The Lone Caner

“Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.”

So goes the introduction to perhaps the iconic hero of all Sword and Sorcery tales, themselves a subset – or bastard cousin – of the heroic fantasy genre. Is there a man alive who has not at some point heard of Conan the Cimmerian? Or seen the vivid paintings of Frank Frazetta and been transported into the mystical and legendary kingdoms of Hyboria? In penning these tales of mythical times long past, Robert E. Howard created one of the great characters of modern American fiction, and one I have returned to time and time again when the weighty tomes of non-fiction or the effort to come to grips with some intellectually subtle point of a Booker Prize contender simply becomes too much for me. Conan hearkens back to the dime novels and penny dreadfuls of the disreputable past, reeks of cheap print on cheaper paper, and redolent of a black and white time when unsentimental heroes talked tough and cracked wise. Sure Burroughs created Tarzan earlier, L’Amour the Sacketts later, and Dashiell Hammett , Raymond Chandler and John M Cain also wrote tough tales of pulp: but among them all coils Howard.

Robert E. Howard, who committed suicide at the age of thirty, wrote some eighteen stories of varying lengths about Conan during his lifetime (along with a huge volume of general pulp magazine fiction covering all fields and genres), most of which were published in Weird Tales; eight others were pieced together from his complete and incomplete papers after his death, and published posthumously. L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter adapted Howard’s notes and outlines to add another four complete stories and a few pastiches, while other authors as varied as Robert Jordan and Poul Anderson have added another fifty or so to the body of work: but the core of it all remains the eighteen Howard himself wrote. These are the backbone of the ten paperback volumes that document most of Conan’s life, from the first “Conan” where he is eighteen or so, to “Conan the Avenger,” the tenth, where he is in his mid forties, King of Aquilonia, and has a wife and son.

Howard remarked in one his letters that he preferred to write about straightforward heroes with muscles, not brains. His reasoning had a sort of charming simplicity to it: in a jam, nobody expected them to think their way out of things – they just hacked, slashed, brawled or shot their way out of trouble (and all his other heroes – Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane, King Kull, Turlogh O’Brien – followed this general trend). In the highly mythological world of Hyboria, all men were cast in a sort of stark relief, with simple, strong characteristics, and all women were curvaceous, beautiful and not at all meek. The impact of Howard’s virile, magic-infested creation was like a blast of colour in a black and white world, and let’s face it: Tolkien might have written about noble sylvan elves in gentle northern climes, but it’s a subtle wine compared to the savage red bouquet of Hyboria’s realism. This kind of writing marries the colour and dash of historical romance fiction with the atavistic supernatural thrills of the weird, occult or ghost story. In short, it’s escapism at its best.

“Conan the Warrior” the seventh book in the cycle, takes place when Conan is in his mid- to late-thirties, and the three novellas in it are called “Red Nails”, “Jewels of Gwahlur” and “Beyond the Black River”. At this stage in his career, Conan had already been a freebooter, a pirate, a mercenary, gained the name “Amra” and seen much of the world. Howard himself wrote these three, and for my money, they are among the best he ever did: “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” and “Queen of the Black Coast” are also in that exalted company, but in separate books, and so I have selected this trio as an introduction to Howard and his Cimmerian.

“Red Nails” stands as the most evocative of the three, with Conan and Valeria of the Red Brotherhood escaping a monster in a forest to come upon a massive, all-enclosed stone city inhabited by the remnants of two warring peoples, who hammer one red nail into a massive ebony column for each enemy they kill. The arrival of Conan and Valeria tips the balance decisively towards one of the two dying tribes, yet friendship, betrayal, lust, sorcery, action and dark magic all have their turn on this tautly written tale.

After parting company with Valeria (the stories are roughly chronological), Conan heads to the jungle to raid a legendary treasure city of Gwahlur (hidden inside the caldera of an extinct volcano), but finds more than he bargained for when the priests who live there are slaughtered by strange beasts and Conan barely makes it out alive.

Lastly, Conan heads to the pictish frontier along the Black River, just as the tribes unite and boil over the border to massacre all the Aquilonian settlers on the Bossonian marches, under their mad sorcerer Zogar Sag. If “Red Nails” had a sense of time and place in the darkened stone-covered city that was unique and vibrant, “Beyond the Black River” is the best short novel of forest war and magic I’ve ever read, with strong pacing and fast action that never loses or confuses its way.

