The Great Return by Arthur Machen

An underdeveloped quickie by an otherwise great author

Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863–1947) is a respected old-school master of the fantasy and horror genres. His novella The Great Return was published in 1915. Because it is quite short, it probably just barely qualifies as a novella. It is so short, in fact, that it’s difficult to summarize the plot without giving away any secrets or surprises.

The narrator, a Welshman, frequently scans the local newspapers for items about “remarkable occurrences.” This man’s profession is unclear, but he has an avid enough interest in the occult to investigate matters that suggest an inkling of the supernatural. Vague mentions in the papers of unusual goings-on lead him to the coastal village of Llantrisant. Some mysterious lights have been seen out at sea, and some folks have heard the peal of a bell from no apparent source. That’s about all I can tell you. Machen draws on a combination of Christian mysticism and old Welsh pagan folklore for this story. This isn’t really horror because it’s not really scary, but it does fit into the Twilight Zone range of spooky fantasy.

The Great Return, unfortunately, reads more like The Mediocre Return. This is more of an idea for a story than an actual story. One can imagine a Stephen King novel based on this premise, and knowing Stephen King, that novel would be way to long. As Machen presents it here, however, it’s way too short. Not much happens in the first three chapters. Some minor rumblings occur in chapters four and five. Then in chapter six it takes a big leap and goes full-on occult fantasy in the seventh and final chapter. The payoff is too little too late. A big problem with this tale is the way it’s narrated. The story is related by a long-winded narrator who’s full of himself and digresses into subjects you don’t want to hear about rather than focusing on the miraculous supernatural events at hand. His personality is obtrusive. A disembodied third-person narration would have been more successful.

I only recently discovered Machen, and I’ve been singing his praises in this blog over the past year. His novels The Great God Pan, The Terror, The Hill of Dreams, and in particular The Three Impostors are all very good. The Great Return is the first piece of writing by Machen that hasn’t impressed me. It’s not going to stop me, however, from continuing to work my way through his corpus of writings. 

Penguin Island by Anatole France

Satire in the tradition of Voltaire

The French writer Anatole France (1884–1924) won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature. His novel Penguin Island, published in 1909, is probably his best-remembered work, at least in the minds of English-language readers. In this comedic and critical novel, France establishes himself as the inheritor of Voltaire’s role as the great satirist of French literature.

Some time in the Middle Ages, a Breton monk named Maël (later Saint Maël) decides it is his mission to sail forth to unknown lands and spread the gospel of Christ to the savages. His boat drifts way off course, and he ends up in the Southern Hemisphere, where he lands on an island full of penguins. At 99 years of age, with failing sight and hearing, Maël thinks the penguins are an Indigenous race of people, so he baptizes them into the Catholic Church. The only witnesses to this sacrament are God and His angels in Heaven, who debate how to rectify Maël’s erroneous baptism of animals. God solves the problem by turning all the penguins into humans, albeit naked uncivilized humans. Maël then tows the Penguins back to Europe, where they establish a new nation in the area of what we know as France.

Spanning centuries in the history of the Penguins, the book is divided into eight related stories taking place in eight different time periods. The early chapters of the book, in which the newly humanized penguins are learning the ways of civilization, are the most funny and entertaining. France seems to be lampooning some of the Edenic noble-savage pipe dreams of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like Voltaire’s Candide, however, Penguin Island doesn’t aim its mocking barbs at just one target but rather scatters its shots to make different satirical points in every chapter. In this book everything is game for absurdity and worthy of tongue-in-cheek scorn.

After a while, the fact that these people started out as animals becomes irrelevant. The Penguins of Penguinia are simply another nation of humans, often a surrogate for the French. Some targets for spoofing include religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular, capitalism, feudalism, gender roles and sexual inequality, various factions in the modern French political landscape, and even Dante’s Divine Comedy. The most extensive parody is directed at the Dreyfus affair of the 1890s, in which a character named Pyrot is a substitute for Dreyfus and Columban for Emile Zola. To a French reader, the characters and events being satirized in this book would be readily decipherable, but it’s not always easy for an American reader to recognize all the players of every political plot. That doesn’t become too much of an obstacle, however, because enough of the humor and derision is universal to human nature and society, not French-specific.

