marginal gloss

Judgment (PS4)

Something I think about often is that there aren’t many games which are set in the real world. By this I man the world in which we live today. You can travel through ancient Egypt or take a trip through the stars in the far future, but it’s relatively rare to be shown a glimpse of something familiar. Hence the unexpected popularity of the new release of Microsoft Flight Simulator, which lets you fly over a virtual representation of your front porch, as well as the Grand Canyon, and so on.

I found something like the same appeal in Judgment, a game which took me longer than anything else listed here to finish — seven or eight months, on and off. Like the Yakuza games to which it is a cousin, it’s set in Kamurocho, a fictional district of a real-world Tokyo; unlike other open-world games, it renders a space of perhaps half a square mile in intense detail. I spent a long time in this game wandering around slowly in first-person view, looking at menus and in the windows of shops and restaurants. The attention to detail is unlike everything I have ever seen, from the style of an air conditioning unit to the range of Japanese whiskies on sale in a cosy backstreet bar. And this was a thing of value at a time when the thought of going anywhere else at all, let alone abroad, seemed like it was going to be very difficult for a very long time.

It’s a game of at least three discrete parts. One of them is a fairly cold-blooded police procedural/buddy cop story: you play an ex-lawyer turned private eye investigating a series of grisly murders that, inevitably, link back to your own murky past. In another part you run around the town getting into hilarious martial arts escapades, battering lowlifes with bicycles and street furniture. In another, you can while away your hours playing meticulous mini-games that include darts, baseball, poker, Mahjong and Shogi — and that’s before we even get to the video game arcades.

All these parts are really quite fun, and if you want to focus on one to the exclusion of the others, the game is totally fine with that. The sudden tonal shifts brought about by these crazy and abrupt shifts in format are, I think, essentially unique to video games. But the scope of Judgment is a thing all its own. As a crafted spectacle of escapist fiction it’s comprehensive, and in its own way utterly definitive.  

Mafia: Definitive Edition (PS4)

I was amazed when I found out they were doing a complete remake of Mafia, a game I must have finished at least three or four times in the years after its release back in 2002. Games from this era don’t often receive the same treatment as something like Resident Evil, where players might be distracted by the controls and low-poly graphics of the original. 

A quality remake makes it easier for all kinds of reasons to appreciate what was going on there. (Not least because they have a lot of new games in the same series to sell.) But in the early 00s PC games like this one had started to get really big and ambitious, and had (mostly) fixed issues with controls; so there’s a hell of a lot more stuff going on in Mafia than in most games of that era. It was also a very hard game, with all kinds of eccentricities that most big titles don’t attempt today. Really I have no idea how this remake got made at all. 

But I was so fond of the original I had to play it. The obvious: it looks fantastic, and the orchestral soundtrack is warm and evocative. The story is basic, but for the era it seemed epic, and it’s still an entertaining spectacle. The original game got the balance of cinematic cutscenes, driving and action right the first time, even while Rockstar were still struggling to break out of the pastiche-led GTA III and Vice City. 

They have made it easier. You’re still reliant on a handful of medical boxes in each level for healing, but you get a small amount of regenerating health as well. You no longer have to struggle to keep your AI companions alive. Most of the cars are still heavy and sluggish, but I feel like they’re not quite as slow as they once were. They’ve changed some missions, and made some systems a little more comfortable — with sneaking and combat indicators and so on — but there aren’t any really significant additions.

The end result of all this is that it plays less like an awkward 3D game from 2002, and more like a standard third-person shooter from the PS3/360 era. Next to virtually any other game in a similar genre from today, it feels a bit lacking. There’s no skill tree, no XP, no levelling-up, no crafting, no side-missions, no unusual weapons or equipment, no alternative routes through the game. And often all of that stuff is tedious to the extreme in new titles, but here, you really feel the absence of anything noteworthy in the way of systems. 

My options might have been more limited in 2002 but back then the shooting and driving felt unique and fun enough that I could spend endless hours just romping around in Free Ride mode. Here, it felt flat by comparison; it felt not much different to Mafia III, which I couldn’t finish because of how baggy it felt and how poorly it played, in spite of it having one of the most interesting settings of any game in recent years. But games have come a long way in twenty years.    

Hypnospace Outlaw (Nintendo Switch)

If this game is basically a single joke worked until it almost snaps then it is worked extremely well. 

It seems to set itself up for an obvious riff on the way in which elements of the web which used to be considered obnoxious malware (intrusive popups and so on) have since become commonplace, and sometimes indispensable, parts of the online browsing experience. But it doesn’t really do that, and I think that’s because it’s a game which ends up becoming a little too fascinated by its own lore. 

The extra science fiction patina over everything is that technically this isn’t the internet but a sort of psychic metaverse delivered over via a mid-90s technology involving a direct-to-brain headset link. I don’t know that this adds very much to the game, since the early days of the internet were strange enough without actually threatening to melt the brains of its users. 

(This goes back to what I said about Judgment - I sometimes wonder if it feels easier to make a game within a complete fiction like this, rather than simply placing it in the context of the nascent internet as it really was. Because this way you don’t have to worry too much about authenticity or realism; this way the game can be as outlandish as it needs to be.) 

But, you know. It’s a fun conceit. A clever little world to romp around in for a while. 

Horace (Nintendo Switch)

I don’t know quite where to begin with describing this. One of the oddest, most idiosyncratic games I’ve played in recent years. 

As I understand it this platformer is basically the creation of two people, and took about six years to make. You start out thinking this is going to be a relatively straightforward retro run-and-jump game — and for a while, it is — but then the cutscenes start coming. And they keep coming. You do a lot of watching relative to playing in this game, but it’s forgivable because they are deeply, endearingly odd. 

It’s probably one of the most British games I’ve ever played in terms of the density and quality of its cultural references. And that goes for playing as well as watching; there’s a dream sequence which plays out like Space Harrier and driving sequences that play out like Outrun. There are references to everything from 2001 to the My Dinner with Abed episode of Community. And it never leans into any of it with a ‘remember that?’ knowing nod — it’s all just happening in the background, littered like so much cultural detritus. 

A lot of it feels like something that’s laser-targeted to appeal to a certain kind of gamer in their mid-40s. And, not being quite there myself, a lot of it passed me by. Horace is not especially interested in a mass appeal — it’s not interested in explaining itself, and it doesn’t care if you don’t like the sudden shifts in tone between heartfelt sincerity and straight-faced silliness. But as a work of singular creativity and ambition it’s simply a joyous riot. 

Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4)

I stopped playing this after perhaps twelve or fifteen hours. There is a lot to like about it; it still looks stunning on the PS4 Pro; Aloy is endearing; the world is beautiful to plod around. But other parts of it seem downright quaint. It isn’t really sure whether it should be a RPG or an action game. And I’m surprised I’ve never heard anyone else mention the game’s peculiar dedication to maintaining a shot/reverse shot style throughout dialogue sequences, which is never more than tedious and stagey.

The combat isn’t particularly fun. Once discovered most enemies simply become enraged and blunder towards you, in some way or another; your job is to evade them, ensnare them or otherwise trip them up, then either pummel them into submission or chip away at their armour till they become weak enough to fall. I know enemy AI hasn’t come on in leaps and bounds in recent years but it’s not enough to dress up your enemies as robot dinosaurs and then expect a player to feel impressed when they feel like the simplest kind of enrageable automata. Oh, and then you have to fight human enemies too, which feels like either an admission of failure or an insistence that a game of this scale couldn’t happen without including some level of human murder. 

I don’t have a great deal more to say about it. It’s interesting to me that Death Stranding, which was built on the same Decima engine, kept the frantic and haphazard combat style from Horizon, but went to great lengths to actively discourage players from getting into fights at all. (It also fixed the other big flaw in Horizon — the flat, inflexible traversal system — and turned that into the centrepiece of the game.) 

Disco Elysium (PS4)

In 2019 I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons. I’m talking about the actual tabletop roleplaying game, not any kind of video game equivalent. For week after week a group of us from work got together and sort of figured it out, and eventually developed not one but two sprawling campaigns of the never-ending sort. We continued for a while throughout the 2020 lockdown, holding our sessions online via Roll20, but it was never quite the same. After a while, as our life circumstances changed further, it sort of just petered out.

I mention all this because Disco Elysium is quite clearly based around the concept of a computerised tabletop roleplaying game (aka CRPG). My experience of that genre is limited to the likes of Baldurs Gate, the first Pillars of Eternity and the old Fallout games, so I was expecting to have to contend with combat and inventory management. What I wasn’t expecting was to be confronted with the best novel I’ve read this year.

To clarify: I have not read many other novels this year, by my standards. But, declarations of relative quality aside, what I really mean is that this game is, clearly and self-consciously, a literary artefact above all. It is written in the style of one of those monolithic nineteenth century novels that cuts a tranche through a society, a whole world — you could show it to any novelist from at least the past hundred years and they would understand pretty well what is going on. It is also wordy in every sense of that term: there’s a lot of reading to do, and the text is prolix in the extreme. 

You could argue it’s less a game than a very large and fairly sophisticated piece of interactive fiction. The most game-like aspects of it are not especially interesting. It has some of the stats and the dice-rolling from table-top roleplaying games, but this doesn’t sit comfortably with the overtly literary style elsewhere. Health and morale points mostly become meaningless when you can instantly heal at any time and easily stockpile the equivalent of health potions. And late on in the game, when you find yourself frantically changing clothes in order to increase your chances of passing some tricky dice roll, the systems behind the game start to feel somewhat disposable. 

Disco Elysium is, I think, a game that is basically indifferent to its own status as a game. Nothing about it exists to complement its technological limitations, and nor is it especially interested in the type of unique possibilities that are only available in games. You couldn’t experience Quake or Civilisation or the latest FIFA in any other format; but a version of Disco Elysium could have existed on more or less any home computer in about the last thirty years. And, if we were to lose the elegant art and beautiful score, and add an incredibly capable human DM, it could certainly be played out as an old-fashioned tabletop game not a million miles from Dungeons and Dragons.

At the time I remember thinking it was quite funny, and very clever. But for some reason it has stuck with me ever since, even though I only saw it the one time. I think about it more often than I think about probably any other film I saw that year. I thought it was funny because it so effortlessly showed up the silliness of that familiar movie routine, and I thought it was touching because it demonstrated our need to construct little stories in our lives about familiar actions. All that frantic action has to come to something, because it would be awful if it came to nothing.

But nobody has ever written like this, have they? This is not what it feels like as I sit here now, at two minutes past nine in the evening, with the faint familiar ache of eye strain across my forehead. And this is only one small way in which movie reality often has little or nothing to do with reality as it is lived. Or rather: reality as I live it, which is really the only thing I am qualified to describe.

Parenting is another one of those things where movie reality so often seems only a distant cousin to where I’m really at now. I struggle to recognise myself in almost any depiction of fatherhood I’ve ever seen elsewhere. Right now I keep trying to find myself in things and failing.

Here are some significant portraits of fatherhood that have always stuck in my mind.

Mufasa in The Lion King

When I was a kid of (I think) around ten years old, I went through a phase of being obsessed with watching The Lion King. I had it on VHS and at one stage I watched it every day, or close to that. At one point I could close my eyes and replay the whole thing inside my head; I could recall every scene and every line of every song in the whole film. It was a good way to fall asleep.

At some point I’m sure I got used to the scene where Simba’s father Mufasa is thrown beneath the stampeding wildebeest herd. This was pretty intense for a children’s film in the late 1990s. The subsequent scene of devastation still conveys how I felt at the time about the idea of losing a parent. It is the stuff of grand tragedy and pathetic fallacy. Mufasa is perfect and life is golden, then he is suddenly taken away, and the world becomes a blasted heath.

Back then I was also desperately worried that something would happen to my parents — that they would either split up, or die, or a combination of both — and then where would I be? I would be alone. Obviously. But then years later when my father actually passed away I discovered that death is really nothing like this. It was tragic only in the sense that it was very sad, and very unfair; it wasn’t tragic like Hamlet is a tragedy. There was no story to it. I was not especially alone, and there was no convenient thunderstorm to underline my emotional state. The world outside mostly carried on as normal, and it was vast and basically indifferent.

Don Davis in Twin Peaks and The X-Files.

