Books You Should Read : Anathem
One of the better Xmas presents I got this year was Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Anathem. I’m only around 500 pages into it (it’s 900 pages + long) but I can already enthusiastically recommend it as the best new book I’ve read all year.
Stephenson is someone whose work I admire intensely (although I’m ashamed to say I’ve still not finished his huge, 3000 page Baroque Cycle trilogy – it’s so dense that without reading it uninterrupted I can’t keep track of the many threads, and lose the plot somewhere around the 1800-page mark and have to go back to the beginning. I plan to take a week off next year and spend it just reading those books).
After the technothriller-of-sorts Cryptonomicon and the historical novel that is the Baroque Trilogy, Anathem sees Stephenson’s return to science fiction, the genre in which he made his early impact. But rather than the cyberpunk of The Diamond Age or Snow Crash, this is hard Campbellian SF with some slight fantasy-esque worldbuilding – it reminds me more than anything of Arthur C Clarke’s work, but with a much better prose style and more ideas.
Science fiction fans often defend SF as ‘the real literature of ideas’, and to an extent that’s true. Good science fiction relies more than any other genre on new ideas. Unfortunately, the ideas themselves are often relatively trivial ones – often solutions to hypothetical engineering problems. One could come up with a pretty good traditional SF plot by, for example, constructing a race that evolved on the outside of a Dyson sphere by feeding off the black body radiation it emits, working out their biology and society, then having them discover that their world has an inside.
Something like this happens in Stephenson’s novel – he has a meticulously worked out pseudo-monastical order of mathematicians (which reminded me of Logopolis, especially in their rejection of computers, but is far more well-conceived than the Doctor Who story) on a fairly detailed world coming into contact with aliens who (at the point I’ve reached) are unknowable in almost every way. So far, so ordinary.
But Stephenson is one of the few novelists I know of who is *really interested* in ideas of all sorts – cultural, political, economic, scientific and so on. Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Trilogy were linked not only by one recurring supporting character, but by the ideas Stephenson was working out (about information flow being the same as flow of value, about to what extent it is possible to represent the world symbolically, about truth and deception, about the creation of modern capitalism, and about looking at history not as a struggle between ‘great men’ but between great ideas). His other novels were similarly based around Big Ideas – and not just one per novel, but several interacting.
In this regard Stephenson reminds me of Grant Morrison, but Stephenson is the better prose stylist and has the space to work the ideas out more thoroughly (Stephenson also appears to be far more instinctually conservative than Morrison – while Morrison’s rebellion against Baby Boomer generation immediately before him tends to be in the form of fetishising youth and youth culture, Stephenson seems to wish the old hippies would just grow up and get over themselves). While Anathem presents itself as a science fiction story, the plot is merely a convenient hook on which to hang a complex net of ideas.
In this case, these start with a fairly simple neo-Platonist world view (that mathematical concepts have an existence separate from human perception, in some other level of existence), which Stephenson links with the many-worlds hypothesis in quantum physics, and with Penrose’s idea that the brain must work on a quantum level, and with mathematical concepts of phase space, to postulate a multiverse with information flow from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ levels, and with brains acting as quantum computers. In this model, our understanding of what is within the range of the possible – our mapping of the phase space – (for example the way we ‘intuitively’ know that a lead weight is more likely to fall to the floor than float in the air) comes from interference with the copies of our brains in close parallel universes.
Now, I happen to think this world view is almost certainly wrong (Platonism makes little sense to me, and Penrose strikes me as the same kind of half-bright person as Dawkins, his argument being little more than “I don’t understand thought, and I don’t understand quantum physics, so they must be the same thing”), but the way Stephenson jams the ideas together – and the many, many other ideas he throws out – is beautiful. During the action sequences I keep finding myself thinking “Oh,enough with the being rescued from a lynch mob by shaolin monks – get back to the discussion of the objective reality of Plato’s forms!”
One common criticism of this book has been the large number of words Stephenson has made up, but this is completely invalid. In a world with no Socrates or William of Ockham or Pythagoras, you can hardly have characters talking about Socratic dialogue or Occam’s razor or Pythagoras’ theorem. Many of his new coinages are very, very witty, and there’s the additional fun of dictionary entries studded throughout the text (the entry for ‘bulshytt’ is particularly worth reading).