It’s a credit to the strength of Howard’s writing that after a bit one can tell which is his work and which is done by others. Nothing Sprague de Camp wrote in his reworking of later stories comes even close to Howard. Consider this passage from “Red Nails” – Olmec was as tall as Conan, and heavier; but there was something repellent about the Tlazitlan, something abysmal and monstrous that contrasted unfavourably with the clean-cut compact hardness of the Cimmerian….if Conan was a figure out of the dawn of time, Olmec was a shambling somber shape out of the darkness of time’s pre-dawn. Or this one: In the cold, loveless and altogether hideous life of the Tecuhltli, his admiration and affection for the invaders from the outer world formed a warm, human oasis that constituted a tie which connected him with a more natural humanity totally lacking in his fellows, whose only emotions were hate, lust and the urge to sadistic cruelty. This is pulp fiction at its best: closely worded descriptions of appearance and motivation, stark identity and basic emotions. And yet I defy anyone to read any of these stories and not admit how vibrant and rich in imagery they are. How strong and direct when compared against the more subtle offerings to which we are accustomed.

And this is not all. If they had been merely thrilling reads – which they are – I wouldn’t have bothered putting the work up for consideration. But Howard’s work presaged much else in modern literature and drew from a well-established wellspring of past tribal lore. Conan is the archetype of the Lone Hero – almost a Nietzschean superman – scattered throughout mankind’s oldest legends, and can be found in much of present day fiction: in Conan we see shades of Hondo and Jason Bourne, of The Road Warrior, the Hardened Street Cop, or the Solitary Soldier on the field of battle. He’s Audie Murphy with a sword.

In “Jewels” one can sense Michael Crichton’s “Congo;” “Black River” is really a rewritten western of the kind John Ford would make popular in his films and Louis L’Amour in his novels. And the darkness of Howard’s magic and sorcery has echoes of Lovecraftian horror: indeed, the two were correspondents, and some argue that the darkly beautiful fiction of the Cthulu mythos has its origins in Conan (though the reverse has also been posited and that Conan’s Hyboria is a subset of Lovecraft’s more insanely imagined worlds). And from there, a straight line can be drawn into “Xena”, Dungeons and Dragons, Warcraft, “Wizard’s First Rule,” and Stephen King.

Lastly, attention should be drawn to Frank Frazetta, whose dark and savagely iconic paintings of the sword and sorcery genre practically redefined fantasy art as we know it (The Legend of Zelda computer game explicitly named Frazetta’s Conan work as an inspiration) and took residence in our imaginations of such places: no elves and dwarves and green dales here, but shambling horrors, beautiful women and ferocious large-thewed men, in bloody battle with sharp glittering weapons under dark stone towers of crumbling and ruined civilizations.

How one crazy young Texan writing for a pulp magazine during the Depression could so completely influence an entire literary genre and have an impact decades hence in fields not imagined in his day is not something about which I can hazard a guess. All I know is that the cables stretching from his stories to these times are there, and in this one book of three superlative tales one can still find them, tautly vibrating and calling us in with their magic.

Dick Francis became a more known quantity in American letters in the last decade or so – one saw his newest offerings on store shelves presented front and center quite often, and they became plumper over the years – but for my money, I’ve always admired and loved his earlier, shorter and tighter works, and have, over the last twenty years or so, picked up most of them. This is in spite of the fact that his name still raises an interrogative eyebrow in most cases when I bring it up: Dick who?

Francis is perhaps better known in Britain than here, and more among older folks than today’s ADD younger crowd. A former jockey – he went professional in 1948 and retired in 1957 – he won his share of races (350 of them), rode for the Queen Mother, and in the 1953/1954 season was Champion Jockey. He began writing immediately after his retirement, a non-fiction book called “The Sport of Queens” which led to him being given a post as a racing correspondent in the Sunday Express newspaper; his first thriller in a long line came in 1962, and he never stopped until his death in 2010 at the ripe old age of 90.