Until recently I had never seen a single episode of The X-Files. The show was a total pop culture blind spot for me: I knew nothing about it, apart from the usual blurb about Mulder and Scully. And so when we got to the episode Beyond the Sea, where get to meet Scully’s father for the first time, I was absolutely astonished to find that her dad is played by Don Davis, who also played Major Briggs in Twin Peaks.

This should not be entirely unexpected. That episode came only a few years after the first season of Twin Peaks, which was hugely successful. But it also goes beyond an inside joke because Don Davis plays precisely the same character in both shows: a distant, austere military man, with an otherworldly demeanour. He haunts both shows in the way you might expect a familiar figure of authority to haunt someone. He is an icon of benevolent patrician power. But it is impossible to imagine him as a dad, doing dad things with a baby-faced Dana Scully. He exists in The X-Files only to be almost immediately killed off. He is more important as a cipher than as a character.

Jack Torrance in The Shining

I read The Shining some years after I first saw The Lion King. I'm not sure how many years, honestly, but by then, my fears had developed a little. I was no longer quite so terrified of losing my parents. But the book left me anxious and preoccupied by the idea of a family turning against itself. It was a little like how zombies scared me not because of their blind sociopathic fury, but because of the idea that suddenly someone close to you could suddenly switch, and start coming after you, and never stop.

I didn’t like the idea that my dad could, for whatever reason, try to kill me. I really didn’t like it. That thing of trust suddenly inverting itself into a blind hatred — one that uses all the things you know about a person against themselves — is one of the most unsettling things I can imagine.

Today the story mostly seems to be about the way that dads are damned to destroy others and die themselves. It's one that repeats itself almost every day in the headlines somewhere around the world, outside of the lofty confines of the Overlook.

It goes without saying that the Kubrick film is a masterpiece that has very little to do with anything outside of itself.

Bandit, the dad from Bluey

It occurred to me recently that I haven’t posted here for about nine months, and that if you knew nothing about me except for this blog, you might think that it something of a cliffhanger that I ended it on a post about expecting the arrival of my first child. (Or perhaps that would have been an entirely fitting way to end it.) Either way: I am fine, and we are fine, and last November brought the arrival of my son Robin into my life. I have been very busy almost every day since.

There are a couple of cliches about parenting that remain indisputably true. The first is that they grow up so fast. And the second is that nothing prepares you for it. We thought we were entirely ready and pretty well informed but from his delivery onwards nothing went as planned. We thought we’d feed him when he was hungry, and we’d put him to sleep when he was tired; and change his nappies, and play with him, and love him; and what else was there to it, really?

It turns out there is a lot more to it than that. Before Robin I never realised how polarised, how strained and how political people’s feelings are about matters of childcare. We’ve ended up raising him in ways we had never previously considered, partly out of necessity, and partly out of the kind of habits that grow into paths of desire across the days. Consciously or not I judge people who do things differently, and no doubt they judge me too. In spite of the reams of available literature it turns out that for many things — perhaps even most things — there isn’t necessarily a right or a wrong way to proceed.

Here is a third cliche that turns out to be extremely valuable: every baby is different.

The question of literature is a tricky one. In search of assistance I read a few parenting manuals; some of these turned out to be better than others, but I’ve yet to find a good book about what it means to be a father. Most books aimed at new dads are of the ‘pull your socks up’ variety — the kind of thing where the author imagined it thrust upon some feckless deadbeat by a weary spouse. But, being reasonably conscientious, and looking for something with a bit more depth than a guide to how to change nappies, I’ve found most books about parenting have little of interest to say to new fathers.

Being a dad is an odd thing to write about. I’ve read and heard people talk about how new mothers ought to be proud to be joining a kind of grand universal maternal tradition, one which predates even humanity itself. (Animals surely know about babies; witness my cat Louie’s endless patience with Robin’s various attempts to pull his ears off.)

People do not generally talk about the grand traditions of fatherhood in this way. And for good reason: a lot of men today wouldn’t be happy to follow the example of their own fathers, let alone imitate the conditions of detachment and distance that defined fatherhood for centuries. I want to say that expectations of fathers today have never been higher; but this is only because for most of recorded history, we had no expectations of fathers at all. In the space of perhaps two or three generations we have gone from the idea that a father should only have to provide for a child’s upkeep (and not slap them around too much) to a very immediate understanding of dadhood as a central plank of parenthood.

Perhaps a lot of this speaks more to my own insecurities than it does to anyone else’s. Still, I feel like there’s an easy camaraderie between mothers that isn’t apparent between fathers. My wife has developed a little circle of local mums with whom she’s in constant communication, whereas the WhatsApp group we created for the fathers in our NCT group has languished in silence. I don’t really have anyone with whom to compare notes. And what would we say if I did?

The pandemic has put us in an unusual situation. Ordinarily I would have had two weeks’ paid paternity leave, plus any holiday time taken alongside that. So I took three weeks off work — but I’m still working from home every day, as I have been since March 2020. This means that instead of watching me disappear to work five days a week, my son has spent every day of his life together so far with both his parents. I don’t even know where to begin with writing about the way this has changed us; perhaps I won’t know how to talk about it until it comes to an end.

It does mean that parenting feels like it has consumed my life in ways that might not have otherwise been the case. Being at home for so long with a new baby was a remarkable opportunity, and in the early days — through winter and the Christmas lockdown — it didn’t feel like I was missing out on much. Things are a little different now. Every absence independent from my family feels like it requires a negotiation as much with myself as with anyone else. And I don’t only mean literal absences. Someone new has come into my life and they have no tolerance for anything else that might be meaningful to me. So many of the things against which I used to define myself have necessarily had to be neglected.

It goes without saying that I haven’t written much. Whatever free time I have at the moment is normally spent collapsed in an exhausted heap on the sofa, watching TV. I can count the number of books I’ve actually finished in the last eight months on one hand; I have started and set aside perhaps two dozen. I feel very remote from the person who spent several years documenting here every book he finished.

Games have fared a little better. In the early days, when I found myself with some late night hours to myself, I picked up the remastered Bioshock collection. It took me months, but I eventually finished all three: the first game is a masterpiece, the second is a very decent sequel, and the third is probably the greatest missed opportunity in all of gaming. (I ended up writing several thousands of words about the games, over the course of weeks — the only thing of substance I’ve written since Robin was born, in fact — which I since abandoned, in a fit of self-doubt and impatience with my own tortuous style.)

But I mean it when I say that the first game is a masterpiece. I had forgotten just how immensely absorbing it is — a journey into another world that’s less realistic than it is gloriously theatrical. Every time I think about it I feel like I want to replay it again. And it never really occurred to me before that Bioshock is about parenting as much as it is a picture of Objectivism in decay. It hits different now, as the kids say.

While driving over the weekend I passed the word ‘DADDY’ outlined in rich pink flowers, laid in memorial at the centre of a roundabout. It made me flinch. Every time I see that word in whatever context it seems to come with an intimation of departure. And in the same way every time I think about this game it seems laden with the feeling of a dying fall that nobody ever really seems to talk about. You play as a kind of genetically modified clone, returning home to his unwelcoming father and near-absent mother in a demented inversion of the Odysseus tale; and the only good you can do in this world is to rescue the handful of innocents left within it. You have to become a father yourself, in a sense. But your days are numbered.

The ending of the original Bioshock is often written off as a bit of a joke. You fight a deliriously incongruous final boss, and then depending on your actions through the rest of the game, you get to see one of two final sequences. In the bad ending, the denizens of Rapture somehow steal a nuclear submarine, and it’s implied that something very bad follows. But the good ending has more to it than that. You return to the surface, and it’s implied that you adopt some of the Little Sisters you rescued down there as though they were your daughters. There’s a brief montage of scenes from an assortment of lives. A graduation. A marriage. A child reaching for a parent’s hand. And then a death bed. The hands of your daughters reach out for you one last time.

After perhaps twenty hours of gameplay this sequence is perhaps less than a minute long. It feels rushed, awkward, sentimental. But as a coda, it also has the outstanding benefit of being perfectly real.

How to describe the experience of expecting a first child in 2020? In some ways the pandemic made no difference at all. Most of the time we have been at home, waiting for things to happen, and that would have happened anyway. In terms of health we have both been quite lucky to have had no immediate concerns or difficulties, but what should have been routine visits to the GP and hospital became slightly more complicated. Our local doctors in particular seemed entirely inert — almost all appointments were over the telephone — and on the one occasion my wife arrived on time for a scheduled meeting with a doctor, it turned out that they’d booked it on the wrong day, and the GP in question was at home. Not ideal.

The staff at the hospital were better. I count myself lucky in that I was allowed to all of the ultrasound scans except the first, though for some reason this didn’t extend to any other appointments. Otherwise my experience with hospital so far has been limited, and strange. Mostly I’m just waiting in the public areas outside the maternity ward, listening to my headphones, waiting for something to happen. And that’s fine, and to an extent I understand why it needs to happen. The hospital itself is not even especially scary. The first time I went there I imagined it would be in some sort of state of perpetual emergency, but in the lobbies and halls everything happens mostly as normal. Only everyone is wearing masks. 

The first thing I have come to understand about being a father in waiting is that expectations of you are very low. What exactly was required from me from the health service, or from my employer, or from anyone else outside my household? Very little. Next to nothing. I’ve had no appointments with anyone. My employer signed off on my paternity leave with no fuss, plus a little extra time from my holiday allowance. The midwives asked me nothing, and I asked them nothing, because usually I wasn’t in the room. Only sometimes I was a quiet presence behind a mask in the ultrasound appointments. None of this was very difficult.

There is still so much scrutiny afforded to the mother’s role. In theory, society expects more from fathers than it ever has in the past – which is good – but in practice nobody seems to have very much to say to them about it. In our antenatal classes (conducted exclusively over Zoom) the focus of every presentation and every discussion was on the mother’s experiences during pregnancy, labour, and afterwards. Everyone who attended my classes came as a couple, but the only mentions of the partner’s role were in the context of how they could assist the mother. Bring snacks to the labour room; remind her to go to the bathroom; figure out the best route to drive to the hospital. All of which is fine! But that’s all it was.

I am trying to avoid the suggestion that it should all be about me. I appreciate that antenatal classes have a practical purpose — they aren’t group therapy. But all this fed into the sense I already had that the expectations of me were so low as to be almost non-existent. Nobody asked how having a child would make me feel. Nobody wanted to talk to me about it. A thought occurred to me from time to time: I could be anyone! In the eyes of the world, I could be any kind of father at all, and nobody would ever know! Except me. 

Managing this feeling is a strange sort of juggling act. In most aspects of life I would be happy to accept these diminished expectations as relieving a certain amount of pressure. But in the context of expecting a child, it leads to a corollary: nobody wants to know what you think about being a dad, therefore it doesn’t matter how you feel about it. I am sure that isn’t true. But it doesn’t always feel that way. The world seems to want a lot from fathers but at the same time it expects almost nothing at all, and certainly not in the same way it expects from mothers.

Recently I was reading samples on the Kindle ebook store for books aimed at new fathers. Almost everything I could find was entirely useless. Most of them are written in a kind of ‘strap in, bucko’ style that insistently reminds the reader of their responsibilities at every juncture, in the most patronising voice possible. Again: I get it. It feels churlish to complain too much about this kind of thing. I understand that these books have a purpose, and I’m sure they have an appreciative audience. But they told me next to nothing about what it would feel like for a new father to understand that they were going to have a kid, and what it would feel like for that kid to arrive, and what it would feel like to have to look after that new presence in a person’s life. I don’t know if these questions are too big or too small to be worth an author bothering with.

Popular culture is weird for models of fatherhood. I hate the term ‘beta male’, but TV and film is preoccupied with images of sidelined men who fit that trope. We’ve been watching a Canadian sitcom on Netflix called Workin’ Moms, which is enjoyable, if a little one-note — the basis of most of its jokes is that the mothers of the show behave just as badly as fathers used to in terms of philandering, over-focusing on their careers, and neglecting their children, whereas the fathers are relegated to keeping the boring practicalities of family life ticking along in the background. It’s fun, but – well, there are many other shows like this. 

Elsewhere I stumbled on some useful stuff. Some of it is slight. I love the ridiculous baby in a bottle in Death Stranding, though I’m at a loss to explain what it means beyond being an unexpectedly tender portrait of babyhood in one of the strangest video games ever made. In The Last of Us: Part II I liked the short sequences late in the game where Ellie is carrying a gurgling potato-shaped baby around a quiet farmhouse; that, plus her subsequent panic attack in the barn, seemed relatable. (Ellie is absolutely the dad of that particular story.)