Not that the book is perfect – the sequences where the plot is advanced through action don’t work nearly as well as those where the plot is advanced through dialogue, and Stephenson also chooses to depart from his normal method of having several viewpoint characters in interweaving plot threads, instead giving us a single first-person narrator throughout the story. While the reasons for this make a lot of sense (the readers only get hints of the big picture in tiny drips, and this is accentuated by the fact that the main character is, while hugely intelligent, a 19 year-old who’s spent almost all his life in a monastery), one of Stephenson’s biggest strengths is his ability with character. He’s particularly good at writing about a few different masculine types of personality (very non-verbal military men and introverted, logical, mathematician types) and showing the commonalities in their perceptions of the world. By showing everyone through the lens of one character’s perception, he has removed this particular string from his bow, so there are (at least in the first half) no scenes like Randy’s Cap’n Crunch-eating techniques or Laurence’s ‘fucking Mary’ plan from Cryptonomicon – where in his earlier books one comes away thinking about the ideas and about individual character moments, here what sticks in the mind isn’t so much the characters as the world – I have only a dim idea of the characters of any of the individuals in the story, but a very clear mental picture of the great Clocks, and how the doors open for Apert, and of the spaceship with its geometrical proof.
If you’re at all interested in the nature of consciousness, the nature of reality, mathematics, the possibility of contact with alien life, the possibility of parallel universes or just a good story, Anathem will set your mind ablaze in a way very few novels will.
I Aten’t Dead
Just a quick note to let people know that I just got back to the UK after spending most of the last day travelling, hence the lack of response to comments to my most recent posts – I appreciate the way that the libertarian side have been very reasonable and friendly, given the rather nasty way I spoke about them. I’m also very glad that my friend Hexar has been posting responses that are substantially the same as I would have posted (I’ll *HAVE* to come and visit you and Leighann some time next year, if (as seems likely) you can’t get over here, Hexar).
For those who are interested, it’s been reposted over at Liberal Conspiracy (albeit with a couple of edits) and there’s some more discussion going on over there.
I go sleep now.
Why I Am Not A Libertarian
Recently, there appears (and ‘appears’ is the word – it’s almost certainly an artefact of looking over a few blogs and reading more into tone than into content, but this is something that has been remarked on by people other than myself) to have been an influx into the Liberal Democrats of Libertarians. This is typified by the members of ‘Liberal Vision‘, which is in turn part of a Tory organisation called ‘progressive voice’ (essentially a bunch of Objectivists).
Now, in many ways I agree with libertarians on many subjects – which is, of course, why we can be in the same party – I am all for more personal freedom, for a lack of government interference in people’s lives, for the restoration of recently-lost civil liberties and so on. But libertarians seem, to me, to have two big holes in their thinking, both of which are summed up by some recent comments by ‘Nick’ in this thread on Liberal Conspiracy (scroll down).
‘Nick’ may or may not be a self-described libertarian (or indeed liberal) but he’s following the libertarian ‘party line’ almost exactly. The government should not interfere with the workings of the market when companies are failing. Not only should they not spend any money bailing out the companies (a reasonable, debatable position) or on retraining the workers so they can get jobs elsewhere (a much less reasonable position in my view) – they should not even pay unemployment benefit to the people who lose their jobs, because the money would be better allocated by the market.
Now, there are two distinct errors here. The first, and less important, is the one that pretty much every ‘free market’ advocating politician of whatever stripe for the last thirty years has fallen into – the belief that markets will always guarantee the most efficient allocation of resources.
People who know a little about economics can fall into this trap, because free-market economists define ‘efficiency’, tautologically, as the state where everyone has the maximum possible without anyone else having any of their property taken from them – in other words, as ‘that state which a market will produce’.
However, ‘efficiency’ in this context is merely a local optimum, not an overall optimum. As an example, suppose that you, O Hypothetical Reader, have a pound – a whole shiny pound all to yourself. And I have nothing. Now, assuming you don’t want to just give me your money, that’s the most efficient distribution of the money possible.
But suppose that, while you don’t want to give me your money, you were forced to, and I invested the money and made ten pounds, of which I was forced to give you five. Instantly, we have *both* benefited, substantially, even though this is ‘less efficient’ in market terms.
