What order actually looks like

When they were alone, Ironside said, "I never thought this would be easy."

"Sir, may I ask you a question?"

"I wish you would." He ran his hand along the schedule for today. The film of Trotsky next.

"What if that" — Pishkoff swept his scarred right hand to indicate everything outside the room — "what if that is what order actually looks like?"

"Pardon?"

"We're here to bring order. I know. But what if this mess is the natural state and what we're doing is ridiculous?"

"You can't believe that."

"I think people get tired of fighting, and for ten years, twenty years, they agree: let's stop. You have some silk, I have a cow, your daughter marries my nephew, we'll drink, it's good, happily ever after, the end. But it's not the end. It's always chaos and shouting and homicide in the end."

Ironside shook his head. "I don't think that's right."

"Why are we fighting now?" Pishkoff presented a well of intelligence behind eyes cobwebbed with despair.

"Honestly? For our lives," Ironside whispered. He missed Pishkoff.

Unexpectedly, Pishkoff snorted.

"There we are," Ironside said. "I was worried you'd lost your sense of humor."

"You know what the peasants believe? They think the devil gave man a sense of humor."

"Why would he do that?"

"So we laugh at our problems instead of solving them."

There's a hell of a lot going on in this book. It may be saying something profound about war, and America's involvement therein. As much about today's wars as yesterday's.

A very entertaining book, Sunnyside, a kind of comedy, but a tragedy too, but only if you think about it really hard. The novel starts on a day in 1916: Charlie Chaplin is sighted in 800 locations. Pretty absurd, really. But what do I know? Maybe it happened.

There's no way to sort out (for one as myself, ignorant of this time period) what bits of which characters and what events they face are based in fact. Doesn't matter.

We trudge through World War I, as seen from Hollywood, but also through France and Archangel (Archangel! My own family has connections to Archangel, during a later wartime.). I don't care much for war stories, or dogs, but there's a lot of both in this book and it turns out that they're very interesting.

This — this book — is what order looks like. Not that I'm any kind of expert. But the way the jokes are set up and the fact that they pay off are evidence of a fine bit of construction.

This is the dawn of celebrity culture. Some people don't see it happening at all, but those who do struggle with how to bend it to their advantage or for the American good, if they can be bothered to care. What you can get away with, and for how much money.

One of my favourite characters is Bill McAdoo, former Secretary of the Treasury, Chaplin's hero, the man who signs the dollar bills, who holds an almost perverse fascination with the Hollywood industry, at first it seems as a factory of potential propaganda, but overwhelmingly as the great experiment to help achieve and prove his grail of economic and social function: the pleasure equation.

It's about squirrels and pigeons.

It's about image versus reality, whether it be of war, of celebrities, or of how it all gets processed in our individual heads.

When they'd lived in Beaumont, there had been that day when Chaplin was seen everywhere. What if that happened all the time? What if people's images were suddenly all over the place, thousands at a time, and this had been going on for years? Maybe there were times a person was projected when there was no projector, and people we met on the street were just these strange modern ibburim invested with living souls, and that's why the movies were so compelling; it was part of our collective memory. Maybe that was why acting was so attractive: you got the chance to be everywhere at once, and you could pretend to be many different people, the way nature intended. No one would have known about these ibburim until now, because now certain people were famous. If, for instance, she, Rebecca, was everywhere, and there were thousands of Rebeccas in cities and villages and in the ocean an on mountaintops, who would know? No one except her, and only if she ran into herself.

Excerpt.
See also my first impressions, with a little clarification.

How it made her feel

"It's a secret."

Washington Irving's old Dutch-style house: Sunnyside.

She had spoken like a girl — it was impossible to keep Sunnyside secret; everyone knew they were going to Sunnyside, everyone knew Sunnyside was there. She wanted to keep secret how it made her feel.

— from Sunnyside, by Glen David Gold.

About intimacy, not spectacle

When it was back down to seven dogs, Chaplin took them everywhere he went on the lot. When the payroll girl came to approve the raise for Carlyle Robinson ("What raise?"). Chaplin interrupted her to tell each dog to sit.

They worshipped him, and he lectured them about how that would never do, this was America, there were no kings here, one had to find one's own way, this demonstration that he was their hero was entirely embarrassing, he wasn't a martinet, he wasn't D. W. Griffith, they weren't making Intolerance, after all, to be a part of his crew was to be about intimacy, not spectacle, and because all were so rapt, he fed them biscuits.