Unlike many prolific authors who try to vary their output, characters, and settings, in Francis’s work there is an aura of similarity about all his protagonists and their milieu, no matter where the stories are placed or what the crime is (for he is above all, a crime writer). Consider: his characters are almost always involved, peripherally or otherwise, with horses, and usually in racing. Just about every story I’ve read is written in the first person, by a nondescript, in-control individual who may or may not be an ex-jockey, is emotionally repressed but has a rich interior life and dreams, and who is brought out of his shell by a crime, a friend, or a woman as a romantic interest (or all of them). They are all brave, unassuming, sensible and above all, competent. If they were fatter, one might be forgiven for thinking that his heroes are modern-day hobbits.

If this sounds boring and “same” – come on, you might be saying, how often can anyone write about the ponies without getting lazy or repetitive? — well, you really need to go through a few of his books, because after a bit they kind of grow on you, like familiar vintages from different years, or new expressions of much-loved whiskies where just enough is tweaked to make it a whole new experience. Throughout the novels you get a sense of a genuine love for and knowledge about, horses. It’s more felt around the corners than seen head on, something sensed and perhaps smelled but never precisely articulated. It’s in small asides, like how horses are cared for, how punters behave, what bookmakers do, how owners and jockeys and Stewards interact. It’s a window into a different kind of profession entirely, as seen from the inside. The beauty about his early novels is how well they present this — not written by someone who has done his research, but by someone who has actually been in the business of equines. And look at how short and taut they are (much like a jockey, really): “Knock Down” (1974) is a concise 188 pages and so is “Smokescreen”, written three years earlier (neither of these is on my list of four to discuss, but I had them in front of me so it saved me getting up to check the others).

Of all these early novels, four stand out as my favourites: “Odds Against” (1965), “Flying Finish” (1966), “Blood Sport” (1967) and “Rat Race” (1970). Yes there are others – certainly there are others – but these are the ones I’ve picked. These are the ones I reread.

“Odds Against” introduced the ex-jockey turned private dick Sid Halley, who was to star in three subsequent novels. Possessing a crippled arm, a dead horse-racing career and no particular desire to do anything or get closer to anyone, Halley takes on a case in quintessential noir-fashion (Phillip Marlowe comes to mind, but not Sam Spade); and in the people he meets during his investigation, he learns to pick up the pieces of a broken life. While solving the case. (Of course he solves the case, come on).

I really loved “Flying Finish” (1966), which is about a poor nobleman appropriately named Henry Grey, who works in a transportation agency that ships horses around Europe. As the plot thickens and people disappear, Grey begins to understand that more is being shipped besides bloodstock. Also memorable for two top-notch villains, the low-key and capable mastermind, and a pitch-perfect homicidal assassin named Billy. And I can’t leave out the romantic interest, an Italian stewardess who smuggles contraceptive pills on the sly (don’t ask).

“Blood Sport” (1967) took the genre in a different direction by presenting us with suicidal spy-catcher Gene Hawkins (he sleeps with a Luger under his pillow), who is recruited by his boss to go find a missing racehorse in America. It starts out hardboiled but doesn’t stay that way, and while I liked the story, I was particularly moved by the brief and almost tender description of how Gene (in that quietly undemonstrative fashion so characteristic of Francis’s work) knows he loves his boss’s daughter, but also knows he is wrong for her and tries to gently push her away.

And I took great pleasure in the disgraced, divorced ex-airline pilot now flying small charter planes from horse-racing meet to horse-racing meet in “Rat Race” (1970). In spite of himself, Matt Shore makes friends with a champion jockey, gets involved with his sister and stumbles across a nefarious insurance scheme which nearly kills her and later, him. Like Halley, Matt learns to live again through opening up to others, which makes the quiet moments he has with Julian’s sister simple, unassuming and a pleasure to read.

That’s a quality I really like in the Dick Francis novels: that deadpan, clipped conversational style that teeters on the edge of, but never quite falls into, the rhythms of pulp fiction. It’s concise, it’s clear, and there’s no waste anywhere. Even the dialogue is like that:

“You’re bastard,” she said.

“Mmm.”

See what I mean? When a writer uses the bare minimum of words necessary to carry the plot and sort out the dialogue, you find yourself paying rather more attention than, say, to whole paragraphs of a Stephen King tome. Some may decry this terse, almost unemotional style and sigh about its similarity from one book to another – for me, however, it works. Oh admittedly, characterization is not always the best – the tough but damaged heroes and their dry mannerisms and taciturn speech have a way of wearing out their welcome after a while – and in a couple hundred pages you won’t get War & Peace, for sure.