Now, in this hypothetical situation, you would of course either just give me the money or invest it yourself. But in a real life situation involving billions of pounds in the pockets of millions of people, it can’t be guaranteed that the equivalent would happen.
A market is a very good way of ensuring, not that the economy always gets more efficient or runs at peak efficiency, for the common understanding of the word efficiency as opposed to the economists’ understanding, but rather that the economy *always moves into the most efficient adjacent position in the economic phase space*. These are very similar things, but they can be crucially different.
As an analogy (appropriately Newtonian for today) imagine a ball rolling downhill. Now, normally, that ball will continue down until it reaches the bottom of the hill (a state of maximum gravitational efficiency). But imagine a little dip in the hill halfway down. The ball rests there, because to go any further down it would first have to go up.
That kind of situation, economically, is when it makes sense for government intervention. Sometimes a mass of people acting independently do not come up with the most efficient solution, and a change, even an arbitrary one, needs to be made to free the ball from the rut. As an example, we need laws stating that you should only drive on one side of the road. The choice of which side is arbitrary, but not having those laws would cause infinitely more problems than the tiny amount of personal freedom given up.
I think the main defining characteristic of a liberal – as opposed to a libertarian – is that a liberal recognises the need for such measures but thinks they should be as few and as minimal as possible.
However, I have left the more important error to last, which is simply this – who says ‘efficiency’ of whatever kind is the thing we need most? For a long time the right have predetermined the terms of the debate by talking about ‘economic efficiency’ and ‘modernisation’. These are probably good things, overall, but are they the be-all and end-all? I think not.
Libertarians almost all seem to believe that they have achieved everything in life entirely by themselves, having struggled against mighty odds and overwhelming enemies to become moderately successful computer programmers, despite the horrible disadvantages of being born white, English-speaking heterosexual males in middle-class families. Their thought is ultimately a selfish one – “I did this, so anyone else can, and I had no help so I won’t help anyone else”.
I, on the other hand, have experienced poverty. I’ve never been at the lowest possible point, but the few months when I had to support my now-wife and myself on one person’s benefits were unpleasant, to say the least. So now I’m in a position where I’m working for a well-known company, earning a good income, doing a job I enjoy, I feel not only an obligation to society to pay back what I’ve taken (for I couldn’t have got this job without help both from individuals and from government institutions), but a profound *need* within myself to make sure that no-one else should have to dig around for half an hour to find twenty pence for a pack of custard creme biscuits which will be their only meal of the day…
PEOPLE are inefficient, messy things. There is no possible rational justification for supporting the continued existence of the human race, let alone helping individual members of it. But anyone who would gladly see tens of thousands of people jobless and with no source of income, either in the name of keeping a few extra pence a week in their own pocket or in the name of a heartless ‘efficiency’ has so little compassion in their heart, so little empathy, that I can’t even begin to imagine a common frame of reference for discussion, despite many surface similarities in our philosophies.
The old ones are the best…
I think we’re all in need of a little Christmas cheer right now (I certainly am, after spending the last few days trying to teach myself more Perl. There’s a reason why perl looks like comic characters swearing. Any language in which ”=~(‘(?{‘.(‘^[).)}'^'.)@@]]’).’”‘.(‘|.@[;*^'^'=@$)^]|’).’,$/})’) is actually a valid executable program has serious problems…) and so here’s my favourite stupid Christmas joke, from the pages of The Making Of The Goodies Disaster Movie…
The Cast List of White Christmas
Emma Dreaming
Arthur White
Chris Muss
Jess Likedy
Juan Sy
Hugh Sterno
Wendy Treetops-Glissen
Ann Chilled-Wren
Liz Anne
“Two Ears” Laybelle
Cindy Snow
Emma Dreaming
Arthur White
Chris Musswit
Avery Criss
Miss Carr
Dai Wright
Mayor Dazeby
Mary-Ann Bright
Anna-May Hall-York-Rhys
Mrs B White
He’s Known As Batman, With Robin The Boy Wonder By His Side…
I’m at a disadvantage with this post, because even though I am in the US at the moment, my comic shop isn’t. So everything I am writing right now could be completely contradicted by today’s issue of Batman, and I won’t know for a week or so…
One aspect of Batman’s life that has been left out of Morrison’s “Everything really happened” take on Batman is Jason Todd. Unless I’m forgetting a brief appearance in one of the Resurrection Of Ra’s Al-Ghul crossovers, there has been no mention of Jason Todd in Morrison’s run on the title at all.
