Slothrop
Tight but Polite
Bring this one back from the dead...
I'm partway through Lights Out For The Territory, and I still can't decide whether it's brilliant or a pile of self-important balls - or possibly somewhere in the middle. I wonder whether it made more sense in the years before you could read about all this "secret history" stuff on wikipedia and a host of blogs - when esoterica really was esoteric?
Also, I think this comment from China Mieville's BLDGBLOG interview is quite interesting and on point:
Also, re his prose style, I think it would improve, if someone went to his house, and wired up the comma key, on his keyboard / typewriter, to a small electric shock machine.
I'm partway through Lights Out For The Territory, and I still can't decide whether it's brilliant or a pile of self-important balls - or possibly somewhere in the middle. I wonder whether it made more sense in the years before you could read about all this "secret history" stuff on wikipedia and a host of blogs - when esoterica really was esoteric?
Also, I think this comment from China Mieville's BLDGBLOG interview is quite interesting and on point:
Novelists have an endless drive to aestheticize and to complicate. I know there’s a very strong tradition—a tradition in which I write, myself—about the decoding of the city. Thomas de Quincey, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Iain Sinclair—that type-thing. The idea that, if you draw the right lines across the city, you’ll find its Kabbalistic heart and so on.
The thing about that is that it’s intoxicating—but it’s also bullshit. It’s bullshit and it’s paranoia—and it’s paranoia in a kind of literal sense, in that it’s a totalizing project. As long as you’re constantly aware of that, at an aesthetic level, then it’s not necessarily a problem; you’re part of a process of urban mythologization, just like James Joyce was, I suppose. But the sense that this notion of uncovering—of taking a scalpel to the city and uncovering the dark truth—is actually real, or that it actually solves anything, and is anything other than an aesthetic sleight of hand, can be quite misleading, and possibly even worse than that. To the extent that those texts do solve anything, they only solve mysteries that they created in the first place, which they scrawled over the map of a mucky contingent mess of history called the city. They scrawled a big question mark over it and then they solved it.
Also, re his prose style, I think it would improve, if someone went to his house, and wired up the comma key, on his keyboard / typewriter, to a small electric shock machine.