The only problem with the century’s best book so far is that you have to do extensive pre-reading before you can dive into the depths of it.
I found that there is often a cultural barrier before you can enjoy exceptional pieces of art. The “Hitchikers guide to the galaxy”? Had no idea what Douglas Adams meant by anything in it and hated it the first half a dozen times before I first laughed at something funny he said. It took years more before I read the sequel and it emerged to be a tragic, bitter and sharp critical work of our world a few decades ago. “A house for Mr Biswas”? Self-centered, flat and uncertain until after half a dozen reads suddenly I felt closer to Mr Naipaul and his colorful, crowded and ancient world opened before my eyes after each word like petals of an infinite flower. Even Szabó Magda, who is from the midst of the culture that influenced my childhood, she needed devotion to be understood. Her random, sad comic-like figures behaving according to an absurd plot until I knew her rooms, her people enough to sit by them, look into their faces, talk to them, until I grew up to understand why they are so sad and seemingly predictable. Bohumil Hrabal’s books were outright confusing and digressing until, again re-reading each book I found myself crying and laughing and now I am hearing his voice as a child praising my long hair as I am biking to preschool with the kids. He is another one of my invisible group of secret friends holding my hand through life.
We are marginally more lucky with Dominic Green. I read his Small World first and my mind had no idea where to focus. One sentence had no connection to the next and he managed to blow my mind five times in the first five lines and that’s a little more mind-blowing I am prepared to take. I am used to easily comprehending what I am told and jumping from one page to the other in thirty seconds. It doesn’t happen with Mr Green’s books. Mr Green, or as he prefers, Dom, absolutely denies the well-known but unwritten concept of sci-fi literature that a novel should be based on one single revolutionary, innovative and unique concept based on science. He seems to think there is one necessary for each paragraph. He cruelly forgets that many sci-fi authors had only one unique concept in their entire lifetimes if they were lucky. Dominic Green is not an easy read.
So after half a dozen reads I actually managed to get some of the concepts that grow like daisies in a lawn in his books. Each one is mind-blowing and refreshing even after several reads and this is when I decided to start collecting his books as I do Asimov’s. Good thing is, he is a prolific writer, bad thing is his books are only in digital format so my bookshelves don’t represent my literary taste accurately any more.
I have to say though, his books are full of the dandelion clocks of also mind-blowing violence. For a long while I wasn’t going to forgive this. I have always felt that “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent” in literature as well as in politics. I felt there was no excuse for this, that anything can be made interesting and engaging without the cheap tool of pain, disease and disfigurement. The reason I persevered was that all his books were first read, enjoyed and recommended by my husband. Him, being a man, has a different approach to violence, and seeing all this blood and suffering through his testosterone-conditioned eyes was a challenge that I took to understand my love of life through Dom’s writing.
Thankfully, Dom doesn’t use the other tool I feel is a cheap method of engaging interest: sex.
After the hard work of digesting Dom’s first works I came across of Ant and Cleo series. As good old superiority-complex dictates, I jumped at them in the very middle wrongly supposing that trying to figure out the missing bits of information will offer a bit of entertainment at the boring bits. THERE WERE NO BORING BITS. Eventually tail between legs I had to go back to Book One and started reading them with the attention and reverence they require and deserve. In my thirst to understand I looked up Dom on facebook, tricked him into accept me as a “friend” and got to follow his entertaining daily excerpts from life (rich in violence, sex and unexpected concepts) in order to get a better idea what he meant.
By this time I was ready to enter the world that was built on the foundations of classic sci-fi, Monthy Python, intimate involvement in modern western culture, solid scientific background, complete disregard to general writing guidelines and an awareness of the tearing mindlessness of global human behavior.
Before I end up talking about the actual book, I also want to talk about a couple of reasons why Dom’s approach touches me. One of them is that I, again, find a companion who is disturbed by unresolvable problems but doesn’t use it as an excuse for anything. Since I could express myself in words I’ve been impacted by stuff that people around me seemed to have no interest in: wars, kindness, money, disease, spirituality, far-fetched implications of simple facts, questioning deeply rooted and accepted truths. This “stuff” only lead to disruption of my human relationships to a level where I learned better and never mentioned them any more. My “book addiction” was down to the fact that the only people I could silently discuss this “stuff” with were sensitive and kind science and science fiction writers, especially Hawking and Asimov. (Having worked through the entire and considerable library of my parents by the time I was four prevents me to mention every single writer who had something nice in their books. I am just talking about the two authors whose entire work was helpful battling these unmentionable thoughts at the time.) Dom is far from being a kind science fiction writer, I first thought. He dissects, tears apart, tortures and ridicules his characters with no mercy at all. However, while dissecting, tearing apart, torturing and ridiculing his characters he carefully dissects, tears apart, tortures and ridicules all things that I feared and never dared to mention to people. He throws them up in the air and cuts them in half with a machete. Way to go man. Make me free.
I also sympathize with the fact, that Dom devotes and hour of each of his days, researches, plots, thinks and composes his time away to produce novels that no one pays more than a dollar for. I feel that this is another “stuff” that we never talk about. Copyright? Money? Counting minutes to charge for the work? What kind of a life is that? Do what you feel like doing and if you never even think of asking money for it, that’s when it’s capable to form as its meant to be, a concise entity adhering to the creator’s last thought and free from expectations and interference of careless and irrelevant external influence. Ask Preston at XCHC. No curators. If it’s a baby on the crucifix than let it be. That’s art.
It might be still me and my limited extent of insight, but the first books of Ant and Cleo still strike me as a collection of brilliant ideas in a story designed to make you think and shudder. As I read through the series, the waters became more transparent, and under the scintillating waves of intellect sometimes I managed to glimpse into the depths of emotion that British people all feel they must hide. What you can reach in Asimov’s books though understanding structure, Hawkins’ books through enjoying the unassuming explanations, you need to get through cruelty and surprise in Dom’s books. By the time Richard Turpin (a man?) appears, it’s clear: Dominic Green’s science fiction is, according the so much avoided traditions of classic science fiction: sensitive and kind.
The Ant&Cleo #9 book is titled “Today’s stars for dinosaurs”. Yes, this is his best book. Yes, read it. Yes, talk to me about it, please, I want to talk about it with someone! But please, don’t read it today. Start with Ant&Cleo #1. Start with Small World. Start with his short stories. Do not read it today.
This book is the best of all. The waters quieted and cleared down. The cold waves sometimes still hit me in the face, but I can understand all violence now. I can see all the respect; respect for cultures, bodies, sexes, thoughts, emotions, limits and Dom himself forgives everything to reach the extent of kindness and sensitivity that, by now, shines through the lines. This is the book that I feel comfortable with. This one doesn’t hurt, finally. It makes me laugh and it makes me cry and makes me feel more at peace with the ideas that I have because somebody understands them and writes about them and loves them. It’s not only I can sit with the Characters at Old Avenger I WANT to sit with them listening to the Unicycle ballad so much that I think I’ll just go and grab my guitar and make some music to go with it because now it belongs to a universe that I belong to and it must exist because if it doesn’t then I still have no home.