, Hugues tries to seduce Sofia. She rejects him violently, but she also begins to have feelings for him as she transforms into adulthood. Carpentier associates romantic relations between Sofia and Hugues with heavy rainfall, one of the many instances of explosions throughout the book.

The house in Havana sets the tone for who Hugues becomes later in the book. He enters the scene with the ambition to help the teenagers set their lives in order. But his good will and leadership result in disruption. One instance is how he brings in a mulatto named Oge who is between two worlds. On his white side, he practices scientifically sanctioned medicine while on his Afro-Caribbean side, he practices the kind of folk healing we would associate with Voudou or Santeria. Oge cures Esteban of his ailment by removing an herb from a hidden garden. This cure leads to a problem for Hugues and the three teens since the herb was being grown by the man who manages the family business. Since the toxic herb is both the cause of sickness and a means of profit, Carpentier links illness with corruption. Hugues, the outsider, has to enter the enclosed world and bring in a new way of thinking so as to bring health into their private world. Hugues’ pattern of invasion with the intention of setting things right is a pattern that repeats throughout the entire novel.

The removal of the herb reveals a hidden conflict between Hugues and the stand-in merchant who he accuses of keeping double books. The man counters the accusation by revealing that Hugues and Oge are friends because they are both Freemasons with revolutionary intentions. Here again we have the conflict between the Old World of colonialism in the corrupt merchant and the New World’s promise of healing and regeneration through cultural syncretism represented by Hugues and Oge.

A big turning point comes when Huhues hears rumors of a police crackdown on revolutionary cells. He also hears about a slave rebellion in Haiti so he decides to bring his new family to Port au Prince to be a part of it. Upon arrival he finds that the rebels have burned down his bakery and, since they are killing any white person regardless of their political ideology, he sends Sofia and Carlos back to Havana and takes Esteban to Paris. This is the first time when the idea of disillusionment with the revolutionary process occurs.

In France, Hugues and Esteban get swept up into the French Revolution. They connect with the Freemasons there, but soon reject them for being preoccupied with mysticism and the occult and not sufficiently progressive enough. They join in with the Jacobins and Hugues becomes a loyal supporter of Robespierre, the mass murderer whose excessive use of the guillotine ushered in the downfall of the French Revolution.

Something else of importance happens here. While Victor Hugues can be interpreted as the protagonist of the novel, Esteban takes over center-stage while Hugues fades into the background though in many ways remaining the central character. The two split when Esteban leaves for the Basque region in southern France to translate revolutionary propaganda into Spanish for the purpose of exporting the rebellion. When the Spanish army begins to hunt down and kill the French Revolutionaries, Esteban reconnects with Hugues on a ship going to the Caribbean. But Hugues has changed. He has been appointed a commanding officer of the French Revolution and sent on a mission to liberate Guadeloupe. Esteban notices that Hugues is no longer friendly with him. In fact, he is no longer friendly with anybody since, as Esteban points out, leaders are men who have no friends, only followers and people they can use like instruments.

Esteban’s growing disillusionment with Hugues and the French Revolution builds him as a character. As he gets put to work doing unfulfilling clerical tasks, he watches as the French invade Guadeloupe and force the English colonialists off the island. True to the ideals of the Revolution, Hugues, as governor of the colony, declares slavery illegal. This liberation results in mass celebration, but also mass slaughter via the guillotine for anyone who doesn’t fall into line. Hugues grows more and more tyrannical by the day. The slaves are reluctant to go back to work even as wage laborers since the pay is low and working conditions are harsh. Hugues abandons the ideals of the French Revolution like a pair of worn out shoes, living like a petty king without any concern for the people he rules over. Like The Who sang in their classic song “Won’t Get Fooled Again”: “Meet the new boss/same as the old boss.” Through the disappointed eyes of Esteban, a true believer in the promise of the Revolution, we see how Hugues has become nothing more than a new colonial despot. No progress has been made and all the bloodshed was for nothing except the consolidation of power over Caribbean island territories.

Esteban does, however, find reason for living in the natural world. He escapes in the jungle where he experiences a kind of religious ecstasy. In a later passage, when he sails away from Guadeloupe, he feels the same way in his encounter with the sea. These nature-oriented passages are the best descriptive writing in the novel and the celebratory aspect of life outside human society offers a solution to the problems of human existence. Immersing himself in nature may be merely escapism, but it renews him and becomes his only source of joy and pleasure in an otherwise dismal, meaningless existence. At least as a coping mechanism, it serves him well.