[...]

"This was a good day's work," Chaplin announced to his crew that afternoon. "Carry on," he said, and since it was four o'clock, his touring car arrived. The cry "He's leaving!" went up, and Kono, the chauffeur, opened the door for him, and the whole Chaplin Studios team — seamstresses, prop master, stagehands, carpenters, lighting crew, Rollie the cameraman, the payroll girl, the assistant director, the whole art department, the portrait painter, the several men whom Chaplin had rescued from disaster and whose jobs were now ill-defined except to be of good spirits all day long, and the entire company of actors, and Vincent Bryan and Maverick Terrell, men whom no one looked in the eye, men whose jobs were mysterious (they wrote ideas for factions on slips of paper and put them into a drawer in Chaplin's desk, where they were never seen again), and Edna — lined up on either side of the gate and waved goodbye to him, and waved back with excitement, and his car pulled out of the studio. The elderly woman in the floral-print dress who closed the gate behind him — once, she had sung in the dance halls with his father and mother — waved goodbye, sadly.

Only when the car was block down Sunset did he realize he had just spent two weeks playing with dogs. They had shot a few thousand feet of film, not really that much, but little of it relating to dogs. Instead, he had a faction of the Tramp trying to get a job at an employment office and being muscled out of the way by larger, rougher workers. He'd done it to a metronome. It was adequate.

— from Sunnyside, by Glen David Gold.

I loved Gold's first novel, Carter Beats the Devil, and for years I've been checking to see if he might have something more in him.

Chaplin, of course, is at the heart of this story. He's a man I know very little about, apart from what I learned watching Robert Downey Jr's portrayal of him (and even that is kind of blurry).

He's portrayed here as a man with a vast ego but incredibly insecure about it, obsessed with his public image, plotting his every social move, to the point of preparing notes for parties.

We follow another young man, whose path crosses Chaplin's. He's worked in a lighthouse all his life, but his ego is devastatingly larger than that. He knows himself to be handsome, believes himself to be talented, and aspires to Hollywood.

This novel may be about the "dawn of the modern age," but it is also (at least, from where I sit, at about half way) very much about the making of America: The War Machine.

(I don't yet know what the title means. )

This book is funny. The set-ups are subtle and intricate, and there are sometimes pages to go before the punchline, but it's worth every word. An intimate — and genuinely clever — spectacle of a book.

Books I'm suddenly excited about

I'm sitting here, thinking about writing, thinking about reading, thinking about blogging, thinking about making and freezing some crêpes for when the girl gets home. But mostly I'm just sitting here, having a beer and a cigarette and not scrubbing the toilets.

I haven't been very excited about new book releases in a while. Nothing grabs me. Maybe I'm just caught up in working my way through some of the not-yet-read eclectic treasures I've amassed.

But I am unreasonably delighted to learn of the forthcoming publication of the following:

May 5, 2009: Sunnyside, by Glen David Gold. For years I've been pining that he write a new book for me to read. I'd heard rumours of one such book, but the publication dates were vague and postponed. But at last it seems imminent:

From the author of the acclaimed best seller Carter Beats the Devil comes a grand entertainment with the brilliantly realized figure of Charlie Chaplin at its center: a novel at once cinematic and intimate, thrilling and darkly comic, that dramatizes the moment when American capitalism, a world at war, and the emerging mecca of Hollywood intersect to spawn an enduring culture of celebrity.

Sunnyside opens on a winter day in 1916 during which Chaplin is spotted in more than eight hundred places simultaneously, an extraordinary mass delusion. From there, the novel follows the overlapping fortunes of three men: Leland Wheeler, son of the world’s last (and worst) Wild West star, as he heads to the battlefields of France; snobbish Hugo Black, drafted to fight under the towering General Edmund Ironside in America’s doomed engagement with Russia; and Chaplin himself, as he faces a tightening vice of complications — studio moguls, questions about his patriotism, his unchecked heart, and, most menacing of all, his mother — to finally make a movie "as good as he was."

May 26, 2009: The City & the City, by China Miéville. Not a Bas-Lag novel, but still! An existential thriller!:

When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he probes, the evidence begins to point to conspiracies far stranger, and more deadly, than anything he could have imagined. Soon his work puts him and those he cares for in danger.

Borlú must travel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own, across a border like no other. It is a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen, a journey to Beszel's equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma.

May will be a merry month.