Review of Bertold Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children

I find myself strangely haunted by this play. When I finished it about two days ago I knew it was a superb book. But now I have had some more time to think about it the more I must come to the conclusion that it is a deeply profound, extraordinary effecting masterpiece, or war, of human suffering, of the morality (or not) that we can gain from such situations.

But I find myself liking it perhaps against what Brecht intended. Throughout Brecht's notes at the end of my edition (Methuen 1993, which are superb by the way) Brecht keeps noting his annoyance that some of the reviewers and the audience kept misunderstanding what he was trying to convey.

He writes that:

"when the title role is played in the usual way, so as to communicate empathy, the spectator (according to numerous witnesses) experiences extraordinary pleasure; the indestructible vitally of this woman beset by hardships of war leaves him with a sense of triumph…" because "…Courage is represented chiefly as a mother, and like Niobe she is unable to protect her children against fate - in this case, war" (p.145).

And:

"I do not believe, and i did not believe at the time, that the people of Berlin - or of any other city the play were shown - understood the play. They were all convinced that they had learned something from the war; what they failed to grasp was that, in the playwright’s view, Mother Courage was meant to have learned nothing from her war...The audience in 1949 and the ensuring years did not see Mother Courage's crimes, her participation, her desire to share in the profits of the war business; they saw only her failure, her suffering"... (p.146-147).

Now, it seems to me that if time after time audiences and reviewers kept coming away with the conclusion that Brecht did not want it is chiefly because what Brecht wanted to convey was impossible, and that the method he set out to convey his thesis, in the way he did it, could only end in failure. Throughout, he keeps constantly stating the effect of alienation should be at play in all times. The peasants who lose their children should be to have a "certain routine quality about it; it must suggest a 'set of behaviour pattern'”. That the Song of Capitulation scene would be "socially disastrous if by hypnotic action the actress playing Mouther Courage invites the audience to identify with her". The lullaby must be sung "without any sentimentality or desire to provoke sentimentality". And so on.

There's a remarkable coldness about the way Brecht wanted to seemingly convey things. His logic behind it is actually correct, he warned his focal point to be on how war is not a Disney film, it is not a tale of unique impersonal evil crushing the "human spirit" for no reason - indulging in a kind of mawkish sentimentalism and pseudo-romanticism. War, as Brecht was trying to convey, especially one that went on for an agonising thirty fucking years, cannot be some unique form of abstract evil springing up from nowhere. The peasants react with an almost perfunctory nature to the death of their child because "the war has gone on too long. Begging, lamenting, and informing have frozen into fixed forms: they are the things you do when the soldiery arrive". The point Brecht is trying to drive through the moment Mother Courage trundles onto the stage is that the play is about "the connection between war and commerce; the proletariat as a class can do away with the war by doing away with capitalism".

The war, and indeed all wars, are specific acts of class genocide, embodying specific constellations of numerous social actors, of which business is indeed one, and eagerly participates (sometimes eggs on) when it starts, and its consent runs from a multitude of sectors of the elite strata for many reasons. War is not a melodrama, it is a piece of social science amongst a global imperialist elite with the working classes of the world as its pawns.

And yet....a good Marxist theory in a PhD thesis this may be, but this is a human drama, with human beings, about death and war and personal tragedy. It is impossible to convey what Brecht wanted in a medium like this without people sympathising with mother Courage, with people, perhaps against their better natures, unable to damn Mother Courage. For all Brecht might want to see her as just another cog in the machine of war, and a guilty one at that, she is, in the end, an old woman, carrying a cart full of shit, with no more power than anyone else in the end. The background to this play was written during the height of WW2, and its easy to see Brecht had the collaborators to Hitler’s regime in place – the business leaders and royal family members who lined up to praise him for his stern leadership against the communist agitators and would later sell him the gas they needed to make Zyklon-B to gas the Jews and the punchcards to categorise the camp inmates, the ‘guilty men’ of Britain’s ruling class who whitewashed his nature and downplayed his threat, not to mention the hundreds of little people who made sure the numerically small SS operated efficiently by becoming unpaid spies for their neighbours.