Recently I found myself listening repeatedly to Spalding Gray’s monologue It’s a Slippery Slope, where he talks variously about learning to ski and learning to become a father for the first time at the age of 52. It is oddly calming, not least as a reminder that there is no entirely right way to go about these things. Gray’s example is certainly not ideal — his first child came as a result of cheating on his long-term partner, and he’s frank about his initial wish that she not keep it at first. But it’s still kind of beautiful, and one of his more optimistic efforts.

I have been neglecting this blog in recent months. My last post was written in fits and starts over many, many weeks. I’ve been preoccupied with other things and, like many people right now, my productivity has ebbed and flowed. I haven’t stopped writing, and I certainly haven’t forgotten about this blog, but I confess that I’ve slightly given up on writing so comprehensively about every book I finish. Most of my time and energy in writing has gone towards trying to write a book about video games. (The subject is a bit more specific than that, but I don’t want to give the thing away just yet.)  

This is something I always thought I could do. I have been playing computer and video games since I was able to do anything at all. I have a lot of ideas on the subject. But it’s also quite difficult, not least because I never thought I wanted to write non-fiction. In fiction you can more or less do whatever you want, but in this other thing the problem of imposter syndrome sometimes seems (to me at least) to be overwhelming. How much do I need to cite? At what point does a generalisation become intolerable? Am I supposed to anticipate every potential objection or counter-argument in advance? Is my authority worth anything at all? Is it worth trusting my own experience, or is it all just, like, my opinion? 

Of course in asking all these questions I forget that I’ve spent years pottering around on this blog, actually doing all the non-fiction writing I am supposedly so worried about. But I still feel like I’m trying to un-learn all the habits of supposedly serious writing that I learned at university. I studied English Literature, which teaches a mode of formal discourse that is useful now only in the abstract, and mostly quite worthless in terms of creating something worthwhile outside of academia. The problem is basically one of tone. It’s one of what kind of book am I trying to write. 

I know what it’s not. It is not a history of games, and it isn’t an academic treatise. There might be a thesis, but it’s not a TED talk. I want it to describe what it feels like to encounter and experience games. I don’t want to try to second-guess player motivation from a distance, and I don’t want to study game design in the abstract, as if it were secretly the most interesting part of games. Above all I don’t want to fight battles on behalf of an imagined movement. There is no shortage of books arguing that games are (or aren’t) worthwhile, either as art or as tools for productivity or creativity or brain longevity or mental health. Some of these are quite good. But it seems to me like the arguments for the quality of games are omnipresent and overwhelming for anyone who cares to look. 

It’s strange, though, that ‘books about games’ are relatively rare. I know that there popular works of non-fiction on this topic, but I’m being a bit more specific: I mean this in the sense of ‘books about particular games’, and ‘books that take a thematic approach to what games do and how’. There are some interesting exceptions: You Died: The Dark Souls Companion by Keza McDonald and Jason Killingsworth comes to mind. There’s also the Boss Fight Books range of short-ish texts that typically focus on an author’s experience with a single game. But for the most part, books about games either fall into one of a few categories. You might get a general record of an author’s life in gaming that argues for the experiential benefits of games; or you might get a semi-academic thesis about games, often supported by evidence from psychological or sociological studies; or you might get a potted history of game development. Or some combination of the above. 

Which is fine. Some of these books are very good. But there aren’t many books of cultural criticism applied to games. Take the question of violence in video games: there are plenty of books which argue the case one way or the other about whether this is ‘harmful’ or not. It’s much harder to find books that forego this angle in favour of taking a long, hard look at the games themselves; that consider what it really means for a game to be called ‘violent’ in the first place, or why violent games can be satisfying and horrifying and amusing all at once. Too often what it feels like to play violent games becomes immediately subordinate to the question of what these games are supposedly doing to our brains, to our sensibilities, and to our sense of right and wrong – as if players weren’t aware of this in the first place – as if the effects of any work of art could only be considered by judging how people behave around it. 

Games are often portrayed as a sort of inscrutable ethical problem for modern society, as if they weren’t the product of human imagination at all. Often an accessible book about games will come loaded with disclaimers and framing devices intended to put the reader at ease, to reassure them that what they’re about to encounter won’t hurt them. It feels like there aren’t many books which try to take us inside specific games, to show us how they work, and to make the reader feel how they make the player feel. 

And that’s odd, in a way, because this kind of game criticism is omnipresent online. In the weeks after a major release, every gaming website will have a whole buffet of hot takes available. People are keen to produce stuff to support their favourite titles, sometimes for years afterwards. To pick a random example, the Mass Effect games are still enormously popular, and have spawned all kinds of novelisations and comic book spin-offs. Doubtless you can still find hundreds of thousands of words of opinion out there about why those games are good. But I don’t think anyone has written a book about Mass Effect.

You could argue that this is not especially unusual. Any of the following arguments could apply:

cultural criticism is best left to specialist magazines and journals

people who play video games do not (for the most part) read a lot of books

people who don’t play video games don’t want to read about games

people in general don’t want to read books about media which they aren’t likely to experience themselves. 

There is a sense in which the most successful games of this sort belong to the fans foremost. The culture that grows up around big games is fan culture. Movies have something of the same thing — especially since the Marvel and Star Wars movies exploded in popularity again — but that’s only one wing of the superstructure that is film culture. There are whole other wings dedicated to serious cinematic avant garde, to art films; you could spend a lifetime studying Hong Kong cinema and barely know a thing about Bollywood, and vice versa. Which is fine because film caters for taste at all levels. There are popular film magazines and blogs, serious journals about film, and occasionally works of critique that bust through into the mainstream: I’m thinking of stuff like Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s De Palma, about the director of the same name; and Room 237, about some of the more outlandish theories that have grown up around Kubrick’s film of The Shining. 

Granted, those examples were only moderately successful. They’re semi-popular but not exactly mainstream. But my point is that it’s inconceivable for me to imagine something similar coming out of the video game community. Whether it’s Ready Player One or the latest Netflix documentary High Score, games are stuck retelling their own histories from scratch each time. Which is not to say that new and fascinating stories can’t be brought to light — but so often games media aimed at a general audience begins with a long, laborious retread of game history. 

There is very good, very specific stuff out there, but it’s hard to find. Video games are very good at reaching people who already play games. Many game critics are good at the same thing. But neither are very good at bringing the most interesting aspects of games to people who have no prior interest. The Beginner’s Guide is one of my favourite games of all time, and I think it’s one of the finest ‘games about games’ ever made; but so much of it is ‘inside baseball’ of the kind which would be incredibly difficult to explain for someone not already steeped in it. YouTube is increasingly a great source for insightful video essays about games that go far beyond ‘hot take’ culture, but in a similar way, it’s kind of impossible for an audience to find any of this stuff if they’re not already out there searching for it. 

A little while ago I wrote about Swimming to Cambodia, a copy of which I discovered in a charity shop. I read it and I liked it a lot. And then for a while I forgot about Spalding Gray until one day my wife pointed him out to me in the film Beaches. I think he played a doctor of some kind — I wasn’t really paying attention — but it was enough to get me thinking about his stuff again.

I started trawling YouTube for what I could find. Most of his stuff is out of print, but there at least you can find a few of the monologues — Terrors of Pleasure, Gray’s Anatomy and It’s a Slippery Slope are all delightful. The most interesting primer is Steven Soderbergh’s documentary And Everything is Going Fine, which is assembled entirely from excerpts from Gray’s monologues and interviews. It’s a deft, skilful, and beautifully elegiac piece of work which feels more like one great final performance than it does a conventional biography. Appropriate, perhaps, given that so much of what Gray did was rendering up his life through storytelling. 

I also bought a couple of books: Impossible Vacation, which is the only novel Gray published, and the posthumous collection of extracts from his journals. Apparently he laboured for years over the text of Impossible Vacation, with the original draft running to over a thousand pages — the monologue Monster in a Box was actually performed with the manuscript sitting in a scruffy cardboard box at his elbow. The final published form of Impossible Vacation is a relatively svelte few hundred pages in paperback, which is enough to make anyone wonder about the scale of the original. 

I was expecting Impossible Vacation to be a bit more novel-like. I was expecting a modern American comic story along the lines of A Confederacy of Dunces, perhaps. But in fact, the novel is a lightly fictionalised version of Gray’s own life. And that’s about as ‘light’ as it gets: it’s funny, but it’s also just as self-involved as any of his monologues. Gray’s protagonist is renamed Brewster North, but not much detective work is required to map North to the author. Much of the novel is mirrored elsewhere in Gray’s stories from the stage: the trip to India, his brief stint as an actor in pornographic movies, the experimental theatre scene in New York; and above all the memory of his mother, and the lasting effects of her suicide. 

If you read (and watch) far enough into Gray’s work it feels a little like wandering into a hall of mirrors: we see the same selves and preoccupations reflected over and over again, sometimes in distorted or disturbing ways. Glimpsed in passing the effect is comic, but after a while the effect becomes haunting. There is a moment in Gray’s Anatomy where he describes watching a student in a storytelling workshop, and staring into her eyes, and watching her face somehow disintegrate until the flesh falls from her skull and her face becomes a sort of ball of white light. Sometimes that’s what reading his stories feels like: the contortions of history and storytelling are subject to a relentless focus that becomes so intense that the reader is lulled into a sort of hypnotic compliance. 

This feeling of falling into a sort of dissociative trance is not uncommon in his work; it seems emblematic of a sort of transcendental feeling that Gray was perpetually striving for. Hence the dream of the ‘perfect moment’ in Swimming to Cambodia, hence escapism via skiing in It’s a Slippery Slope. Set against that dream of escape is everything the real world has to offer: the anguish of the domestic; the problems caused by anxiety, depression, drinking; the sad, strange, tortuous complications of his love life. In these respects, it hasn’t aged well – I can imagine audiences today having a little less patience for Gray’s occasional sways into mysticism. And his attitude towards women might at times be generously described as ‘problematic’. In the 90s perhaps it was easier to dismiss his casual reports of philandering as the trappings of the tortured artist; today it only seems sad, and a little wearying.

So why is it that I find his stuff so appealing? I’m not in the habit of reading biography. I like podcasts, but while Gray seems like a model for all kinds of modern tendencies in vlogging, I’m not aware of anyone who is doing exactly what he did in the same way he did it. Current trends towards the confessional in stand-up comedy don’t quite fit, either. The form of the thing is so important. He was as much a performer as he was a storyteller. The closest equivalent that I know of is David Sedaris, and I find his stuff intolerable. There are a few reasons for this, but to me Sedaris always seems convinced that the problem is with other people. He is stuck in a mode of perpetual disdain. But with Gray, we are never really left in any doubt that this author is in fact the only author of his own troubles. And yet he also knows how to have fun, sometimes; and I find that endearing because it seems to me more honest, and less spiteful.

One point of comparison is Proust. I don’t mean to say Gray’s prose is exactly Proustian, but they have an endearing amount in common. There’s a perpetual anxiety about death and entropy that often manifests itself as hypochondria. There’s the obsession with the mother, the retiring nature, the preoccupation with irony. The pursuit of the perfect moment through which emotion can become recollected in tranquility. And though both took to entirely different forms of media, it seems like both were attempting something a level of formal innovation which, while initially seeming familiar, approached a new way of committing memory and experience into art.   

Impossible Vacation is often intense but it’s not always laugh-out-loud funny. More often it seems possessed by a restless, struggling, enquiring energy. Sometimes the writing is inspired, but it lacks form – the feeling of form that was so dominant in the monologues themselves. As it stands, you wouldn’t consider half of the things that go on in the book as the plot for a novel because (like life) they don’t entirely cohere. And the story ends before it ever really begins, though it does at least contrive a neat circular ending that recalls (lightly) Finnegans Wake. 

Still, it’s a shame that the novel is out of print because, much like his monologues, it’s certainly worthwhile; the published journals of Spalding Gray are an entirely different and more difficult thing. The journals are kind of a mess. An enormous amount of biographical heavy lifting is provided by the notes and annotations by the editor, Nell Casey, and without this context any reader would struggle to discern what was going on. But the notes are pretty comprehensive, and in the end this seems as close to a biography as we are ever likely to get. It does, however, take a long time to get going. The journal entries all through the 70s and early 80s are sketchy, and not especially interesting. A lot of the time they’re purely expressive, and we have to be told what it is exactly that they are referring to. It’s only once the monologues get going that his private style becomes elaborate and involved enough to be worth reading.  

