By Hugh Walters
5...
I recently attempted to do an on-line CBT/mindfulness stress-reduction course.
Apparently, it is possible to relieve stress by imagining that your anxieties are an orange and letting the orange gently float away into a relaxing sunset. You have to imagine the texture of the orange and the colour of the fruit-bowl and what kind of relaxing beach the sun is setting over.
I assume that this works for some people or the therapists wouldn’t keep selling it.
The main thing I discovered from the course was that I didn’t have a visual imagination.
Come to think of it, I must have known that already. So the main thing I discovered from the course is that some people do have one.
I definitely know what oranges look like. If I appeared in a court and was asked to describe one orange in particular, I could state some solid facts about it. “There was a blue spot near the stalk, your honour. I thought that was odd at the time.”
But forming a mental picture of the orange and holding it before my mind’s eye: and then adding the tree, the sunset, the yellow bird and the tallyman tallying his bananas entirely eluded me? The best I could achieve was brief mental orange shaped snapshots amid the encroaching darkness.
Is this normal? Is this common? Is there a three letter abbreviation that I can apply for?
For the record, I found that breathing in through my nose to the count of six and then slowly blowing the seeds off an imaginary dandelion made me as calm as I am ever likely to be.
I suppose that this disability—or perhaps it is a superpower—affects the way I read and the kinds of books I enjoy. It might explain why I find “difficult” books like the Silmarillion relatively approachable, and approachable books like Conan the Freebooter relatively difficult.
It would also explain why I like fiction where someone has taken the trouble to actually draw the pictures he wants me to see, instead of leaving me to do all the hard work for myself, or “comics” as we used to call them.
I have talked before about book-memes on Facebook: I have even insinuated that the "Reading is Brilliant" threads are often implicitly anti-literate. You tell me that books are magical devices that carry me away to places I have never been where I will meet people who are more real to me than my friends and family. I am apt to reply “Are they bollocks!” I tell you that Tolkien’s archaic prose and Salman Rushdie’s oblique metaphors are the exact things which make them both in their different ways great writers. I fully understand why you want to reply that I have taken all the fun out of reading. Across such a chasm, no bridge can be constructed. If you enjoy being physically present in Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory, experiencing all the smells and textures and sounds of dissected corpses and arcane machinery, you don’t want to hear Mr Pedant telling you to pay attention to the actual words Mrs Shelley used to describe it. Or, indeed, pointing out that she didn’t.
I blame school teachers. For everything. Many people of my shape and demeanour are unable to quite shake the belief that football is primarily an excuse for big kids to kick little kids in the shins and a pretext for repressed adults to look at teenagers in states of undress.We don’t quite literally believe it, but we feel in our guts that it must be true. And some people enjoyed Eng. Lit. almost as much as I enjoyed PE. It must as strange to them that I would pay money to watch actors performing Shakespeare as it is to me that they would pay money to watch other people doing a kick about on a field.
It's a prejudice. But not everyone realises it's a prejudice. Some people think that “I had to sing boring hymns at infant school” is a theological position.
Miles Kington said that the trouble with O Level French was that O Level French is not the language that French people actually speak. I think that school PE did sometimes involve the playing of a game that was in some respects quite similar to the one that football fans enjoy. But school English was largely detached from anything the normal theatre-goer or the normal novel-reader would engage in voluntarily. I don’t know what the normal poetry reader does. Is there even such a beast? Or is poetry written by the sorts of people who write poetry for the benefit of the sorts of people who publish and review poetry books? You can fill a medium sized coffee shop with people who want to hear actual vernacular performance poems, but that wouldn’t be caught dead between the covers of a school anthology.