But to be honest, the war she is fighting is more akin to WW1 than 2, were the notions of any moral cause behind the fighting is an obscene joke, where there are no good guys, where everyone's hands are stained in blood and all the victories are Pyrrhic. She is not Krupp of I.G. Farben, or Henry Ford, or Quisling, or Lord Halifax, or the imbeciles in the German Social Democratic party who thought they could manage Hitler by inviting him into power. She is not even the owners of BA Systems or Lockheed Martin, who, like Mother Courage are delighted at the prospect of a new round of Middle Eastern slaughter and who push their paid politicians to cause them, a business model literally unsustainable without mass butchery.

In fact in the context of the play, not to mention the war she is shoved in, she almost become, dare I say, admirable? There is something sort of emboldening, the fact that this little woman is able to sort of fuck the rules of the war these stupid elderly aristocratic degenerates have plundered them all in, she cannot stop it or control it, but she games the system, and in some small, tiny, worthless way, manages to be slightly more in control of her life and retain a little bit more of a sense of dignity than the poor peasants who watch helplessly as their son is killed later on. Sure, she participates in a horrendous war. She is literally profiting from death. She is "guilty". But does she have a choice? Who did in the middle of the Seventieth century? The names mentioned above are especially dammed in history for allowing Hitler to gain power, allowing a totally unnecessary war to start, were either too stupid to see the threat before it came to claim them or eagerly keen to see Hitler turn Europe into a bloodbath for their own despicable reasons.

They all could have made different choices, they all had to knew what they were doing and who they were allowing to be tortured and killed, and each and every one of them had alternatives.

Can we say the same about Mother Courage? I just don't think so. There is no welfare state to survive, no notion of human rights, no notion of political asylum seekers, no body of international laws to appeal to, no vehicle for anyone born outside of nobility to be a political actor. What alternative was there in such a blood-bath of a continent, a continent for which pointless and stupid slaughterfests from which no rhyme or reason can be found were the norm, not the abstract (Charles Tilly estimated that from 1480 to 1800, a significant new international conflict started somewhere every two or three years, a vast majority probably in Europe, the most war-like continent perhaps ever in human history).

So what does Mother Courage become, in my reading, much as Brecht may hate it? She does become a victim, and the entire play becomes a story of what happens when a ruling elite of depraved elites, insane military psychopaths (who praise he son Eilif's crude butchery of peasants is praised by the generals as glorious one moment and then gets him shot in peacetime, as the they change the rules to match their current fit of psychosis). It becomes a story of what happens when a continent, indeed an entire civilisation, sinks in a total barbaric pit of unending horror and internecine bloodletting. The backdrop of the Seventy Years War is a suitably nihilistic, only matched perhaps by WW1 in its senseless and pointless level of killing, in its prolonged destruction of all forms of sanity and civilisation. In such a scene, Mother Courage ends up having to prostitute her morality repeatedly. The Baker resigns himself to the knowledge that her daughter would have to be left to die simply because he knows there is no way they could support three people - it is just brutal necessity. Her son becomes a violent thug – in a society and a system in which that is the required norm. Every part of the moral foundations from which Europe might have pretended to believe in are laid bare to be false, Christian brotherhood, the unique superiority of Western values of Eastern barbarism, its art, its culture. They have been ripped apart like they were flimsy tissue paper; irreverent scraps now fluttering in the winds as the Europeans busily prepare themselves for epic butchery. In such a world Courage appears almost harmless, even somewhat subversive in a sense. And this is because, as Courage does have the paradoxical position of a mother and a profiteer, she is able, actually, to become an astute social critic of their world they live in and the dynamics of war, capable of exposing the hypocrisies the general’s spout and display the inverted morality now required to live in a world this hellish without pretension.