The picture we get of Gray is less of a single-minded auteur and more of a man who sort of wandered-or-fell into fame as a monologuist. After the fame and exposure of Swimming to Cambodia there is a sense of freewheeling — of doing what he’s doing because it’s what he does, and it’s rarely entirely under his own steam. He is perpetually worried, questioning, uncomfortable. Eventually he would become concerned with the idea that he had used himself up, and that he had no private life worth living outside the performances. But some of this was ameliorated by the late in life arrival of children and a more settled family situation. For a while, he thought himself happier than he had ever been.

In 2001, Gray was involved in a terrible car crash while on holiday in Ireland. His injuries included a broken hip and a fractured skull that likely caused brain damage. The accident changed his life, and afterwards he was never the same. The journal entries from after this point are harrowing — there is no other word for it. I knew of his eventual suicide, but I had no idea until of the extent to which depression utterly consumed his life. I didn’t know about the frequent hospitalisations, the shock treatment, and the pain his failed suicide attempts caused on others. There aren’t many extracts from this time shown, but what we are given was enough at times to make me wonder if any of it should have been published at all. But perhaps there is a purpose in trying to give a picture of the anguish he was in. 

All through his life Gray had been preoccupied with the idea of his mother taking her own life. The story he told about this was that this was precipitated by his parents moving house, to a new place away from the ocean, which his mother could never feel at home in. After the accident he and his family also moved house, and he came to regret this decision intensely. The editor Nell Casey calls this ‘his obsession, a mythic rant’. Gray cannot seem to accept the idea that a house might be, as a psychologist puts it, ‘a pile of sticks’. Here is how Gray considers trying to explain it to his sons:

The thing about Control is that I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where I’ve felt such a vast difference between a game’s artistic and technical quality and its total lack of thematic and narrative depth. 

There is a good case for saying that this oughtn’t to be a problem. It’s long been the case that if a video game is entertaining enough, any further ‘depth’ (by the standards established by other media) is unnecessary. This is why we don’t much care if the story isn’t good in Doom. The sense of being there and doing the thing is enough. But Doom isn’t drawing on influences bigger than itself. Clearly it’s been influenced by a variety of things — from Dungeons and Dragons to heavy metal album covers and Evil Dead and everything in between — but Doom is not referential, and it’s not reverential. Doom is complete unto itself. Control is not complete.

Horror films and ghost stories and weird fiction are best when they are about things. Think about The Turn of the Screw and The Thing and Twin Peaks and Candyman, to pick a few examples off the top of my head. They work not just because what we see and hear and read is mysterious. They are compelling because they have intriguing characters and thematic resonance. The Babadook is not just a story about a monster from a book for children. Night of the Living Dead isn’t just about, you know, the living dead. By comparison I find it hard to say that Control is about anything, but it presents itself as adjacent to this kind of work. It is a magnificent exercise in style which trades in empty symbols. It wraps itself in tropes from weird fiction in the hope of absorbing meaning by osmosis.

It feels like a wasted opportunity, because the setup is not without interest. You play as Jesse Faden, a woman supposedly beginning her first day on the job at the Federal Bureau of Control, a mysterious government organisation that deals in high-level paranormal affairs. The FBC is a feast of architectural and environmental detail: a vast Brutalist office complex with an interior that seems to be stranded in time somewhere around the mid-1980s. Everything is concrete and glass and reel-to-reel machines and terminal workstations. It’s frequently stunning.

Unfortunately most of the staff are missing because Jesse’s visit to their headquarters coincides with a massive invasion by the Hiss, a paranormal force which has taken over the building. The Hiss is a sort of ambient infection that turns people into mindless spirit-drones, chanting in an endless Babel. (Conveniently, most of those drones are present as angry men with guns. There are also zombies, and flying zombies, for variety.)

There is, obviously, more to Jesse than meets the eye. She spends a lot of time talking to someone nobody else can see. But there isn’t that much more to her. Like every other character in the game she is a monotone. There is no reason to believe she has any existence outside the plot devised for her here. Similarly, the other characters you meet exist only as the lines they speak to you. It works only when the effect is entirely, deliberately flat: the most compelling person in the game is Ahti, the janitor with a sing-song voice and a near-indecipherable Finnish accent. He is nothing but what he is — he has no past, no future. He has all the answers, if only you knew what questions to ask.

Control is undeniably stylish. The interiors are striking, vast, spacious. Even on the smallest scale the game has a great eye for little comic interactions via systemised physics. You can shoot individual holes in a boardroom table and watch the thing splinter apart into individual fragments. You can shoot a rolodex and watch all the little cards whirl around in a spiral. If a projector is showing a film you can pick the whole thing up and the film will reveal itself as an actual dynamic projection by spiralling and spinning madly across the nearest walls. (Speaking of film, the video sequences with live actors are great fun, and this being a Remedy game, there’s a fantastic show-within-a-show to be found on hidden monitors around the FBC.) And all of this before I mention the sound design — the music, which is full of concrète mechanical shrieks and groans — and the endless sinister chanting which fills the lofty corridors and hallways of this place, The Oldest House. 

All of this is very, very good. And most of the time it’s quite fun to play. I mean, you can pick up a photocopier and fling it at enemies. It’s never not fun when almost anything can be used as a projectile. And then you get the ability to fly! At its best the combat in Control feels messy and chaotic — in a good way — but in a way that has little to do with typical video game gunplay. Staying behind cover doesn’t work because the only way to regain health is to pick up little nuggets dropped by fallen enemies, so most of the time you have to use your powers to be incredibly aggressive. The result is that often you feel like the end-of-level boss — a kind of monster — throwing yourself into conflict with a team of moderately stupid players who think they’re supposed to be playing a cover shooter circa 2005. 

That you are given a gun at all seems odd. The gun feels like a compromise. The gimmick of a single modular pistol that can shape-change into a handful of other weapons is neat, but those weapons are just uninteresting variations on the same old themes: handgun, shotgun, machine gun, sniper, rocket launcher. The powers are more interesting and powerful. But of course the gun has to be there; can you imagine them having to go out and sell this game without a gun in it? What would Jesse be holding on the front cover? 

A gun is an equaliser. It evens the odds between the weak and the strong. But if you’re already strong it doesn’t feel worthwhile. You’re clearly so much more powerful than everyone else you meet in Control that after a while you begin to wonder why the game is also frequently quite hard. The omission of any difficulty settings is notable in a game of this type; it suggests that the developers were committed to their vision in the way that might recall Dark Souls. In fact the hub-like structure of the game is pretty clearly influenced by From Software’s games, and though it’s nowhere near as challenging, it seems to be reaching towards the same kind of thing.

It’s a game which demands you take it seriously as a crafted object. But then it has all these other elements cribbed from elsewhere — the generic level-based enemies with numbers that fly off them when shot, and the light peppering of timed/semi-randomised side activities, both of which made me think of Destiny. So there’s games-as-service stuff wedged in here too, and it doesn’t sit at all comfortably with this supposedly mysterious, compelling world that you’re supposed to want to explore.

This isn’t a horror game. There are one or two enemies with the potential to induce jump scares, but given that you can always respond with overwhelming force, it’s never really unsettling. But it’s clearly been inspired by horror. A source often mentioned as an inspiration for Control is the internet horror stories associated with the SCP Foundation wiki. From there the game borrows the idea that unlikely everyday objects can become sources of immense cosmic power — hence we see items like a rubber duck, a refrigerator, a pink flamingo, a coffee thermos imprisoned behind glass as if they were Hannibal Lecter. A pull-cord light switch becomes an inter-dimensional portal to an otherworldly motel. The great part about this is that these little stories can be told effectively in isolation; it’s always interesting to come across another object in the game and to discover what it does. (The fridge is especially unpleasant.)

But experiencing this kind of thing in the context of an action game is entirely different to stumbling it on it online. SCP Foundation is pretty well established now, but still, there’s a certain thrill in stumbling across something written there in plain text, titled with only a number. When those stories are good, they can be really good. Given the relative lack of context, and the absence of any graphical set-dressing, there’s room for your imagination to do the heavy lifting. 

In Control these fine little stories are competing for attention with all the other crazy colourful stuff going on in the background. You read a note and you move on to the next thing. You crash through a pack of enemies and the numbers fly off them. There’s never a sense of the little story fitting into an overall pattern. That lack of a pattern can be forgiven in the context of a wiki. In Control, these stories start to feel irrelevant when you never come across an enemy you can’t shoot in the face. In a different format, or a different type of game, this kind of rootless narrative might be more compelling. 

But what is this game about? There’s a sister and brother. A sinister government agency. Memories, nostalgia. A slide projector. It’s all so difficult to summarise. When I think about the game all these words seem to float around in my head, loosely linked, but not in a way that suggests any kind of coherence. The game always seems to be reaching towards some kind of meaning but it only ever feels hollow. It feels flat. Yet all the elements that are good about Control must be made to refer back to these hollow, flat signifiers. Sometimes the flatness works for the game, but mostly it doesn’t.

Today, it’s hard to see that anyone could see the point in establishing a website like SCP Foundation if it didn’t already exist. Viral media is not what it was in the first decade of the 2000s. Written posts that circulate on social media have a shorter half-life than ever. It’s almost impossible for any piece of writing over a few hundreds words to go viral in ways that go beyond labels like ‘shocking’, ‘controversial’, ‘important’, etc. ‘Haunting’ and ‘uncanny’ don’t quite cut it. This kind of thing doesn’t edge into public spaces in the way it used to via email inboxes, or message boards, or blogs. 

The Mirror and the Light has been in the works for a long time. I read Wolf Hall shortly after its release in 2009, and loved it. Same with Bring up the Bodies in 2012. Two years after that my wife and I went to see Hilary Mantel read from The Mirror and the Light at the South Bank Centre. Back then it must have seemed like the release wasn’t too far away; had someone told me then that we wouldn’t see it till 2020 I would have thought them unhinged.  

It’s long — well over 700 pages. At first glance the length might seem surprising because this is not (for want of a better term) the sexiest part of Henry VIII’s rule. The story is one of those notorious miscalculations of history: after the death of Jane Seymour, who is often thought Henry’s most beloved wife, a marriage is arranged between him and Anna of Cleves. She is a woman from a distant German state who Henry has never met; the union is essentially one of convenience, because England’s international situation has rarely been more complicated. 

Following the reformation, England has been excommunicated by the Catholic church. In theory, both the nation and its ruler are fair game for invasion or murder by any loyal Christian nation. In practice, the uneasy relationship between the rulers of France, Italy and the Holy Roman Empire makes that far from straightforward, but the risk seems real all the same. Cromwell faces further trouble at home — riots and uprisings are becoming more of a problem, motivated in part by deep local affections for the old religion. Thomas is the most powerful he has ever been but he’s still surrounded by enemies, especially amongst the old families of England, who have never allowed him to forget his humble origins. 

It may seem as though there’s a lot going on, but by the end of the novel I felt like there wasn’t enough to justify the sheer weight of paper in my lap. This is not to say the writing isn’t good. It is often great. But this is a novel light on surprises. I enjoyed reading it all the same – it’s enough for me to be carried along by Mantel’s authorial presence, which still feels absolute and omnipresent. Cromwell’s personality in these novels is one of the most compelling characters in fiction. Yet there’s very little in The Mirror and The Light which we haven’t encountered before in the two previous novels. The same scenes from his life come again and again — the death of his wife and children in Wolf Hall, and those endless scenes with Anne in Bring Up the Bodies. The same lines become like motifs: arrange your face, so now get up, and so on. Perhaps the problem with a novel where you see everything is that after a while you start to feel like you’ve seen everything.

We feel there isn’t much that is new to discover about Cromwell. There are a few exceptions; the rumours that grow up around Cromwell regarding prospective new marriages are not without interest. But I found little here which sticks in the mind like the scenes from the earlier books, and part of the problem is the whole concept of ‘scenes’ as they exist here. 