Now, obviously, speaking for myself, I like thinking about books. I like writing about books. I like reading books about books (“criticism”). I even like reading books about books about books (“critical theory”). Whether we are talking Demons of the Punjab or a Passage to India, I have no truck at all with people who say “You ought not to think about this: you ought to just allow it to wash over you.” ("It's just a TV show! Just a piece of entertainment! The whale is just a whale and he said her hair was red because red is the colour her hair actually was!") But I think it is a really bad idea to think about a book before you have read it, or instead of reading it. I think it is an error to suppose that Dickens wrote David Copperfield mainly to give students raw material for their essays. (A surprising number of people believe that the main reason God wrote the Bible was to give Vicars something to preach sermons about.) I think that your first, second and third reaction to Waiting For Godot ought to be “What a strange, puzzling, fascinating, peculiar play.” I think that it is okay to whistle a catchy tune without wanting to find out what makes a tune catchy. He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
But perhaps we are simply talking about people with, and people without, visual imaginations? If the majority of people genuinely can think of an orange when they are told to think of an orange, then presumably, when someone speaks of horses they really do think that they see them, pounding their hoofs in the receiving earth. And if you are in that majority, then the person who tells you to count up how many I-ams Shakespeare put into each of his pentameters and find out what "puissance" means is missing the whole point of the play. You aren’t being taught to play football better: you are being told that you oughtn't to have been "playing" it at all.
I am not a formalist. I am not claiming that the only things you can definitely say about oranges is that they have three syllables and don’t rhyme with anything. I have just read the latest Knausgaard, The School of Night, which would, incidentally, be an excellent jumping on point for anyone who hasn’t read any Knausgaard and would like to find out what all the fuss is about. It is nominally the fourth volume in his excruciating Morning Star metaverse. I think if I use the search function in my Kindle it may turn out that the main character, Kristin Hadeland, is the John Doe who the agnostic Church of Norway clergywoman buried in volume one. But it stands very independently as a novel; about a student at a prestigious photography school whose art is not appreciated by his contemporaries, who makes a possibly unwise agreement with a mysterious figure, while, incidentally, helping out with a fringe production of Doctor Faustus. He becomes extremely famous and successful but finds that some extremely reckless things done as a young man come back to haunt him in middle age.
It’s a story.
And certainly, I wasn’t “just reading the words”. If you were “just reading the words” of Knausgaard you would go insane. It isn’t true (pace Private Eye) that he ruthlessly chronicles every character’s bowel movements: it is true that if someone is going to have a cup of coffee, there is a serious danger that we will learn about how the granules gradually dissolve in the cup and the milk swirls around in a swirly milky pattern. Which is why the publishers were rather spot on to use the epithet “addictive” to describe the book.
Besides, a hand-held vacuum cleaner was a very useful thing when we left crumbs in places where a big vacuum cleaner was impractical, on the kitchen worktop for instance, or we might make just a small mess somewhere, perhaps we’d spill thirty or forty grains of rice onto the floor when we tipped the bag, and who would go to the cupboard to get the big vacuum cleaner then, which had to be lifted and carried, plugged in and switched on? No, it was much easier to turn to the small one that sat so snugly in the hand and was always at the ready. I lived in the age of hand-held vacuum cleaners, but it didn’t mean I had to bow down to them, just as Giordano Bruno in his day had felt unobliged to bow down to the Catholic Church.
It took only about ten pages to go from “Who is this awful man and why do I care about his awful life?" to peeping out from behind a metaphorical sofa thinking “oh god please don’t you aren’t really going to steal a dead cat from the vet oh…” or indeed screaming “stop agonising go to the police and admit that you failed to report an accident you bloody fool”. In the final section it becomes very clear that a very bad thing indeed is about to happen, and the blow by blow description of the trivial minutiae which are occurring while it is pointedly failing to do so become almost physically painful. I certainly wouldn't want to attempt a GCSE "compare-and-contrast-two-minor-characters" essay about it. I cared far too much about the actual story and wanted far too badly to know what happened next. Did I feel that I was temporarily in Norway? That Kristen was someone I had actually met? Did I feel that my mind was full or oranges, oranger and more orangey than anything I had ever oranged before?
Did I bollocks.
4...
There is, you may be surprised to learn, a point to this.
As you know, we have been engaged for several years in a critical re-reading of the works of Hugh Walters, who was my favourite science fiction writer when I was at primary school. The latest volume is called Passage to Pluto. It is exactly the same as all the others.