Contrast that to the time he spends in French Guiana where the jungle is too thick for him to enter. Unable to escape into the wilderness, he remains a prisoner in the colonial outpost of Cayenne When Victor Hugues is removed from his post in Guadeloupe, he gets sent to the South American coast to manage affairs there. Esteban goes with him and the two old friends become even further estranged as Hugues becomes more callous, more cruel, more corrupt, and more greedy. By this point, Hugues no longer even thinks about the ideal of the French Revolution. Even worse, he reinstates slavery there without considering that he fought for the end of that evil practice not so longer ago. Out of pure disgust, Esteban quits his job and returns to Cuba.

When he returns to the family home, he finds Sofia has married a man who now successfully runs the family mercantile business. Carlos has become his partner. The whole household and their associates are all aflame with enthusiasm for the Revolution. But, in a way, the inhabitants of the household are just as insular as they were in the beginning of the novel. They started out being unaware of world events outside the colony of Cuba, or even events in Havana outside their house, and when Esteban arrives they are unaware of the tragic failure of the French Revolution and its bloody events. If Victor Hugues arrived as a stranger bearing glad tidings of a political movement that would usher in a new era of liberty and justice, Esteban arrives as a defeated familiar figure with news that the Revolution was a human rights disaster. Despite this, Sofia and the family welcome him back with open arms and give him back his old room, but continue to believe in the ideals of freedom. They haven’t seen the results of the Revolution with their own eyes. Esteban remains a melancholy character until the end of the novel.

From this point on, Sofia takes over center stage as Esteban fades into the background. When her husband dies, the police come to arrest her for her association with a revolutionary cell. Esteban helps her to escape and she sets sail for French Guiana. She has had an unfulfilled desire for Hugues’ love ever since the night he tried to seduce her. In Cayenne she takes a boat upriver to find Hugues living in a colonial mansion on plantation grounds. Although she is shocked to see he has become the kind of rich merchant the Revolution was supposed to overthrow, she moves in with him anyways. A hurricane hits once again when they make love. She soon becomes disillusioned with him since he is more concerned with business and power than he is with her. So she leaves, never to return. The end of the book finds Sofia and Esteban moving into a house in Spain as Napoleon’s troops invade and ransack the whole town where they live.

The prose in this novel is incredible. Alejo Carpentier was a student of classical music and this story isn’t written so much as it is composed. It doesn’t have chapters, it has movements. The presence of explosions act like symphonic crescendos and the hurricanes are just as much explosions as the outbreaks of violence. The depth of character and situation, along with the contrast of moods, are also multi-layered in ways that remind me of orchestral arrangements. And all of this comes through even though I read it in translation. The original must be even more amazing, but unfortunately my Spanish isn’t quite good enough for reading an entire novel. The biggest flaw is that it contains one of my biggest pet peeves in literature: conversations are written in reported speech rather than in direct quotations. The effect is that of listening to somebody telling me what the characters are talking about while I can hear them talking. I don’t know if this is the fault of the author or the translator, but it is one thing that interferes with the execution of the story.

The writing is unconventional though. It could be argued that there is no lead character. While Victor Hugues may be the most important character, large parts of the narrative are told through the eyes of Esteban and Sofia without Hugues anywhere in sight. The meaning seems to be in how Hugues’ trajectory from good hearted ideologue to cruel egomaniac affects the perceptions of the two cousins. Carpentier uses the historical fiction genre as a vehicle for a deeper statement about the human condition and the conflict between ideology and reality. Since both Esteban and Sofia start out by being starry eyed followers of Hugues only to have their faith in him deflated when they see his lofty ideals eclipsed by his flawed humanity, Carpentier is showing how placing faith in someone else with big ideas can lead to disappointment and disaster. Some readers have tried to link this novel with Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and the Cuban Revolution even though it was written before that historic event took place. I can’t say they are entirely disconnected though. Post-Independence Cuba in the early 20^th century was a time of political turbulence. Havana was saturated with political gangs that were constantly plotting revolutionary overthrow of the government and ideological communists were a part of that. It is possible that Carpentier turned to history attempting to predict what could happen if a revolution came to Cuba and decided to write a novel warning of the potential disasters that could result. If that is the case, it is uncanny how much he got right. By the way, Carpentier’s Victor Hugues is based on a real historical figure.