The early formative years of the Penguins are laugh-out-loud silly at times, but the latter, more modern episodes of their history take the form of more wryly stated indictments of hypocrisy. There is also a science fiction element to the book as the final chapters take place in the future. After all the satire and cynicism, France ends the book on a surprisingly inspirational note of hope. Penguin Island is a work of great insight and much wisdom, but perhaps presented too cleverly for the non-French reader to grasp all in the first read. I think I’ll give it a second look, eventually, because it seems worthy of further scrutiny.   

Mathematical Puzzles by Martin Gardner

An early collection of brain teasing quickies

Martin Gardner was a popular and prolific nonfiction author of the latter half of the twentieth century. Just as Carl Sagan was the great popularizer of science during that time period, Gardner was the great popularizer of mathematics. For over 25 years, he wrote a column in Scientific American magazine entitled Mathematical Games, in which he presented all sorts of mathematical curiosities and puzzles and educated readers on the mathematical laws and theories behind them. These columns were collected into over a dozen books that enlarged his audience well beyond the subscription list of Scientific American.

Mathematical Puzzles, an early collection of Gardner’s mathematical writings, was published in 1961 and later rereleased by Dover Publications in 1986 as Entertaining Mathematical Puzzles. The puzzles in this volume are not taken from Gardner’s column in Scientific American. Some of them previously appeared in a magazine called Science World, for which Gardner also wrote a column entitled On the Light Side from 1957 to 1959. These are not the chapter-length mathematical explorations from Mathematical Games but rather what one typically finds in a collection of brain teasers: items of one to two pages, essentially a word problem followed by an explanation of its solution. Altogether, there are about 60 puzzles in this book. They are arranged into ten categories such as money puzzles, speed puzzles, plane and solid geometry puzzles, and probability puzzles.

Compared to his writings for Scientific American, these little brain teasers are not Gardner’s best work. It’s amazing how many of these puzzles conclude with “Nope. It can’t be solved.” You read the first page, wrack your brain to try to come up with a solution, and then turn the page to find out there’s no viable answer. Where’s the fun in that? If it were one or two puzzles, that would be reasonable, but it seems like nearly half the book is unsolvable. Another frustrating aspect of brain teasers in general is that they are essentially mathematics written with words, and if the author isn’t exactly precise and clear in the wording of the problem, then you end up feeling like you’ve been cheated or you wasted your time. Gardner’s guilty of that as well in a number of these riddles. Such occasions call to mind the questions on your old school math tests that no one in the class got right because the teacher worded them poorly.

Nevertheless, there’s still fun to be had here and math to be learned. Every puzzle has its little twist that forces you to think outside the box of straightforward solutions. As the aforementioned list of categories indicates, there are little lessons on geometry, probability, and arithmetic. These are not easy math puzzles, but you don’t need to know algebra or calculus to figure them out. The most unfamiliar area for most will probably be the little section on topology. Gardner also describes some games of the abstract strategy variety (think checkers or tic tac toe, for example) that can be played with pencil and paper, coins, or other everyday items.

The material here may not be Gardner’s most ingenious writings, but this little book still does its job adequately. The next time I download a volume of Gardner’s mathematical puzzles, however, I’ll make sure it’s one of the 15 volumes from his Scientific American series. 

Reeds and Mud by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Compelling Spanish regional naturalism

Reeds and Mud, a novel by Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, was originally published in 1902 under the Spanish title of Cañas y barro. Blasco Ibáñez was a realist writer, and sometimes a naturalist (a specific form of realism), and Reeds and Mud qualifies as both. He was born in Valencia, a city on the Mediterranean Coast of Eastern Spain, and most of his fiction takes place within that district. Reeds and Mud is set in the town of Palmar in the Albufera region of Valencia. The Albufera is a large lake or freshwater lagoon, surrounded by marshes and separated from the ocean by a thin strip of land. It is to these marshes that the title of the novel refers, as well as to the homes of the area’s inhabitants. At the time this story takes place, about half of Palmar’s residents are still living in traditional fishermen’s huts of reeds and mud, while the other half resides in more modern wood-frame houses.