You just have to think of these earlier, crisper novels as train fodder…something nourishing and gripping to read on a short train journey. Small, bite-sized horse McNuggets about mostly small, bite-sized men who get involved in criminal matters, are battered and thrown about a whole lot, but always manage to get back up and gamely battle on. There may not be a life lesson in that, but there’s sure a lot of fun.

Wilfred Thesiger, who died in 2003, was the last of the old land explorers, whose likes included Burton, Speke, Younghusband, Lawrence, Connolly, Hedin, Amundsen, and stretched as far back as Marco Polo. Fluent in Arabic and French Thesiger was the first European to cross and extensively map the dreaded Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia, and wrote acclaimed travelogues of now-vanished times in the middle east, and the Marsh Arabs of Iraq. An unashamed Arabist, he loved the great empty silences of the desert, and the nomadic culture of the Bedu; he much preferred to travel and live the way they did, and he despised the modern era of travel where all hardship was erased, and man could not longer test himself against the land he sought to describe and explain.

“Arabian Sands” which Thesiger published in 1959, is one of the great works of travel literature. It stands alongside “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” and the works of Sir Richard Burton (not the actor), Marco Polo or Ibn Battuttah, and the old victorian travellers of their day who shared the characteristic of describing not only the journey, but everything they saw on and experienced on it: peoples, customs, flora and fauna, geographical details…a sort of holistic experience that today is rarely found outside of fictional accounts (though I should single out Colin Thurbon’s work, or that of Thor Heyerdahl, and those others who go into the the Third World to attempt to achieve something singular and individual). If I were to name a modern equivalent – which has both greater and lesser value – it would be the Lonely Planet series, though this is not strictly comparable since these travelogues serve a different purpose.

“Arabian Sands” is, like “Seven Pillars”, part autobiography, part travelogue, part adventure story and part an account of various explorations Thesiger did in Abyssinia, and his years of being a civil servant in the Sudan Political Service. Thesiger did not appreciate the civilized norms of the service, and ensured his own postings to more remote areas. After the war, having been inspired by the exploits of Bertram Thomas and St. John Philby who had both crossed Arabia in the north, he resolved to try exploring and mapping the area of the Rub al Khali himself, not least because no European had ever done it. The heart of this book describes his adventures in the Empty Quarter, the vast sands which covered the Southern part of Saudia Arabia, the place where even today the maps read, “Border Undefined.” The first crossing was 1946-47. Wilfred Thesiger persuaded Doctor Uvarov of the Locust Research Center in London to allow him to return to Oman and the Empty Quarter in order to map the area.

The book describes in detail Thesiger’s experiences with the Bedu, his opinions of them, their habits and lives and customs, and how he longed to be part of their culture. And how, as he travelled with them, he was eventually accepted: there’s more than a whiff of “Avatar” or “Dances With Wolves” in this narration. But over and above the autobiographical details, what we really get is the description of a whole way of life that no longer exists. The existence of the desert Bedu, even then under threat from rapid modernization based on oil, is evoked in prose that is both Kiplingesque and nostalgic. Certainly Thesiger had a hankering for male camaraderie and, like many Orientalists, a rather odd attitude towards sexuality for the time; he did not find the wells of his soul filled with water from his own civilization, and found it elsewhere. It is this blend of honesty, clarity of prose and evocation od worlds gone, which give Thesiger’s books their power.

I’ve read Sven Hedin’s accounts of his trips in Central Asia, as well as some of Younghusband’s work, and that of Burton, Livingstone and Aurel Stein: these explorers all shared a blend of craziness and chutzpah that got them past many hurdles in strange places; however for the most part, they went with expeditions and equipment, all the trappings of their culture. Thesiger, like Lawrence, is more of an individualist, sometimes adhering to a code more closely seen as fascist or hero-worshipping, someone who wanted to sink himself into a different culture that did live and survive in the places he wanted to explore. Now to some extent, Thesiger’s vision of man the explorer against the unknown is a classicist and romantic one, more redolent of Rousseau than Hobbes: but the kind of life of manly hardship he extols was even then a vanishing one, and is best appreciated by those who have an option to turn their backs temporarily on a more luxurious lifestyle. These days, in an interconnected, always-on microculture where gender roles are blurred and the “old ways” are seen in a misty, traditionalist haze of nostalgia, some readers might look back at a man like Thesiger and sigh enviously.