In the end, Esteban and Sofia no longer believe in the French Revolution. But they die defending Spain against the invading French army. Carpentier is thereby telling us that even though revolutionary violence leads to disaster, there is still a cause worth fighting for. That cause is the defense of one’s own territory. Political violence in the name of ideology is futile, but violence in the name of self-defense is worthwhile and noble.

The idea behind the paiting titled Explosion In a Cathedral that reappears several times throughout the novel changes according to what is happening each time it is mentioned. But one overall interpretation is that the cathedral can be any place where you find peace, comfort, and sanctuary and the explosion is any outside force that intrudes and disrupts the place of home. The explosion could be a house, a man with sexual desires, a Caribbean colony, or a revolution, a political leader, or a small town in Spain. These explosions are inevitable though, and you can’t keep the outside world from coming in.

Explosion In a Cathedral is a fascinating and a memorable book. I’d say it is a must read for anyone who wishes to contemplate human nature and what it means to have aspirations for the improvement of the world. It may be an important work of literature for Cuban people, but it goes much farther than that. Due to its execution and universal themes, it reaches the heights of a novel to be respected on the world stage. Alejo Carpentier reached for the stars and accomplished just what he wanted. 

 

Book Review & Literary Analysis: The Gas by Charles Platt

The Gas

by Charles Platt

      I will say from the start that I believe no book should ever be banned on the grounds of obscenity. Having said that, if there ever was a book that was likely to be burned it would be The Gas by Charles Platt. That was exactly what happened. When originally printed in 1970, the uptight British censors got a hold of most copies, banned the book and sent the remaining print run straight to the incinerator. I’ll agree with the censors on one thing though: this novel certainly is obscene. It recklessly crashes through all taboos in a frenzy that is nothing less than sadistic. Of course that doesn’t mean it should be banned or burned. Quite the opposite. It should be studies, analyzed, and interpreted. We may even learn something in the process. Fortunately, this short novel was reprinted in 1980 and if you are lucky or unlucky enough to find a copy, you can further enlighten yourself in the ways of sexuality that are dirtier than sewer water.

It doesn’t take long for things to start happening. With minimal background or plot development, the lead character Vincent steals a Rolls Royce and picks up an attractive yound hitchhiker named Cathy. You can see where this is going already. After some explicitly described sex that reads like the rougher passages in Letters to Penthouse, Vincent explains that they are in great danger. He works at a military chemical weapons laboratory where a toxic gas has accidentally been released into the atmosphere. The gas causes peole to go into a trance where they lose all sexual inhibitions and morality falls away just as easily as underwear at a nudist colony. As the gas spreads over England, massive orgies ensue and anybody who has been affected sinks deeper into pits of uninhibited violence and depravity. If you are easily disturbed by graphic depictions of paraphilias, this isn’t a book for you.

Vincent’s plan is to rescue his family who live in London. He wants to take his wife, son, and daughter up to Scotland where the gas has not reached. He takes Cathy along with the intention of rescuing her and, after crashing the Rolls Royce, he hijacks a car being driven by a priest who he intends to rescue also. What could possibly go wrong? Well to start, after receiving two head injuries, Cathy starts going crazy and having delusions about Vincent being a communist or fascist secret agent who unleashed the gas deliberately. And the priest, after abandoning his vow of celibacy to indulge in a menage a trois, begins to...how can I say it nicely?...involve his bodily fluids and excretions in the act of making love all the while whimpering and sniveling because he has forsaken his pact with God.