The preceding novels have now had at least two major adaptations — one for the West End stage, and one for TV. I saw both, and they were good, solid, conventional. A cynical reader might declare that too much of The Mirror and the Light feels like it’s been written with dramatic adaptation in mind. At times it seems less like a novel and more like notes towards a screenplay. There are endless conversations which seem intended to be tense, dramatic confrontations, but which never seem to advance or demonstrate anything. 

And yet as soon as the novel switches back into the interior mode, you almost want to forgive it everything. Being in Cromwell’s room is like working your way through a series of rooms in a museum — full of detail and diversion — and it’s wonderful, except the novel keeps pulling you out of it like an excitable tour guide who can’t help but subject you to another conversation, another insignificant moment from history, another scene. 

I feel like the previous novels weren’t like this. But I still feel like I’m too close to them to go back now. The best I can say of The Mirror and the Light is that it consolidates the vision of Cromwell as perhaps England’s greatest ever reformer and renaissance man. He wins the long game in the ways that matter: not only the break from Rome, but in the idea of the monarch and state as deserving respect entirely separate from any religious obligations. In these books Cromwell also seems to stand for something profound in the idea of the British idea of the self-made man. He plays to our love of the self-starter, the man who started out with empty pockets and a seemingly infinite set of talents, and who took on the establishment. He won, but in the sense that he lived long to see himself become the establishment, and to be swallowed by a machine he had built to catch others. (And there’s something additionally satisfying in this kind of downfall. We love to see a man build himself up, but we also love to see him torn down to size.)

In the end, there is something drab and faintly disappointing about Cromwell as he emerges here. All his work was not in service to anything greater than himself. The pursuit of humanistic knowledge, the service of his prince, and the consolidation of his own power — what was his legacy outside of this? Part of Mantel’s genius is to work that thread of disappointment through the text here; Thomas is constantly looking to his own legacy, worrying that he hasn’t done enough; he is preoccupied with his mistakes and things he could have done better, like the death of William Tyndale. In this way he emerges as a bit more human: he is someone who, like any of us, is worried about what he will leave behind. 

I was never much of a one for rock climbing. I have tried it a few times over the years, enough to know that while I’m not afraid of heights, the fear and discomfort and frustration that sets in while trying to balance on a tiny ledge some fifteen or twenty feet above the ground is too much for me. It’s not something I want to be doing.

As with much else, the climbing in Rise of the Tomb Raider is borrowed from the Uncharted games. They add a couple of mechanics for flavour, but not much. Once you’ve latched on to a surface you just move the stick in the right direction and Lara proceeds to execute all kinds of seamless acrobatic moves. There’s no skill, one might complain. But that’s fine with me, because I don’t like climbing. 

I like the stuff that happens before and after the climbing. I like camping, I like hiking, I like exploring. And Rise of the Tomb Raider actually does that stuff quite well, in a very safe, very streamlined, very contained way. It gives you these big open areas to romp around — they’re supposed to be wild, dangerous places, but they are laid out more like huge soft play rooms. You scramble up slopes and slide down ravines and swing on ropes and splash through rapids and delve into secret caves, and it’s all just as satisfying as when you were diving into a big ball bit or sliding down a death slide or bouncing on a trampoline as a child.  

The other stuff the game borrows from Uncharted feels a bit tedious. The mandatory plot-driven action sequences are a bit tedious, though the story itself is not totally without interest. There are far too many moments where it dumps you into a room (not even a big room!) full of angry guards and asks you to get on with it. This is like having to do your homework in between soft play.  But when it slows down a bit afterwards, it’s a pleasure. The world is beautifully rendered, and it’s fun to romp around finding stuff and solving puzzles and sneaking around and collecting junk.

Here’s a thing: I don’t think I have ever played a game which pays so much attention to detail to depicting the protagonist as vulnerable. She is physically small and slight compared to everything and everyone else around her, and that’s refreshing, but so often Lara is shivering or gasping for breath or reaching out as if to steady herself. Sometimes the animations are charming: when you climb out of a pool of water, Lara will always take a moment to reach up and fix her ponytail again. That’s a nice, human touch. But there’s a fair amount of discomfort too.

This is worth mentioning not because it’s shocking, but because visible vulnerability is a rare occurrence in games of this type. Male protagonists in particular are rarely shown visibly suffering unless it’s a horror game, or things get really bad. It’s odd here because as a player you almost never feel disempowered, even while the game is showing you that Lara is cold or injured or exhausted. The game seems to be asking you to sort things out, but there’s no penalty for leaving her to shiver forever.  

So why do it at all? In part it seems to be a stylistic hangover from the first rebooted Tomb Raider that came out back in 2013, a game which seemed partly inspired by survival horror films and the concept of the ‘final girl’. Lara begins that game a naive student; mid-way through she emerges reborn from a vast pool of gore; by the end of it she is machine-gunning bad guys with panache. Here, Lara is still at ease with thumping her ice axe into some dude’s skull, but the game consistently feels the need to emphasise her fragility. 

In terms of violence, the dissonance in this kind of representation has been widely discussed. I have little to add to it; as a topic of discussion it seems exhausted, one to file alongside ‘lack of player agency’ and ‘lazy developers’ as exegetical dead-ends. But by the end of the game I was starting to wonder at what point that Lara would become the woman from the old games again. (These are, after all, prequels.) I don’t mean ‘when are they gonna put her in hot pants again’, obviously; her attire in this game is thankfully quite sensible by comparison. But there is something to be said for a video game protagonist who is confident, knowing, assertive; probably murderous, and fairly dubious in her intentions. Someone who can live up to the way they’re supposed to be behaving on screen. 

Back in 2000 when The Amber Spyglass came out I feel like there was not so much news in the world. At the turn of the millennium we seemed to be entering a more optimistic time. Tony Blair was elected in 1997 at the head of a liberal Labour government, and while it may be true that Blair would never be so popular again as he was in the opening years of his premiership, the Tories seemed hopelessly outdated by comparison. They were still the nasty party of old, while the country was ambitious, outward-looking, internationalist. Explicit racism and homophobia were no longer tolerated. We were Europhiles, but we weren’t part of Europe. There seemed to be a lot of money about.

At home there were occasional horrors — the murder of Jill Dando, the homophobic pub bombings in London, Harold Shipman — but they were somehow isolated, disparate, inexplicable. They were exceptional. There was the war in Kosovo, which set a template for liberal interventionism in years to come. The economy was trucking along; unemployment was low; for the first time there was a national minimum wage. I skim the headlines today and it seems like such a comfortable time by comparison. Perhaps I am remembering it wrong. But when the years to come would bring a spiral of endless war, recession, and one of the most significant declines in relative generational living standards, I’m not sure there is any need for rose-coloured glasses.  

Into this comes The Amber Spyglass, which is basically quite an optimistic anti-authoritarian novel. It was also the book which, for a handful of reasons, really brought Philip Pullman to the world’s attention. It was this which ensured that his name still lurks around the list of authors most frequently ‘banned’ in America, and which in the years after its publication would attract scores of avid cheerleaders and detractors. Inevitably most of those had no interest with engaging with the substance of the book itself. Instead, it became a sort of battleground: on one side, those convinced that religion was under attack from an educated elite; on the other, those who were committed to reducing the role of religion in public life, discourse, education, and so on. It is worth revisiting this typically excitable interview and profile by Christopher Hitchens for an example of how these novels were talked about. 

To call the novel ‘optimistic’ might seem surprising, because much of it is shrouded in scenes of gloom and suffering. But when I think of the tone of the novel as a whole, it is pastoral. When the world isn’t tearing itself apart the language seems more lyrical than in either of the two preceding books. Some of that is to do with the perspective, which now has at least three (and sometimes more) main characters to follow. This means that a sense of distance, of floating high above the many worlds of the story, becomes necessary. But it’s also that the reader has a sense that this book is going to be about the promised war against the heavens outlined in The Subtle Knife, and it’s likely the reader will also understand that this is a war that must be won. 

It feels like a world of binary opposites. Even characters who seemed villainous in the previous novels are here redeemed (at least in part) so they can be mustered against the ultimate figure of the ‘Authority’. A certain amount of good versus evil is likely in any book for children, but here things are now cast explicitly in terms of these two sides squaring up against each other. And taking sides is a matter of decision, not of belonging. This is a book where angelic figures can decide to fight alongside men, and where demonic harpies can be convinced not to consume the souls of the dead because they want to hear their stories instead. It’s plausible in terms of oldest storytelling traditions, where it is possible to talk one’s way out of anything — where the role of storyteller gives a person the ultimate kind of authority.   

Is the capital-A ‘Authority’ in these novels intended to be absolutely synonymous with God? I’m not sure. The book is explicitly anti-religion in the sense of being anti-church, but the forces of the Authority (and the being himself) do not seem to represent any kind of absolute power in the universe. The Authority is not omnipotent nor omnipresent, nor is he very much of a creator or a father-figure any more — he is a despot, but he is also somehow irrelevant. Like a shrivelled relic, he is vastly reduced when we finally meet him. The worst aspects of his regime seem like the calcified remnants of decisions long since made and now barely remembered, like the afterlife that has become a giant prison camp. In fact it’s the abolition of the afterlife, not the death of its creator, that’s the only really significant consequence of the fall of the Authority. 

So if God isn’t in the Authority, then where is he? In spite of the tendency for atheists to want to claim the author for one of their own, it seems like the heart of these novels is not in pure humanistic rationalism, but in a broader sort of pantheism. The idea of ‘Dust’ is the closest thing to a true divine presence here. It could be characterised as something akin to a spirit which moves through all things. It is ‘conscious’, and though it’s hard to determine what this means in practice, we know that it is not indifferent to humanity. It’s not like a host of little thinking homunculi (although Mary did have a whole conversation with it on a computer back in The Subtle Knife). But it wants to persist. It would seem to be the force that drives the Alethiometer. It has intentions.  

The counter-argument to this would say that Dust isn’t divine at all — it exists at the bleeding edge of science, and has nothing to do with faith. It’s a material thing. It’s not a spirit. But I don’t know that this is especially convincing. The books often try to equate Dust with quantum mechanics, but this doesn’t entirely seem to add up — these are particles which are somehow small enough to slip through gaps between universes, but big enough to see with the naked eye. Everything about Dust seems too convenient from an authorial perspective. It’s as though someone took everything indefinable and unique about evolved human (and non-human) consciousness and made it into a quantifiable thing and then said: there, without this thing we are no longer what we are. It’s an easy solution to the hard problem.

It the article linked above, Hitchens described the Alethiometer and Will’s knife as ‘tools of inquiry and struggle, not magic wands’. This is only half-right. Clearly they aren’t tools like a microscope or an X-ray machine. Both items are bonded to their owners through an innate sensitivity that has little to do with rational enquiry or rigorous method. The Alethiometer is even compared to the I Ching at various points. It seems wrong to mistake ‘inquiry’ here for the scientific method; it has much more in common with ‘negative capability’, a term which is actually quoted in The Amber Spyglass — the ability to pursue truth and beauty via one’s innate sensibility, to ‘see feelingly’ through a fascination with a sort of natural mystery, and not to depend exclusively on reason and knowledge.  

This leaves the reader in an odd sort of no man’s land between the armies who supposedly either adopted or despised this novel. A hypothetical arch-rationalist might find it difficult to accept all of what they find here without rolling their eyes at some of it. Negative capability does not sit comfortably alongside the scientific method as a tool, but nor does it have much to do with priests and popery. And yet it is a sort of inspiration, and in that respect I think it comes closer to a religious experience than it does a rational one.  

The problem with this is that it is not possible to get any sense from this novel of what it means to be religious, or to believe in a higher power, or to be ‘spiritual’ (choose your own euphemism). There is Mary Malone, but while I like Mary’s story here, her account of her early life in cloisters and later conversion/defection is unsatisfying. We have no sense of doubt, of anguish, of guilt — it is an all-too-straightforward seeing of the light. Will is arguably more complicated, more conflicted, but for the most part he never seems to have to make any difficult compromises. If he ever loses out on anything by abandoning his mother to travel through a whole set of alternate universes, we aren’t told about it. 

What if Will made the wrong call? What if he weren’t so trustworthy? He is, in a way, the lynchpin of the whole story. For all Lyra’s good intentions and inner strength, if it weren’t for Will, Asriel would have failed and nothing would have changed. So Will must be made to work. Yet it often seems as though he doesn’t want anything for himself, except perhaps to be with Lyra. It’s interesting to wonder what might have happened if Will weren’t quite so faithful (for want of a better word). 

