LUKE RHINEHART: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of George Cockcroft, who, as Luke Rhinehart wrote and was the main character in The Dice Man, appeared in the Guardian on November 27th; it had already appeared online but was bumped from the paper paper on the 26th by the death of Diego Maradona. If you missed it in either location, you can link to the online version here. 

It was a fascinating story to tell, and there were bits I had to leave out and some which had to be cut to fit the length I'd been assigned. I had, for example, started to discuss The Dice Man in terms of other works that play with probabilities; Philip K Dick's The Man In The High Castle, for example, about a decade earlier, had characters throwing the I Ching to decide their actions; Dick himself claimed to have plotted the book using the I Ching. Since Cockcroft's fictional protagonist is also the fictional author, I liked the comparison. But though I felt fairly confident that Cockcroft had likely read the novel, I couldn't really find any connection. Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association is about a man whose life is centered on running his own fictional baseball league whose results he finds using three dice,whose numbers read consecutively, offer probabilities through which his simulated games take place. And of course Stoppard's Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead begins with a coin being flipped again and again, with always the same probability of either heads of tales. But intriguing as these ideas were, and the way they might merge together, there was no way to speculate in a couple of lines!

The research was somewhat problematic too. I found several revealing interviews; Cockcroft, once he went public with his identity, could charm his interviewers, especially, as I say, when they visited him on his lakeside house in upstate New York (one of them marveled at being introduced to the peanut butter, olive and mayonnaise sandwich. . But sometimes there were differences in the stories, and it was exceedingly difficult to discover facts, about family, and where he taught, and sometimes when. With a good guess as to his mother's maiden name I did find his ancestor who was Chief Justice of the Vernont State Supreme Court, but I couldn't establish who the governor in his mother's family had been. I know he was at University de los Americas in Mexico City in the mid-Sixties and at Dowling College probably when it opened in 1968 in an old Vanderbilt mansion on Long Island. It might have been their programme in which he was teaching in Mallorca.

The story of his near-death at sea was cut; he actually had apologised to his wife and children for killing them before they were rescued by a freighter blown adrift. He had just bought the yacht with his savings, and was sailing it on vacation before bringing it back to Mallorca. The delay caused him to miss the first meeting with Mike Franklin, whose co-publisher was Shel Talmy, the producer of the Kinks and Who among others, who got cut from the obit, but if you're looking for first editions, the UK one is from Talmy-Franklin. 

His younger brother James was an interesting story himself: the brothers and their wives twice lived together, one of those times being in Mexico City. He was also a writer (of more than 30 books) and professor, and an activist, specializing in left-wing Latin American politics. He predeceased Cockcroft, but there was also an older sister, Patricia, also pre-deceased, who doesn't seem to have figured as deeply in their lives. I also tracked down (online) Tim Linthicum, who wound up an English professor and seems to show up in writers' circles in academia. 

But the most serious bit that was lost was my explanation of the start of The Dice Man, which I felt was necessary because although Rhinehart is a funny narrator, he is also a very self-centered and as Cockcroft said, "the colder harder part of George". The problem was the novel starts with Luke wanting to sleep with his best-friend's wife. So he rolls his die, and the one he rolls dictates that he should rape her, so he does. I wrote that, but it was changed to "have sex with her", which is in a way more accurate because it is a gray area: he goes to their flat, rings the bell, and tells her he is going to rape her. So she invites him in and tells him not to borrow her husband's bathrobe afterwards. The paper was averse to using the word rape because they had received a number of complaints after their obit of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, but again, to tell the story properly would have taken too long, and I then wanted to mention the very Fifties attitude this "if rape is inevitable lie back and enjoy it" scene represents.

I had never been a fan of the book particularly, but I found it an interesting look at an era that had already changed: Luke was like if Henry Miller had written the Jack Lemmon character from The Apartment crossed a bit of  Holden Caufield.I think Cockcroft was looking for something more existential, as his thesis on Kafka might show, but he's very much in Miller's tradition, that what I do, who I am, is important, even if I lie outside the world of societal expectation.

HARVEY PEKAR: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

It's a daily double in the papers today: my obituary of Harvey Pekar appears in the Independent, you can link to it here. And no, I didn't spell 'comix' 'commix', that's just a literal! In writing the piece, it was difficult to avoid launching into a detailed (and thus far too lengthy) analysis of just where Pekar fit in the spectrum of, say, Robert Crumb on one end and Woody Allen on the other--I found it far easier and more telling to link him to Henry Miller, outside the realms of comix and comics, and he is, along perhaps with the Beats, the true inheritor of Miller's legacy.