At this point, the novel may seem like nothing but a sick pornographic fantasy with a plot as thin as wet toilet paper. It does, however, provide us with some symbols for consideration. One involves the way that social roles enforce sexual taboos. Vincent’s act of rescuing a nubile young woman, a priest, and a his family represent ways that, in a Freudian sense, libido or sexual energy, are held in check in order to make society functional. Within the nuclear family, sexuality is kept in check through the incest taboo, preventing sexual relations between children and their parents. The expression of that sexual energy is also contained while being expressed in the relationship between husband and wife. The socially constructed taboo against extra-marital sex is represented by Cathy whose presence in Vincent’s cell threatens to rupture the sexual energy contained in his family’s structure. Note that Cathy becomes more threatening to Vincent as she slips into her psychotic delusions. The priest also represents the social taboo of familial sanctity, an extra-legal taboo that is enforced through the institution of the church. It should also be noted that the priest is the one who introduces taboo bodily fluids like urine, feces, and blood into the sexual activities .of Vincent and his crew. The purest and most morally spotless member, the man representing the cleanliness of the spiritual through his role as religious authority and arbiter of religious practice is associated with filth. The packaging of religion with filth is not new; it was St. Augustine, for example, who said that we are born between feces and urine, indicating our lowly status as the excrement of God’s creation.

There are social, psychological, and biological reasons why bodily substances are taboo. The ingestion of another person’s blood, feces, or urine could potentially be fatal and so psychologically people regard them with disgust. Seeing excessive amounts of your own blood could also be reviled as it might be a warning sign that you are in danger of bleeding to death. Through the course of evolution, we have developed a physical, olfactory revulsion towards feces and urine because that is our body’s way of telling us that it is not food and ingesting it could potentially kill us. Unrestrained sexuality can lead to overpopulation or high rates of birth defects when the incest taboo is broken. If we go by the logic of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, libido needs to be contained and sublimated into industrial productivity because if the proletariat if fucking more than working then the capitalist system can not sustain itself. There is a good reason why “make love not war” was a slogan of the 1960s. Therefore, semen, feces, urine, and blood are all substances that need to be contained in their proper vessels. We have built psychological defenses and social taboos, mainly enforced through the institutions of religion, law, and social praxis to keep them hidden, presumably for the benefit of the common good. Violation of these taboos are existential threats to Vincent in the guise of the psychotic Cathy and the germ infested priest. But notice that no direct threat to Vincent comes when he violates the incest taboo, an aspect of this story which could have been one of the main reasons why this book was burned by the British authorities.

Anyhow, returning to the story...Vincent agrees to stop in Cambridge en route to Scotland because Cathy’s brother lives there, potentially able to let her stay until the gas cloud goes away. Cathy’s brother Edmond is a student studying the science of experimental psychiatry at the university. By the time Vincent and his group get there, he has already succumbed to the influence of the gas. An orgy with him, his landlady Mrs. Dunnell, and everybody else takes place. Ther is no need to analyze the sex here, but it is gross and offensive. It’s also cartoonish and sometimes ridiculous. Honestly, at this point, the excessive sex gets to be redundant and dull, even if the author does take it up a notch or two. When the minuscule plot fades into the background, being overridden by page after page of violent sex, the sex starts to seem like filler more than anything. Besides, an engineering student might initially be fascinated the first few times he sees an engine’s pistons popping, but by the time he gets to retirement the sight is so familiar that it no longer holds any fascination. Yes, sex is exciting but an elderly man might say that there isn’t much difference between rubbing one off and taking a leak. That’s where the spectacle of outre sex in this book ends up. If you’ve already read the works of William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, or the Marquis de Sade then this literary territory won’t be anything new to you anyways. And if you actually find any of it arousing, then you will probably wind up in jail someday.

Fortunately, the carnal indulgences recede towards the end as the plot emerges back into the open. Vincent gets tricked into participating in one of Edmond’s experiments at the university and the results lead to the murder of people who represent Vincent’s deepest insecurities. This horrifies him but also proves to be cathartic, giving him a sense of liberation and greater agency in the conduct of his life. Edmond provides him with a psychological profile that also helps, as well as insults, before going on to explain that he plans on conducting further experiments to find out how he can use the effects of the gas to control Cambridge University. Here the author presents us with his view of the institutions of science and psychiatry as being a means of social control, an emerging field in the technology of domination, one that will replace religion as the primary means of oppression which can be seen in the light of the novel’s next passage.

