Shaken-Not-Stirred Blogging...

Last night I got to page 186 of:

Charles Stross (2006), The Jennifer Morgue (Golden Gryphon Press: 1930846452).

I'm enjoying it immensely. Of course, I am its target demographic: somebody who knows too much about H.P. Lovecraft, too much about computers, too much about Ian Fleming, and too much about James Bond movies. All I lack is a Rhetoric Department's professors knowledge of narrative form and love of semiotics. But how large can this target demographic be?

Just before I went to bed I had a "bing" go off. if the Charlie-Stross-emulation-program running on my personal wetware is any good, the real boss supervillain is [spoiler] Fluffy [/spoiler].

---

And Virginia Postrel says:

Dynamist Blog: The Lost Meaning of Casino Royale: James Bond is a glamorous icon, but we don't notice some of his original glamour today, because we've forgotten what a constrained world his early audience inhabited. Simon Winder explains in his engaging new book, The Man Who Saved Britain:

Casino Royale is a book all about privilege, but privilege of a very marginal and almost grimy kind, and it shows the reality of British life with startlingly greater clarity than the Coronation. The action is entirely based in and around the dull, failing Normandy coastal town of Royale--a sort of hopeless Deauville. One can imagine that French casinos circa 1950 had been through rather a lot--the previous decade having seen a "mixed crowd" at the tables. The nature of Bond's privilege is to be at Royale at all. Currency and travel restrictions meant that the Channel, the barrier essential in 1940 to keeping the Germans out, was now quite actively penning non-military British people in. The very wealthy, or those with friends in France, could make arrangements to get round the restrictions (which stayed in place in various ways until the 1970s--yet another example of how strange the recent past was), but for virtually everyone France, even blustery, sour northern France, had become as exotic as Shangri-La. Fleming could not have chosen his location more cleverly: he would need to ratchet up the flow of exotica with each of the later books (until by the end Bond is mucking around with Japanese lobster eaten live as it crawls around his table), but Britain's frame of reference had shrunk so small by the early fifties that Royale was quite enough.

The book teems with now almost invisible digs--indeed the whole idea of the casino with its theoretically limitless stakes and winnings must have seemed derangedly heady to the book's first readers. And the Anglo-American relationship has never been better summed up than when Felix Leiter hands a broke Bond an envelope crammed with lovely new dollars, allowing him to carry on playing cards with the villain, Le Chiffre. For me the heart of the book, though, must be the scene when Bond tucks into an avocado pear. An avocado! These were exotic in 1939 but they could at least be bought. Avocados only really became available again in Britain in the late 1950s and had a desirability status akin to that felt (rather more democratically) for bananas by East Germans. The sense of the exotic which Fleming had to work for really hard in later books is won here with a mere oily tropical fruit on the windswept Channel coast. Oddly, during one of the many horrible, diarrhoeic currency crises that ravaged the international value of the pound (this one in the late sixties), avocados were specifically mentioned (along with strawberries and vintage wine) as imports to be restricted under the draconian "Operation Brutus," mercifully never implemented.

The 21st-century world of the movie is still dangerous, but far less suffocating. I recommend Winder's book: to both Bond fans (some of whom will find in infuriating) and anyone interested in the mentality of postwar Britain.

Comments

[Henry]

I liked it a lot too - just finished it today - but my ability to run Stross on internal wetware is less developed than yours - didn't spot who the supervillain was despite several hints. The misdirection and jokes around Angleton's first and second name were just about within grasp of my cognitive capacities though.

[Kathleen]

Thanks Brad - I actually just read Casino Royale and thought it was not very good. This adds a layer that I had totally missed.

[Gene O'Grady]

I'm curious -- when I went East to college in 1965 one of the things I discovered to my shock was that none of my classmates had apparently ever seen an avacado. Were they really known in Britain before Massachusetts?

I seem to recall that the quaintly labeled "avacado pear" figures as a symbol of the exotic and pretentious in a David Lodge novel, but I can't remember which one.

[christofay]

I heard of the Coffee Trader through this blog so this might be an interesting area to check out.

I grew up in Massachusetts and hadn't know of avocados till Mexican restaurants started to spread that way late 1970s.