Except… there sort of has…
You see, there are three ‘Jason Todds’ in Batman, and have been for a few years now.
One is the character that is currently running around with no narrative purpose, whose very existence in one panel of a comic requires, out of necessity, the whole comic to be perverted into a rationalisation of the most pointless returns from the dead in comic history, and who has no fixed characterisation. This character is an utterly pointless waste of ink, and an example of the artistic bankruptcy of a superhero comics medium that is obsessed with ‘things being like they were when I was 12, but more badass’.
The second is the character that existed from 1988 to 2005, and is still what most comics fans think of first when they think ‘Jason Todd’. The martyr. Good soldier. He Died So That Others Might Live. Young boy at the height of his powers, struck down by the Joker. An illustration of what happens when Batman Goes Too Far and Lets Others Get Hurt. A character that was more interesting in death than he is now in life, Jasonthegoodsoldier was still, unfortunately, just a symbol for everything that was wrong with Batman comics from the moment Dark Knight issue 1 came out…
But there used to be another Jason Todd. One that we in the Silent 73 remember…
This Jason Todd was, as bobsy put it, “a Robin for the burgeoning Dark Age – troubled, angry, rebellious and a natural brawler”. While his intentions were usually good, he was brattish, spoiled, a criminal before becoming Robin (at least in the post-Crisis retconned origin of the character). He would even kill when he thought it necessary for the greater good.
In short, wasn’t he just a slightly more mature Damien?
While fans have generally disliked the character of Damien, the crucial issue 666 (the most important issue so far of Morrison’s run on Batman, which I’m still praying will continue post-Battle For The Cowl, as Rich Johnston suggests it will) shows the same character traits, but in a far more disciplined, resourceful adult Damien:
I spent my first three years as Batman making the job easy for myself. Turning the city itself into a weapon. The victory is in the preparation…I knew I’d never be as good as my dad or Dick Grayson, but I promised I wouldn’t leave Gotham without a Batman. So I specialised in cheating.
Morrison essentially has taken the character of Jason Todd out of the 80s comics and brought him back under a pseudonym. Making him Batman’s biological son is just icing on the cake. Remember, Jason Todd (pre-Crisis) was the son (adoptive, but also, it was hinted, biological), of Nocturna, a villain who had a love-hate relationship with both Batman and Bruce Wayne. Just like Damian with Talia…
Morrison has, intentionally or otherwise, spotted that Batman really needs a Jason Todd figure. Tim Drake is an adequate Robin, but he’d make a lousy Batman – Batman needs an heir as conflicted as himself who will ‘carry on the fight’ when Batman is gone, and he needs a sidekick who will argue with him to provide some kind of narrative tension.
So he’s done the ultimate Silent 73 trick – he’s made it so Jason never died. He’s just called Damien, but otherwise he’s the same character, with the same narrative purpose. So bringing in Jason thedeadmartyr goodsoldiergoodsoldier or the new, pointless version would just confuse matters. He’s got a character who serves the same narrative purpose for which the original was created, and who could be a fascinating source of future Batman stories were it not for the fact that (as with so many of Morrison’s other ideas) no-one else seems to get the point of the character.
Tomorrow – more on this whole FinalRIPsis storyplex, if I can get to the computer.
Linkblogging for 22/12/08
The Mindless Ones are continuing the interblog circle jerk by interviewing pillock. Choice quote
Kirby saved Marvel from drowning by pulling it out of the lake, the Seventies boys kept its heart beating, Claremont and Byrne took over when they got tired, the Nineties stabbed its heart with adrenaline and figured that’d be good enough, so call the paramedics and tell them we don’t require their services…and then it died, but the paramedics arrived anyway just in time, but then…I don’t know, the corporate masters decided it was good enough just to have a guy they hired off the street dress as a paramedic, and stand nearby, and everything would be fine?