Vincent gets abducted and taken into a church that is filled with a congregation of young lesbians. Rock music has replaced the church organ. On the altar stands the psychotic Cathy, vowing to kill al men and standing over a pile of naked male corpses who were castrated before being snuffed. Elements of the youth counter-culture of the 1960s, the Sexual Revolution, and the upsurge of radical feminism have fused into a cult of Neo-Paganism. It is reminiscent of Euripides’ Greek tragedy The Bacchae in which the Maenads, followers of the god Dionysus, go into a frenzy and behead King Pentheus. Like the Maenads, Cathy’s cult has entered into a trance where the free reign of their libido leads to the slaughter of the patriarchal overlords who sit at the top of society. Vincent gets taken up to the altar in preparation for the ceremonial sparagmos, but gets saved by the priest who runs into the cathedral. The priest and Cathy kill each other, Vincent escapes to find his family, and the church collapses.

In this scene, a movement of Pagan reawakening threatens the social engineering of the traditional Christian church. The Pagans are lesbians run by a young woman while the church is represented by an elderly priest. The young are supplanting the old, a practice of sexual liberation is replacing the theology of sexual repression, the old is giving way to the new or maybe it’s more accurate to say the primal is reasserting itself over the modern. In the end, Cathy and the priest cancel each other out through mutual destruction. Religion is dead, making room for the amoral institution of scientific discipline to become the means of social and psychological domination.

The story ends with Vincent and his family escaping to Scotland as the effects of the gas wear off. Once across the border, their lives stabilize and the nuclear family unit remains intact. But there is a catch. Let’s say that the last scene ends with Vincent and his wife proving that they believe in “keeping love in the family.” After going through the experience of losing all inhibitions under the influence of the gas, the family can not go back to where they were before it all started. They have adjusted to a new reality, one in which they can function despite having a new orientation to their sexuality. The family unit remains the basis of social order, but family values have been radically altered. The preoccupations of the 1960s all filter into this story including sexual liberation, the military industrial complex, the breaking of taboos, and the places held by science and religion in the modification of social relationships. I believe that Charles Platt is saying that once we have gone through the cultural transformations of the 1960s, there is no going back so we have to find a way to live with it whether we like it or not.

There was a point where I considered not finishing The Gas. This book did thoroughly disgust me, but that’s not the reason I almost quit. The excessive descriptions of sex just bored me at times and often felt pointless. But in the end, the plot did hold up and the story does make a statement. Compared to Charles Platt’s Garbage World, a far superior novel in its execution and social critique, this one just barely held my interest. In comparison, Garbage World analyzed society the way we used to dissect frogs in high school biology classes, that is with precise use of a scalpel so that the different organs could be extracted and looked at carefully. The Gas doesn’t work the same way; it is more like stomping on the frogs until their guts squirt out and then throwing their entrails around until they are a gelatinous ooze dripping down other student’s faces. Similar to a cafeteria food fight, it’s like a biology class frog fight. Your average bukkake video is more sanitary in contrast. It assaults society and it assaults the reader almost as if Platt is trying to induce uncontrolled nausea in his audience. He almost pulls that off and I’m sure that for some squeamish readers he actually does. And the title leaves me wondering if it has a double meaning. The gas is the catalyst for the whole story, being an agent manufactured for chemical warfare, but “gas” can also have other meanings. Getting gassed can mean being drunk or intoxicated and having a gas can mean having a good time as in, “The party last night was a real gas, wasn’t it?” This novel is a sex and violence party and I’m sure Charles Platt had a gas writing it, even if the results were not as profound as he would have intended.

 

Book Analysis & Review: Keeper Of the Children

Keeper Of the Children

by William H. Hallahan

Quite often, horror writers are sensitive to the currents of anxiety that flow throughout a society. And for good reason: in order to write something unnerving they have to be aware of what makes people anxious. William H. Hallahan’s Keeper Of the Children addresses two concerns that American society had in the late 1970s. One was the cult scare that arose after the 1960s when new religious movements, some being authoritarian in nature and often accused of brainwashing,, swept through American society. Groups like the Moonies, the Hare Krishnas, and the Peoples Temple of Jim Jones were thriving and often cast a menacing shadow on those outside the groups. Another fear at the time was the breakdown of the American nuclear family. Divorce rates were increasing and children were distancing themselves more and more from their families, often seeking surrogate or alternative families in other places, some of which were maladaptive. Conservatives blamed the social changes of the 1960s for this, but in reality the rising cost of living contributed more to this than the counter-cultural impulses of the youth since career minded parents had to spend more time at work and less time at home. So the bases of Hallahan’s now overlooked novel were firmly rooted in the fears of his time.

