The Broken Road by A.E.W. Mason - A Review

The Broken Road by A.E.W. Mason

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Broken Road was sold to me as adventure fiction, but I’m not sure that’s a comfortable label for it to carry. It certainly bears a romantic air that fits the name, and there are moments which are ‘adventurous’, for lack of a better word, but overall there is no single adventure running through it. The hero, if he is one, does very little, while the villain is closer to an antihero in many respects, and is arguably the most sympathetic character for at least a portion of the book. Neither of them ‘get the girl’, who is clearly better off without them, and vice versa – although the ‘villain’ is ruined in figuring that out. Besides a somewhat illusory kidnap attempt, there is very little danger encountered and almost no hardships endured besides the psychological ones suffered by the erstwhile villain.

It starts well enough as an adventure, there’s a siege and a tough-as-nuts hero, but he dies of overexertion and the siege ends, and it’s all a prologue anyway. There’s the expected siege towards the end of the book, but it never happens, and the characters involved are asides, included more for completeness in the narrative than anything else. The war, such as it is, and the hunt for a fugitive across a remote alien land, are dealt with in summation, the latter in a portion of dialogue years after the event. The book is not about adventurous undertakings.

Instead, The Broken Road, is a novel about two young men filled with ideals, who learn through bitter experience that the world simply does not work the way they dreamed. That the main character, in terms of taking up most of the stage, is an Indian prince sent away to England to learn at Eton, gives the novel its central position as a colonial fiction. It is he who, if this were an adventure novel, would be the villain, and he is described as becoming one as events progress, but he is more pathetic in the end than villainous. A mere cog in the wheels of other people’s plans.
It is his progression from proud Oxford graduate who sees himself as White and better than his own people, to religious fanatic avowed to drive the English out of Chiltistan, his fictional home province, and ultimately to sorry drunk removed from any sense of home or identity he once had, that is the centre of the work.

There is much that can be made and said of the book in terms of colonialism and race, but the largely metaphorical nature of the three central characters and the Road itself means there’s no chance of applying a definitive reading on the book – thank goodness. It can be read as sympathetic to subject nations, or not. For my part, it seemed somewhere in the middle. That the British had a position of cultural superiority is not questioned, but that they should therefore force their will upon their supposed subjects – to ‘better’ them – is shown to be ill-fated at best.

Overall, despite some apparent sympathy for the ‘villain’, the sense of English superiority is too strong, and its surrounding narrative too weak, for this to escape the gravity of being ‘colonial’. That said, it is a fascinating read, with strong characters that can give much thought to an open-minded reader.




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A Literary Ramble on Literature

In preparation for the next semester (or trimester as DU calls them), I read two introductions to books introducing the various voices within literary theory, both of which asked that essential question, what is literature? Of course, the answer is vague, partly because it's a debatable point and partly because they were introductions and they can't give it all away. But it made me think about what literature is or has been to me, which is something I probably should think about if I'm studying Literature.

The first thought I have is remembering the many times I rearranged my books in my teens. It was something I did at least once a year I think. I would take every book off the shelf and put them into piles according to how I wanted to organise them, then work out the best way to arrange them all on the shelves. I could make a joke here about how much of a nerd I was/am, but, as I think about it, I'm not going to wear that label over this - I love books, I always have and always will, that doesn't mean I have to wear some societal label.

I digress, the point is, and there is one, I typically sorted them back into 'genre'. Fantasy always had the largest piles, with science fiction next and horror a small pile that grew steadily, especially if you include the Gothic Romances. There were plenty of problems and 'ums' and 'errs' deciding which pile to put some books on. Star Wars novels got their own pile and took up a shelf of their own, so that avoided that one, but other books raised questions - which could be the origins of my thesis, but that's a topic for another blog. The point, is where Literature stood, and in terms of sorting - and cataloging - my books it meant, books that don't fit any genre I'm aware of. Mostly it contained books I'd read for English at school like Dickens' Oliver Twist.