I also thought one of the real beauties of the film American Splendor was the way it took Pekar and his work with the seriousness it deserved (and it is probably Paul Giamatti's best, least stylised performance). I really wanted to draw a comparison with Philip K Dick, whose 1950s work, including his mainstream novels not published until much later, usually deal with people caught in the reality of such mundane work and lives, and who like Pekar saw that as a by-product, not just as reflection of society itself. And like Dick, he was a fanatic collector of records; I would have liked to write more about his jazz reviews, but again, space wasn't available.

As with Dick, Pekar's work turned out to be prophetic, in its way, as more and more people found themselves caught up in the financial meltdowns and victimised by the antics of the money-pushers. I meant to stress the irony of his medical coverage via his employment: the Veterans Administration is, like Social Security, one of the last remaining targets of the right in their efforts to dismantle the New Deal and other post-war efforts at making an egalitarian society. For all its faults, the VA is a shining example of government run socialised medicine in a system whose flaws we already know all about.

One other thing about Pekar I enjoyed was the way he never did anything to improve his image or presentation, not for David Letterman, and not, according to one obit, for comic conventions. He remained stubbornly true to his persona, which may be seen as self-indulgence, or may be seen as a kind of Tolstoyan self-belief. It was also impressive how he turned in his last decade to different kinds of projects, things and people about which he cared deeply, in the world outside his Cleveland life.

WHERE DID WE ALL GO WRONG? An essay on Tony Judt's ILL FARES THE LAND

When I was in school, some 50 years ago, we learned that among the reasons we won our revolution was that the British were fat and happy, didn't care enough about fighting for their American colonies, and hired at great expense mercenaries from Hesse to do the fighting for them. The yeoman farmers who fought for independence cared far more about winning than some Germans fighting so their lords and masters could rake in more English gold. Ten years later, Tom Disch's story 'Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire', part of his novel 334, would make the same point to me about the decline and fall of our own short-lived empire.

Tony Judt's Ill Fares The Land recalls those moments, even though he doesn't make the points explicitly. But his examination of what has gone wrong over the past 30-40 years in American and British society rang more than few familiar bells. Partly because Judt, who is only a few years older than I am, is contrasting those decades to the era immediately after WWII, say 1945-75, which saw those two societies at both their most prosperous (mostly the US) and least unequal (particularly "you've never had it so good" Britain) ever. This implies, as I've often suggested, that we baby boomers grew up as the most broadly privileged generation the world had ever seen, and were given more advantages of the sorts unavailable even to our fathers (who had grown up in depression and fought in a world war) when they were young (though again, GI Bill housing and education opened up doors for them too).

Judt's is also a book with particular immediate relevance, as our governments, having thrown their treasuries away first on two illegal and impossible wars, and then on preserving the extreme financial privilege of those who manipulate money for a living, now face the so-called 'hard choices' which they will inflict on the rest of us. Hard choices is a euphemism; as Judt points out, courage used to mean enduring pain, not inflicting it on those weaker or poorer than yourself.

Ill Fares The Land is also a rich garden of aphorism, starting with its title, which comes from Oliver Goldsmith and reads in full: 'Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay'. It's good to see him gather John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith as advocates for social justice. As you might intuit from that, the book is not so much a history of the rapid decline of the three decades since Reagan and Thatcher took power and changed the world-view of their societies so completely, as a moral treatise on what that all means. It is argued with exceptional reasonableness, only the odd spark of ill temper slips out, and if occasionally the evening glow of Marxism circa 1968 still illuminates the background, it is by and large realistic too. Though even Judt can't help conflating the activists of that era with its entire generation. Perhaps it's because it seemed to him, in Paris, that everyone was!

But there of course is the rub, and one which he never really addresses. We can understand the children of Reagan and Thatcher embracing Bush's compassionless conservativism or Cameron's unsociety, because they have grown up in that world, but what explains US? How does a generation which benefitted from both more wealth and greater equality than any in history, which saw the end of lesgalised apartheid in America, and the end of another divisive illegal war, wind up concentrating on ways to enrich itself, to rebuild the gilded-age barriers between the wealthy and rest, locking themselves up in gated communities and second homes? Judt can quote DeToqueville on the concept that money talks and bullshit walks, and yes it's always been true, but that really isn't enough of an answer. He does engage with the idea of 'protest' quickly moving to more personal issues, to self-interest or to single-issue activism, and he is right as far as he goes; I think there is a good case to be made that baby-boomers were, on the whole, spoiled, that it was no coincidence that the 'me' decade of the 70s came as they reached maturity and faced having to make a living, and that much so-called activism may have been no more than people worried about avoiding the draft for an unpopular war (which brings us back to the illegal war being fought by mercenaries who fight alongside a smaller professional army in Iraq and Afghanistan).