While re-reading the book, I am fairly sure that I had a visual flashback to the pictures I made in my head when I first read the story, I think in the summer of 1972. At the end of the book, three astronauts are saved at the last possible moment from Certain Death by their erstwhile comrade Chris Godfrey. During the rescue, young common northern engineer Tony Hale does something very reckless and dangerous in the engine room. As I read this passage, I distinctly saw the two characters in my head: Tony crawling around the engine room, Chris at the helm of the rescue ship. I could distinctly see their faces. And I observed (can you observe yourself having a memory of a mental construct?) that I was picturing Tony as Stephen (Peter Vaughan) from the Tomorrow People, and that, by a process of elimination, Chris was being played by Nicholas Young, (John), from the same series.
We have established that I was reading Walters’ books and watching the first run of the TV show, at exactly the same time. I don’t know if some after-the-fact firing of synapses hyperlinked the two aesthetic experiences in retrospect, or if Kid-Andrew was consciously “casting” the characters during his primal reading. Roger Price’s teenaged mutant heroes were at least two-dimensional, where Hugh Walters’ cast are basically cardboard cutouts, so it would make sense to have used the TV show to add a bit of reality to the books.
Was I remembering stuff I had seen on the telly as a substitute for what the writer failed to describe? Did the spaceships look as if they were made by the BBC visual effects department, tin foil and wires an all? I think they might have done. Did my lack of a mind’s eye force me to lean on stuff I had seen on TV as a ready made source of imagery? Or was mental-picture building something I unlearned through watching too much TV, not a neurological faculty which I happen to have been born without?
I think these are excellent questions. What happens when we read a book. Just how do our brains transmute words into emotions? Do some people really experience reading as hallucination, or is this just a rhetorical exaggeration? Was I exaggerating when I talked about the orange?
It’s all very interesting. Which is just as well, because Passage to Pluto really isn’t.
3...
Hugh Walters’ books are ostensibly rip-roaring adventures about Man’s first tentative steps into Space. But that’s a cover story. From the first volume, what he has really been engaged in has been a theological debate. Can you continue to believe that there is a friend for little children above the bright blue sky when you’ve been as far as Mars and found no sign of Him? Can one person be a man of action, a man of science and also a man of faith? Does the presence or absence of a deity make a difference to the way a human faces Certain Death?
In the previous volume (First Contact?) Walters’ offered an elegant solution to the problem. God literally exists: but He is simply the most highly evolved being in the Universe. Angels are extraterrestrials who occasionally look in on Planet Earth to see that we are evolving correctly. This information is so mind-boggling that in the final chapters of the book, our protagonists’ memories have to be erased.
A lessor theologian might have rested his case at this point. But Walters continues the dialectical process. Passage to Pluto is a riposte to First Contact. The new proposition is “God exists: but the being who exists is not God.”
It is clear that the author's attention is focussed on this question. I don’t think that even the youngest reader could have missed the fact that Passage to Pluto is Hugh Walters by numbers, a reversion to the formula established in Blast Off At Woomera. It’s the kind of plot he could have written in his sleep, and possibly did. Our heroes prepare for launch (page 1-42); they are blasted into space (page 43) there is a Terrible Disaster (page 72) a daring rescue is attempted (page 90); and at the last possible second they are saved (page 120).
Everything comes into focus on page 53. Our hero, Chris Godfrey (now a grounded deputy-director of the space programme) learns that his friends have no way of getting back from Pluto. There is no hope and this time they are quite definitely going to die.
“Oh God, what shall I do?” Chris prayed, desperately.
And then the idea came.
"And then the idea came." The subject isn’t broached again until the very last page of the novel. The long shot has paid off and the day has beens saved and everyone is safely back on earth. Funny Whiskers, the retired RAF pilot, asks if they are going to “have a wonderful celebration”.
The four young men who had returned safely from the most incredible adventure the world had ever known looked at each other uncomfortably. Chris spoke for all of them. “That can come after” he said “but first we are going to give thanks to God for our safe return".
How does Walters want us to read this? My first thought was that Chris’s mind was not, after all, wiped at the end of the last book: that he (the viewpoint character since the first volume) is aware that the stories now take place in a theistic universe. He has acquired the capacity to invoke the deity at moments of crisis. He is become Neo in the Matrix, a kind of Space Buddha: or at any rate a very Anglican Lensman. It is astonishingly easy to accidentally add a T to his name while typing this kind of article.