And in fact throughout the play she almost became to me this kind of bizarre figure of death, and haunted elemental spirit wandering the landscape of a Europe raped by war, her trundling cart rolling into each new scene of becoming a kind of omen of doom (one can imagine, in a stage production, the noise of the cart as it comes out from the wings must become a kind of dreaded sound to indicate some scene of horror is to begin). She with her cart becomes a travelling freak show displaying a concentrated twisted parody of the dynamics of war, imbuing the values of their society in a creaking horse and cart and reflected back onto the world. But to me it also had a doubly ominous notion, as it reminds me of either the carts used to turn out plague ridden bodies in the medieval age, or the tumbrils that were used to send people to their deaths to the guillotine in the French Revolution, the noise of the wooden wheels on the cobblestone indicating to all that a new round of killing was to occur. Her entire presence becomes one of a kind of transcendental figure of death, detached and yet part of the mortal world, contemptuous and derisive of the humans who have voluntarily and without much opposition allowed themselves to be dragged into this morally empty charnel house and yet fundamentally resigned to it all, feeling she might as well join in as there isn’t any real alternative. It is a deeply, darkly pessimistic play in that sense – the absence of any kind of morals is stark.

And yet, whatever Brecht would like to think, that is a sad play, that does make us feel pity that people, in many ways quite good people. Mother Courage herself is deeply ambiguous. It’s hard for us to despise her when she clearly does care so much for her children, does try and form friendships, look after people from danger. But that’s the point too me, it’s not it’s the fact she isn’t an angel. It’s not the fact she’s a devil either. The play is full of moments of genuine humanity. Moments where genuine human love, of understanding, or an attempt to reach across and bond desperately with another human soul (between Courage and the prostitute Yvette, between the doomed pseudo-love of The Chef and Mother Courage), to salvage some tiny little bits of kindness in a world gone mad (in the priest’s attempts to help a wounded man). And yet they are fleeting, and like flowers trying to bloom under a car-park they can only slither weakly in tiny little cracks, never able to fully flower into their true beauty as they are repeatedly oppressed by the nature of their surroundings. War is tragic, as it crushes the potential of flawed, silly little people to ever become fully human, only mutilated half-finished clay figures, lumbering around a broken landscape, who try to mould themselves into something better but fail. War robs that ability from people, by either killing the young before they have even grown, or turning the surrounding players into collaborators and criminals just for survival.

So it is odd, and frankly slightly misgiving to me Brecht would be so harsh on this kind of a view. There’s a bizarre kind of distant disdain given to any kind of expression of human sorrow or despair in this play. He seems to have wanted actors to act this in no way an actor ever could do. Which I guess he’d say “duh! That’s the point of alienation techniques!” but I don’t think a drama this war could ever be conveyed that way without seeming almost sociopathic in its uninterest in human suffering. He wants us to see it in the abstract, like a good Marxist, as a tale of classes bouncing around each other in a grand arena table of imperialist power plays. We can’t. It’s impossible. We can only see the humans on the stage, and their raw powerful struggles in front us, and we can only sigh at them.

And so we leave Mother Courage, as she trundles on, learning nothing, gaining barely anything, ready to continue the cycle all over again. What do we sense from the end of this play? In one sense then, the play is a failure. And yet in another perhaps Brecht (without him even realising maybe), because he wrote such a powerful piece of drama, his descriptions and his dialogue such pieces of stark, brutal poetry, his use of characters and scenarios to convey points so well, in his use of a deliberately spoiler-laden stage title sequences, which robs us of the potential of vesting any hope in Mother Courage’s life before we have even begun reading, in his beautiful depiction of human interactions, and how human beings try to operate as humanity in a world divorced of it, created something that can transgress his own intentions and still become something truly amazing. Is Mother Courage to blame? Is she amoral? Guilty? Careless? Yes. And yet, do we still pity her for trying to play by the rules of a society geared against humanity, tries to retain little slices of morality in a world geared up totally to destroy it? I think we do. Because of these contradictions, it becomes to me a true masterpiece, a haunting depiction of human frailty in its all grandeur and monstrosity.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Review

Title: Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas
Author: Hunter S.Thompson
First Published: 1971
Genre: Humour, Journalism
Where to buy: Amazon, Waterstones, Book Depository

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me". 