“Arabian Sands” reminds us that civilization has its price. The world can support over six billion people but the tag on that is a perhaps more elemental way of life being given up for creature comforts and delicate parsings of justice and law; of fantastical, even obscene aspects of culture, style, fashion, media and privacy. Many people will read Thesiger’s work and either long for a simpler time when matters stood more clear, or despise it for its simplicity and extolling of manly virtues from a different era: I am not one of either of these camps, but I have lived in many parts of the world and travelled to many more remote corners of it, and, aside from my appreciation for the beauty of Thesiger’s writing, I also fully understand the siren power of its call.

The other day I was having a spirited discussion with a friend of mine in Toronto. He cautiously started a sentence: “The fall of Constantinople in the 16^th century…”

“1453.” I said

He gave me a doubtful look. It’s not one of those facts you expect a half drunk guest to have at his fingertips, and I kinda feel for him there. It was sort of unexpected. “Are you sure?”

“1453, April to May, when the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet the 2^nd laid siege to the city, then took it by storm. It marked the end of the Byzantine empire and the flood of émigrés to western Europe was supposed to have helped fuel the Rennaisance.” And I buffed my nails complacently, had some more of the excellent rum I was filching from his stocks, and smiled like a cherub.

It takes more than guts to tackle some of the tomes in my library: it requires a genuine love for good writing as well as an interest in the world. By carefully parsing that sentence and the conversation above, you may gather that I’m not talking about fiction, but histories. I’ve got quite a few that handily exceed a thousand pages, and can be comfortably used to serve as foundation stones of your new house: A History of the World by J. M. Roberts, for one, and Europe: A History, for another. It was Europe that informed the discussion above.

Much of the blame (or credit, depending how you see it) for the accumulation of such massive works that take weeks, if not months, to get through, belongs to mon pere, who early on in my life suggested I never let a history class pass me by. Years – decades! – later, I still follow this dictum. And of all the works of the human past I have read, Europe: A History by Norman Davies, stands out as one of the most original, complete and readable presentations in the genre. Yes it’s long, yes it is daunting, but as with all well written works, treasures are there for the tireless reader who perseveres.

Three things make Europe stand apart from the herd. The first is the fact that here, for one of the few times I’ve ever seen, an author takes the time to go beyond the rather timid interpretations of what and where Europe actually is. Not limiting himself to those places where barbarians invaded – Britain, France, Germany plus a few extras — Davies remarks “For some reason it has been the fashion among some historians to minimize the impact of the Magyars. All this means is that the Magyars did not reach Cambridge.” And so he takes for his canvas northern, southern, eastern and western Europe…the continent in totality. What in effect this means is that previously ignored portions of the continent (or those that are the subject of specialist books on their own that do not integrate them into the larger canvas) are given equal weight with the more commonly written about countries.

Secondly, there is the oddity and charm of the “inserts” as I call them. These are boxes, bordered small essays, on one particulary tiny detail that is of interest in the period he is discussing, like time capsules. One describes why cheeses are similar across Europe; another discusses the origins of the word “jeans”, and yet another talks about the history of printing. These inserts help break up the admittedly monolithic text and keeps the narrative flow quirky and interesting. In fact, if you ignore the text and just read the three hundred plus inserts, that alone (in sheer informational and entertainment value) might justify a read of the book.

Lastly there’s the quality of the writing. Davies has a subtly ironic and quietly humourous style that is actually very readable (as the above remark on the Magyars should illustrate). He tends to take the overview, discussing mass movements, ideas, trends, and then delve in here and there for something more detailed. He avoids the bias of “western civilization” in the central portion (giving equal weight to other parts of Europe), covers the prehistory to the fall of the Soviet Union in twelve dense chapters, but for all that volume, it’s an entertaining read, however limited in its own way, and the prose helps the mass go down. I may be a bit strange this way, but I’ve read it twice so far, and it looks like a reread is in the cards this or next year.

