The prose of Richard Calder (WAS: The Divinity Student, by Michael Cisco)
Mark Dillon
>> By the way, Ms. Webster, have you read Richard Calder's recent
>> book, THE TWIST? Not his best novel (in my opinion that would
>> be DEAD GIRLS -- ignore the sequels) but vivid, fascinating and
>> morbidly perverse enough for me to recommend it to anyone
>> with a taste for weird gothic SF-Fantasy surrealism.
[SNIP]
>Let me ask you this: is _Dead Girls_ well-written? I know it's
>supposed to be fun and a good story and all that, but does the
>prose stand up to close examination? I'm much pickier about writing
>quality when I venture outside my chosen genre. SF novels have
>no chance of keeping my interest if they're not crafted well on
>a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence level.
[SNIP]
>And what I've heard about _Dead Girls_ makes me wonder if it's...
>how shall I put this?... kind of sloppy and self-indulgent in style.
Calder is never sloppy, but he is a mannered writer strongly
influenced by the Decadents of the 1890s.
And because his narrative is constantly on the move, finding
a suitable passage to quote can be difficult without having
to explain who is doing what to whom, and where, and why.
But here is a passage in which the narrator tells of his
schoolboy crush on Primavera, who, like so many girls
of her generation, has been transformed by viral warfare
into a predatory Cartier doll --
Primavera was twelve; her DNA had begun to recombine.
She sat in front of me in class, her long blonde hair
betraying its first streaks of Cartier black. Primavera Bobinski.
One day a classmate similarly progressed in doll metamorphosis
had said something to her in a giggly undertone. Primavera
shook her head. Throughout that lesson -- divinity? history?
geography? -- scraps of paper appeared on her desk,
passed on by that handful of girls who, like her, wore the
green star of the recombinant. I grew nervous. Primavera
was a girl I had stared at, I suppose, too long; whom I had
been observed following down those interminable school
corridors, or across the park after last bell; and now the
adored one was being goaded to take revenge. At last,
piqued by their teasing, eager to show she could take a dare,
she waited for our teacher to avert his gaze, then turned
contrapposto, put her face close to mine, bared her teeth,
and cut open my lip with a swift, expertly aimed glance of
one of her newly extended canines. "Oh?" she said, in pert
demotic Londonese, "did I hurt you?" her death mask of a
face insolent as the toothy laughter of her peers. I put
my hand to my lip; felt blood; flushed.
>(Yes, I know that _Dead Girls_ has a lot of horror content,
>but the premise is SF, so I see it as SF until proven otherwise.)
Definitely SF. And the content you mention is less horrific
than grotesque and surreal. Imagine a future devised by the
Gustaves Moreau and Klimt, in which their ambivalence
towards women has become the cultural norm and their
imagery has taken on a rotten, cybernetic sheen.
Yet for me, what brings the book to life is the doomed
relationship of the two lovers, whose tenderness and
mutual respect break all the rules of a hypercapitalistic
world hell-bent on gynocide. They can run and hide but
only for so long -- right up until the undeniably moving
finale.
Ignore the sequels; they add nothing to a book complete
in itself. Give THE TWIST a try, instead.
>But let me hasten to say, I mean no offense toward SF by asking
>this question. There's a lot of badly written horror fiction and
>a lot of well-written science fiction. I'm just more tolerant
>of mediocre and even bad writing in horror fiction.
-- Which makes you far more tolerant than I will ever
be! : )
Mark Dillon
Quebec, Canada