Judt does lay out the promised land of the post-war era, drawing heavily on The Spirit Level, a book whose immensely revealing graphics and charts illustrate how social and economic equality correlate with all sorts of benefits to society. It is odd to see virtually every graph clustered the same way; the Scandinavian social democracies and Japan down in one corner, where low levels of imbalance and/or high levels of mobility seem to deliver better health, longer life, lower murder rates and so on, while the US is always at the opposite end of the scale, with the UK and, oddly, Portugal, floating just below them. Judt also reprints a revealing bar graph, showing how social mobility in the US (measured by son's incomes being explained by father's income) increased sharply in the 60s (as the baby boomers began to enter the workforce) then declined far more severely in the 90s and again in the 00s.

Social democracy, as practiced in Scandinavia, is itself a relatively recent phenomenon, one born of a certain practical bent of mind when those societies transformed themselves from peasant economies into industrial ones. And it arose in both the US and UK out of a certain practicality as well, in America during the depression, as Franklin Roosevelt fought to lessen the ravaging effects of the economic collapse (again, one caused by speculators--recall that despite the words we now use for the 'crises' they are not natural phenomena, beyond avoidance, though they are inevitable in the face of unregulated greed) and in Britain after the War, as veterans and those who had suffered through its effects felt they deserved a fairer deal. Judt's hero in all this is John Maynard Keynes, whose economic theories underpinned the post-war successes of both societies.

If Keynes is the hero, the villains are Friedrich Hayek and his fellow Austrians whose economic theories underpinned Thatcher and Reagan economics, and were based on the demonstrably false premise that 'state control' of economic planning inevitably led to Hitler, or dictators in general. They felt economic justice and individual freedom were thus incompatible, which seems a huge and largely self-serving jump for laissez-faire capitalism. That the Chicago school took such theories and ran with them conceals the hollowness of the assumptions that lie at their base. As Judt demonstrates the failings of the past three decades, the false accounting of privatisations and cuts in government series, and the cheerleading for inequality which has been the result of all this, the arguments will seem familiar to anyone who has lived through this period with their eyes, as well as their pocketbooks, open.

Which is the weakness of the book. There is a certain sense of preaching to the converted, something one often feels when reading the New York Review of Books, which is especially disheartening when you are among the converted. There is precious little practical advise for how to reverse this decline, especially in the face of the new ConDem government in Britain, and the seeming inability of Barack Obama to transform the promise of his election into any sort of meaningful change. There are other factors which Judt barely touches on, like the stultifying effect of modern media in acclimating its audience to lower expectations, and of the web's fragmenting society even further into smaller groups of self interest. Were it a social history he would have to address the problems of race in America, where the post-war consensus began to crumble in the face of civil rights legislation in the mid-Sixties, and class in Britain; in both countries the real problem is not with engineering equality of opportunity, it is in extending it to the untouchables at the bottom.

But the strength of the book is its inescapable moral rightness, which forces the reader into associations. I have mentioned the one which immediately occurred to me about a society that relies on mercenaries, and it has provoked the reflections above about my own generation. I think the argument about the transformation of our societies into increasing Orwellian, and even more prophetically, Philip K. Dickian worlds, is one which needs to be addressed. And in the wake of his scorn poured on the huge bonuses paid out at Goldman Sachs, it suggests the thesis that, given their virtual control of the US treasury in the past two decades, 2008's huge financial meltdown was part of a Goldman Sachs plan, one which gave them total domination of the marketplace as well.

I don't think Judt is dreaming of a golden age that never existed, nor of an age of relative justice that can never exist again. But I confess that rarely can a book create such a feeling of uplift by bringing on such a sense of depression. It's a rich but bleak story. That it was written by a man suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease merely adds to the sense that he, and we, need to focus our minds more intensely on the moral dilemma which we have brought upon ourselves. This compact moral treatise reminds us eloquently of that fact.

WHY JULI ZEH'S DARK MATTER MATTERS

Like the 'many worlds' theory proposed by one of its main characters, Dark Matter can be read as different stories at the same time, a feast of ambiguity and delight in ideas mixed with a thriller of sometimes gut-wrenching suspense. On the face of it, physics professor Sebastian has a perfect life in a Black Forest backwater; a lovely wife and a bright ten-year old son. He worries only that he might have been left behind, in the physics world, by his once-inseparable friend Oskar, now a high-powered researcher in Geneva. Then his world collapses: his son is kidnapped while on his way to camp, and Sebastian is told that, if he wants his son back, he has to kill a man named Dabblelink who is a close friend of his wife's.