But in fact, I think that Walters intends to refute the message of the last book. Granted the existence of extraterrestrials, one race must by definition be more evolved than all the others; and since we are all agreed that evolution means improvement and that improvement implies moral advancement, the most evolved being in the universe must be morally superior to all the others. So we might as well give the most-evolved and most-moral being in the universe the name “God”. But The Most Highly Evolved Being would hardly be the sort of thing you could pray to, and certainly not the kind of being who would care if you went to Mass at the beginning of your mission, or sung hymns of praise in the camp chapel after you came on. The God of religion has nothing to do with the “God” our heroes encountered on Uranus. Proof denies faith and without faith I am nothing. The Most Evolved Being could not have saved the lives of Chris's friends. The Church of England God has apparently done so. Which may be why Whiskers, who originally proposed the M.E.B theory, wants to have a party rather than a church service.
The third possibility is that I am reading slightly too much into this; that Walters has completely forgotten what he wrote in the previous volume; and chucked a couple of Sunday School references in because that’s the kind of thing you expect to find in vaguely improving children’s fiction. But it's much more fun to pretend that isn't the case.
2...
So: our heroes are blasted to Pluto, partly because it is the only planet they have never visited and partly because the boffins have discovered a mysterious new Planet X out beyond its orbit. The boffins have also invented a new, atomic powered, near light-speed space-ship which can get our heroes to Pluto and back in weeks rather than years. They still have to be put into cryogenic sleep to prevent their being squished by the acceleration. (I am not entirely sure that would work.) The ship is called Pluto One, but there is a back-up ship called Pluto Two. No-one has ever seen a Disney movie.
Chris, the hero of the first thirteen volumes, has stepped back from his role as an astronaut in order to become second in command of the space programme. His friend Morrey has been promoted to boss-astronaut. making him responsible for all the agonising and soul-searching when Certain Death is on the horizon. Chris is, of course, very sad that he is not going into space with his friends. (Did I mention there was a back-up spaceship?) He is also very sad during the training, the launch, and while his friends are on their two week journey. (Did I mention that there was a back-up spaceship?) And of course, when disaster strikes, he is very sad indeed that is not there either to help out or to perish alongside his friends. (Did I mention that there was a back-up spaceship?)
When the Famous Three arrive on Pluto, they discover there has been a Very Bad Accident and they have lost all their fuel. We never find out what the Very Bad Accident was: probably, I don’t know, some sort of meteor strike. (The chances of this are “unimaginably remote...yet it had happened”.) I suppose by this point we know the formula as well as the author and are happy to fast-forward to the Certain Death part of the story. Although the ship is powered by nukes, it uses chemical fuel to turn around and navigate an earthward course. And they can’t escape from the gravitational pull of Planet X (which is a massively dense asteroid, or just possibly a massively dense alien construct). So the crew are faced with an agonising choice between eating three worms or running three times round the playground in the nude, sorry, dying slowly from asphyxiation or quickly by crashing the ship into Pluto.
Did I mention that there was a back up space ship and that Chris was very sad that he couldn’t go into space with his three comrades?
And so, in the final pages, readers are subjected to this kind of thing:
Chris let out an involuntary groan as his body took the full force of the chemical motor’s thrust. ….But it didn’t matter. No matter what his suffering, Chris was determined to do his utmost. He was prepared to go beyond the limit of human endurance in his desperate bid.
And this:
Caution must be thrown to the winds. He would risk ALL in the effort to save his friends.
And this:
Twenty-four thousand miles an hour. Gosh! that would take some slowing down.
And in case we haven’t got the point, this:
It was all or bust! He was going to catch up with Pluto One or die in the attempt.
Meanwhile, back on the the main ship, emotions run understandably high
A flood of admiration and gratitude flowed over the three astronauts. Chris was attempting the impossible in order to save them. Who but Chris could do such a thing?
And, indeed, on earth, where they don’t quite know what is going on:
Sir Billy and the others were staggered at the fate that must have befallen the four young men. ….. Feelings of utter despair spread among the scores of tired men and women in the control room…
It’s all quite exhausting.