The story starts when teenager Renni Benson does not come from school. Her mother Susan and little brother Top begin looking for her, eventually to learn that she and her friend Pammy, who comes from an abusive family, have gotten roped into a religious cult led by a Tibetan monk named Kheim. This monk is said to be an expert in brainwashing, mind control, and occultism so of course, Susan is scared for her daughter’s safety.

That’s when the absentee father, Eddie Benson, enters the picture. Eddie works for a film production company which requires him to spend long stretches of time abroad. On this particular trip, after working for a while in Europe, he returns home to find his daughter missing. When he learns why she is not home, he realizes his duty as a father is to rescue her even though his absence might be a contributing factor to her running away. Eddie also worries throughout the story that his wife is losing interest in him, something he again attributes to his absence. When his company demands that he leave for another lucrative filming job in Africa with a flirtatious and attractive camera woman by his side, he knows he must sacrifice his career in order to save his family from disintegrating.

Eddie gets together with a group of parents whose teenagers have also been led away into the cult; their plan is to find a way to get their children back. But then, one by one, the members of the group get killed in unusual circumstances. The first one to die is murdered by a walking scarecrow that comes to life, descends from his perch in the moonlight, and enters the man’s house to snuff him. The cult leader Kheim is a master of astral projection, so he can leave his body, enter into inanimate objects, and commit acts of violence and homicide in this way.

From there on, we learn about the lives of the other parents in the group and why Pammy so desperately wanted to join the cult as a refuge from her abusive parents. As these others get picked off in a series of bizarre murders, Eddie realizes conventional means of fighting Kheim will not work, so he joins an ashram run by an Indian yogi and learns astral projection himself. Having learned this occult technique, he engages in fights with Kheim in some unusual ways.

The unreal aspects of the story are the most interesting part of the book. Fights and murders happen while Eddie and Kheim are using their astral bodies to animate marionettes, a giant ax-wielding teddy bear, and a feral cat. You might be tempted to read some kind of symbolism into these hand-to-hand battles, but there probably isn’t any there. These fights are done, mostly in the guise of toys to ornament the violence, making it more of an entertaining novelty than a metaphor. Since the story is pedestrian, a father-hero goes to the rescue of his captive maiden daughter, and some elements are given too much description while others don’t get enough, Eddie’s course in the ashram drags on for too long and the activities of the cult are barely even touched on, there has to be something to prop up the story and keep it interesting. That is why these toy and cat fights are given so much attention. They really are the best passages in the book and the main reason it might be worth reading once.

As for the meaning of the story, there isn’t much here. The social themes of family breakdown and the menace of sleazy religious movements are issues addressed, but as for commentary on these topics, Hallahan doesn’t have much to say beyond the idea that families are important, even more important than career advancement, and cults are bad. This is unfortunate because the author has enough talent to inject some meaningful commentary into the narrative, taking it to another level. Instead he declines to use this novel as a pulpit and makes it an almost entirely commercial form of entertainment. There is a catch here though; while Hallahan could be accused of racism or xenophobia by portraying Kheim, the evil Asian occultist, as the adversary of the story, he counters this by portraying the Chinese father of a cult member in a sympathetic light and also turning to an Indian yogi for guidance on how to defeat Kheim. Thus he provides a clear indication that his opposition is to cults of coercive indoctrination and not to Asian people or immigrants.

While Keeper Of the Children does touch on some social issues of the 1970s, it ultimately is a work of entertainment. In that regard, Hallahan mostly succeeds, at least when writing about homicidal marionettes and cat battles. Hallahan could have gone deeper, but he didn’t. As such, it’s a fun read even if it is a bit predictable and basic in its methods. It’s amusing in the way a carnival fun house is. Just don’t expect much if you try to look beneath the surface.

 

Book Review

The Room

by Hubert Selby Jr.

In pre-modern times before prisons became institutionalized, criminals were punished by shunning or exile; they were either ignored by other members of society or they were sent out of their villages to fend for themselves in the wilderness. Since prisons were invented, criminals have been contained and segregated from the general population and sometimes even segregated from the prison population when put into solitary confinement. Humans are mammals, specifically primates, and so social bonds and community are necessary for survival. Isolated primates become mentally sick. A notorious scientific experiment was once conducted on rhesus monkeys where one monkey was separated from his peer group by a glass wall. He could see them but could not associate with them. He became depressed and angry and when the lab technicians released him back into the rhesus monkey population, he became hostile, aggressive, and violent towards the other monkeys. Solitude had made him insane and so he had to be permanently removed. The main character of Hubert Selby Jr.’s The Room is a lot like that rhesus monkey.