No one book, no matter how weighty or long, can possibly cover the entirety of the history of such a large area, over such a long period of time, without getting bogged down in minutae or detail or length. That Davies has done as much as he has, is astonishing in itself, but he himself remarks that it’s an overview, and not much primary research was required. The book is best used as a sort of central point to gather all threads of other more detailed works into a cohesive whole, maybe as a research tool for students.

Professor Davies is a leading English historian who made his reputation with the book God’s Playground (1981) where he comprehensively reviewed Polish history (he studied in Poland and his doctoral dissertation was about the Polish-Soviet war). He has written much about Poland, also wrote The Isles: A History, much in the same vein as Europe, with numerous capsules dotting his pages and consistently writes for the mass media. His interpretation of the Holocaust has been criticized by some (this led to Stanford controversially refusing him a tenured position in 1986).

At 1400 pages and weighing in at 1.6kg (3.5lbs) Europe: A History is absolutely not for the faint of heart: but those who delve into its depths and brave its scope, will surely not be disappointed…always assuming they ever get to the end. I’ve dived into the deep ocean of Davies’s work twice now, and have always emerged months later, dripping, exhausted and tired, but also enervated, and always educated by some new thing I overlooked the last time. It may not be your thing, but what the hell, I highly recommend it anyway. You may only want to read the capsules, or you may brave the whole book, but whatever you read, you will absolutely come out with more than you went in with.

I don’t know of anyone from my generation who did not at least hear of Doom. This one game – first released in 1993 – was the single most eagerly awaited offering of any software company to that time, was a landmark event that crashed the servers of the hosting BBS one minute after the midnight “opening”, and was reputedly the second most common reason quoted for the loss of productivity in offices worldwide (solitaire being the first).

As a working pro who corrupted every team of auditors for three years into playing deathmatch games after hours in our darkened offices, I can testify to that game’s addiction, adrenaline pumping action and (for its time) absolutely stunning graphics in a fully realized, spatially coherent 3d world. It went beyond the trials of its zany predecessor Wolfenstein, made shareware common, game software respectable and launched a thousand coders into the gameworld. Even its terms have entered the common speech: Deathmatch, BFG, frag, First Person Shooter…Doom started a tidal wave in popular techno-culture that is with us still.

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture seeks to go behind the scenes and trace the origins and development of the geniuses behind the game: John Romero and John Carmack . They were two guys barely out of their teens, but had already amassed experience coding games, and were the first (together) to create games that scrolled smoothly from side to side. The success they had with one of these – Commander Keene – led to another game which I obsessively played, Wolfenstein (long range thanks to John, who provided the 1.44mb diskettes which loaded it onto my computers all those years ago), that also enjoyed considerable popularity.

While Romero was the ideas man, it was Carmack who was the programmer who created the realistic 3d modelling engine that gave the games their realism and quasi-3d feel.

And then of course, there came Doom.

The book is a relatively short read at 300 pages, and while it covers the history of the founders, it also is a sort of introduction to the programming subculture made famous years later by the Google corporate ethos. A bunch of guys simply got together with some great ideas, programmed like crazy for weeks on end, living like hermits on pop and pizza and in the process created not only fantastic games but charted a course which all first person shooters subsequently followed. MoD discusses the role of the two egocentric and driven founders of id Software, the way they came up with ideas, the programming of the 3d engine that underlay Doom, and intersperses the lot with witty anecdotes about matters as varied as the reason for naming WAD files as such, what a BFG is, how the shareware concept evolved and the origin of the word Deathmatch.

As with all supernovas, things had to come to an end. Creative differences led to a dissolution of the friendship and business association between the two men and the team they had built up: MoD discusses this frankly and in surprising detail. In fact, the book could be seen as a sort of primer not only of programmers’ secret lives, but on how tech startups start great, develop some kind of killer-app, and then either fly high or flame out. It doesn’t stop with Doom either, but continues into the new century and gives weight to subsequent events like the development of Quake, and where the founders are now (well…then: it was published in 2003).

The reason I post this review is because I not only loved the game and am a bona fide trivia- and history nut, but because it is a remarkably tense, tight and interesting read (especially if the subject matter appeals to you). The chapters on how they posted the first shareware version on the University of Wisconsin – Madison server in December 1993, opened the file up for download at midnight and crashed one minute later due to overload; the section on how amazing the reception was, both by the gaming community and average office Joes the world over; and the popularity of Deathmatch…they are well written, well paced and a wonderfully fun read.