1...
The book shows every sign of being unplanned and unrevised. While Chris is risking all to save his friends, we are told, out of the blue, that in between meeting God on Uranus and being blasted to Pluto, our heroes developed an interest in motor racing, and became more than decent amateur drivers: and that the nerve and reflexes needed when going round tight bends in a fact car is quite a lot like the nerve and reflexes needed when accelerating a space ship to save your friends from Certain Death.
It seemed that the amateur racing driver had pulled off another incredible feat by flinging his ship along at breakneck speed, and then applying the brakes at the last split second.
Very probably. But surely this should have come at the beginning of the story, not at the very end? Walters should surely have started the book with Chris dramatically winning the Isle of Mann TT race, leaving the readers asking “I wonder what this has to do with the rest of the story?” Then, in the last pages, when we’ve mostly forgotten the opening, he could have revealed that amateur racing stands you in good stead when you need to push a space ship beyond its operational limits, and we would all have said “Aha!”
But he doesn’t do that.
Again; after the Daring Rescue, Tony (the naughty, northern, chocolate stealing one) crawls into the engine room to do a certain thing, and is berated by the others for his recklessness. What he has in fact done is set the abandoned ship to crash into Planet X, which results in the destruction of the asteroid. Chris is quite cross and says that they will discuss it in his office when they get back to school. But it turns out a few pages later that, er, Planet X was not only going to mess up the orbit of Pluto (did I mention it had super-strong gravity?) but also of Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and eventually Earth, so the young scallywag's mischievousness has in fact saved civilisation as we know it. Fair enough. But why didn’t the boffins mention that Civilisation was imperilled? Because it only occurred to the writer at the last minute, that’s why.
In the opening chapters, the crew are very worried about the fact that, what with Einstein and relativity and everything, after four weeks of zooming through space at an appreciable percentage of light-speed, they will be twelve hours out of sync with the people they left behind on earth. There is some speculation about what effect this will have on them. They were, if you remember, quite worried about missing birthdays when they were first put in cryogenic sleep.
The eventual resolution to this philosophical dilemma is, er, nothing.
“What’s happened to the time-slip?” asked Morrey. “I don’t feel any different.” It was true, they had forgotten about this mysterious effect of space travel. “Our time should be twelve hours different from yours,” Tony exclaimed, “but it’s the same.”
Possibly this is a set up for something that will become important in the next volume. Or, possibly, it isn't.
Finally, he have to go through the obligatory Death Row Drama on the Definitely Doomed Ship. This time around the astronauts and the ground crew engage in a more than usually morbid game of suicidal astro chicken. The crew of Pluto One don’t want Chris to sacrifice himself in a futile rescue attempt: so they consider scuppering the ship to make such a gesture pointless. But Chris guesses that that is what they are going to do because it is what he would do if the positions were reversed, so he says he’ll embark on the suicide mission even if they commit suicide first.
“By the way, you fellows,” Whiskers said, “Chris tells me that he’s coming to join you even if it’s only to pick up the pieces.”
And Walters’ writing becomes borderline hysterical:
The argument between the astronauts went on for some time. An outsider would never have guessed from the calm, detached way in which they were discussing the problem that these three young men were trying to decide the manner and timing of their own deaths….
But this position was different. What they had to face was not a sudden catastrophe that would destroy them before they even knew it, but the knowledge that their lives would end in fifteen or sixteen days’ time! With a little help from their computer, they should be able to calculate the precise moment. As leader of the doomed trio, Morrey was determined to set an example. If anyone did crack up—and who could blame him?—he must not be the one.
They play long-distance chess with Whiskers to take their minds off the inevitable, because of course they do.
0....
With the exploration of Pluto, there are no new worlds to conquer. Despite having established last time around that interstellar travel is possible via a network of divine gravity beams, Walters isn’t prepared to send our heroes outside the solar system. So you might imagine that we have just tackled the final volume.
But in fact, the series is going to go off in a slightly new direction. And the next volume will offer yet another perspective on the God question.
The thing you have had some fascinating thoughts about is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
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