- Hunter S. Thompson

Fuck me they take a lot of drugs in this book don't they?

"...we had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get into locked a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon."

If anything actually that's my main problem with this book. And don't get me wrong I'm a big pro-drug legalization supporter so I'm fine with them taking it, it's just that it seems to be the only real hinge to the book.

It's as if when Thompson was pitching this to the publisher he was like:

"Right, okay! So first there in a car...on drugs!
Then they go into a casino...on drugs!
Then they go back to there hotel room...still on drugs!
Then they have to go to a drug conference...on different drugs!
Then they go to an airport...on even more different drugs!"

It didn't seem to me like there was any other real backbone to the story. I just got the overwhelming feeling when I finished it of "Really? They get high all the time and then go on crazy hijinks in Las Vegas and then the book ends? Seriously? That was all there was too it?" There really wasn't much plot to get me particularly interested and didn't seem to go anywhere other than the enormous amounts of drug taking and booze drinking that went on in it.

But I wouldn't say the book was completely without merit. There are some great bits of social commentary in-between all the drug taking. Thompson provides despairing passages on the failure of the sixties dream throughout. I wasn't born in the sixties so I have no experience of what it was like, but for me there was a tinge of sadness in me knowing that all the positive sixties idealism shrivelled and died to make way for the harsh seventies. I've actually heard that the "swinging sixties" as everyone remembers it is a fairly romanticized version of the actual sixties. But even if that is so I still miss the ideals and attitudes that we now think of with that period. The idea that we could all do something to improve the world no matter how small. And that peace and love are the ultimate goals to strive for, in a world where people are free to be a member of any sex, race, religion, class or gender they want without prejudice and persecution. But now it's all gone. It crumpled and died like a flower that didn't get enough water.

If anything though I actually miss Hunter S. Thompson a little more than the sixties. Having read up on him more I learnt that he was a great guy who had a passionate love of freedom and defended with it with stark clarity. It's a darn shame not to have his voice around anymore, and if this book has done anything for me it has made me want to track down more of Thompson's work. Perhaps his non-fiction "Gonzo" journalism will be better suited for me.

On a different note the illustrations are fantastic in this book. There all done by Ralph Steadman and they are completely fitting to the book's twisted feel. They look like the deranged drawings that you would find in a serial killer's journal. There fascinating to look at and I would be perfectly happy if the book was just a collection of those drawings alone.

In all honestly though I found most of this book rather underwhelming. And weirdly despite the myriad of twisted and insane things that go on in the book, I actually found it pretty unmemorable. Suffice to say, this book was a bit of a disappointment and didn't leave that much of a mark on me.

Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter - Review

Title: Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter
Author: Seth Graham-Smith

First Published: 2010

Genre: Historical Fiction, Horror

Where to buy: Waterstones, Amazon, Book Depository

It shames me to say that the only reason I picked up this book was because of the title. I mean, just the words "Abraham-Lincoln-Vampire-Hunter". The image alone of Abraham Lincoln running around slashing vampires was too cool not buy.

But sadly the rest of the book does not live up to it's incredibly awesome title.

First of all, the most annoying thing about this book is the constant switching between first and third person. The first being Abe's journal and the third being Grahame-Smith's Narration. It is so annoying and almost completely unnecessary. If he had just stuck to one or the other he could of made a much better book.

Also, I have some issues with taste. I mean, did he really need to take one of the most admired figures in history and dumb his down simply as a "vampire hunter". I mean what next? "Mahatma Gandhi: Zombie Slayer", or how about "Martin Luther King: Alien Killer". It just doesn't seem particularly respectful to me.

