I've been reading some older books lately. Here are my quick reviews of:
- How to Shoot an Amateur Naturalist
- The Unexpurgated Code
- A Century of Humour
- Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog)
- Three Men on the Bummel
- Men, Martians and Machines
How to Shoot an Amateur Naturalist. Gerald Durrell (1984).
I read a bunch of Durrell's zoology-memoir books as a teenager. The prose is purpler than I remember it being! Sometimes that hits (describing a mole as a "furry ingot" is just delightful), but a firmer editor would have cut every other adjective.
Various pat little details also made me suspect that some of the anecdotes have been, shall we say, punched up. I don't think the stories really matter though. If you're reading this book, you're mostly in it for the descriptions of animals, and the author does just fine there.
The Unexpurgated Code. J. P. Donleavy (1975).
This is a parodic "complete manual of survival and manners". It's infuriating. The premise (providing utterly cynical etiquette advice for social climbers and bastards) is such a good one.
In practise, that deep potential for humour is completely ruined by the violent misogyny (and several other forms of bigotry) which intrude on the text at every turn.
I opened this hoping to find unusual mid-century turns of phrase for a future project. Unfortunately the turns of phrase I found were unprintable. Avoid.
A Century of Humour. Edited by P. G. Wodehouse (193?).
A book too old to bother printing its own publication date! Wodehouse mentions in the introduction "It is a bare thirty-four years since I started earning my living as a writer", so I infer the book was produced c. 1934–1939.
This is a hefty thousand-page tome that's been sitting on my bookshelves since forever. It's 77 short from almost as many authors, many of them former Punch editors. Notables include A. A. Milne, Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Wodehouse himself. The front matter strongly implies that the choice to include some of these works was in "better to beg forgiveness than ask permission" territory. Yikes!
The book's main weakness is that almost all the authors are middle-to-upper class, highly educated, white male Brits, so there's shall we say a narrow band of perspectives. Anyone from another country or class has their accent written phonetically and that sure ain't the worst of it. William Caine's "Spanish Pride", for example, is a touching story of human goodness. It's followed immediately by another story by Caine that is so revoltingly racist I don't even want to type its title.
But some stand the test of time. My favourites were:
- The Shooting of Shinroe (Somerville & Ross)
- Family Faces (Herbert)
- Chapters from Three Men In A Boat (Jerome)
- Biffin on Acquaintances (Graham)
- The House-Warming (Milne)
- The Gold Cup (Darlington)
- The Toy Dogs of War (Emanuel)
- Soaked in Seaweed (Leacock)
Almost all the stories are laced with that characteristically British styles of humour: sardonic-to-droll tiptoeing into absurdism with a focus on institutional incompetence.
When it comes to comedy, it's interesting to see what holds up and what is rendered bewildering by age. Take for example The Whole Truth, by Inglis Allen. On just page 734 alone we get
- an adverb for almost every verb: somewhat intricate, tolerantly rapping, looks down jocosely, silently contemplates, excessively jocund, assents with indulgence, taps mysteriously, says protectively, etc
- six instances of 'jocund' or 'jocosely', and a policeman who is described as 'stout' three times
- instead of 'says': observes, observes, observes, inquires, queries, assures, assents, says protectively, inquires, returns, cries, whispers
Pair this eye-rolling writing style with a slice-of-life plot and I have no idea what about the story is meant to be funny. I can only assume that it's some lampooning that's gone over my head.
I take it a a lesson for world-building that big cultural divides can spring up in only a few generations. Even societies that are close to us in absolute terms are full of now-inexplicable tics and customs. Would things be different if supernatural longevity meant a few of these authors were still around, providing a long thread of cultural touchstones and explanatory power?
Side note: Spare A Penny (F. E. Baily, originally published 1932) uses the phrase "pack a gat", making the phrase at least 50 years older than I would have guessed.
Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog). Jerome K. Jerome (1889).
I found the extracts of this book in A Century of Humour so fun that I went and read the whole thing. Three friends go rowing (and towing) up the Thames, with a travelogue itinerary of the towns and villages on the river. It's all wrapped in humorous anecdotes and tall tales.
The language, humour, characterisations, and situations are bizarrely relatable. Half of the jokes feel like they come from Tumblr! But then it hits you with a line like
"There is no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet—except in dreams."
Or they just find a corpse in the river like that's something you have to deal with now and then.
The dry/wry humour is counterbalanced by loving descriptions of the riverside country that remind me a little of Tolkien.
Jerome has a very endearing trick where his first-person authorial voice tells you something with a false earnestness that is part of the joke.
For example, in Chapter 13 there are some passages roundly condemning steamboats on the river, and talking about the tricks the protagonist uses to deliberately hinder them:
There is a blatant bumptiousness about a steam launch that has the knack of rousing every evil instinct in my nature [...]
They used to have to whistle for us to get out of their way. If I may do so without appearing boastful, I think I can honestly say that our one small boat, during that week, caused more annoyance and delay and aggravation to the steam launches that we came across than all the other craft on the river put together.
“Steam launch, coming!” one of us would cry out, on sighting the enemy in the distance; and, in an instant, everything was got ready to receive her. I would take the lines, and Harris and George would sit down beside me, all of us with our backs to the launch, and the boat would drift out quietly into mid-stream.
