The Forest of Doom!!

For those of you who don't know, The Forest of Doom was the third installment of the brilliant Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks.

This post is a response specifically to comments made by the brilliant Auckland based blogger, Murray, who has been playing his way through the series and posting accounts of his misadventures and opinions on the books.

So be warned; if you have haven't encountered the Fighting Fantasy books, or read Murray's blog (which I hugely recommend) this will probably make no sense to you. And not in an intentional, post modern literature sort of way.

Forest of Doom was always one of my favourites (and one of the few that I finished, though it took me years and I probably stopped playing by the rules to do it) but the opinion of those commenting on it is generally negative. So what I offer here is a defence of Forest of Doom. The criticism of the book by Murray - and on other blogs - shows fatal misunderstanding of what Livingstone was trying to do.

I think FoD was the second game book I bought, after Death Trap Dungeon. Keep in mind that, if flicking through those pages and being perverted gently by all those barely concealed genitalia, was a novelty for me, it was also kinda new for Steve and Iain.

Warlock of Firetop Mountain came out in 1982, and Citadel of Chaos and Forest in 1983. Like musicians, who get to plunder their whole miserable angsty adolescence for their their first album, and six months of cocaine, constant touring and meaningless sex for the second, Steve and Iain were in a hurry.

Also bear in mind books 3, 5, 6 and 7 were solo efforts by Livingstone. After Citadel, and the co-authored Starship Traveller, Steve Jackson took a holiday from writing the 'core' Fighting Fantasy. So it was pretty much a one man show, with cameo appearances by various people all called Steve Jackson. And Iain managed to knock out five solo books in two years. So maybe we should cut these him some slack, huh?

So, exculpatory pleading aside, what of FoD? Well, as Murray notes, it is set OUTDOORS. Ponder that novelty for a while. The default settling for most adventures is still a fancifully network of tunnels and rooms, populated by random monsters, with no real ecology (What does the DRAGON in Warlock eat?) or purpose.

A good friend of mine, a role-player of considerable vintage, says that it was Forest of Doom that made him realise You Could Take This Shit Outside. Okay, FoD is just a dungeon with trees for walls, but that is still a transition many have to make. What Freud would have made about our reluctance to move from the warm comforting 10x10 tunnels and wombs, sorry, rooms?

Taking the action out of tunnels makes the setting more convincing. Tunnels have to be dug by someone, whereas trees just grow, yeah? And the forest setting immediately creates a viable eco-system. Even if we can't go off the paths, the nasties we encounter can. So the WEREWOLVES, CAT WOMEN, CENTAURS and such like seem more plausible.

Another thing Livingstone did that was really cool was create a detailed story setting. FoD has a decent introduction, outlining how you get involved in the quest. It also gave you a pay off if you managed to complete the quest - a remarkably long 'paragraph' 400, meaning you get some sort of a reward for all the page flicking and dice rolling. I think it was Masks of Mayhem that ended the story with a single sentence 'paragraph' - a pretty crappy ending.  FoD really felt like a story in which you got to be the hero.

The structure of the game book is also innovative and some seem to have misunderestimated Livingstone's purpose. Yeah, sure, you can play it as a psychopath and attack everyone ... Livingstone is giving you that choice. You get to choose how you interact with the population of Darkwood.

Obviously, if you attack them all, they'll all try to kill you right back. If you don't, some of them probably won't; but (clever bit) some will, because the outcome has to be unpredictable. Some times being nice will get you out of a fight, but not always.

If Steve Jackson was a GM, you get the impression he'd be the sort of GM you'd hate - the type that are always out to kill the PCs and who revel in the cunning ways they manage to Seal Their Doom. Whereas Iain would be the sort of GM who would provide a good night's entertainment for all with plenty of beer and chips.  Steve would probably put slow acting poison in the chips, and then giggle evilly as he watched you expire.

The other big innovation was structural. Remember the frustration of bursting into tears on the Warlock's treasure chest because you didn't have the right damn keys? Instead of, you know, doing what a self-respecting Dragon slaying, Warlock disembowelling sword waggler would do, going back into the maze to find the damn things? FoD doesn't do that.