For centuries, the primary mode of life in the Albufera has been fishing, with eels being particularly bountiful in these waters. The residents of Palmar also do quite a bit of hunting, though much of it in the form of poaching in a nearby forest where they’re not supposed to venture. At the time of this story, agriculture is starting to gain a foothold in the region. The novel focuses on three generations of one Palmar family. The grandfather, Tío Paloma, is an elderly boatman, fisherman, and hunter who embodies all the traditional customs and lifestyle of the Albufera. His son, Tío Tóni, on the other hand, dreams of being a successful landowner and struggles to coax a profitable crop out of the marshy soil. This contrast in lifestyles­—old ways vs. new, fishing vs. agriculture—causes conflict between father and son. Meanwhile, the grandson, Tonet, is a lazy ne’er-do-well who would prefer to avoid work altogether; neither fishing nor farming for him. His grandfather feels some affinity towards the young man, but his father considers him a disgrace..

In addition to the drama within the family, Tonet is involved in a love triangle that brings further conflict and suspense into the story. There’s more going on in this sunny fishing village than just picturesque rural living. Blasco Ibáñez turns over some stones to reveal the darker side of this community, and the story occasionally ventures into some frightening scenes. Naturalist authors like Emile Zola were often criticized for their vulgar and disturbing subject matter, but Blasco Ibáñez includes one image in this novel that is so graphic and horrifying I would be surprised if this book wasn’t banned by the censors of its day.

The Albufera region has no doubt changed much in the eleven decades since Blasco Ibáñez wrote this novel. What’s great about Reeds and Mud, in addition to its compelling story, is that it functions as a historical document of the people, customs, and natural environment­ of this specific time and place. That’s one of the valuable aspects of the naturalist novel—when done right, it functions as a sort of time-capsule for historic preservation, like a National Geographic article but deeper and more personally engaging. Almost every chapter of Reeds and Mud centers around a traditional public event, like a religious festival or the drawing of lots to assign fishing grounds. Instead of photographs, the reader gets the rich empirical description of reality characteristic of naturalist texts. Blasco Ibáñez was one of Spain’s great realist chroniclers, along with Emilia Pardo Bazán and Benito Peréz Galdos.

Since I discovered Blasco Ibáñez a couple years ago, he has become one of my go-to authors for fiction. I can always count on him for a rewarding read. As good as Reeds and Mud is, I like his novels The Cabin (La Barraca) (1898) and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916) even better.   

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy does Elmore Leonard

Few American authors garnered as much critical acclaim over the last half century as Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023). He published his first novel in 1965, but it wasn’t until about 30 years later that he achieved any commercial success. I rarely quote Wikipedia, but this was too good to pass up: “As of 1991, none of McCarthy’s novels had sold more than 5,000 hardcover copies, and for most of his career, he did not even have an agent.” He hit it big in 1992 with All the Pretty Horses and has since become a household name. Not only the appeal, but the style of his work seemed to get more commercial in his latter years. He started out as the new William Faulkner, but by the time he died, it seems he had discovered an affinity for pulp fiction. McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men was published in 1992. The film version, made 15 years later, won the Oscar for Best Picture. This book is a crime novel, similar in style and subject matter to Elmore Leonard’s work, but as he did before with Blood Meridian, McCarthy instills this gritty, violent story with the deep thoughts of highbrow literature.

In the borderlands of Southern Texas, Llewelyn Moss is out hunting antelope when he spots a group of trucks parked out in the middle of nowhere. Upon closer inspection, he finds the site littered with dead bodies. In an apparent drug deal gone bad, it seems that both sides have massacred each other. As is often the case in such scenes, there’s a briefcase full of money on site. Moss absconds with what he estimates to be 2.4 million dollars. The drug cartel naturally wants its money back, so it sends men after Moss. Among those hunting him down is a mystery man named Anton Chigurh, a cold-blooded assassin who uses an unusual weapon to make his kills, though he’s pretty good with a shotgun as well. One way to get to Moss is through his wife, so she has to go on the run as well. Ed Tom Bell, the local sheriff, considers it is duty to serve and protect the citizens of his county, including Mr. and Mrs. Moss. He sets out investigating the case, hoping to catch up with Moss before the killers find him.