Juli Zeh moves this book in multiple directions, but at its core is the very real moral dilemma Sebastian faces. This acts as a fulcrum for the arch relationship between Sebastian and Oskar, with its overtones of Edwardian dandies as well as quantum mechanics, and for the 'crime' part of the novel, when Detective Schilf, dying with a brain tumour, is sent from Stuttgart to assist his old protege, the Valkyrie-like Rita Skoura with the case. The book might be read as a meditation on repressed homosexuality; it also follows one dying man's struggle to understand existence.

And that latter quest reverberates with Schlif's (whose name means 'reed' in German) entrance. The focus changes, not so much to the crime's 'solution' but to the characters of our two physicists, and Schilf's attempts to understand their theoretical argument, and through that understand the crime. In effect, he stands in for the reader, or a certain type of reader, and in German the novel itself is titled Schilf. And when the mechanisms of the kidnap and murder are revealed, we realise through an exquisite twist, that it is itself enmeshed in just the sort of issues the two scientists have been arguing. Fear of spoiling makes that difficult to explain more, but trust me, it works perfectly, at least in this dimension.

This sketching in of plot cannot do justice to the intricacies of this novel's structure, nor its prose which, even in translation, is both challenging and playful. 'Nature is a labyrinth of distorting images,' a butterfly collector tells Sebastian as the latter prepares his murder trap for Dabblelink. Sebastian ought to have paid more attention. But just as Oskar and Sebastian suggest Wilde, the butterfly collector suggests the shifting realities of Nabokov, and that is the territory Zeh has staked out here, that zone where the mysteries of the novel and the mysteries of the murder overlap. You might try to identify a European school of 'intellectual' novels that crossover into crime, books with theoretical bases, and you might link Zeh to it. But I thought more of Durrenmatt, with those echoes of the Theatre of the Absurd, and of American writers like Philip K Dick and Jack O'Connell. That the prose can be so captivating, and the aphorisms so frequent turns the book into an adventure of the mind, satisfying on whichever level the reader wishes to approach it. It is certainly the best novel I've read so far this year, and should mark Zeh as one of Europe's brightest younger novelists. And if you're reading this in America, note that the book will get its third title, In Free Fall, there--Dark Matter, with its reference to physics and its overtones of menace, probably works better for me, but a rose by any name is still a labyrinth of distorting images.

Dark Matter by Juli Zeh
Harvill Secker £12.99 ISBN 9781846552083

NOTE: Check at IT for an interview with Juli Zeh in the very near future...
NOTE 2: This review will also appear at www.crimetime.co.uk

FLITHY RICH: AZZARELLO AND SANTOS GO NOIR

Filthy Rich comes complete with blurbs from George Pelecanos and Meagan Abbott, and it doesn't get much more noirish than that--impressive enough that my wife actually gave me this copy for my birthday! And she does not do comic books. Brian Azzarello has shown in 100 Bullets that he's absorbed a full menu of late 50s and early 60s noir, and artist Victor Santos' art, which seems heavily influenced by Frank Miller as much as 50s black and white films and maybe Bernie Krigstein, suits the story very well.

There is a fine line between hommage and derivation, and the graphic novel format often winds up drawing heavily on both; in writing terms they are short stories, while in story format they are presented more like novels--the same sort of boundaries you might place on film, but even moreso without the giant screen and dark cinema to encompass the viewer. So although the outlines of the story are familiar, what makes it work so well is Azarello's combining of angles: the failed athlete turned car salesman thrown into the nightlife milieu is not only redolent of noir, it carries the undercurrents of the era, the sort of thing you get in Philip K Dick's mainstream novels, in everything from Death of A Salesman to Glengarry Glen Ross, the sort of thing that kept Gold Medal books in business fo so long. Junk Junkin, the former star football player who was accused of shaving points in college and then saw his pro career disappear to injury before it even started, is a desperate, empty man, with a half-track brain and a one-track mind--the perfect noir hero.

If anything, the story is even more desperate than Junkin himself, and that's where Romero's art cranks up the pace to a frenzied level. It resolves itself the way noir ought to, the way it has to, the only way it possibly can, in its real underbelly of a world. Filthy Rich is filthy, and it's rich noir, and what more can you ask for?

JACK O'CONNELL'S BOX NINE: A Forgotten Friday Entry

I'm revisiting Box Nine specifically because O'Connell is in Britain to promote his latest novel, The Resurrectionist, but more generally because it is hard to believe that a novel which won the then prestigious $50,000 Mysterious Press First Crime Novel Prize, and which has been followed by four books full of both invention and erudition, should even spring to mind as being overlooked today. But Box Nine appears to be out of print in America, and although The Resurrectionist may be his best book yet, it has not received anything like the attention it deserves.