On would come the launch, whistling, and on we would go, drifting. At about a hundred yards off, she would start whistling like mad, and the people would come and lean over the side, and roar at us; but we never heard them! Harris would be telling us an anecdote about his mother, and George and I would not have missed a word of it for worlds.
and then three chapters later, this turnaround:
At Reading lock we came up with a steam launch, belonging to some friends of mine, and they towed us up to within about a mile of Streatley. It is very delightful being towed up by a launch. I prefer it myself to rowing. The run would have been more delightful still, if it had not been for a lot of wretched small boats that were continually getting in the way of our launch, and, to avoid running down which, we had to be continually easing and stopping. It is really most annoying, the manner in which these rowing boats get in the way of one’s launch up the river; something ought to done to stop it.
And they are so confoundedly impertinent, too, over it. You can whistle till you nearly burst your boiler before they will trouble themselves to hurry. I would have one or two of them run down now and then, if I had my way, just to teach them all a lesson.
Delightful.
Three Men on the Bummel. Jerome K. Jerome (1900).
The sequel to Three Men in a Boat is a bicycle tour of the Black Forest, sporadically illustrated.
It starts off with a promise: "I have come to restrain my passion for the giving of information; therefore it is that nothing in the nature of practical instruction will be found, if I can help it, within these pages."
The book has sequel problems. There's no dog, for a start! It's less funny and characterful than the first. It also deviates frequently from anecdote into much longer reports about 'what the Germans are like as a people'. This is slightly eerie, given the burgeoning historical context, with passages like:
In Germany to-day one hears a good deal concerning Socialism, but it is a Socialism that would only be despotism under another name. Individualism makes no appeal to the German voter. He is willing, nay, anxious, to be controlled and regulated in all things. He disputes, not government, but the form of it. The policeman is to him a religion, and, one feels, will always remain so.
and
Hitherto, the German has had the blessed fortune to be exceptionally well governed; if this continue, it will go well with him. When his troubles will begin will be when by any chance something goes wrong with the governing machine. But maybe his method has the advantage of producing a continuous supply of good governors; it would certainly seem so.
Overall, where Three Men in a Boat is entertaining and funny, Three Men on the Bummel mostly just feels like one historical English writer's account of a German bicycle journey.
(By the way, a 'Bummel' is only explained in the book's final paragraph. It is a journey "without an end; the only thing regulating it being the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started. Sometimes it is through busy streets, and sometimes through the fields and lanes; sometimes we can be spared for a few hours, and sometimes for a few days. But long or short, but here or there, our thoughts are ever on the running of the sand.")
Men, Martians and Machines. Eric Frank Russell (1955).
I enjoyed this book as a kid and went into the re-read with nostalgia goggles. It's slightly Wodehousian – Russell was British but writing for American readers, and that shines through. The language feels even older than the mid-century, and the descriptions of action are quite convoluted. It's hard to believe I got through this as a child!
I was tickled by the nonsensical futurism. There are friendly chess-playing Martians, tobacco and beef ranches on Venus, and spaceship cargos of watch-making tools and radium needles. The objects 'duralumin gangway' and 'rawhide suitcase' appear in consecutive sentences.
I love this whole aesthetic and might draw on it if I ever make a SF game. Crewmembers carry a needle-ray projector, mud-skis, "thin, multi-purpose oil", a jar of graphite, a microwave radiophone powerpack, and "nutweed pellicules". There are audiojournalists, astro-computators, plate photography, grenade-sized atomic bombs, and pervasive cigarettes. To my surprise, a "quasi-arc welder" turns out to be a real thing.
The book establishes its main characters with a very short story on the delightfully-named spaceship Upskadaska City. The remaining three self-contained chapters are set in an experimental FTL spaceship which provides the framing device (first contact on three different worlds). To the modern eye the protagonists in these situations come across as inept, aggressive, and basically 'would-be colonisers'.
Men, Martians, and Machines hasn't aged well. There's casual and direct racism throughout, plus coded forms: the Martians read in several ways as problematic Asian stand-ins, and newly discovered aliens are immediately labelled "greenies" despite having other notable physiological differences from humans. There are no female characters. Of the two mentions of women in the whole book, one is sexist.
The actual stories aren't particularly good. The ship has a dedicated radio operator... who didn't think to check the radio waves upon landing on a new alien planet. Radio is presented as being centrally important, and then in one story the Martian crew members turn out to have been telepathic all along, saving the day. In fact the Martian and robot characters have such huge advantages that the human crew are rendered narratively worthless. I was also annoyed by Captain McNulty's inconsistent characterisation: he is by turns understated and taciturn, opinionated and bloviating, risk-averse and non-committal, or self-assured and overconfident.
The final story of Men, Martians, and Machines is by far the best. At this point Russell seems tired of his central conceit: many characters resent or regret going on another mission, and several (including the narrator) want to retire. The setup is more of a science fiction horror story. It's a sort of proto-antimemetics trope, and also made me think of Arnold K's false hydra. The weird ending is a high point, tying together a couple of the book's throughlines.
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