My other big taste issue is the idea that vampires were responsible for the slave trade. Lines like "slaves began revolting against their vampire captors in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation" make me feel a little uneasy. And I know it's just a work of fiction but to me it just feels like passing the blame. Like people who believe in God or fate or destiny or conspiracy theories. People placing the fault of something on someone/thing else to comfort their world view. It was our fault, and it should always be portrayed as our fault and shown as the disgusting, horrific act of human evil that it was.

But despite it's faults, it is readable. It's has decent plot development that goes along at a steady pace and I found myself rarely bored by what I was reading. The other good thing was the historical bits detailing his life. Having known nothing of Abe Lincoln other then he was the leader of the north in the American Civil war and wore a top hat it was genuinely interesting reading about his life. However having seen at the back that the author used Wikipedia as one of his sources I wonder how efficient and reliable his accounts were.

On the whole, I wouldn't bother reading it. Out of the many,many wonderful books to read out there in the world I wouldn't recommend this as one. Even if it does have a kick-ass title.

No Country For Old Men - Review

Title: No Country For Old Men
Author: Cormac McCarthy
First Published: 2005
Genre: Crime, Thriller
Where to Buy: Amazon, Waterstones, Book Depository

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

"They say eyes are the windows to the soul. I don't know what them eyes was the windows to and I guess I'd as soon not know."

That is a line from the introduction of this book and is a good indication of the atmosphere and tone of this entire book.

Y'know sometimes buying a book on a whim reaps great benefits. As soon as I purchased this book knew I was going to enjoy it.

As stated above this book is a very dark and grim book that deals with the dark nature of humanity and how it's only getting worst. Intercepted between the end of one chapter and the beginning of another is monologues from one of our main characters Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a tired, old, world-weary WWII veteran. We see the world through his eyes in these experts, and the world he paints is not nice at all. He talks about the moral degradation of the West and America in general and the way society has decayed beyond his reach. The passages were one of the highlights of this book and were an excellent way of conveying the bleak world that McCarthy has made.

The plot centres around a man named Llewellyn Moss who one day when out deer hunting comes across a scattering of dead bodies and broken cars, most importantly though amongst all the wreckage he finds a satchel full of money. Feeling greedy, he takes it. Generally this was bad move on his part, as this means that another man named Anton Chigurh is hunting him down. Anton is a ruthless, psychopathic hit-man who kills just about everyone and anyone he meets with effortless ease. Them two in turn are being searched for by the authorities and the aforementioned Sheriff Bell. So it's essentially a wild goose chase between those three. It's a relatively simplistic plot, but that by no means is a bad thing as McCarthy clearly shows that you can create a captivating, engrossing and brilliant novel even with a simple premise.

By far the most interesting character is Anton, one of the most chilling and scarily unpredictable villains in the whole of literature. Anton represents death, a unstoppable killing machine that is bearing down on us that cannot be halted who plays into the darkest recesses of human fear. We also know very little about him, and in much the same way as The Joker in The Dark Knight is infinitely more effective in making the villain someone we should be very very afraid of. We don't know where he comes from, who he is or why he does all the heinous things in the book. When he does speak it doesn't give us much help either, as every word is shrouded in a cryptic mystery. For instance there's this bit when he's talking to Moss's wife about to kill her and they share this conversation:

You've got no cause to hurt me, she said
I know. But I gave my word.
Your word?
Yes. We're at the mercy of the dead here. In this case your husband.
That don't make sense.
I'm afraid it does.
....You give your word to my husband to kill me?
Yes.
He's dead. My husband is dead.
Yes. But I'm not.
You don't owe nothing to dead people.
Chigurh cocked his head. No? He said.
How can you?
How can you not?
You can change it.
I don't think so. Even a nonbeliever might find it useful  to model himself after god.

That's about the closest we get to a formal explanation to his actions and even that is confusing.