Much of the plot takes place in motel rooms and highway diners on Texas desert roads, where gunfights frequently ensue. There are two aspects of the book that elevate this novel from a genre thriller to a great work of American literature. First is the character of Chigurh, a force of nature when it comes to dealing death, but also a philosopher when it comes to dealing dialogue. Second are the monologues of Ed Tom Bell that are interspersed in italics throughout the primary third-person narrative. These monologues alone could constitute a book worthy of a Pulitzer. Bell contemplates his mortality, old age, marriage, his regrets as a law enforcement officer, a former soldier, and a man, and how the world has changed for the worse on his watch.

Similar to Leonard’s writing, No Country for Old Men is written in curt, choppy prose—sometimes so curt and choppy that it’s a little tough to figure out what’s going on. It reads like an exercise in using as few words as possible. There are no visual or biographical descriptions of the characters, you just have to figure out who they are by what they say. The dialogue is brilliantly written, again calling to mind Leonard, but without so much overt humor. The manner of speech employed by the characters, intelligently rendered in authentically down-home diction, is also reminiscent of Charles Portis’s great Western novel True Grit.

Most literary critics don’t consider No Country for Old Men to be McCarthy at his best because it doesn’t have the Faulknerian profundity of his earlier novels. For that same reason, it may be his most accessible book to an audience of general readers raised on crime films and Westerns. This is definitely not a conventional thriller, but I was riveted to every page. I’ve liked McCarthy’s books in the past, and I like Leonard, so to me this novel was the best of both worlds.

The Green Hills of Earth by Robert A. Heinlein

The mundane aspects of space exploration

American science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein wrote a series of roughly two dozen short stories and novels known as his Future History. These works were all originally published in fiction magazines such as Astounding Science Fiction or The Saturday Evening Post before being gathered into book-length collections. The first collected volume of Heinlein’s Future History fiction, published in 1950, was The Man Who Sold the Moon. The second collection, published in 1951, is The Green Hills of Earth. This latter volume contains ten short stories that were originally published in periodicals from 1941 to 1949. The book’s final selection, “Logic of Empire,” clocking in at 41 pages, is the longest entry in the volume. The rest of the pieces included are truly short stories in the 10- to 20-page range.

Many consider Heinlein to be the greatest science fiction author of the 20th century. Given such high praise, I found The Man Who Sold the Moon rather disappointing. Most of the stories were more about business and logistical matters than science and exploration. What was missing was any daring speculative thinking, deep thoughts, or any sense of wonder. In his desire to make his future realistic, Heinlein focuses on very mundane aspects of space travel and extraterrestrial colonization. For the most part, The Green Hills of Earth continues this prosaic approach. “Gentlemen, Be Seated,” for example, is about pressurized tunnels below the surface of the moon, and what happens when one springs a minor leak. “Delilah and the Space-Rigger” is set at the construction site of a space station, but the story is essentially about a human resources matter.

The first six stories in this volume are mostly about mankind’s base on the moon, the better part of which is built underground. There’s some mining going on. It’s not terribly exciting stuff. With story number seven, however, the book takes a turn for the better. In “—We Also Walk Dogs,” which takes place around the 1990s of Heinlein’s Future History timeline, mankind has established colonies on many planets and moons of the solar system, and some of those new worlds have Indigenous inhabitants—Martians, Venusians, etc. This story is essentially about a glorified interplanetary concierge service, but it provides an intriguing introductory look into Heinlein’s vision of solar system colonization.

The book’s title selection is about an interplanetary hobo-troubadour poet, kind of a Woody Guthrie or Leadbelly of outer space, who writes a famous folk song, “The Green Hills of Earth.” The aforementioned “Logic of Empire,” is the other notable piece in this volume. Two well-to-do Earthlings argue over whether the system of indentured servitude that prevails on Venus qualifies as slavery or not. Then the pair of friends get drunk and accidentally sign themselves to long-term contracts of hard labor on Venus, a jungle planet with amphibious natives. It’s really more of a prison story than a sci-fi story, but sci-fi has often been used to comment on social issues, and here Heinlein uses his dystopian Venus to critique colonialism and the exploitation of developing nations. I found the blunt pessimism of the ending admirably unexpected.