That main character, who I will call the Prisoner because he is unnamed in the narrative, remains isolated in his jail cell, waiting for his trial, throughout most of the novel. Unable to leave, save for meal times, his only escape is inwards into his own mind where he indulges in either memories of his childhood or fantasies involving either his pursuit of justice or indulgences in the torture of the policemen who arrested him.

The first thing to notice in The Room is Selby’s writing style, a continuation of how he wrote his previous novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. The punctuation is minimal and follows Selby’s own invented rules. This makes his prose rush along at a rapid pace. It also demands a lot from the reader in a way that benefits his style; it is difficult to be a passive recipient of information when reading Selby since the writing demands you pay careful attention to what is happening, when people are speaking since there are no quotation marks. The narrative also shifts between first and third person which is something else to watch out for. This benefits the narrative because it shows you who the Prisoner is from an inner and outer perspective. The shifts from third to first person also draws you into his inner world in a way that might not be possible using a different writing technique.

Needless to say, the Prisoner’s childhood memories are not pleasant. Two persistent themes are his relations with the police and a snowballing sense of shame. From a young age, he plays solitary games where he pretends to be having shootouts with the police. Otherwise, his real life interactions with them are not so bad. In one scene, a policeman helps him when he gets bit by a dog. Another policeman helps him when he gets injured. But then there is a suspicious incident where the Prisoner is in a park and a cop hiding behind a bush jumps out and smashes his hand with a billy club then runs away. It’s an improbable story and one that marks the Prisoner out as an unreliable narrator. This is the story he tells his mother when he returns home with an injury. It sounds like the kind of a story a twelve year old would make up if he were doing something he shouldn’t have been doing and was too ashamed to say what really happened.

The theme of shame and dishonesty persist throughout the Prisoner’s childhood memories. Most of these revolve around sex as his thoughts keep coming back to stains on his pants from either urine or semen. Some of the incidents that lead to these stainings are narrated more than once with differences in details each time therefore reinforcing the status of the unreliable narrator. For example, one story he tells his mother is that the urine stain on his pants was the result of an incident with a girl. He says he urinated on her and she got him back by urinating on him; somehow she had good enough aim so that her urine stream landed precisely right on his crotch. Again it sounds like a story a child would make up out of shame for what really happened like losing control and pissing in his pants.

Another stain he gets on his pants is the result of the Prisoner and a girl fondling each other in a movie theater. He has to walk home and performs an excessive cleansing of himself in the bathroom so no one can see the stain left by the semen. And so the theme of shame and the attending cover ups through actions and lies persist. You might also notice the way the Prisoner lies to himself in his jail cell inner monologues to justify his mistakes as if his self-deceptions are the only thread of hope he has to cling on to. His thoughts are just as much of a prison as his cell is.

As he lies in bed, the Prisoner’s mind becomes a stage for the acting out of his fantasies. One involves himself writing an imaginary letter to the press which sparks a government investigation into injustice and police brutality. You might notice that the letter is neither detailed nor persuasive, but in his fantasies it is. This launches into a grandiose story of the Prisoner being lauded as a hero for standing up for justice and speaking out to the media and in the courts. He also daydreams about representing himself as a defendant in court. His cross-examinations of the cops who arrested him are deranged, unrealistic, and absurd. They serve the purpose of confusing the witnesses more than cross-examining them though that really doesn’t matter because the Prisoner’s objective is to humiliate them more than anything. These grandiosities are silly and pathetic, but they reveal a lot about the Prisoner. He is a man with a mediocre mind fantasizing about being a genius, but since he lacks intelligence, his idea of “genius” just looks stupid. It also tells you something else about who he is. People fantasize about what they don’t have. So what kind of man would have grandiose fantasies about being a hero and an intellectual giant? A nobody, that’s who. Also notice that the Prisoner never writes, let alone sends, the aforementioned letter. He only dreams about it because he is a coward and could never bring himself to do such a thing. Indulging in self-pity suits his self-destructive purposes more than being assertive ever would.