If you get to Stonebridge without the two parts of the hammer, you don't get called a dumbass loser, you get to carry on. You may have found a significant location but not had the magical item needed, like the GHOUL's crypt. So you get to re-visit Yastromo and buy the magic items you now realise you need. Or you can explore new paths - in fact you have to do this, as the two parts of the hammer are located on different routes through the forest, justifying the classic/infamous "You come to a T junction, L/R" opening to EVERY game book in the series.

Obviously, this means you might go through some encounters twice, and it would have been nice if Livingstone had included an "If you have been here before and killed the werewolf, turn straight to ..." option, players with a modicum of intelligence can just skip repeat encounters, unless you really like killing CAT WOMEN. This highlights a profound difference in attitude between Steve Jackson and Iain Livingstone. Iain isn't out to kill you for any wrong choice.

Steve Jackson, on the other hand, certainly is, as Murray discovered in House of Hell. Pretty much any wrong choice in a Steve Jackson book leads to certain death ... and, frustratingly, it may not occur immediately; you may still seem to have options, as in the Kitchen of Death in the House of Hell; but there is no going back once you blunder into one of his 'Kill Zones.' FoD, on the other hand, forgives mistakes, some of the time at least, and doesn't kill you too vindictively too often.

So in terms of innovation, it is something of a high water mark in the series. I don't know if any of the later books had such a complex structure or allowed as much freedom of interaction. Which isn't to say it is perfect, because it isn't. But it is different and, I think, undervalued.

The Arrow of Gold, by Joseph Conrad

I finished The Arrow of Gold the other night, which probably makes me one of the elite in Conrad appreciation.  because if you manage to read that book ... Look, it isn't bad.  In places.

Unfortunately, the places where it isn't bad are the places where the tiresome love interest is not to be seen.  And there are not many of them, and the whole purpose of the novel was to record the romantic tensions between the narrator and the allegedly captivating Dona Rita.  I desperately wanted her to be captivating.  For moments - when the narrator was not directly involved in the story - she was tolerable.  But that is not easy to do.  So swathes of the novel are tedious and pointless and frequently bordering on the incomprehensible.

These sections are thrown into relief by the scenes which don't feature Rita, or where Rita is narrating her own personal history, with the narrator dumbly standing about twiddling his thumbs.

There are moment when the ladies withdraw and the men get on with manly stuff, and that is always where Conrad is at his best.  It is no wonder that his greatest novels are often the ones which are set on ships or other places where women are generally not a concern.  Conrad seemed to find them profoundly puzzling and - as one of my correspondents in the recent guardian discussion pointed out - this rather damages his standing as a great novelist.

After all, if you find fully half the species profoundly incomprehensible, and intercourse (careful now!) with them deeply confusing, then you are rather limiting yourself.

I'm not so harsh, as there are many things that chaps can get up to without having to dally with girls.  But it does count against Conrad that he wasn't smart enough to realise what a dreadful dead end the romantic aspects of his later novels would be. To try and fail once might have been commendable.

To try and fail repeatedly suggests either he was so arrogantly convinced of his brilliant, or he had stopped really caring and was trying to milk the formaula that had - inexplicably - made the equally muddled Chance a best seller.

No Stars

A list of some films I particularly admire

I can't call it a bloody Top Ten because there are more than ten of them, and I couldn't ever settle on a definitive Top Ten if I tried.  So here's a random list of films I really admire.  Tonight.

I used to be able to reel lists like this off off so easily. See, I used to be pretentious. I used to be able to do Top 10s of nouvelle vague directors ... and now I'm not sure if I even managed to spell nouvelle vague correctly.

How times have changed. I used to be somebody ... I coulda been a contenduh ... now all I got is vintage wine and memories. And the sad thing is, I'm so out of touch with cinema my top 10 would probably looks pretty much the same as it did two decades ago. I stopped caring, you see, about new Scorcese films sometime between Brining Out The Dead and The Aviator.

Back then, it all seemed so important. I understood Jean Luc godard. Not his impossible movies, no-one, not even Jean Luc, understands them. But I understood the man. The urge to go and see half a dozen films in a day and argue endlessly about them with your equally intelligent and fixated friends in some cafe. Cinema seemed vital when I was in my 20s

But now ... I can barely find the time to watch a DVD and when I do, suddenly the desire to be challenged and puzzled by it seems so indulgent.

In no particular order ...