But it’s inconceivable in the world of these books that anyone could possess negative capability and then use it for anything other than a pursuit of — well what exactly is being pursued, anyway? What is Asriel’s goal, above and beyond the overthrow of the Authority? There is vague mention of something called ‘the Republic of Heaven’ — a heaven on Earth, as it were — but today that phrase can only make me recall the idea of ‘Outer Heaven’ in the Metal Gear Solid games. It’s difficult to discern any latent irony lying in wait for the reader in this case. Will whatever replaces the Authority be just as bad, eventually? Perhaps, but again, the vibe of optimism in this novel is so strong it feels odd to impose doubt on it from elsewhere.   

The paradox of The Amber Spyglass is that while the explicit ‘moral’ of the novel is set against organised religion, it cannot help but describe the world in terms originally set by religion. (A very basic reading might declare the novel invalid for this reason, for much the same reason as a socialist might be declared hypocritical for buying a smartphone.) It isn’t just that there are angels, or that the story of Adam of Eve is central to the thing. It is the journey through the world of the dead and back. It’s the arc of redemption and overthrow. 

In 2011 I bought a PS3, in part because I really wanted something on which I could play Deus Ex: Human Revolution. This was the long-awaited sequel to a PC game series which I once loved; for many years it was thought unlikely that anyone would make another game called Deus Ex. So I had to see it for myself. And to do that I had to buy my first ever games console. So that game was the incident that led to games becoming a more regular part of my life again, as they are today. 

Mankind Divided came out in 2016. I waited until now to play it, maybe because I was slightly underwhelmed by actually playing the original. I didn’t dislike it but I suppose I never felt the urge to play it again. (As it turned out, Dishonored and its sequel did most of the same things much better.) And playing this now I was reminded of all the things I didn’t love about Human Revolution. The protagonist is still embarrassingly self-serious — ‘unsmiling’ works well for him as an adjective because his face seems crafted out of something entirely inflexible. But then this is the sort of game where very few characters have emotions beyond a sort of world-weary impatience. Everything is over-stylised, and mostly this isn’t done in a way that contributes to meaning. Everything about it is devoted to making you feel like a cool, powerful guy, cutting his way through a bleak world.

Most of the game takes place in a near-future version of Prague, which sometimes looks great, but feels flat. Traversing this semi-open world isn’t particularly fun. There is a lot of purposeless traipsing back and forth, especially near the end of the game. One can only break into an uninhabited identikit apartment so many times before scrounging through peoples’ cupboards feels like a bit of a chore. (And if you’re playing stealthily you never feel like you particularly need any of the gear you find. So why do it? To see what’s there, of course. You have to see what’s there.) 

I’d almost forgotten that Mankind Divided suffered a bit of controversy on release; the story is set in a world where cybernetically-enhanced people live alongside everybody else in a situation that approximates apartheid. This is not wholly uninteresting, even if the marketing of the time did a pretty awful job of promoting it (‘Aug Lives Matter’ etc). As it turns out the game doesn’t do much with these concepts. You see a good deal of suffering, but it’s always from arm’s length, presented in the classic style of the video game ethical dilemma: do you help person X if it means hindering person Y, and so on. It won’t surprise you to learn that there are never really any ‘good’ outcomes. It feels significant that the player themselves is never especially hindered by their status as an ‘aug’. The worst of it is a gentle telling off from the police if you get on the non-augmented carriage on the subway.

There’s a lot to criticise here. But the heart of it is still tremendously entertaining. Once you get into the missions, the level design is excellent. It’s still hugely satisfying to find yourself on the outskirts of some vast multi-level facility, and have to pick through it one room at a time, avoiding cameras and hacking systems and knocking out guards. I might almost say that this kind of thing is what I enjoy most, in all of video games: being confronted with a thorny multi-dimensional problem and using an array of tools to pick it apart, piece by piece. 

Still, I found myself daydreaming of a better alternative to the open-world stuff: everything between the mission areas happens inside your apartment. You read your emails, do all the character interaction stuff from the comfort of your computer. Maybe there’s a weird VR hacking interface, like in the original System Shock. Maybe you can rearrange the tchotchkes on your nicely modelled desk. And then once you’re ready you go off and do the mission and come back. You would lose nothing about what makes the game good this way!

There is something to be written (and somebody has probably written it already) about how Death Stranding unexpectedly became the most prescient game of 2020. This is a game built around the idea of a delivery worker in a time of national emergency. Had the phraseology of our current moment been common parlance much before 2019 you can bet that Hideo Kojima would have incorporated it into this typically rich, weird, overwrought, maddening, beautiful game. But even without it, he got unnervingly close to creating something which neatly encapsulates the loneliness and anxiety of our present moment. If Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the escapism we all needed from the current crisis, Death Stranding reads now like a doomed attempt to stare it down.

A brief summary of the plot: after a vast pre-apocalyptic incident, almost everyone on Earth is dead. In America the remaining humans are clustered together in towns and bunkers, and the player’s job is to make deliveries on foot between these settlements. This means you have to do a lot of walking. There is a lot of quiet trudging in this game. (Most of the time there isn’t any music, unless there is a deliberate cue. The game even prevents you from running Spotify at the same time on the PS4. And then suddenly as you are descending a hill, the mist will clear and a song will start to play, and you will burst into tears at the wonder of it all.)

You are mostly alone, but not entirely. The world is haunted by ghostly figures known as ‘BTs’; human bandits survive by stealing from couriers; and rain has become ‘timefall’, which accelerates the ageing of whatever it touches in moments. And all this is before I mention the terrain itself, the traversal of which always requires deliberate forethought. You can’t just plough ahead and hope to remain upright; you will slide down steep slopes, flounder in deep water, trip over rocks. Small victories matter, and in this game staying upright always feels like a small victory. (Again: prescient.)

Every time I got into trouble in Death Stranding it was through my own fault. Perhaps I was carrying too much, or perhaps I had tried to walk too far with too little energy, or both. Perhaps I tried to shimmy up an especially difficult section of cliff without carrying enough ladders. Or perhaps I shouldn’t have loaded up my truck with valuable cargo before attempting to drive through an area full of boulders and ghosts. 

The worst thought you can have in this world sounds a bit like this: “I’m going there anyway, so I might as well…”. If you accept this, and you internalise it so it becomes a dictum, the game will provide you with so much extra weight to carry it will become impossible. Learning to play Death Stranding becomes about knowing when to say: this much and no more.

This seems like a valuable lesson to learn, so much so that it almost seems to contradict something else within the essential message of the game. The player is told repeatedly, often at great length, that this is a game about building connections with other people. The superstructure of this is borrowed in part from social media (‘Likes’ are one of the main currencies) but it becomes manifest in the objects built by other players that litter your world once the game is online. Ladders, ropes, bridges, and later even roads and shelter bunkers eventually appear; anything you set down yourself will probably be seen in somebody else’s world at that same exact position. 

It’s a gentle sort of pleasure to find oneself building connections between one place and another, with part of the work already filled in by other players you will never meet. After several difficult sessions yomping through waist-deep snow while carting packages across the mountains, I spent a few hours building myself a series of ziplines across the same route. By grafting my work onto the half-finished work of others, the end product wafted me across the same route in seconds, much like an accelerated alpine ski-lift. It felt amazing. 

But you always have to know when to draw the line. No amount of connections can act as a substitute for individual resolve. There will always be more than you can carry and only you can decide how much you can take at any one time. There is never the sense that by relying on these tools you are enabling the game to complete itself. You are only making a deliberate choice to make things slightly easier, but in the end you still have to pull on your boots and tramp up that hill and tramp down again at day’s end. 

The Subtle Knife is the sequel to Northern Lights, and it is in various ways a darker, bleaker book than its predecessor. Years ago, this one was always my favourite in the trilogy, in part because of the tone, and in part because I related to Will more than I did Lyra. I still like it now, and though it has some trouble with pacing, it also has moments which are far more emotionally affecting than anything in Northern Lights.

It’s something of a shock to find ourselves in our own world in the opening pages here, alongside a boy who seems at first fairly ordinary compared to Lyra. If Lyra is impetuous and driven, Will often seems the opposite — a reluctant, responsible, ordinary sort of hero — one who is persistent rather than courageous. When we meet him, he hasn’t been running wild over the rooftops of Oxford; he has been looking after his mother, who is deeply unwell with what appears to be a kind of paranoia or agoraphobia. His father has been missing for years, and mysterious men are pursuing Will’s mother for something related to him. And then after a series of sudden, unexpected events, Will finds himself in another world. 

Conceptually, there is suddenly a lot more going on in this novel. It quickly moves to answer many of the questions that Northern Lights didn’t really have time to address. Characters are now moving between multiple universes, often within the space of a few pages. We are told that Dust is a particle that is also a kind of consciousness. Dust is also angels. The holiness or goodness of angels is called into question. Lord Asriel has sequestered himself away in a fortress, and is preparing to wage war against an authority that seems analogous to God. And the Magisterium are after Lyra, believing that she has a role to play akin to Eve in the Garden of Eden. Everything is suddenly getting quite complicated.

It was possible to read Northern Lights as a great adventure story with an intriguing allegorical subtext, but The Subtle Knife is comparatively direct with its myth-making. It has a lot more going on because the author says so — we know that Lyra is like Eve because the author tells us, not because it is implied. Some readers may find this too direct, but I think it is only a product of Pullman’s preferred mode of storytelling in these novels. They are not tricksy and they are not ‘difficult’ in the sense of the modernist or postmodern novel. These are stories to be told, and told in the sense that a nineteenth century fable might be told. And if the author has a lot to explain in terms of themes, there are only so many ways in which to do that.

That said, some things are still fairly unclear throughout. Is Lord Asriel one of the good guys? He is almost absent entirely from this book. Is Will one of the good guys? Probably — but he has to do some pretty awful things here. Lyra’s Alethiometer labels him early on as a murderer. It is not wrong. And it’s odd and strange and sad how he seems to be driven through these moments with little control over them. Lyra, by comparison, so often seems like the driver of her own destiny. It is her insatiable curiosity that leads her to hide in the closet through Lord Asriel’s lecture, and then to follow the trail of the kidnapped children, throughout the previous novel. But in The Subtle Knife, Will is only trying to look after his mother when he kills someone by accident; he is only acting in self-defence when he kills others later. In fact he’s only trying to hide from the world when he ends up falling through a window into the strange half-deserted world of Cittàgazze. 

A few words about that place. Encountered today it seems like a distinctly odd choice, to go from Lyra’s crowded Edwardian-ish Britain to somewhere starkly modern and essentially familiar. For an adult reader the deserted mediterranean plazas and hotel rooms might recall J. G. Ballard and the emptied landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico, but for a young mind there is a simpler pleasure here: what if you could walk into any shop and take what you wanted with no adults there to stop you? Inevitably there is some awful reason for the absence of order here. Spectres roam the place — ghost-like figures that have invaded this world. They are brought into existence every time a window between worlds is created, and they feed on the Dust that settles on people once they reach the end of childhood. 

As an addition the spectres seem somehow inevitable but also a little unconvincing. The reader knows from the moment they arrive in Cittàgazze that somehow awful resides here: the spectres fill the role nicely. Perhaps the problem is in the name. ‘Spectre’ in English is a little too close to ghost, albeit with less personality — the word suggests a sort of shapeless threat, an anxiety — a ghost is always a ghost of someone, while a spectre might as well be a virus. In which case I wonder: why embody them at all? I almost feel that they have too much shape, too much suggestion of ghoulish malevolence. The spectres make more sense as a configuration of disease, or of depression — invisible but felt intensely by those they prey upon. 

I don’t recall exactly when I first read Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. It must have been in the late 1990s, since I’m fairly sure it was after the release of the sequel, but definitely before The Amber Spyglass came out. (I was very excited for that one.) I would guess I was no more than twelve or thirteen. It seems a little odd now to think that initially these were promoted as books for young people. My edition was published by Point, the Scholastic imprint best known for pulpy teen horror fiction; in a bookshop today you are more likely to find a new edition of one of Pullman’s novels dressed up in handsome pastel colours, with a more ‘artisanal’ cover style. Which is fine, and well-deserved. But my copy is the same one I read more than twenty years ago; I know this because it is missing the top-right corner of the last thirty pages or so, having once been lovingly chewed by a late lamented family dog.

