nixsight

It’s going to be a weird month, what with me promising myself that I’d do Nanowrimo, and then absolutely failing to get started yet. I did manage to finish “Millennium People”, finally, mind.

Millennium People by JG Ballard

So I finally finished “Millennium People”, after complaining bitterly about my strange compulsion to read another book by the man, after my dreadful formative experience with “Crash”.

I have to say that it was a pretty compelling read. Ballard has a florid, and often overwritten prose style, but sometimes his way of articulating a point is inspired.

Which is just as well, because he has a tendency to take each idea or point of view – of which there are around three in this novel – and repeat them over and over again, changing his examples and metaphors but basically describing the same key situations.

It’s a by turns frustrating and almost hypnotic style, and he certainly does press his key ideas – of an archly humorous look at middle class ennui and rebellion on the one hand, and nihilistic self-destruction or violence as stimulus on the other – to centre stage. As with “Crash” before it, I did find that after a few chapters, I was feeling a little annoyed with the author, wanting to shout “yes, okay, I get it!” more than once.

I understand that maybe that looping, never quite resolving, revolution thread may be part of what the author is trying to achieve – in some way designed to reflect thecycle of mediocrity that keeps almost triggering the inhabitants of Chelsea Marina to bloody revolt, but while it may make for nice self-referential art, it only barely makes for an engaging or worthwhile read.

But as I said, strangely hypnotic. There’s also the wrinkle of the thread of a thriller running through the thing – Ballard lowering himself to basic mystery writing for a while – which provides some reason for the protagonist’s continued immersion in the middle-class revolt, beyond the point where he seems to have learnt everything ideologically that he could have, and has otherwise found himself in the same loop of being close to an epiphany but not quite having it, and wanting to go home to his wife… but… not… quite… yet… that Ballard has put us in with his endlessly looping narrative.

However, Ballard’s narrator is infuriatingly naive and slow on the uptake – the mystery unfolds in front of him pretty much on first meeting with the people who will form his cast of suspects, and doesn’t really get any more complicated. With the book being narrated, the author doesn’t have the excuse that the reader knows more than the protagonist, as the character has experienced everything that the reader has. Either Ballard was too impressed with his own cleverness, and didn’t realise that the mystery really wasn’t that mysterious, or this, as well, was part of the experiment – a trained and talented psychologist, utterly failing to unravel the unsubtle performances of the people around him may be a statement on the state of mental health practice by Ballard.

I don’t think so, though, and it’s difficult to feel much sympathy for him. His wife, on the other hand, is very well drawn by Ballard, as a flawed and damaged, but ultimately caring and even, in her way, loyal, companion.

Doktor Sleepless by Warren Ellis and Ivan Rodriguez
I also re-read the first book of “Doktor Sleepless”, and I still don’t really know what to make of it.

It’s a sharp and smart piece of writing, as you’d expect from Warren Ellis, and there’s a lot of work put into researching and layering the text. This is clearly meant to be Ellis’ current sci-fi petri-dish – like “Transmetropolitan” before it, it’s where he throws his most obvious world-building and future-facing writing.

However, the pace is all shot to hell on these issues, and I’m failing almost completely to engage with it.

Rodriguez doesn’t help. He’s got a really nice, rounded line, and is perfectly competent. But his panel construction is all over the place, and he goes to too many pains to “spice up” scenes, with far too many panel or scene transitions that don’t follow smoothly, and some very inventive but ultimately unneccessary poses – for example, mid-rant, and across the horizontal middle of a page – the good Doktor is seen from a floor eye view, up between his legs, in a very awkward piece of camera work.

As I’ve mentioned when talking about his current X-Book, Ellis’ dialogue doesn’t need the extra decoration.

The writing has moments of genius, and is densely packed with research and ideas, and the long arc of the book gives the impression that Ellis has a fairly solid story planned, but page-to-page it lacks the cohesion of “Transmetropolitan”, or even “The Invisibles”, the tortured Grant Morrison book that it occassionally evokes. The model and structure of each issue is familiar from the former, with the Doktor’s rants to broadcast cut hard against silent and snapshot scenes of the city that he is talking to, into plot driven scenes of the supporting cast, with at least one chunk of exposition.

In this way, Ellis services the narrative’s multiple needs – the shock-jock fulfills the philosophical, while the exposition provides the historical and physical function of his world-building. The supporting cast help give momentum to what the Doktor is doing and move his plans on, and the panel-by-panel scenes of the city reacting are supposed to give us a wider context to those plans, and show us what he is trying to change, and how it is changing.

Something about it just doesn’t gel for me, though. With one exception, I love reading those four facets of the story, but somehow the way they fit together is jarring, and I’m not certain it’s deliberate. I also can’t tell if it’s the art or writing, or the way that the two are working against each other, that makes it happen.

It might actually be the one facet that I don’t think works so well that drives my uncertainty. In “Transmetropolitan”, Ellis and Robertson’s scenes of the city that Spider railed against were often delivered with a bittersweet tone and a great attention to detail – and where the ones here have the detail, they lack the poignance. When that book did it, it felt like a David Simon montage of Baltimore in “The Wire”. There’s nothing in “Doktor Sleepless” street scenes that have that gravity. Even though this city is much more densely populated than the one in “Fell”, each isolated and lonely denizen there means more to us.

And it’s the city, and the populace, here, that gives us a reason to engage with the story. Because the Doktor’s machinations are not insular – his aim is to affect change in the world around him. If we don’t care about that world, it’s tough to care about the story, and we’re just left with Ellis’ tight plots and the awesome power of his mental engine as it pumps out idea after idea, with no consequence.

The doctor’s aims aren’t, as it happens, really to affect social change. This has interesting parallels with “Millennium Nights” – perhaps unsurprisingly, as I’m sure Ellis will have read that novel.

Both texts feature a culture grown stagnant, and a populace just starting to wake up to the invisible bonds that consumerism and social expectation have placed upon them. And each features an enigmatic focal character working as a catalyst, ostensibly driving an ideological revolt against that invisible authority.

In each, that character may simply be deranged, and while their superficial goal is social change, each has their own secret and self-serving agenda – in both cases, to tear the world down around them.

Both books have a moment of railing against the appeal of a false “authenticity”, that is delivered in each case as a momentary and throwaway sentiment, but that underlies the key character’s contempt or boredom for their fellow man.

There’s a level at which I can’t enjoy that sort of narrative as much as I might. I noticed long ago that comfortable people are much more likely to rage against the machine, because they have more time on their hands. So my sympathy and interest in narratives that are largely made up of rationalising such protests are difficult to win.

Ultimately, both Ballard and Ellis seem to be as amused or annoyed with the complainants as they are the system that they are complaining about. Unfortunately, both narratives still go to great lengths to establish righteous causes for their pocket revolutions, and sardonic jokes or not, that makes for a lot of pages that I found myself just disconnected from.