Later, when I was doing some post-grad study in writing, I was talking to someone who'd finished her Masters at the same uni, and I mentioned I had contemplated doing the Novel Writing Workshop. She asked what my novel would be about and as soon as I described some vague notion I had she replied 'There's a Genre Writing Workshop too'. I was floored, poor naive fool that I was, it had not occurred to me that a fantasy novel was not really a novel, but a piece of genre fiction. To her defence, she meant no offence and didn't intend any disdain towards genre, and I wasn't put off by her attitude, merely that the distinction between 'literature' and 'genre fiction' was so well established as to be taken as part of the structure of writing and teaching writing.

These days I'm aware of the existence of such distinctions to some people, and of the mirrored snobbery within genre fiction itself, however it is eroding I'm happy to say. Which leaves the question - what is literature to me now? And the answer is ... I'm not entirely sure. In the end, I think it's any creative work which uses language and is approached by a reader as such - that is a creative work using words. So, a play is literature when approached as a script for reading and digesting, and a performance text when approached for mounting a production. A performed play is literature when approached by a reader/audience member from the point of view of the words being uttered and the context they are in (so scene/characterisation etc is part of it not just the words). So literature, I realise as I write this, is a relationship between the reader/watcher and the text.

That was a journey for me, I didn't expect that outcome. I hope, if you've stuck with it this long, that your relationship with this text has been enjoyable.

Keep dreaming!

ERB - Master of Adventure

One thing I did during the period I wasn't blogging was go to Hobart to see some of Dark MoFo, which I hope to blog about soon. While there we (my family and I) of course went to the Salamanca Markets, and, of course, I looked at a lot of second-hand books. I managed to resist many temptations but there was one old paperback that caught my eye. I tried to resist - I told my wife I'd leave it and if no-one had bought it before we came back that way, then I would buy it.

The book, which you have guessed I bought, is Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure by Richard A Lupoff. It caught my eye because of the cover illustration which was clearly a Frank Frazetta painting and I can't resist any work by that man. If it was just a Burroughs' novel I could have resisted but this is much more.

It's a scholarly look at the collected works of ERB considering them individually and as series and as a whole in terms of their success both on their own terms and in terms of their influence on the genre.

Burroughs seems almost forgotten now, although his major creations are remembered. Tarzan is of course the most famous and Lupoff does a good job pointing out how the Tarzan most of us are familiar with is not the one Burroughs wrote. For one thing he never spoke in the "Me Tarzan, you Jane" style, it was more a "My name is Tarzan, pleased to meet you Jane." Although, he had to learn English from a Frenchman, since he spoke French first. Yes, Tarzan was trilingual if you include 'beast', bilingual if you don't.

His second most famous series were his Barsoom novels, Barsoom being the name Martians have for Mars. These have recently suffered through the horrible Disney film John Carter, which I can see no justification for. There are scenes in it which prove the people behind the film had read the book so why they proceeded to ignore its heart, rip out its soul and mutilate its corpse is beyond me.

But, once you get to what the real Tarzan and Barsoom stories are you still don't come away with literary brilliance. These are unapologetic adventure stories written primarily to entertain. ERB himself said he didn't write because he wanted to be a novelist or create great art. He was poor, he had a family, so in the evenings he wrote on the back of envelopes and managed to sell the result for a few hundred dollars to one of the pulps of the day - a big sum in 1912.

As such ERB wrote slavishly, but didn't spend hours and hours poring over his work refining it. This led to a high output, most of his books took him a couple of months to write, but also many flaws. There is no contention that Burroughs was a particularly skilled writer. His stories are full of plot holes and rely heavily on coincidence to turn out. But, for the most part, they are exciting adventure stories filled with outlandish beings and lost civilisations.

And where his plots may be full of holes, his civilisations are full of detail with rich histories and cultures. Outlandish yes, but rich.

Lupoff also places ERB in a chronology, looking at some of his sources and considering some of the influences he had - suggesting that even sword and sorcery is deeply indebted to Tarzan, despite it not being the genre of Lord Greystoke. I think there could be debate on how strong the influences Lupoff discusses were but it's always interesting to consider the development of genres over time.

Lupoff finishes by pondering the longevity of ERB's works and suggests that, as a character, Tarzan had a good chance to outlive the other modern 'supermen' of literature - Superman and Sherlock Holmes. Back in the 60s maybe that was possible, but clearly it hasn't come true. Maybe if his film incarnations hadn't been such pale reflections of their source material he'd have done better. And the abovementioned disgrace to John Carter certainly won't help ERB's reputation.