The three main characters. From the 2007 adaptation of the book.

When a writer makes a psycho character the character they normally write id a crazed, hedonistic, killer who wants as much fun as possible and doesn't care who get's killed in the process (e.g Alex DeLarge or The Joker). These characters love causing as much anarchy and chaos as possible. Anton is definitely not this type of character. I never got any hints that Anton wanted there to be chaos and to me Anton clearly sees some kind of fate and reason in this world. In fact It could almost be that Anton sees himself as fate and that he has the power over people's lives and that him killing them is unavoidable and has to be done - as if there is no other way. The only time in which he seems to break that idea of destiny is when he flips a coin to decide if someone lives or dies. 


But even if he is the most interesting character that doesn't mean the rest aren't, far from it. Even the most incidental character is still full of well-developed characteristics and personality and is still as detailed and interesting as the main ones. McCarthy is clearly excellent at characterisation, effortlessly creating memorable and defining characters with sometimes the littlest of words.

The novel itself is written very oddly. There are no speech marks for dialogue and the sentences lack any kind of punctuation. It makes for very weird reading first time and I wasn't sure if I liked this at first, after all these things are the backbone of writing and have been drilled into us since we were about 5. But I actually really admire the McCarthy decided to say "fuck you" to grammar. It's a fresh approach to writing that hasn't been done before and It's really a great way to experiment with the art. It's not even distracting either, you'd think trying to read something with no grammar would be difficult but it's not. The writing is perfectly fast-paced and and works just as well without the grammar than with it.

Also, the southern dialect is written superbly in this book. With the exception of Mark Twain I don't think any other author has managed to capture it so perfectly. It is so fantastically rich and strong you'll find it near impossible not to read occasional words aloud in a southern accent.

I didn't know about Cormac McCarthy before this book. Now I do, and I sure as hell am glad I found him. I look forward to reading more of his work in the future.

A Clockwork Orange - Review

Title: A Clockwork Orange
Author: Anthony Burgess
First Published: 1962
Genre: Dystopia, Science Fiction
Where to Buy: Amazon, Waterstones, Book Depository

Ahh, finally. After reading two duds (Great Gatsby and 2001 respectively) it feels so good to finally get a book as excellent as this one.

What I  from reading the introduction (one of the few times I have actually found the introduction useful or interesting) is that Anthony Burgess didn't think that this was his best work. He dismissed it as his lesser work and felt he did much better work later. So it was a source of much frustration to him that this one had to be his most famous work thanks to the infamous movie and the hoo-harr surrounding it at the time of it's release.

The most obviously unique and the thing that's hits you first when you read this book is the incredible language. When I first read "you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches" I had no fucking clue what they were on about. It's incredibly frustrating at first but if you keep ploughing on with the book you quickly pick up the words very easily and by the end you know the language of Nadsat very well. Burgess was a linguist and his skills with other languages is clearly shown here. The language of Nadsat that Alex and the rest of his droogs use is a strange combination of a more slang Russian and cockney-rhyming slang and learning about the meaning of the words is fascinating. Praise must be given to Burgess for managing to essentially create a new language that is not completely incomprehensible.


It also struck me how prophetic this book is. After all the language and the clothes are all pretty reminiscent of today's youth (and yes, I will be sounding about 67 from this point on). The main characters all wear these ridiculous clothes consisting of old-fashioned hats, white shirts and trousers, lapels and of course the crotch grab. This is his gang's uniform and is perfectly reminiscent of the type of tribes you get today. There are goths and emos and chavs who all have their own set of clothes that distinguish them.
The language is also a very familiar asset of today's youth. You could quite easily replace "yarbles", "horrorshow" and "gulliver" with LOL, ROLF and LMAO. Nadsat was Alex's teenage slang, text-speak is today's teenage slang.