Then there are the torture and rape fantasies. In two scenes, the Prisoner imagines himself kidnapping the two policemen who arrested him, taking them to a dungeon, which he calls the kennel, and training them to be dogs in ways that are sadistic and homo-erotic. They read like gay BDSM sessions that have gone horribly wrong. In another scene, he fantasizes about the two cops kidnapping and raping a woman in the woods. If this passage isn’t disturbing enough, then you have to understand that there is a whole other dimension to it. This fantasy is about not just the rape but how the two cops get away with with their it so the Prisoner can use it against them as evidence during the cross-examination during the imaginary trial. Tom Waits once sang “you’re innocent when you dream.” The Prisoner really puts this idea to its ultimate test.

These fantasies make the Prisoner look absolutely repulsive. And yet they are only fantasies and they come from the mind of a chronically lonely man, suffering from inadequacy and shame to the point of despair. He wallows in an inescapable pit of depression and his sadism is an attempt to make himself feel superior to someone else. At some level, these fantasies are also a means of torturing himself. In one part, he imagines cutting off the cops’ eyelids and shining bright lights at them while using eye drops to moisten their eyes. He controls when they are allowed to get the drops in a combination of the psychology of water torture and physical sadism. This transitions into the Prisoner lying on his bed and holding his eyes open for as long as he can while staring at the lights and then closing them to form tears. Those tears are just as emotional as they are for physical relief. He also uses similar language to describe the way the police restrained the woman during her rape and how they restrained him during his arrest while pushing him into the back of the police car. By associating himself with his imaginary victims, we get a sense that his own thoughts are a means of hurting himself.

When the Prisoner emerges from his memories and daydreams, he is alone with his thoughts in his cell and nothing else. He gets obsessed with a pimple on his cheek. Every time he prods at it, the painful thoughts of the police start up again. To him, the pimple is disproportionately painful to what it actually is. To most people, such a blemish would be a minor discomfort but for him it is an excruciating reminder, like the semen and urine stains on his pants, of how worthless he feels. While suffering in his shame and isolation, such a trivial thing becomes magnified to a point of incomprehensible pain.Then while in his bed, his pants get stained again and he has to go to the mess hall trying to hide it from the other prisoners. He begins feeling nauseous and finally admits that nausea has been the only friend he has ever had. You can’t get anymore sick with loneliness than that. There is no way out of his cell, there is no way out of his isolation, and there is no way out of his mind. All three are his inescapable prison.

The subject of this book is a loser. He is a whiner, a complainer, a coward, a weakling, and a failure. His isolation is a double-bind since it causes him to be miserable while his misery drives other people away. Can you blame those other people for ignoring him? You have to admit that you probably wouldn’t want to be around him yourself. He’s just one of those problematic people you’d be better off avoiding. It is a discomforting thought that we might be complicit in this man’s loneliness and despair. On the other hand, by reading this book we get up close and personal with him. At some level, we relate to him. Is anyone happy all the time? Hasn’t everyone felt alone in the world at some point? We may not be as miserable as he is, but we have all been miserable at least once and the Prisoner reminds us of that. It is another discomforting thought that we might have something in common with such an unappealing person.

As unique and provocative as this novel is, there is one major flaw in the prose. There are at least three passages where Selby just goes on for too long. The most memorable one is the scene where the main character and a girl fondle each other in the movie theater. It goes on for a good fifteen pages and, honestly, that isn’t necessary. Once you know what they are doing, it doesn’t need to be excessively explained over and over again. We all know what a hand job feels like and don’t need it to be explained. There are a couple other passages where Selby just plain overshoots his mark. It is also a little too obvious at times that this novel was inspired by Jean Genet’s Our Lady Of the Flowers which, I have to say, is actually a much better work of art.

I can’t say The Room is for everybody. Then again, Hubert Selby Jr. generally isn’t for everybody either. It takes a certain amount of courage and dedication to finish a novel like this. The kind of courage it takes is motivated by the desire to understand someone who is not like we are, someone we would rather not know about, the kind of person most people would ignore. Then it also takes a certain kind of honesty to admit that we might have some common ground with such a person. It gives you a different perspective on life, but maybe one that is tragically important for understanding the human condition.