Box Nine, like all O’Connell’s novels, is set in Quinsigamond, which is based geographically on Worcester, Massachusetts (where O'Connell lives) but is a futuristic fantasy of a mill town crossed with the Blade Runner LA of cyberpunk novels. In Box Nine there’s a new drug around town, called Lingo, which gets you speaking in tongues but also drives you to fiercer rage than the worst crank you ever saw. The high is great, but the price is high.

Connections to Vonnegut’s Ice-Nine are obvious, and also to Naked Lunch, which first posited language as a viral infection, and addiction. Language, in one way or another, has been at the heart of all O'Connell's work. When Box Nine first appeared, I noted O’Connell’s most relevant influences appeared to be the early Thomas Pynchon, concerned with issues of entropy, the early Don DeLillo, apparently concerned with early Pynchon, Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (and the Borges who inspired Cortazar) and of course Blade Runner, and its source material, Philip Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

This may have seemed a strange mix to apply to a small city in central Massachusetts, however fantastically it is imagined, but it does work, particularly because O’Connell’s alternately manic and dreamy prose echoes not only the effects of Lingo, but his concerns with the uses and abuses of language itself. I am amazed this guy is not being taught in post-modernist English Departments all around the world.

Leonore Thomas is the drug cop investigating Lingo. Problem is, she’s a thrill-seeking speed freak gun fetishist who might be more at home on the other side of the fence. In a city torn apart by ethnic gangs, the big drug lord is Cortez (Cortex? Neil Young's Cortez the Killer? Keats' 'stout Cortez'?) and the microcosm of society O'Connell presents is more like a slide full of bacteria wiggling under a microscope. It works as a crime novel, it works as a 'mainstream' novel, it works as a cult 'slipstream' novel. The bottom line is, it works.

O’Connell is one of those writers who can bend his prose to what he’s doing. There aren’t many of them around. It's form as an extension of content—and it wasn't a surprise I discovered Robert Creeley as one of his earlier influences. I, and other reviewers, keep comparing O'Connell to so many great writers not because he's derivative, but because he's unique, the kind of writer who makes you want to compare him to those other great writers who've blown you socks off with your first hit. Sort of like Lingo. And now I try to compare his career path, and I find no one close to the same, perhaps Joseph McElroy or someone else you probably haven't heard of either, or maybe Donald Harington, most of whose books were set in his own fictional Arkansas (see my obit of him here). But he's the real deal, and Box Nine is the place to get that first hit. No Exit Press have kept him in print in the UK, and their cover for The Resurrectionist should be one that attracts the kind of 'sophisticated' general readership who perhaps might pass by the book were it billed as crime. Their cover for Box Nine was a beauty too: Dick would have loved it. At least one publisher gets it.

Box Nine No Exit Press 1998 (second edition)
ISBN 9781901982275

The Resurrectionist No Exit Press 2009
ISBN 9781842433065

MOON: MIDNIGHT COWBOY TAKES A MOON WALK

I will confess to being a little apprehensive when I showed up to see Moon; a film directed by David Bowie's son, scripted by Alan Parker's son, produced by Sting's missus and released, as if by coincidence, on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing--Apollo 11 meets Ziggy Stardust Jr? Yowza!...but no role for Moon Unit Zappa?-- suggested all the hallmarks of a vanity project, the better-connected equivalent of Judy Gardland and Mickey Rooney going 'why don't we put on a show!' in the Andy Hardy movies. But I was won over completely by a film that, despite being very knowing about its roots, and somewhat playful with them, treats itself and its audience seriously, tells a simple tale well, and uses that simple tale to suggest, rather than gnaw over, stronger and deeper concepts. It's helped by the fact that it is nearly a one-actor, if not one person, show, and Sam Rockwell does such a good job in carrying it off.

Rockwell plays Sam, who's coming to the end of a three-year stint mining Helium-3 on behalf of Lunar Industries for clean consumption back on energy-hungry earth. It opens with a Lunar Industries corporate promo, always a red flag in sf films, especially those based on Philip K Dick, or his spirit. Since Blade Runner, there have been many Dick adapations (Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report among the big ones) and probably twice as many films that are Dickian in all but credits, playing with his concepts and worries, everything from The Truman Show to excellent smaller films like Cypher or Gattaca, or almost all of Charlie Kaufman's work.