In comparison with the white-hot writing style portrayed in this short book, I found “The Ultimate History of Video Games” which should have been a great piece of work, simply plodding, pedestrian and plain boring. No such problems afflict Masters of Doom, and if you have an affinity and sneaking affection for behind-the-scenes work of software (games!) publication, then this book describing the early years of the industry will not disappoint.

What an enormous, sprawling, wide-ranging, dense, tragic, magisterial narrative has Robert Fisk spun out of his journalistic experiences. I have read Edward Said’s works on the Middle East, Huntigndon’s “Clash of Civilizations,” and passed through many histories of that troubled part of the world, but it is my considered opinion that this outcome of thirty years’ reporting there is in a class by itself. Personal, compelling, well-researched and passionately written, it is on a par with “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” for unbridled emotional and intellectual impact.

Fisk’s writing is a tour of the modern history of the middle east (although he digresses to other points from time to time). He writes about his interviews with Osama bin Laden, the Armenian genocide (it was the Congressional recognition of this in 2010 that made me go back to the book), the Algerian civil war, and 20th century histories of Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Through it all you get the sense of his outrage at how, as the British Empire waned and shrank and the American one rose, whole populations were manipulated, used, killed and moved as pawns across a strategic board, with fear and hysteria as coercive weapons. Nowhere is this more clear than in the account of the Iraqi invasion and how, by deliberately manipulated intelligence and populations whipped into war frenzies of hatred and revenge, the Western Powers commandeered the oil in Iraq, and labelled anyone who disagreed as being on the side of the “terrorists.”

This brief account of the book does little justice to the sweeping arc of Fisk’s accounts of the Middle East. Yes it’s a weighty read, and yes, it’s long – a book covering this much history can hardly be anything else. But his personalized writing style and in-place observations of the events that shaped the region for over a century are a valuable counterpoint to the drier historical tomes written by more erudite historians, and there’s no denying is research, or his passion for the innocent dead. Indeed, it is these accounts that inflate the book (a fact bemoaned by many). Fisks acts as a speaker for the dead, presuming to ask why. And if he writes stridently and with too many words, I can only recall the Emperor’s whine to Mozart about too many notes. And Mozart’s reply…”Which ones should I cut?”

I reiterate that if history is not your thing, this book won’t do much for you. But as year passes year and we are no closer to a Middle East peace, and nations continue to go to war in that region, then perhaps a book like this, unashamedly partisan and mourning the waste, is in itself, perhaps, a good thing to take hold of and read through, if only just once.

The Flood Tablet

Tablet XI, Column i, The Epic of Gilgamesh

Aside from historical and biblical scholars, not many people know about The Epic of Gilgamesh, though my research suggests that the character seems to be somewhat of a subterrannean cultural icon and is referenced quite often in the arts; those that do know the epic, came to it not as a classic in its own right but because they heard or read that it provided one of the first independent written records of The Flood (a fact not as startling as it may seem, since many creation myths from around the world have a destruction of man by gods in a titanic cataclysm as one the central theses).

But like Moll Flanders, the Ramayana, Huck Finn or The Tale of Genji, it shares a unique genealogy: it is among the first of its kind, if not the first. It may be the oldest tale ever written, and the earliest work of literature known to man.

The Epic is a Mesopotamian myth; it is a series of short episodic poems from the proto-kingdom of Sumer, which flourished around four thousand years ago (divorce and property rights were developed here, for the trivia nuts reading this). It describes the adventures of the King of Uruk, and his best friend Enkidu (in this it parallels the Kyrgyz hero-myth of Manas and his best friend Almanbet, though the legends are not strictly comparable), and is inscribed on twelve stone tablets found at the city of Nineveh, once part of Babylon, in 1849. Various interpretations suggest that the oldest part of the tale is from Sumer itself, but later Akkaddian additions created the famous 12 cuneiform tablets which form the basis of most modern translations.