But Lupoff has encouraged me to read more of these adventures, and I hope the adaptations can be forgotten without us losing the source material completely. There are fantastic vistas to visit within those pages, let's do some travelling.

Keep dreaming!

The Rest of Astounding Stories May 1931

Following Dark Moon which I discussed earlier, comes the short story When Caverns Yawned by SP Meek. It’s one of his Doctor Bird and Operative Carnes stories, the first I’ve encountered, and I have to say it was terrible. The villain was a one-dimensional evil genius and he has an infallible plan for world domination – or giving America over to Soviet Russia at least. Doctor Bird matches wits with this scheme and of course comes up with a way to stop it.

The story is bland, the characters cardboard cut-outs and the writing gets lost in useless explanations of scientific theories. Apparently he was a popular contributor to the SF pulps in the early ’30s but as tastes turned to more literarily acceptable fare he gave up science fiction and wrote children’s stories.

Then came part two of a four-part novel by Ray Cummings, The Exile of Time. I’ll go back, read the other parts, then get back to you.

Next came Hal K Wells’ When the Moon Turned Green, which was about a scientist who’d been in his underground lab for three days working on a new explosive based on radium. He comes out to test a small charge of it and finds the moon is green and every living thing is in a sort of living death, totally immobile but not dead.

Then he’s attacked by a monstrous spider with a half-human face. Story short, aliens from Alpha Centauri were bathing the moon in a green glow that was sapping the life from everything on Earth to make them mindless so they can be used to make hybrids, like the monstrous spider, and so rule the world.

Thankfully for us, the scientist has discovered this powerful explosive and his friend has invented a radio-seeking missile that’s already locked on to the space ship. His friend (and his friend’s daughter who is his fiancée) escaped the “Green sickness” because they were interrogated by the Centaurians on Earth who used a crystal thing to bring them out of it. The alien base was of course on his property. Talk about a string of lucky coincidences.

Plot aside, it’s a fun story with some nice monsters and aliens. Okay, so I’m a sucker for pulp tropes, so sue me.

Finally there was The Death-Cloud by Nat Schachner and Arthur L Zagat. This is a war story set in The Last War, where almost the entire planet has fallen under the Red Flag except for America, of course. The action takes place before the Big Push of ’92 (1992), and sees a secret agent infiltrate a mysterious enemy location.

It’s a fairly exciting cross-genre story but not all that gripping. The best part for me was the war was not being fought on land but in airships and with submarines. Interestingly, as with When the Moon Turned Green and When Caverns Yawned, the principal weapon and scientific concept was a ray gun. There seemed to be a lot of belief in the powers of rays yet to be discovered at the time. Not sure I’m sorry it didn’t turn out to be true though.

Keep dreaming!

Subgenres, Wikipedia and Finding My Geek Niche

I had some free time so I was browsing Wikipedia and ended up reading the articles on Sword and Planet and Planetary Romance. They clearly haven’t been written by the same people as they differ on a number of points. The Sword and Planet article, which I think is a better constructed piece than the other, argues that it is a distinct genre from Planetary Romance, whereas the latter article has a non-committal discussion on ‘sword and planet’.

Once the article on Space Opera is added to the mix things get even more confusing as it had a section arguing its definition in opposition to Planetary Romance – since one happens in space and comes from Westerns and Seafaring epics whereas Planetary Romance happens on a planet and is tied to lost world and lost civilisation tales. Who knows what happens when stories go from outer space to a planet and back again?

Now, I know opponents of Wikipedia will jump on this opportunity to say it’s more proof of its inaccuracy and inconsistency, but that’s not fair. Genres are notoriously difficult to nail down and subgenres like these are even worse and will be described differently by scholars regardless.

As always, genres and subgenres are just broad boxes which inevitably overlap in any given story. But looking at them and some of the authors involved in these and others (Weird, Sword and Sorcery etc) I realise I have a huge interest in the developments of Speculative Fiction (the overarching super-genre) through the first half of last century and the end of the one before it. Particularly in the pulp era when genres were being mashed together all over the place and new territories uncovered.

I think that’s where I’d like to focus my studies and my geekiness. So expect to see more posts on this era and the stories it generated.

Keep dreaming.