Dick's central concern is whether the world we live in is 'real' or a construct, how to tell the difference, and more importantly, whether we ourselves are real, or constructs, and if the latter, what difference it makes. For three years Sam has had no direct communication with earth; the satellite link has suffered endemic problems the whole time he's been on the dark side of the moon, and he sends and gets only taped messages with his family. The tapes themselves will remind you of Total Recall, and as Sam's date of departure looms closer, they become more and more distant, and omnious, in tone.

His only companion in space is the robot, Gerty, an obvious reference to Hal 3000 from Kubrick's 2001. Gerty is perfectly realised, voiced by Kevin Spacey (yes, Spacey's his real name) and given his humanity not by Spacey's monotone, but by cleverly changing emoticons. The knowing quality of the film is evident in the way they tease a revisiting of Hal's breakdown, there's a wonderful tease where Gerty appears to be about to strangle Sam, onl to pat him on the shoulder, because, as he reminds us, hes programmed to protect him. It's also cute that, in a film produced by Trudie Styler, this robot should be called by another dimunitive of Gertrude (when I made this point on Saturday Review it was, oddly, edited out of the broadcast).

Sam and Gerty's relationship follows in the traditions of smaller-budget sf films like Silent Running (to which there are obvious references in Sam's garden, and whose situation, of Bruce Dern with robots Huey, Dewey and Louie, is very similar), or Aaron Lipstadt's Android : and any number of other films that use their limited budgets in creative ways, working out straightforward approaches to serious sf concepts . In the same way Dick hit on some instinctive truths, and certainly a clearer vision of our present world than virtually any other writer in or out of sf, while churning out his pot-boilers for chump change, and got the future much more accurately and entertainingly in the big sense and the 'serious' hard sf writers, so too have these 'smaller' films often contained much more humanity than bigger films whose budgets seemingly demand to be spent on effects, not ideas.

Without giving away too much of the plot, Sam is seriously injured in a crash, then wakes, apparently having been rescued and treated at his station. But how? He realises that the Sam from the crash is still out there, goes to rescue him (for he is still alive) and finds himself. Which means Sam II is a clone.

The beauty of the film from this point, as Rockwell plays two roles (it's like Silent Running's Dern face to face with 2001's Keir Dullea) is that rather than get all philosophical over identity, the two clones behave like two people forced to realise they are both the same person as well as two different people. Working together, they uncover the secret of the moon operation, of Sam and his family, and of the way Lunar Industries has devised to cope with the problems of leaving a man isolated on the moon for three years--a method devised, we realise, at least 15 years before.

The film makes only one visual reference to the moon landing: one shot of Sam bouncing along the surface, which makes him look almost gleeful in a situation where he should not be. Likewise, it only cheats once with the concept, when Sam sees a vision which foreshadows the situation, like a mirage, but for which there should be no memory on which to draw.

The story's heart now becomes the two Sams working for a solution, an escape; basically a reworking of another event which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year: John Schlesinger's film Midnight Cowboy. As the injured Sam deteriorates, Rockwell launches into a knowing but respectful, if playful, impersonation of Dustin Hoffman playing Ratso Rizzo--and in the end it's hard not to see the other Sam as Joe Buck heading off to Miami on his space bus. The two, and Gerty, work against the clock, making it a suspense film, and by now the audience has been won over to the two Sams, and the struggle is the classic one of individuals, clones or real, against the system.

Early press documents and reviews compared Rockwell's performance to Nicholas Cage's in Adaptation, and to Jeremy Irons' in Dead Ringers (Irons' is the most subtle of the three, Rockwell's the most flamboyant). But there is another comparison, which I mentioned on Saturday Review. Moon's director Duncan Jones (ne Zowie Bowie) reminds me of another director with a famous name who changed it to Jones, Spike Jones. Like Jones' first feature, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation was written by Charlie Kaufman, and very much in the Philip K Dick mode; in Adaptation, of course, Cage played two brothers, with the question of the second brother's reality always in the forefront. Spike Jones' directing career stalled, but there is a difference. Duncan Jones came up with the story for this film, and he's apparently already working on another sf film; he has great visual flair, and it will be interesting to see if the ideas, and the playfulness continue in that film. Nathan Parker has apparently done a screenplay for Thomas H Cook's subtle and very moving thriller, Red Leaves.

In the meantime, however, Moon is a small, intelligent movie, entertaining enough for a non-sf audience, and knowing enough for (older?) sf fans who will get its references. Can it appeal to the CGI Friday crowd? It deserves to.