In the first part of the Epic, Gilgamesh is a king, two thirds god, one third man, who oppresses the citizens of Uruk by – among other things – indulging himself in the droit de siegneur (the “prima nocte” made famous by Braveheart). They cry out to the gods, whose create a primitive man of the same power as Gilgamesh; he is Enkidu, covered in hair and living in the wild, until found; seduction by a temple prostitute is the first step in his civilization (an interesting twist on Rousseau’s thesis that it is civilization that corrupts the Eden-like state of primitive man). He goes to Uruk to confront Gilgamesh and after a titanic battle, they become friends

The next tablets tell the various adventures the two friends have: the slaying of the demi-god Humbaba; the encounter with the goddess Ishtar after returning to Uruk, and Gilgamesh’s refusal of her advances (Ishtar is part of the the prototypical triumvirate of elder gods, corresponding to the Sumerian Innana, Egyptian Isis, semitic Astarte…and the (downgraded) greek and roman goddess of love); her petulant plea to her father Anu to avenge her humilation by sending the Bull of Heaven to wreak destruction on Uruk. The heroes slay the bull, but the gods decide one must die for this affront to heaven, and after a short illness interspersed with many vividly recounted dreams, Enkidu dies. Mad with grief, Gilgamesh seeks to find a legendary man called Utnapishtim who may be able to to provide him with the secret of immortality and of regenerating life…since he has been alive since the Great Flood.

And here we come to it. Try and imagine the impact such a statement on a four thousand year old tablet must have made on a mostly secular but still religious culture which had not yet been exposed to Darwin. The description Utnapishtim gives Gilgamesh corresponds very closely with the Flood Myth of the bible (and with many other myths in world culture, but I won’t go into that here), most particularly how one family was given advance warning to build a boat to ride out the flood, and then, after the waters began receding, released a bird to see whether it returned.

In the event, Utnapishtim instructed Gilgamesh how to find the sacred flower that provides immortality, but after Gilamesh discovers and picks it, the bloom is stolen while he bathes by….what else? A serpent. (I just love this stuff…even a modern novelist can hardly better this one)

Gilgamesh is one of those stories at the root of our memories and culture, so basic that we can’t see its murky outlines underneath our common notions of storytelling. Much like Robert Johnson’s primitive licks which whisper from under the bedrock of current rock music, Gilgamesh is one of the prototypical tales without which none of the others can be properly understood. He is the first Nietzschean superman, the most basic wandering hero like Rama, Hercules, Manas or Conan. He calls to our unconscious mental picture of a Jungian first man with correspondences in Aboriginal, Lakota, semitic, Hindu, Greek, Inca, Polynesian and shinto mythology. He is the first recorded attempt in world letters to nail down the concept in a permanent form. The epic dealt with sex, religion and flawed beings in a realistic way not found again for literally millenia, questioned dogma and the gods themselves, and told a coherent story that actually had a point (though scholars feel it is still incomplete and not all tablets have been recovered)

And for a legend this old and this dusty, it’s actually still referenced a lot in modern art and historical forms. Consider: Atlantis theorists refer to the Epic constantly as a secondary source for the Flood Myth they claim underlay the sinking of that fabled isle; Phillip Roth wrote a novel abut a baseball player Gil Gamesh, whose story arc followed the epic; it has been translated into Klingon for Star Trek fans (along with Hamlet) and been the focus of at least one episode in The Next Generation; at least three operas of that name have been written in the latter half of the 20th century; perhaps due to its oral backgrund, a variation of the legend has often been performed in theatre; and Japanese anime references it in Sword of Uruk and in Gurren Lagan (there’s this mecha called Enkidu…); even Hercules: The Legendary journeys, an American TV series, had Gilgamesh make an appearance. Think this is all? In the Final Fantasy video games, there is usually a boss called Gilgamesh and his sidekick Enkidu; in Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance, there’s a Viraxo ship named Enkidu; in Civilization IV Beyond the Sword expansion pack, the leader of the Sumerian civ is called Gilgamesh.

Joseph Campbell’s powerful work The Hero With A Thousand Faces (which helped George Lucas fashion Star Wars, by the way) probably comes closest to allowing us to understand the peculiar longevity of a character in myth mostly forgotten and rarely read. The Hero on a Quest holds a fascination for us all because it is embdedded in our subconscious, part of our race memories of a wandering past. We seek the unattainable both within and without our physical selves, seek a state of grace and strength over and beyond the mundane lives we live. Gilgamesh, strong, kingly, flawed, who lost his best friend and gained knowledge if not enlightment, speaks to that part of us that rises above the petty considerations of our world and searches for a more sublime state of mind.