[Paul Reber]

I quite enjoyed the Atrocity Archives and recognized some of the thematic ideas from his short story collection Toast, but I haven't gotten to the Jennifer Morgue yet.

I had that demographic "problem" with Accelerando, though. When the short story Lobsters (which ended up being the first chapter of Accelerando) first came out in Asimov's, it hit me with a wow! unlike anything since Gibson's Neuromancer -- like touching a live wire in the ideas it sparked. Only Charlie actually knows something about computers, neuroscience, cognitive science, politics and economics.

Oddly (to me), none of the friends I've personally recommended it to seems to have experienced the same wow that I did, whether they are computer scientists, neuroscientists or cognitive scientists (ok, so my reading recommendation circle is not that big). I was left with the impression that although I loved the book, maybe there weren't that many people who were really in the target demographic sweet spot.

Fortunately for Charlie, most of his other stuff is a bit more broadly appealing, I suspect (if less wow! to me). I should go read his short story in the new Asimov's (Jan issue) and pick up the books I've fallen behind on.

Random factoid/recommendation: Charlie lost the Hugo for Lobsters to Ted Chiang for his story "Hell is the Absence of God" which is decent enough, but nowhere near (IMHO) as excellent as his earlier story titled "Understand." "Understand" was another early "wow!" story for introducing the idea of trans-human super-intelligence (to me anyway). Charlie got his Hugo 3 years later for The Concrete Jungle but while justice was served, I think they both won a well-deserved award for the wrong story. :) Both of Chiang's stories are available in his only published collection "Stories of Your Life and Others."

[Emily]

99% of what I know about post-war Britain comes from being a Beatles fan. They were able to travel to Germany in ~1960 to work. But they couldn't buy all the records they wanted or have a big choice of guitars until they came to the US in 1964. As far as I remember, avocados are not mentioned in Beatles literature.

[Adrian Smith]

I also enjoyed The Atrocity Archives and have yet to read The Jennifer Morgue, but felt that Charlie violated a fairly central tenet of the Mythos ethos (?) by giving the former a happy ending, though I can see how that would be necessary if one were contracted for multiple trilogies or something. He managed to resist the temptation in A Colder War from Toast, and I thought it was the better for it.

[Alex Tolley]

Postrel's comments about setting is a worthy topic in iteself. We often forget how life really was different. Another early Bond book, Goldfinger, was set during the time when owning gold was essentially illegal because. Goldfinger was a villain, at least initially, because he had found a way to convert his British gold to more valuable Asian gold. How could this be? Because the exchange rates were set by governments, often unrealistically. From the contemporary vantage point of a floating rates world, one can almost turn the story around and argue that the British government was the villain, and Goldfinger was the hero speculator.

[Roger Albin]

The insularity, limitations and divisions of British life are a common subject of more intelligent British popular fiction. Le Carre's A Small Town in Germany, published some years after Casino Royale, is, among other things, an acute allegory of British life in the early 60s and late 50s. Arguably Le Carre's best book, though not a major commercial success.

[dilbert dogbert]

Read the Hiscock's books on sailing round the world during this time. I think they could take 50 pounds out of country and could only spend it in Sterling countries. Also another book along the same lines read "Walkabout" about a Rhodesian family getting some assets out of Rhodesia during the last parts of white rule.

[James Killus]

"All I lack is a Rhetoric Department's professors knowledge of narrative form and love of semiotics. But how large can this target demographic be?"

Oh, crap, he said, recognizing himself and all the members of his immediate household.

[stewart]

Also from that time, with a reminder of the impoverishment of British life, and another American rescuer: Trustee from the Toolroom, by Nevil Shute.

I was rereading the Sherlock Holmes stores, and was astonished at how the wealthy non-aristocratic characters all came by their fortunes in the US, Canada, South Africa or Australia, but never in England, home of doctors and clerks. What will the American bankruptcy look like?

[Phoenician in a time of Romans]

Brad: "Of course, I am its target demographic: somebody who knows too much about H.P. Lovecraft, too much about computers, too much about Ian Fleming, and too much about James Bond movies."

Trust me - you're far closer to the target demographic for "Halting State"...