MOON directed by Duncan Jones, screenplay by Nathan Parker, story by Duncan Jones, with Sam Rockwell, Dominique McElligot, (voice of) Kevin Spacey, photography: Gary Shaw

STOP, YOU'RE KILLING ME! GUARDIAN/OBSERVER 1000 NOVELS EVERYONE MUST READ: CRIME

The second chapter in the Guardian/Observer's '1000 Novels Everyone Must Read' was titled 'Crime', but anyone looking for a coherent best of the genre would be disappointed. Of course such lists exist to attract attention, if not controversy, and this one was specifically designed to rise above the usual suspects, such as the 50 best crime novels chosen by the Times back in April (see it here) or the Telegraph's last February (here). It's somewhat harder to pick apart than those were (see, for example, Mike Stotter at Shots here on how difficult it is to know where to start) but there are some egregious omissions--and inclusions-- by any standards.

Having said that, it is important to note that the list was introduced with a tortured attempt to define their goals, a Mission Statement which, using prose George Bush might envy, detailed an attempt 'to reflect as much of the spectrum as possible, as well as the regularity with which literary novelists have made evildoers their theme. The difference? The latter break genre rules, typically eliminating the hero who solves or prevents crime. And they usually write more stylishly; but the recent rise of the literary crime fiction epitomised by PD James has made that distinction less clear.'

Oh really.

This at least explains why Carrie O'Grady is such a treasured crime reviewer for the paper; her review of Fred Vargas, which was so amazingly wrong-headed it prompted an entire essay: 'The Guardian's Telegraph Crossword Theory of Crime Fiction', which you can find linked in the 'Bullseyes' section at the right, or here, made exactly the same sort of myopic distinction, with same sort of celebration of the epitome of 'literary' crime fiction ignoring some seven decades of writing. O'Grady features prominently in writing the entries here; you might not share her sense of the importance of Michael Innes's 'impish glee', but it helps explain why Anthony Berkley is a 'master of the genre' and Donald Westlake doesn't appear, in any of his guises, as if Richard Stark's writing didn't mark a revolution of crime style.

Yet even within their own parameters, the G/O can't achieve any consistency; not least because rather than reflect as much of the spectrum as possible, they tended, by choosing multiple books by favoured writers, to narrow that spectrum considerably. For example, five books by Ruth Rendell, none by, say, Margaret Millar, or Kate Wilhelm, or Laura Lippman's Every Secret Thing, if they want something recent. Colin Dexter has two books included, one because, according to Ms. O'Grady 'the Jag, the jokes, the crosswords...it's all here' (the crosswords?!) but where is John Harvey? Michael Dibdin gets his own section written by Mark Lawson, in which four books are chosen, perhaps these were the books Mark must read before he dies. Guardian reviewer Matthew Lewin gets to provide a sidebar on 'modern hardboiled crime', but the selections are only two of James Lee Burke southern gothics, and two by James Ellroy: yes, LA Confidential is a must, but why The Big Nowhere rather than the more crucial Black Dahlia or the more manic White Jazz? Why not the amazing American Tabloid, the start of the still unfinished American Underworld trilogy? Indeed why not a Lloyd Hopkins novel or even Ellroy's startling debut, Brown's Requiem? And in modern hardboiled crime, where is Michael Connelly?

Or, for that matter, Joe Gores, whose DKA novels are the most real of non-police procedurals, whose Hammett became a film (see below) and opened a sub-genre for writers as detectives, and whose Interface is the most serious bending of the hard-boiled detective hero that anyone has done before or since (you can find my essay on it here).

The selections also seem overly influenced by film (or TV) adaptations, and not just because they need art to decorate the section, and they must believe film stills work better than book covers, but also because films are a short cut to a writer's work (and reputation). Even so, is 'Get Shorty' really the Elmore Leonard you'd feel everyone 'must' read? Why The Manchurian Candidate and not Winter Kills? On the other hand, Jim Thompson gives you The Grifters and Coup de Torchon, as well as Peckinpah's excellent The Getaway (and its insipid remake). And yes, in this case, a still of a soaked Ali MacGraw may well make a better illo than the cover of Thompson's book.

In spy fiction are 'Tinker, Tailor' and 'Constant Gardener' really more essential reads than 'The Honourable Schoolboy'? Those two are listed among the choices, while the more crucial 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold' is included as part of an essay, The Best Spy Fiction, by Henry Porter (at least one of whose books, Empire State, deserves mention) which includes only two other candidates, both by Eric Ambler. On the main list are three James Bonds (all by Ian Fleming; I'm amazed they could resist including Kingsley Amis or Sebastian Faulks) but none of Donald Hamilton's Matt Helms. And is there really no place at all for the spy fiction of Robert Littell, Charles McCarry, Alan Furst, Paul Hennisart, or, indeed, Norman Mailer?