The overruling moral question Burgess poses in this book is that is it right to take away a man's free will, even if that free will is violent and destructive? Burgess' answer to this question is stated in this quote from the book "Goodness comes from within. Goodness is chosen. When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man." Burgess argues that it is wrong to do this to people as the only way anyone could be "good" would be by their own personal choice and not simply by brainwashing a person into the government's way of thinking, in the process taking away any choice that person had. It's an excellent philosophical argument that leaves you think deeply about the issue which is always what I strive for in a book. And BTW on the whole I came to the conclusion that no, it's not alright. Even a criminal ,one who rapes and robs and kills, deserves the right to make moral choices.

Edit: 9/8/12: This review took me a ridiculously long time to write. So sorry for the wait, I hope to be a lot speedier in the future when writing reviews. 

Watchmen - Review

The hardcover version (and my version). 

Title: Watchmen
Author: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (artist)
First Published: DC Comics (April 1, 1995)
Genre: Graphic Novels, Alternate History
Where to buy: Amazon, Waterstones, Book Depository

I personally feel this is the best novel I have ever read. There's no sarcasm or over-exaggeration in that sentence. This novel truly is the best book I have ever read.

And to some people - mostly idiots - it's not even a "proper" novel. It's technically what you call a "graphic novel". Or for a less fancy and more let's-stop-beating-round-the-bush-and-get-to-the-bone-of-this-thing word, a comic book.

Yeah, a comic book. A trashy, under-the-counter, worthless picture book for children that has no artistic value and at the end of the day should just be thrown out and used as recycled paper.

Of course if that's what you think comic books are then you're so bloody wrong you might as well hurl yourself out of a big bloody window before the dawning sensation of how wrong you are hits you in the face and you are left with a horrendous cloud of shame and humiliation for the rest of your natural life.

In general Watchmen (along with perhaps Neil Gaiman's Sandman series and Frank Miller's Batman comics) is credited as completely re-inventing the comics industry and proving once and for all that comics are firmly for adults and certainty not just for children.

I love this book so much. I love the characters. I love the writing. I love the plot. I love the artwork. I love the themes explored. I love how much is fucks the superhero genre. Heck, I even love the mirroring panel-structure. I love this fucking book. This book really is a masterpiece on all accounts. But to make sure this review isn't just a load of warbling fanboy bollocks let's actually get down to the bones of this thing.

First of all what's this book about? Well it's a story set in an alternative 1980's in which Nixon is still president, the US won Vietnam and the whole world is staring into the face of nuclear oblivion. In this world costumed heroes are abundant and follows their lives post-Keene act (a bill that outlawed costumed vigilantism) It leads you on a sublime journey full of conspiracies, romance, violence, science, mystery, suspense, horror, drama and explores the nature of power and the many, many shades of grey to human morality.

Oh, and you know when I said heroes above? Yeah, well perhaps "heroes" isn't really the right word to describe these characters. Nearly all the characters show none of the characteristics of a hero and are all either mentally deranged or have some dark side to their personality. So who do we have?

The paperback version of the book.

Well starting off there's the Comedian who we find out thanks to a series of flashbacks that he was a nihilistic, hedonistic, misogynistic, sadistic, mass-murdering, sociopathic rapist with little to no regard to morality or human life. So that's a fun character to start off with and it only get's better. There's Dr. Manhattan; the only real "super" hero in the whole book as he has the power to teleport from place to place, bend the laws of physics and time, lift objects into thin air and essentially explode a person right in front of him. Unfortunately that means he is an incredibly alienating and cold sociopath who views people as merely a bundle a modules and atoms rather than genuine people.

There's also Night Owl who is a weak and affable man unable to stand up for what he believes in and who suffers seems to suffered from impotency. Yet he is also the most moral and friendly of any of the group. Then there's Silk Spectre who really doesn't want to be a crime-fighter yet was dragged into it by her over-bearing mother. Also there's Ozymandias who has some rather...strange views on how to bring about world peace.