1. Touch of Evil. D: Orson Welles. Gargantuan film from the gargantuan Welles. Charleton Heston - cheekily blacked up as a Mexican drugs cop - investigates a murder while Janet Leigh lounges about in a bra that would make Madonna blush. Berserk, but brilliant. Or is it the other way round?
2. Sånger från andra våningen / Songs From The Second Floor. D: Roy Andersson. Brilliantly puzzling non-;inear story (sort of) about The End Of The World. Moments of unsurpassed beauty.
3. Simple Men. D: Hal Hartley. Wonderfully dry comedy about two brothers searching for their father and the meaning of life on Long Island. It's a terminal moraine, you know.
4. Raging Bull. D: Martin Scorcese. A grim tale of an athlete's attempt to escape the lower class drudgery and enjoy a brief stab at success. Peerless example of what cinema can be. Absolutely perfect in every regard.
5. Week-End. D: Jean Luc Godard. Simply because this changed my conceptions of what cinema meant. A middle class couple set off with murder in mind get caught up in the collapse of western soiety, and cannibal pig killing Maoists.
6. Mulholland Drive. D: David Lynch. Convuluted tale of desire, murder, corruption, revenge and some guy in a big cowboy hat. Horribly, perhaps the last truly remarkable film I saw in a cinema.
7. The Sporting Life. D: Lidsay Anderson. A grim tale of an athlete's attempt to escape the lower class drudgery and enjoy a brief stab at success. Another one.
8. Lone Star. D: John Sayles. A clever, low key film about a intergenerational murder mystery in small town Texas, from a director who liked to keep things simple so you could appreciate how complicated they really were.
9. Withnail & I. D: Bruce Robinson. Oh, come on. It's fantastic. I'm a trained actor, reduced to the status of a bum! An essential part of my student days, and still a fine meditation on growing up too late, unrequited love and oh, everything. My boys, my boys!
10. The Third Man. D: Carol Reed. I used to call this my favourite film, though it is currently out of favour. An inimitable setting, fine set pieces and performances. But would the police really not looked at Harry Lime's body before he was buried?
11. Fat City. D: John Huston. A grim tale of an athlete's attempt to ... Late, low key boxing drama from the great director. A washed up might-have-been gets a sniff of a second chance.
12. La Chinoise / The Chinese. D: Jean luc Godard. Godard renounces radical leftism in charactertistically off beat tale of student terrorists. Characteristically baffling and defiantly unhelpful, but contains many moments of Godardian genius.
13. Nackt Unter Wolfen / Naked Among Wolves. D: Frank Beyer. Concentration camp cat and mouse as prisoners conceal a Jewish child. A distant ancestor of the slushier Life is Beautiful, this film is stark, brilliant drama.
14. Oldboy. D: Park Chan-wook. Sick, brutal, nasty film about long delayed revenge. Redeemed only by the fact that it is brilliant in almost every way.
15. Darwin's Nightmare. D: Hubert Sauper. Jarring documentary about poverty, exploitation and pending ecological collapse around Lake Tanzania, where locals fish for invasive Nile Perch which are freighted to European restaurants while the fishermen subsist on rotting fish remains.
16. The Sweet Smell of Success. D: Alexander MacKendrick. Uber-louse Tony Curtis oils and weasels his way about the screen in a stupendous film about how vile people can be to each other.
17. A Night To Remember. D: Roy Ward Baker. The sinking of Titanic, the way it should have been told.

So, yeah. A top Seventeen. How stupid is that?

Something Happened! But do I really care?

I don't usually give up on books, but I hereby publicly announce that I am giving up on Something Happened, by Joseph Heller.

This is odd as a) Joseph Heller is a proper author who wrote at least one undeniable classic novel, Catch-22, and b) people sometimes say Something Happened is better.

It isn't.  It's very dull, with slab like pages of unparagraphed text dully reporting nothing happening.  It's about an advertising executive, right, and his troubled marriage and ... and I can tell you just had to stifle a yawn there.  Reading that sentence.  Now imagine the whole sense of "Who really cares about this?" stretched out over a 400+ page novel.

Though I am in no position to judge the novel fairly.  I didn't even make it to the halfway point.  Maybe the second half is astonishing.  Maybe the protagonist stops ruminating and gets a really big gun, a really hot and sexually voracious girlfriend, a fast car and zooms off to blow up Las Vegas.  Or maybe it builds to some astonishingly acute psychological or philosophical insight that would have forced me to re-evaluate every aspect of my own sad, petty life.