Mailer? Well, I say this because the list also includes two of Thomas Pynchon's novels. The Crying Of Lot 49 was a clever choice, but V, which was my favourite book when I was 17, and still is one of them now, is more of a stretch. John Dugdale does point out that, in V Pynchon pardies the John Buchan/Erskine Childers--both included in the Guardian's list-- thriller, but V is a novel filled with literary parody, not a crime novel itself.

Mailer wrote a huge spy novel, Harlot's Ghost which holds up very well, and to which the promised sequel remains unwritten. He also wrote a parody hardboiled, Tough Guys Don't Dance. There's murder at the heart of An American Dream, my own favourite of his novels, and of course there's The Executioner's Song, probably his best book, which is a non-fiction novel and certainly more rewarding for you to read than most of the books on this list.

I mention Mailer also because a very erratic group of 'literary' works are shoe-horned in, the likes of Ian McEwan, Patrick Susskind, Sarah Waters, Brett Easton Ellis, and Donna Tartt (someone must've loved that Bennington/Manhattan circle 15 years ago!). These are the literary lights who 'with regularity make evildoers their theme', yet nothing included by any of them holds a candle to An American Dream, much less American Tabloid.

There are also a lot of classic novels, including Zola's Therese Raquin and Dumas' The Count Of Monte Cristo. I love the latter, (who doesn't) and I guess it has crime (perjury) at its core (as well as a great prison break), but its inclusion really opens the door to any number of adventure novels, and might best have been put into a supplement of books you have to read before you hit puberty. Genre seems to create some major stumbling blocks for the Guardian. Peter Carey's Kelly Gang is surely a western, even if it is set in the southern hemisphere, while both the Michael Crichton novels included are surely sf. Why them and not any other sf classics that involve crime, like Philip Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep (not that it's Dick's best, but it does have a detective, and it was made into a famous film by a British director). If you've got The Three Musketeers, why not Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination? Why not Crichton's Eaters Of The Dead?

The whys and why-nots were the decisions of a 'panel of experts' but the write-ups for the entries chosen were apparently then assigned elsewhere, so we can't blame those who wrote the entries. For example, I doubt anyone 'must read' James Hadley Chase's No Orchids For Miss Blandish but I'll concede it does have some historical value here in Britain. As John Sutherland writes, Chase had studied Warner Bros. gangster movies, but perhaps he wasn't aware that the 'experts' had also chosen for this list William Faulkner's Sanctuary, which would make it worth his pointing out that Chase evidently studied Faulkner's book far more closely than any movie.

One can quibble too choices of books for the authors who were included; I'm not sure who'd choose Lush Life as the only Richard Price novel, or Sidetracked for Henning Mankell, but those quibbles aren't as important as asking why two Sara Paretsky and no David Goodis, two John Grishams and no Ross MacDonald, or why Jonathan Lethem but not Michael Chabon.

There are some positives. Nice to see George V Higgins, who surely qualifies for such a list even were it reduced to a dozen. Yes, Eddie Coyle was the one made into a movie, but it is still one of Higgins' very best. Good to see Sjowall and Wahloo remembered, even if one suspects they chose The Laughing Policeman because they don't know there's also a movie of The Man On The Roof! There's Friedrich Duerrenmatt's The Pledge, recognition of his place within the pantheon. Among the literary choices is Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red, for which John Mullan makes a good case. All of Hammett's four great novels are in, though someone (I'm assuming it wasn't Maxim Jakubowski, who wrote the entry, but one of the sub editors 'correcting' him) felt compelled to Anglicise it, transforming Red Harvest's setting of Personville (aka Poisonville) to Pentonville (!) Even the Continental Op might be amused by that one.

As I said, these lists exist to stir debate, prompt rants, and sell papers. But also, in this case, to educate the audience. And it is so heartening to learn that, thanks to PD James, crime fiction may someday attempt to rise to the literary heights of Perfume, Fingersmith, American Psycho, or The Secret History. Mission Accomplished!

POSTSCRIPT (24/1): It turned out that the Crime supplement was actually far more sensible than those that followed, whose categories, after Comedy (where the choices made Crime's look rational and comprehensive), grew increasingly more bizarre, like the oxymoronic Family and Self, State Of The Nation, and my favourite, War and Travel. The beauty of that one was that it allowed them to include Black Beauty, South Wind, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance (which isn't a novel, and if we're including non ficton where's Dispatches?) and even The Mark Of Zorro (what, no Fu Manchu?), while excluding War And Peace. Think about it. The outre categories meant inclusion for most of Pynchon, which was a good thing, but among all the fashionable moderns and Guardian contributors, they found no room for anything by Richard Powers, in my mind the very best 'younger' novelist writing in English. And how CAN anyone discuss the self or the nation without reference to Philip K Dick?.