And finally my personal favourite character and undoubtedly the most interesting one, Rorschach. I guess you could say Rorschach is the protagonist but it's a very loose definition of protagonist considering he's an ultra-right wing, woman-hating psychopath with a demented obsession of bringing about justice (no matter how violent or insane) who has a warped sense of right or wrong in which there are no grey areas when in comes to human morality in which to him stealing an orange and raping a woman are both just as punishable as each other. So in short - a nut. But whether they be a nut or a loner, all of the characters in Watchmen are incredibly detailed and complex with many layers to the characters that simply adds to the believability of them.

But as much I have praised the writing of this novel I must also praise the artwork in it. After all, a comic book writer can be as good as he can possibly be but his words mean nothing without a good artist to accompany them, and Dave Gibbons is more than sufficient as the artist. After all without him we wouldn't of had Rorschach's distinctive inkblot mask or the clockface ticking to midnight that reappears so many times throughout the novel or the now famous smiley face with a bloodstain in the corner.

That's another fantastic element of this book. It's use of symbology is everywhere and all have their own distinct meanings behind them. Most of them would give away the plot but there are other sources to find out what they all mean. One of the joys of this book is going back over and noticing these symbols which are littered everywhere and I always like visual works of art that still give you something to look for.

The colour is also used very skilfully in this book. The recurring colours are normally browns, purples, beiges, dark greens, yellows. These are colours that are harsh and clash with each other but that is right for this book as it reflects the dark, perpetually grim  world that the characters exist in.

So, this review is getting kind of long now so I better finish this off. I really cannot stress enough how good a book this is. From the sharp, dark and gritty writing to the subtle artistic additions here and there this book is truly the best example of what you would call a masterpiece and genuinely deserves the overused title of genius. Buy it. Buy it now.

2001: A Space Odyssey - Review

Title: 2001: A Space Odyssey
Author: Arthur C. Clarke
First Published: New American Library (1 April 1968)
Genre: Science Fiction
Where to buy: Amazon, Waterstones, Book Depository

 Having seen the film of 2001 a decided to read the book to see what is essentially the same story although portrayed in a different way.

So naturally the whole book is rather overshadowed by the question "what's it like compared to the film?" Well the trouble with that question is that film and literature are tow very different mediums. Film is the visual art and books are the written art. So I would probably question "Is it better than the film?" And I would have to say...no, it is not.

Alot of people find the film incredibly confusing and annoying (I personally think it's fascinating and very interesting) and therefore they assume the book will explain things more clearly. And it would be unfair to say it doesn't go into more detail than the film, although in my opinion it goes into too much detail.

Arthur C.Clarke was a big science geek and as such tends to explain every single piece of equipment on the ship. I'm all for background detail but there's a limit to how much excitement I can have reading how the spin of the carousel of the Discovery spaceship could be stopped when necessary and that when this happened it's angular movement had to be stored in a fly-wheel and switched back again when the rotation was re-started. After pages and pages of that kind of stuff it goes get a little tedious.

But there is plot interspersed among the technobabble and there it really does hit it's stride. The scenes later in the book with HAL are wonderfully atmospheric and give you a genuine feeling of Dave Bowman's feelings and emotions when he's in a very chilling and disturbing situation.

But then that get's halted constantly for another bit of science-talk. He builds and builds and build the tension and then cuts it of to talk about how scientists have thought that the rings of Saturn are estimated to be 3 million years old. This stopping and starting jolts you and makes you feel like you are starting to get somewhere and then smacked in the face with a physics lesson.

Also, the ending didn't make much more sense in the book. Not because I didn't understand the processes going on but the way it was written was hard to follow. Was he in space? Or on a planet? Or zooming through a tunnel? And then heading to a sun but then seeing things in the sun and then buzzing over again or...something?

So in conclusion. Like Great Gatsby it's not a truly awful book but I felt long sections were very long, boring and tedious and the good bits were too far and few in-between the long essays about astro-physics.