So far I haven’t been overly impressed by Heinlein’s Future History. Personally, I prefer the Terro-Human Future History of H. Beam Piper, which may not be as scientifically realistic as Heinlein’s universe, but it’s a lot more fun to read. Given his high renown, I’m guessing Heinlein has better work in his oeuvre. I suspect that his stand-alone novels, like Stranger in a Strange Land or Starship Troopers, are a whole different kettle of fish, so I’ll probably head in that direction next.

Stories in this collection

Delilah and the Space-Rigger

Space Jockey

The Long Watch

Gentlemen, Be Seated

The Black Pits of Luna

It’s Great to Be Back

“—We Also Walk Dogs”

Ordeal in Space

The Green Hills of Earth

Logic of Empire

Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form by Christopher Laing Hill

Zola’s effect on American and Japanese literature

If you read this blog religiously (which I’m sure no one does), you’ll know that one brand of fiction that Old Books by Dead Guys really likes is Naturalism. I started this blog by reviewing the complete works of Emile Zola, Frank Norris, and Jack London, all of them naturalist writers. The naturalist movement, spearheaded by Zola, was an offshoot of realism. It’s known for hyper-detailed and brutally objective descriptions of settings and social milieus. Naturalist authors often have an atheistic bent; they emphasize how human lives are influenced and governed by scientific laws of evolution and heredity, physiology, sociology, and psychology. I’m a well-read fan of French and American literary naturalism and have started to branch out into the naturalist literature of other nations. Wanting to learn more about naturalist authors in other parts of the world led me to Christopher Laing Hill’s 2020 book Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form. This book, published by Northwestern University Press, is available as an open access publication, meaning you can download a pdf ebook for free (or you can purchase a print copy).

What I was hoping to get out of Hill’s book was an international list of authors and books for further reading, and I certainly got that. Some of those books may have never been translated into English, but if even a quarter of them are, they ought to keep me busy reading for years. Hill focuses primarily on French, American, and Japanese literature because he reads in those languages. The bulk of the book is comparing novels from those nations to show how Zola’s ideas spread from country to country. His detailed examination of works by Zola, London, Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Kosugi Tengai, and Tayama Katai brings up many interesting and thought-provoking points. Like most literary critics, Hill gives away the endings of all the novels he discusses, but I’ve already read all the French and American books, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever read the Japanese. In addition, Hill does mention and briefly discuss many other works from other countries. He gives particularly good overviews of Spanish and Latin American naturalism and East Asian naturalism. Hill says almost nothing about British and German literature, but he does reference plenty of naturalist authors from other European nations such as Denmark, Greece, and Slovenia. 

Having an avid interest in this subject, I naturally liked much of what Hill had to say. As a nonacademic, however, I can’t say I like the way he says it. Hill is a PhD writing for other PhDs, and the text is the jargon-heavy academic prose you’d expect for an audience of specialized professors. It drives me nuts how many words are used to make a point, how many times the points are made over and over again, and the pretentious, obscure vocabulary (ugh, the title). The word “figure” is used over 400 times to mean just about anything and everything. There are chapters on “the body figure” (anatomical imagery), “the Nana figure” (sexually liberated and/or independent women), and “the social figure” (just about any time and place, as far as I can tell). When Hill comments on the work of other Zola scholars, he points out exceptions to any proffered thesis as if to nullify its value. He then seems hesitant to say anything concrete himself for fear that his arguments will be likewise picked apart. Every statement has to be made with heterogenous multiplicity, so that nothing can ever be nailed down as fact, theory, or even an explicit opinion. 

Naturalist literature can be enjoyed and appreciated by nonacademic readers, not just the intelligentsia within academia. As intended by the author, this scholarly monograph only addresses the latter category. For the nonacademic audience, if nothing else, the bibliography and the index suggest myriad opportunities for further reading. With this blog I try to turn a few readers on to some readworthy naturalist literature, and hopefully the knowledge I’ve gleaned from Figures of the World will help me do that.