I think those interviews they’ve been doing are fascinating (and not just because they chose me to interview first). I’ve noticed that since they started there seems to be more of a shared sense of community or purpose or… something… among a subset of comics blogs that includes Mindless Ones, Trout In The Milk, my own blog, Vibrational Match, The Factual Opinion and a handful of others. Not that I’d say that all those blogs are in any way alike, and nor would I compare mine in quality to the others, but we all seem to be trying for and sometimes achieving something a little different to what other comics bloggers do, and we seem to be recognising the commonalities a little more since these interviews started. Or maybe that’s just me?
Either way, this is another fascinating interview about the state of comics – and comics criticism – today, and also goes into some of the stuff about seeing one’s own culture with alien eyes that we talked about in my interview, though from a completely different direction…
(And they’re right, it is odd that all the people they’ve interviewed so far use wordpress, as they do themselves…)
Alex is continuing his “Int Doctor Who brilliant?!” series with “Why 1977 was brilliant”.
A good conversation is going on in this post and its comments at Liberal Conspiracy, on the tension between green and left-wing views. I particularly like the suggestion (which I would have made myself had Lee Griffin not made it first) that rather than bail-out failing car companies, it would make far more sense both economically and environmentally just to spend that bail-out money on giving the workers a couple of years’ salary to go off and get retrained… not a perfect solution but, I suspect, a better one than the alternatives that are being discussed…
David at Vibrational Match continues his look at Grant Morrison’s The Filth.
And Scholars And Rogues have a post on something that must – surely – be a joke? Outsourcing of local journalism to India…
ETA Chicken Yoghurt has a post on something that escaped me as I’ve been out of the country – bailiffs are now going to be allowed to break into people’s houses and assault them… this is the most evil thing this government has yet done, and it’s done a lot of them…
On Luck
I’ve never been someone who made friends particularly easily – a combination of intense shyness and an utter inability to read social signals has seen to that. However, I do have some friends, and I am very lucky that they are, without exception, some of the most intelligent, thoughtful, generous, funny, kind, knowledgeable and (in the case of my female friends – I’m no judge of the male ones) physically attractive people I’ve ever known.
I’m even more lucky that of all my friends, the one who fits those criteria the most also happens to be my wonderful wife Holly, whose twenty-seventh birthday it is today.
Happy birthday love.
Albums You Should Own – I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times
This week’s Albums You Should Own is hamstrung a little by my presence in the US. I haven’t brought the vast majority of my record collection with me, for obvious reasons, and I don’t like writing these things without re-listening to the album in question. So this one is going to be about a less obscure album than the last few, but a good one – Brian Wilson’s I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times.
In 1995 Brian Wilson was considered even by his most ardent fans to be a washed-up failure. Since the Beach Boys’ eponymous album of ten years earlier, his musical output had consisted of one pretty-good solo album in 1988, an unreleased and not-very-good follow-up, a couple of terrible singles and a single track on the Beach Boys’ Still Cruisin’ album, all of these more than six years earlier.
But rather astonishingly 1995 was to be the biggest turning point in Wilson’s career since 1966. To start with, MOJO magazine voted Pet Sounds the greatest album of all time, causing one of those occasional resurgences in the album’s profile that happens every few years. There was also a general wave of popularity for id-60s pop music at the time, caused partly by the Britpop boom in the UK and partly by the release of the Beatles’ Anthology series. So the time was ripe for a comeback. But rather startlingly, unlike the earlier ‘Brian is back’ campaigns, this time Brian actually did come back.
The end of 1995 saw two new albums from Brian Wilson. While neither contained any new Wilson songs, that was still more than the previous decade had seen. One of these albums, Orange Crate Art, his collaboration with Van Dyke Parks, I’ve dealt with in an earlier post. The other, however, while breaking no new artistic ground, is a rather lovely introduction to Wilson’s work.
In the mid-90s Don Was was busy trying to work with every legend of rock music he could. He produced the Rolling Stones’ Stripped, a Jerry Lee Lewis comeback attempt, and while he couldn’t do the Beatles, he did the next best thing and produced the Backbeat soundtrack. So it was probably inevitable that he would try to work with Brian Wilson. The result was a black & white documentary, I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, designed to show non-fans why musicians so often refer to Wilson as a genius.