Or perhaps the dullness was the point, in which case, Joe, we didn't really need it spelled out for us at quite such length or in such banal detail.  Perhaps a short story would have done just as well.

Or maybe the whole thing was a joke and the point was that, in the whole novel, nothing happened.  In which case I hope Joe Heller was cremated as I may dig up his corpse just to punch it in the face.

Re-read Catch-22.  Don't bother with Something Happened.  Or, if you have read it, tell me when it gets good so I know what page to start from.

Because the first couple of hundred pages made me really, really wonder why I was living (not in a good way) and - more pertinently - why I ever bothered to learn to read.

Player of Games

A surprisingly good article - though with a rubbish headline - about the way video games have developed over the decades, to the point where they challenge more traditional literary forms in terms of plot, characterisation and philosophical content.

You might sniff, but while video games might not yet be Tolstoy, they are certainly beating Wilbur Smith ...

Cart Life is an equally effective study of contemporary life in America on the poverty line. As you scrape a living, selling coffee or newspapers, you begin to feel the grim pain of systemic unfairness and economic failure. The sense of injustice when one character is evicted from his motel room for keeping a cat is devastating.

Cart Life is a game, of course.  Though from the synopsis above, you might think it was a novel or a TV series - or an article from an unusually socially aware newspaper or magazine.

That's how debased our culture has become - where games can seem closer to capturing the grim reality of the times than the supposed established arts and media.

Interview with Hilary Mantel

A surprisingly good, detailed and in depth interview with Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies.  Though it is A Place of Greater Safety which I remember most fondly - it is one of my all time favourite novels, though I did not know was her first effort (though not first published) until reading this interview.

Originally published in The New Statesman.

“Also, it taught me what I’ve long suspected: that public opinion is not something that features very highly in my life. Nobody should go into a trade like writing expecting applause, or universal approval, or even popularity. What appals me is that people mistake this constant storm of trivial abuse for some kind of freedom. ‘Me, speaking my mind!’ ” Her tone is boldly dismissive. “It’s not. It’s actually a huge distraction of the bread and circuses variety. To a large extent proper civic engagement, community engagement, proper political debate and activism, has been replaced by this. By illogic. By platitudes. And actually a lot of it is just abuse and bullying. There’s a nasty, narrow little conformism. And people are afraid, quite understandably, to differ from the norm. I think it’s a very sad state of affairs.”

The Crimson Petal and the ... who really cares

In a rare move, I have given up on Michael Faber's massive The Crimson Petal And The White.  After about 750 pages, I suddenly realised I utterly did not care what happened to any of the characters and did not have the slightest interest in what might transpire in the final hundred pages.

Sorry, Michael.  You obviously put a lot of effort into this book and thought you were onto something.  But size isn't everything.  The Fire Gospel was shorter, and much more interesting and entertaining than the bloated tome I have just put down.

Too much sugar is bad for you, you know.

RIP GGM

Aged 87, so hardly shocking, and I remember a foretelling of his imminent death about a decade ago, allegedly from the pen of the man himself. Though it was either fake, or he got better, as he carried on living and writing for years afterwards.

 As for the books themselves, I was flabbergasted the first time I read A Hundred Years of Solitude, but on re-reading it seemed flat, contrived and really just an endless recitation of random stuff happening.

Great ending though. I read lots of his books, and they all seemed pretty much the same, South American melancholia-by-numbers and lots of random stuff happening that was presumably meant to be portentous.

 I think the thing that annoyed me about 100 Years was the slab like pages of text, without dialogue or even paragraphs. Just endless recitation of what was going on, none of which really amounted to much. There were only a handful of key incidents in the book and the rest of it was just filling pages to give it an epic feel so it really did seem like a century had passed.

That said, the last time I re-read it, the fate of the luckless Mauricio Babilonia (yeah, I had to look up his name), a minor character I'd pretty much over looked before, struck me as incredibly sad. Fantastic apocalyptic ending. I've never been able to look at ants quite the same way since.

And still one of the iconic writers, for all my carping.

 And it is a shame he didn't get to live to a hundred, for obvious reasons.