Northern Lights is not a long book, and in many ways it feels like a quick sketch of a fast-moving story, one which is touches lightly on the world in which it depicts. By the standards of genre fantasy or science fiction, there isn’t a lot of detail here. We follow Lyra, a young girl growing up in an alternate Oxford — it might be some time in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, by our standards. Through a combination of accident and concealed design, Lyra is drawn into a conspiracy that involves two aspects: an expedition to the distant arctic in search of a mysterious particle called ‘Dust’, and a conspiracy to kidnap children and transport them to this same far northern region. What follows is an adventure in pursuit of Lord Asriel, a man Lyra believes to be her uncle, while alternately monitored and pursued by a sinister rich woman called Mrs Coulter. This race to the frozen North forms pretty much all of the main body of the book.

For the most part it rolls along at a storytelling pace: one thing happens, then the next, then the next. It really does have the rhythm of a story one might tell out loud to children, over many bedtimes. (Consider the frequent asides about what Lyra must eat, and where she sleeps — so often a chapter will end with her curling up to sleep in some sheltered corner of a forsaken place.) It doesn’t come across as overly considered. With a few exceptions, the book doesn’t often slow down to explain itself. If a reader were so inclined I’m sure it would be possible to poke holes all kinds of holes in the plot. Even by the end of the novel I didn’t feel entirely sure what Dust was, nor did I really understand what the antagonists were trying to do with it. Are they trying to destroy it, or to control it? And some of it seems whimsical, in the best possible sense. Want a Texan cowboy with his own gas-powered balloon and a talking bear for a best friend? Why not? It’s fun. It may be whimsical but that isn’t to suggest it’s frivolous; the author’s imagination comes from a place of experience, from deep reading. It’s a world that fascinates, even as it seems to resist scrutiny. 

Something else which surprised me on returning to this book was the near absence of any explicit references to organised religion. There are mentions of something called the Magisterium, but it’s far from clear what their role is in the story, while a passing mention of ‘Pope John Calvin’ seems like a sort of gentle joke for older readers. This seems significant because at a certain point after the final book in this series was released, public discussion of Philip Pullman’s work became centred around his attitude to organised religion. By then a new populist atheism was having a kind of resurgence — people were talking about ‘the New Humanism’ or ‘New Atheism’ as if it were something to be excited about. Pullman would be loosely associated with this movement, insofar as his books could be championed by people who might proactively define themselves as atheists. 

But to the best of my knowledge, his statements on these matters have been altogether more measured, and less definitive. I’m curious now to revisit the later novels and consider the extent to which they really have much to do with atheism at all. It’s been a while, but it always seemed to me that the atheist reading was worth unpicking from the anti-religious impulse in these novels. There is a certain amount of what you might call ‘fantasy spectacle through hard science’ in Northern Lights — the many-worlds theory, the vague invocations of particle physics, all of which was so excitedly summarised by the New Atheism as the ‘wonder’ of the universe — and yet I’m not sure the novels are altogether so content to settle on a purely materialistic view of reality.

The big idea of Northern Lights is in the daemons. They are a beautiful idea, and the book’s story could easily be read as one long pursuit of this idea. What if every person was born with an animal companion which represented — no, which actually was — an indivisible part of their being? As if we all had another organ of personality, like a second brain or a second ‘heart’, linked to our bodies by an invisible thread. The notion has the genius quality of immediate appeal to all ages. Children (and many adults) love the idea of a permanent animal companion, while older readers may appreciate the associated philosophical concepts: the shadow self, or psychological anima; or just the little angel/devil on our shoulder. 

Perhaps the existence of the daemons a kind of heresy, as much as it implies that each person’s soul (for want of a better word) belongs essentially to themselves. There are no refunds, and a daemon is not subject to exchange; a daemon is not the property of some other high power, gifted at birth and reclaimed at death; they might not even be properly said to belong to their ‘owner’, any more than their person-companion belongs to them. Still, in spiritual terms this might be characterised as a problem of accounting rather than of blasphemy. There is a lovely image presented early on of the crypts under one of the Oxford colleges, where great people are buried alongside precious tokens depicting the forms of their daemons. Even in death they belong to one another, though the account into which they have been deposited remains a mystery.

After the reader is introduced to the associated rituals and taboos, it is the pain of separation from one’s daemon that becomes a sort of leitmotif in this book. All this is expressed incredibly well — the sense of separation anxiety is perhaps the most memorable aspect of the whole story. It is unpleasant for one’s daemon to be handled by another person, and it is literal agony to be separated from it by more than a very short distance, and so when the reader discovers that children are being severed from their daemons it seems like an uniquely agonising kind of cruelty. 

The allegories for this ‘cut’ are more explicit than I remember. At times it is directly compared to castration or genital mutilation. Lobotomy might be another comparison. The procedure seems to have a uniquely devastating effect on children — it seems that adults have undergone it without such dramatic effects — but as with much in this book, that much is never explained. Again, it’s unclear why the procedure is happening at all. Nobody seems to be gaining anything by it. It is like one of those pointless bleak cruelties we find in Roald Dahl. It’s something to do with Dust, we’re told, and it is dependent on the unique relationship that children have with their daemons before they reach puberty. But that it is hard to rationalise is, I think, part of the point. 

As I write this it is the last day in November, and I have to renew my TV license. You have to have a TV license if you live in the United Kingdom and you own a device for watching live broadcasts, either online or through an actual TV. The fee is mostly used to pay for the existence of the BBC, and it costs £154.50 per year. It is effectively a regressive hypothecated tax. 

Sometimes it seems like there must be a better way of paying for public-service broadcasting. But the BBC has to remain free and universal to access, and free from advertising. And most of the time, the license fee is not controversial. There is little in the way of serious political will to abolish it, in part because it feels like nobody can be trusted to think of a serious alternative. In this respect it is not dissimilar to council tax, which is even more egregiously regressive, more conducive to extremes in inequality, more dangerous to reform. 

Various exemptions and concessions for the TV license are available. At the moment those aged over 75 don't have to pay at all. (This may change soon.) Oddly, if you have a black and white TV, there is still the option of paying a reduced rate license fee of £52 per year. The logic for this is essentially indefensible; aside from the fact that it is impossible to buy a new monochrome television, it would be absurd to suggest that anyone owning one was only receiving a third of the value of a full subscription. 

There are two ideas which might be mustered in defense of the black and white TV license. (I call them ideas rather than arguments, since again, nobody is really arguing about this.) The first is half-economic, half-emotional. It says that the only people still owning these ancient sets are those almost incapacitated by age and poverty. They have few pleasures left in life; they cannot be expected to arrive one year at a bill almost three times the usual amount. 

The second idea is linked to the first. It is wholly emotional, and far more important. In the British imagination the idea of a black and white television represents a link to the past. It is families clustered around a single glowing screen in a darkened room. Someone is probably smoking and someone is definitely drinking. There is a child lying inches from the screen, propped up on their elbows, head in their palms. The food is dreadful, in a homely sort of way. But something momentous is probably about to happen.  

The second idea comes out of a feeling that began near the end of the Second World War and went on to aggregate over fifty years or more of the second half of the twentieth century. There is something in the notion of a black and white receiver that is emblematic of the BBC as a beloved institution. It says: we've been here with you for all those years, for your parents and for your grandparents; won't you stick with us a little longer, at least? 

Sometimes the BBC is referred to as 'Auntie' in other parts of the media. It is a very old nickname. It is gentle and knowing. It is authoritative, and vaguely authoritarian – but at least it isn't 'Uncle'. The idea that the BBC might be a 'state broadcaster' (the special name it uses for equivalent stations in Iran or Russia) seems superficially absurd. Why? Because BBC content doesn't look like what we were taught propaganda looks like.  

More often than not, the BBC will contort itself to maintain some notion of journalistic impartiality. But these contortions create more problems than they solve. It is possibly to be openly racist or homophobic or transphobic on BBC television or radio, as long as prejudice is couched behind suitable disclaimers and a veneer of civility. As long as these views can find a counterpoint elsewhere, our national broadcaster can claim it was only doing its duty in representing the views of a section of the populace who pays for its continued existence.  

We are less than two weeks away from a general election. It seems like every day the BBC is accused of bias, from all sides. But at times the nature of the bias seems less like a considered editorial stance, and more like the product of something inherent to the way the BBC thinks about itself. And so a piece of footage which showed an audience openly laughing at the Prime Minister is cut to remove the laughter. On Memorial Sunday, the BBC runs a clip of the PM from a previous year, in which he managed to both look presentable and place the wreath the correct way around (neither of which he did this year). The BBC Politics twitter feed runs a handful of tweets critical of Jeremy Corbyn in between a jolly thirty-second clip of the PM spreading cream and jam on a scone. 

It is hard to distinguish a conspiracy in all this. What is evident is a consistent attitude of deference to power. The BBC house style is expressed through a voice in love with its own history, its own authority. These clips are chosen because they make the men in power (and some women) look good. They are picked for the same reasons they would not show the PM picking his nose. It is an unsubtle way of establishing the BBC as a broadcaster of quality. The people who produce this work want to align themselves with power. 

There is a sort of inverse courtship happening here. Once it was thought that politicians ought to defer to the media, out of a sort of necessity. You had to play their game if you wanted to be taken seriously. But suddenly none of that seems to matter. Now our Prime Minister can say, during an election campaign – what if I didn't show up to the leader's debate? What if I chose not to do the half-hour interview with the BBC's most aggressive presenter? What if I openly lied at every opportunity?  

All of this is facilitated by a media which is essentially reverential. Individuals vary in their approach but this is the default state of most newspapers and most television programmes. The position of the government must be respected not because it is always wise or informed, or moral or ethical but because it belongs to the government. Other political positions may be taken into consideration but they lack the democratic legitimacy which (we are to assume) is the privilege of government. And so members of the Cabinet are treated with a level of reverence which is entirely unrelated to their actual capabilities or the results achieved by their departments.

The BBC has no idea how to handle the current Prime Minister. The journalist Peter Oborne caused something of a stir recently by quoting a senior BBC figure who told him that they were reluctant to openly accuse the PM of lying because it would undermine trust in politics. And so the corporation must twist itself into strange knots. Its presenters must nod and smile, and report faithfully the inane ramblings of a man who is utterly devoid of principles, because he happens to be the Prime Minister.

Is he lying? Certainly most of what he says is demonstrably untrue. But to accuse him of lying would be to doubt his motivation. This is another sin of which the BBC cannot bear to be accused. Perhaps he simply didn't know that he wrong? Perhaps he was ignorant? So it must suffice to report the lie, and then to tell the audience that there may be some debate about the nature of the facts. And so we are treated to headlines that accuse the Labour party of increasing spending by over a trillion pounds. This is a total fabrication. But even if this is accompanied by a disclaimer to say that Labour dispute these figures, which part of this will stick in the mind of the general reader? Perhaps there will be a talking head to explain that even if we were told we would be getting 40 new hospitals, some of those might only be refurbishments to existing hospitals. And the rest? We don't know. We move swiftly on to other things. 

In matters relating to the Royal Family, the BBC will always cleave closely to its special heritage. Its coverage is resolutely uncritical. Turn on during a royal wedding or some other state occasion and the tone is set to gaping admiration throughout. The recent interview with Prince Andrew could be considered an exception, but it wasn't astonishing because of a particularly penetrating line of questioning. The questions were direct, but the Prince still got to sit in the big chair, relatively speaking. What happened was so surprising because Andrew so effectively engineered his own public humiliation. It took only the gentlest of informed prompts for him to express some of the most extraordinary things heard on television in recent memory. 

I keep thinking back to the vast room in which Emily Maitlis and Prince Andrew sat for that interview. It did him no good, of course. It was lit like a room from Dracula's castle. I wondered who had allowed it. But there is at times a sort of mutual deference that we receive from the Royals. I mean in terms of the way that the Queen might be said to enjoy a particular brand of biscuit, for example; it's like a particularly British form of the idea that Madonna drinks Coke and you can too. It's 'democratic' in the (entirely incorrect and inappropriate) sense of the word commonly used interchangeably with 'popular'. At heart we know the Royals are nothing like us. Somehow we live with this.