Unfortunately, the soundtrack album for some reason misses the three best musical moments from the film, all intimate round-the-piano performances. One is Wilson and Parks sat at the piano together performing Orange Crate Art, but the really special performances are Brian at the piano with his brother Carl (also of the Beach Boys) and mother Audree, singing God Only Knows and In My Room (heartbreakingly, both brother and mother would be dead in a little over two years from the film’s release).
What is released, however, is essentially that most 90s of artifacts the Unplugged album. While these aren’t actual live performances, they’re ‘as live’ – Brian overdubbed his lead vocals onto otherwise straight live cuts. The arrangements are subtly different from the originals – more ‘commercial’. The interesting edges have been smoothed off, and a glossy AOR sheen applied, that makes the music much less compelling for those like myself who are as interested in Wilson’s unique arranging skills as they are in his songwriting. While there’s nothing as actively distasteful as the arrangements on Wilson’s 1998 Imagination album, there’s nothing at all striking about them either – everything’s acoustic guitar, piano, drums, and not much else.
But there’s still the songwriting, and the vocals. Wilson’s vocals here are strained – he’s not been a ‘good singer’ since the late 60s – but that’s not really the point. What he is, is someone who believes in the song he’s singing like no-one else. He can communicate the feeling in a song better than any other vocalist I can think of.
And the songs are impeccably chosen. Almost hit-free, they’re instead chosen from the very best songs he’s ever written, and this short album does manage to do what Was wanted, to explain why Brian Wilson is a genius.
The album opens with Meant For You, originally from 1968′s Friends, a little 51-second piece of beauty, before going into This Whole World. This Whole World is the greatest pop single that was never a hit. In under two minutes the song sums up everything positive about pop music, with a dazzling, extraordinary race through almost every key and harmonic ambiguity imaginable, never settling on one tonal centre for more than a bar or two. Just gorgeous.
The rest of the album continues like this, going through obscure Beach Boys classics like Let The Wind Blow (from 1967′s Wild Honey album) and Wonderful (a collaboration with Van Dyke Parks from the Smile album which may well be the most perfect song ever written), as well as remakes of the two best songs from his first solo album. But the best thing on it is a song that wasn’t recorded for this album, but 19 years earlier.
Still I Dream Of It was from a bunch of songs written during the time of the Beach Boys Love You album, and originally intended for the unreleased album Adult Child. A full studio version from 1977 had been released on the Good Vibrations box set a few years earlier, but the version on here was Brian’s solo piano demo.
Written during a time when Wilson’s mental illness was at its worst, but his compositional ability was still as good as ever, Still I Dream Of It is the howl of pain of a scared little boy crying for his mother, and for a world that makes sense, but filtered through the sensibilities of a man with an absolute command of music. The lyrics are almost incoherent – Wilson never being the most verbally articulate of men at the best of times – but heartbreaking in their implications:
Time for supper now, day’s been hard and I’m so tired I feel like eating now
Smell the kitchen now, hear the maid whistle a tune my thoughts are fleeting now
Still I dream of it, of the happy day when I can say I’ve fallen in love
And it haunts me so, like a dream that’s somehow linked to all the stars aboveYoung and beautiful, like a tree that’s just been planted I’ve found life today
I’ve made mistakes today, will I ever learn the lessons that all come my way?
Still I dream of it, of that happy day when I can say I’ve fallen in love
And it haunts me so, like a dream that’s somehow linked to all the stars aboveA little while ago, my mother told me Jesus loved the world
And if that’s true then why hasn’t he helped me to find a girl, and find my world?
Til then I’m just a dreamerI’m convinced of it, the hypnosis of our minds can take us far away
It’s so easy now, to see someone up there high in heaven’s here to stay
Still I dream of it, of the happy day when I can say I’ve fallen in love
And it haunts me so, like a dream that’s somehow linked to all the stars above.
Hearing these lyrics, both childlike and childish, sung by a man who was at the time in his early thirties but sounded more like someone in his late 60s, with a voice prematurely ravaged by alcohol and cigarettes, recorded on a crackly old cassette, is one of the most emotionally intense musical experiences I’ve ever had. And getting just a couple of minutes of the pure, unfiltered power of this music makes you grateful for the gloss and sheen and emotional distance that comes from the more ‘professional’ sounding tracks surrounding it.
