Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

What an interesting book this one is.  Where to start?

Listen: there is always the plot. But there really isn't one. On the other hand, there is a general conception of the story.  The universe is hit by a timequake, and time is rewound by ten years.  Everything then starts to run forward again, exactly in the way and order it had happened before the timequake.  Exactly the same way!  The big casualty is free will.  Humans have memories of the ten years that now lie ahead of them, but they are unable to change a single word or a single action as their lives unfold a second time.  They just have to go on auto-pilot until the re-run, well, runs out.

Vonnegut gets up to more of his post-modernist tricks as the pages turn. Timequake was first published in 1997; however, the narrator tells the story from the view point of 2001 (then four years in the future), not long after the supposed re-run has finished.  Is the narrator Vonnegut, or a fictional Vonnegut? We are given clues but we can never be sure.  The narrator interacts with other characters, some fictional, and some who really existed.  Kilgore Trout, the failed science fiction writer and Vonnegut's alter-ego, is a major character in the story.  Trout frequently slips in and out of his role as a fictional construct and his role as someone known personally by the narrator.

The narration blurs the boundaries between fiction, memoir and polemic. The narrator tells us Timequake will be his last novel.  As he looks back on a long life, one that has been made ten years longer by the timequake, he tells us quite a few things about his politics and philosophy of life, which are basically socialist and humanist:

[Uncle Alex] said that when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it ... Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: 'If this isn't nice, what is?'

He quotes his son Mark: 'We are here to help each other through this thing, whatever it is.'

Eugene V. Debs (1855 - 1926), the American union leader, is a favourite of the narrator, and his words have been quoted in previous Vonnegut novels:

While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

As in a few of Vonnegut's previous books, there are suicides in this story.  It is notable that there are an awful lot of them; and the narrator also tells us of the deaths by illness and misadventure of many of the people he has known and loved.  Tolkien said that the inevitability of death was the key spring of his stories, and this would seem true for Timequake's narrator, too.

The reader can rest assured that the narrator leavens his dark themes with wit and compassion; and he has this to say about the consolation of literature:

Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone.'

'You are not alone.'  Yes, I think that is the real reason why I read Vonnegut, and why I will continue to read and re-read him.  Between you and me, this is the second time I have read Timequake.  I like it that much.

Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell

Another stroll down memory lane.  In the early '70s, Channel 7 used to screen a weekly horror movie double bill in a program called Creature Features.  I was quite the addict and never missed it.  Looking back on those days, the movie I best remember was The Thing from Another World (1951), an adaptation of Who Goes There? Not that it was a great movie.  Few of those cheap '50s films were very good.  Still, despite its cinematic shortcomings, it scared the willies out of me.  Those were the days.

So, my interest was piqued when I stumbled across a copy of the original short story by John W. Campbell.  I was pleasantly surprised.

A group of researchers in the Antarctic discover an alien spaceship frozen in the ice and, nearby, the preserved body of an alien.  They are inattentive when they thaw the body of the alien, and the thing escapes inside their base.  The group realise the fate of the entire planet is in the balance when they come to understand the alien's prodigious biological and mental abilities: most notably, it is a shape-shifting mimic par excellence.  Now they must confront the fact that at least one of them may be the alien.  But who, and how many?

Campbell has given us an exciting psychological drama in a few short pages.  The characters don't know who to trust, and neither does the reader.  Experiments need to be devised and conducted in order to tell friend from foe. Campbell builds the tension into several climaxes before the denouement in the final two chapters.  Given the shortness of the story, it is surprising how much has been packed into it.  This more than makes up for the slight clunkiness of the prose style.  Still, Campbell was writing pulp fiction in the 1930s, and there probably wasn't the time or the money for too much polishing.

Overall, Who Goes There? is an exciting and suspenseful story, and I am glad I read it.

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

I first saw the film My Fair Lady (1964) when I was five years old, and I have viewed it many times since.  I liked it then, and I like it now. The film is an adaptation of the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion (1912). It surprises me that I hadn't read the play earlier, but there it is (2013).

Henry Higgins makes a handsome living by teaching the nouveau riche to speak with a cultured accent so they can pass into polite society.  Two accidental meetings present Higgins with the opportunity of teaching the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle and passing her off as a duchess; it is a challenge he finds irresistible.  Eliza and Higgins develop a love-hate relationship in the process, and the young, good-looking but penniless Freddy Hill provides the third point of the eternal triangle.  Two questions are posed: Will Higgins succeed in his plan for Eliza? Will Eliza choose Higgins or Freddy?

The title of the play refers to the ancient Greek myth of the sculptor Pygmalion who falls hopelessly in love with one of his creations, a statue of a beautiful woman whom he calls Galatea.  Pygmalion prays to the gods to bring his statue to life.  His wish is granted, but does it make either him or Galatea happy?

George Bernard Shaw's play has certainly given life to some very memorable characters.  There is the intelligent, talented but socially inept Henry Higgins, a "confirmed bachelor".  With him is the kind and mostly thoughtful Colonel Pickering.  Eliza is a resourceful, almost ambitious, young woman with a firm moral character.  And her father Alfred Doolittle is a honey-tongued cadger of the first order.

The banter in the play is sparkling and, at times, profound.  Shaw has endearingly rendered Eliza's versatile Cockney expression of surprise and disbelief as "Ah-ah-oh-ow-ow-ow-oo!", and there are more than a few of them in the play.

Higgins gives us some nuggets of wisdom:

Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby!

and

It is these little things that matter, Pickering. Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves is as true of personal habits as of money.

and

Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means making trouble. Theres only one way of escaping trouble; and that's killing things. Cowards, you notice, are always shrieking to have troublesome people killed.

Eliza  grows as a person.  Early on we are treated to her less than eloquent judgements on the world:

What become of her new straw hat that should have come to me? Somebody pinched it; and what I say is, them as pinched it done her in.

Later, she is able to sum up her difficulties with Higgins in razor-sharp terms:

... the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.

And, of course, there is the ever-philosophical panhandling Alfred Doolittle:

I don't need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don't eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I’m a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.

A great point of interest for me was comparing the ending of Pygmalion with the ending of My Fair Lady: one entices speculation, while the other, frankly, palls.  I'll leave you to work out which is which.