Black and white televisions were once a status symbol of a sort. Another British stereotype says that in the 1980s/1990s if you still had a monochrome set you were probably not poor – you were probably a sort of aesthete or aristocrat, and mostly likely you had neither the time or the inclination to replace it. Or you might be very rich (because you hadn't frittered away money on buying a new TV). Big colour screens were considered the preserve of the idle feckless poor; by contrast, there was something pleasingly authentic about the black and white set.  

And why should those owners be made to pay if they chose not to enter the modern world with the rest of us? We might not want it ourselves, but it was nice to think of them as being there, the owners of the black and white sets. They were keepers of the flame. Most likely they were shut up in their damp, draughty stately homes, with only a skeleton crew of servants, the old Bentley slumbering under a tarp in a crumbling garage. But they were holding on to our myths for us.

‘…There were so many ways in which the vast army of the dead could be drilled, classified, inspected, and made to present their ghostly arms. No end to the institutions, civilian and military, busy drawing up their sombre balance sheet and recording it in wood, stone or metal. But if there was no end to the institutions there was no end to the dead men either. In truth, there were more than enough to go round several times over…’

Troubles was not the first novel by J.G. Farrell, but it was the first to achieve really significant literary success. Farrell wrote three novels set in a loosely connected trilogy set in the twilight of the British empire — I read The Singapore Grip last year, and I’ve been meaning to revisit this one, which I first read many years ago. It might be the best thing Farrell ever wrote, though I now find myself wanting to reread The Siege of Krishnapur as well.

Troubles is set in Ireland, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Having been freshly discharged from the army, Brendan Archer (mostly known as ‘the Major’) travels there to visit Angela Spencer; Brendan is more or less convinced that he and Angela are engaged, having met previously while he was on leave from the front lines. They have exchanged letters since, but on arriving at her home — the Majestic hotel — he finds her distant. Her father, Edward, is a model of English strength and reserve. And then there is the hotel itself: a gothic revival falling apart at the seams, overrun by potted plants and cats, populated by a skeleton crew of staff and flocks of elderly women. 

The hotel is labyrinthine and seemingly fathomless, like something out of Ballard or Borges. It is an unmappable confection of turrets and towers, sewn up with catwalks, stairwells, secret corridors. The tennis courts are thick with weeds; the glass ceiling of the ballroom is on the verge of collapse; there are strange things swimming in the murky remnants of the swimming pool. Here, at the end of a lonely peninsula, the residents are cut off from the outside world. The only reminder that the Irish exist at all comes from the figures glimpsed at the roadside, sometime seen standing in the fields, or rummaging in the bins at the house. (Many of them are starving.) 

We soon realise that the Major lives in a state of post-traumatic myopia. Everything around him seems to take place in a sort of dreamlike haze. Like a typical man of his class he makes a point of not seeing things about how the world is operating, but his experiences in the war place him at a further remove from the rest of society. He is typically English; he adopts an attitude of perpetual befuddlement, leaning heavily on privilege and impatience to get himself through the day. He is inflexible and uncommunicative. But he is also deeply traumatised. His memories are shot full of holes:

‘Although he was sure that he had never actually proposed to Angela during the few days of their acquaintance, it was beyond doubt that they were engaged: a certainty fostered by the fact that from the very beginning she had signed her letters ‘Your loving fiancée, Angela’. This had surprised him at first. But, with the odour of death drifting into the dug-out in which he scratched out his replies by the light of a candle, it would have been trivial and discourteous beyond words to split hairs about such purely social distinctions.’

Ireland is riven by violence. Rumours of killings are rife around the hotel. People are shot in ones and twos every day, apparently at random. Interspersed throughout the book are newspaper clippings, many of which seem absurd. It seems a bleak, purposeless cycle of assault and recrimination. But in spite of the resident paranoia, next to nothing actually happens on the grounds of the Majestic. No republican ‘shinners’ appear intent on massacring the residents in their beds. But regardless, the English are determined to make a stand — even if it is only in the bar of the local pub.

This novel was first published in 1970, at a time when Northern Ireland was seeing some of the worst violence in the latter half of the twentieth century. By comparison the level of strife depicted here seems almost parochial by comparison. But this is because the whole text of the novel is sunk within the consciousness of an observer who is too broken himself to see what’s really happening. After all, this is 1919: in historical terms we are in the thick of the Irish war of independence. The country would finally become its own nation state a few years later. But none of it feels that way to the characters in the book.

Perhaps there’s something about it that approximates the feeling of watching the news in the late sixties or early seventies— while living in England, of course. It is a constant drip-feed of appalling atrocity, delivered with the benefit of distance so that the expected response from the audience is to feel exactly as the Major does: ‘An old man is gunned down in the street and within a couple of days this senseless act is both normal and inevitable,’ reflects the Major. For him these killings might as well be happening in a vacuum. Names like De Valera float through the air, but they might as well belong to legendary beings. There’s no awareness of history or context. There is barely a line in this book which affords a glimpse of the world from an Irish perspective. We don’t know how they might feel about it because we aren’t told. 

‘The Major only glanced at the newspaper these days, tired of trying to comprehend a situation which defied comprehension, a war without battles or trenches. Why should one bother with the details: the raids for arms, the shootings of policemen, the intimidations? What could one learn from the details of chaos? Every now and then, however, he would become aware with a feeling of shock that, for all its lack of pattern, the situation was different, and always a little worse.’

We are stuck in the belly of the beast, and the beast is dying. The Major is trapped in ‘the country’s vast and narcotic inertia’. The hotel is falling apart. Angela vanishes not long after the Major arrives, and then she dies. Somehow this is not a cause for much regret. From then on, he has no reason to stay in Ireland, but the place has a strange gravity that seems to draw him back. And there is Sarah, a local woman who seems to have taken an interest in him. She is fiery, direct and open — far more than he — and initially she is mostly confined to a wheelchair. There are shades of Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity in their relationship: the Major is a model of polite restraint, while Sarah is openly flirtatious, at times frantic with emotion:

‘One day when he had been speaking, though impersonally, about marriage and its place in the modern world, she interrupted him brutally by saying: ‘It’s not a wife you’re looking for, Brendan. It’s a mother!’ The Major was upset because he had not, in fact, been saying he was looking for either. ‘Why are you so polite the whole time?’ she would ask derisively, while the Major, appalled, wondered what was wrong with being polite. ‘Why are you always fussing around those infernal old women? Can’t you smell how awful they are?’ she would demand, making a disgusted face, and when the Major said nothing she would burst out: ‘Because you’re an old woman yourself, that’s why.’ And since the Major maintained his hurt and dignified silence: ‘And for Jesus’ sake stop looking at me like a stuffed squirrel!’’

It’s a very funny book. Farrell was a masterful stylist, and he wields irony here like a weapon. There is humour to be had at the expense of the English in a way that recalls P. G. Wodehouse. But with Jeeves and Wooster there is the pleasure of retreating inside a world which is entirely its own — for the most part, nothing really awful can happen there. Whereas here, we are never allowed to forget that something awful is perpetually happening only just outside of that friendly bubble. And it isn’t so cosy inside the bubble either. 

Either way, we cannot forget that the characters of the novel are all implicated, if only through their vast unthinking ignorance. There is something very dark crouching at the heart of this book, something made all the more tragic by the Major’s essential simplicity, by his constant air of strained incomprehension. We know that he will never learn, that he will never grow. Somehow he is both entirely innocent and fully responsible for everything that goes wrong. 

He is not the only pathetic creature here. The author reserves a special combination of pathos and threat for the animals that reside at the Majestic. They are vehicles for fables in this story. There are the countless stray cats, which ride the dumb-waiters, climb through the chimneys and nest inside the wrecked sofas. (The biggest cat has orange fur and bright green eyes; a noteworthy colouring, perhaps.) And there’s Edward’s old dog, Rover, who has an especially hard time of it:

‘By degrees he was going blind; his eyes had turned to milky blue and he sometimes collided with the furniture. The smells he emitted while sitting at the feet of the whist-players became steadily more redolent of putrefaction. Like the Major, Rover had always enjoyed trotting from one room to another, prowling the corridors on this floor or that. But now, whenever he ventured up the stairs to nose around the upper storeys, as likely as not he would be set upon by an implacable horde of cats and chased up and down the corridors to the brink of exhaustion. More than once the Major found him, wheezing and spent, tumbling in terror down a flight of stairs from some shadowy menace on the landing above. Soon he got into the habit of growling whenever he saw a shadow. Then, as the shadows gathered with his progressively failing sight, he would rouse himself and bark fearfully even in the broadest of daylight, gripped by remorseless nightmares. Day by day, no matter how wide he opened his eyes, the cat-filled darkness continued to creep a little closer.’

There’s another elderly dog in Farrell’s later novel The Singapore Grip — an elderly spaniel who is nicknamed ‘The Human Condition’. The irony there is a bit less subtle, but the implication is equally bleak. By the end of this novel Edward and the Major will both be reduced to growling at shadows, each in their own way. But perhaps the Major has more in common with the deserted pet rabbit who has been left to fend for himself in the grounds of the hotel: 

‘…Old and fat, it had been partly tamed by the twins when they were small children. They had lost interest, of course, as they grew older, and no longer remembered to feed it. The rabbit, however, had not forgotten the halcyon days of carrots and dandelion leaves. Thinner and thinner as time went by, it had nevertheless continued to haunt the fringes of the wood like a forsaken lover…’

The fourth volume of Proust’s great work is alternately a chore and a pleasure. It’s relatively focussed compared to what has come before, in that one could quickly jot down a list of themes, motifs and preoccupations that occur here. But much like the third volume, there are extended sequences that serve no purpose at all other than to act as background music. I think it would be hard to argue with Proust, as one might with some novelists, that every line is equally sacred; there is a great deal of material here intended as a sort of playing for time, intended to suggest a sense of weight that isn’t always there. And that’s all right, though it takes some getting used to. It brings with it the sense of the interminable that lurks behind the everyday. Life can seem very long sometimes. Even (especially) when we are supposed to be enjoying ourselves. But before we know it the book is over and we are left thumbing back through the pages, searching for a few lines of something half-remembered that seemed so special at the time. 

As the title might suggest, homosexuality is one of the key preoccupations of the narrator throughout this instalment. It opens with an effective outing, albeit one which we might have suspected from the previous novels: M. Charlus, who so memorably exploded with rage at the end of the last book, is gay, and is carrying on affairs with a whole variety of different men. The book describes his life with a sort of superficial fascination, and follows him from time to time; to the narrator, the life of an ‘invert’ might as well be that of an alien being. But the narrator’s attitude for the most part is one of amused tolerance rather than distaste — quite different, it turns out, to his feelings about gay women, which are altogether more stark. 

After another one of those endless party sequences the book takes us back to Balbec, where we spent so much time with his grandmother back in the second volume. He’s back in the same room in the same hotel, which is cause for much nostalgic recollection. Many of the same characters are present, as is Albertine; she and the narrator are still in an on-and-off relationship, though he seems reticent. She has lost the glow she once had, but he still appreciates the physical aspects of her company. (This is putting it kindly.)

To a reader today, he probably seems like a bit of a swine. But there is something about Proust in general that allows us to suspend judgement. It is as though everything is happening in a time and a place very far away. Everything is filtered through a deep haze of recollection; above all there is a sense that this is a story being told. Everything seems entirely unreal. This sense of dictation is more pronounced here than in most novels, where the narrator is either omniscient or simply interfering. Somehow there is here the sense of conversation, even though one half is missing. For the most part the book anticipates our critique and contorts itself accordingly. 

Proust is not always an easy companion. He can be funny; there’s a good running joke here about the narrator’s infatuation with the maid of one Mme Putbus, provoked only by a passing mention by his rakish friend Saint Loup. (I feel sure that ‘Putbus’ is intended to sound just as silly in French as it does in English.) But these books are not exciting. We need not pretend that reading them is a constant stream of delight. The defining tone is that sense of the over-sustained, of the strained, of an endless nothing stretching before us in an eternal youth, until one day — 

All that is entirely characteristic. In a very real sense it’s extraordinary that this book still exists for us to read at all. It seems inconceivable that anyone might have thought it commercially fit to publish (and this is before one gets to the contemporaneous arguments about obscenity; this volume flies fairly close to the sun in that regard). It is long and often it is quite boring. Of course it is often very beautiful, and the beautiful passages are easily quoted at length. But it is harder to know what to think of the moments in which next to nothing is happening.