Brian Wilson’s music communicates to me like no-one else’s does, and if you’ve yet to understand why the man who’s best known for I Get Around and Surfin’ USA commands any respect at all, you could do a lot worse than tracking down this album or the film for which it is a soundtrack.
But Incognito As Batman He Fights Crime At Night
One of the things that people have found most confusing about the ending (if ending it is) of Batman RIP is the question of who exactly was the villain behind The Black Glove.
Was he, as he claimed, Thomas Wayne back from the dead (if he was ever really dead)? Was he Alfred (or working for Alfred)? Was he Satan himself? Was he operating under orders from some dissociated part of Bruce Wayne’s psyche? The conclusion was left ambiguous enough that all these were left as possibilities. This did of course leave several people frustrated, lacking the ‘closure’ they felt they deserved from such a long storyline.
Well, the answer to who the villain really was is obvious enough, to anyone who’s read Morrison’s other work.
It’s the Anti-Dad..
Morrison lost his own father fairly recently, and since then most of his superhero work has been devoted, in one way or another, to working out his feelings about this, both good and bad. All-Star Superman, for example, is largely about the inspirational power of Superman’s two dead fathers, and also about his power to inspire after his own ‘death’. Seven Soldiers is likewise full of lost or evil father figures – Klarion’s missing father, Zatanna searching for her father’s books, Jake’s father-in-law dying, Melmoth… the complex attitude towards Alan Moore in Seven Soldiers could be seen as part of this – Morrison having to kill his ‘father’ Moore (for a wonderful take on the Moore-Morrison inspirational relationship, see Uncyclopedia’s entry on Morrison ) .
The Anti-Dad sums up everything that was hinted at for the Black Glove – the not-really-dead Thomas Wayne who hates his son, the Devil, Alfred (who after all is Bruce Wayne’s surrogate father)… the Anti-Dad is also appearing right now in Final Crisis.
Anti-Dad is actually a pretty good description of Darkseid (the inspiration, after all, for cinema’s most famous ‘Dark Father’) and it is interesting in this context to look at the design notes in the Final Crisis Sketchbook for ‘Terrible’ Turpin.
Turpin of course later in the story becomes the body that Darkseid takes over, but he’s described as being ‘Jack Kirby as drawn by Frank Miller’. Now, that’s actually a good description of how the character should look, but if you wanted to name two people who could be described as the ‘father’ of modern superhero comics, Jack Kirby would obviously be one, and Miller could reasonably be described as the father of modern ‘realistic’, downbeat, grimungritty comics, of the kind both Final Crisis and Batman RIP at least pretend to be.
Both stories are reflections of each other – as above, so below, the microcosm and the macrocosm. As the Earth is being taken over and subverted to Darkseid’s will, so Batman finds that his own mind had been booby-trapped (with a phrase that sounds very like ‘surrender’ – surrender being another subject that has come up more than a few times recently in Morrison’s work).
Morrison is doing Crisis On Infinite Earths and American Gothic at the same time (unsurprising as he’s always claimed Moore’s Swamp Thing run as a big influence). He’s managing to take the little ground-level story and have it reflect the themes and events of the huge mega-complex crossover – and he did it without anybody realising this til after the fact (I thought the two were connected, but I couldn’t be sure). Certainly Batman RIP has far more claim to be a Final Crisis tie-in than most of the books Johns and Rucka are doing with the Final Crisis logo slapped on them (Revelations, to be fair, ties in quite well, but why the others are considered Final Crisis tie-ins at the moment I have no idea).
So the idea that the events of Batman RIP will come to their ‘real’ conclusion in Final Crisis is not a problem for me – the two stories are one and the same.
However, the icing on the cake, if true, is the report in Lying In The Gutters that Morrison *AND FRANK QUITELY* are going to be the creative team on Batman after all the big shake-ups have shaken out. If this is the case (as all right-thinking people hope and pray), it would appear conclusive proof that the story was not, as some thought, messed around with by Dan DiDio, but was what Morrison intended all along.
More on the Final Crisis/Batman RIP mega-story tomorrow…
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