50 Book Challenge: Book 36
The Greatest Show Off Earth – Robert Rankin
Go and read it yourself. That is simply the only intelligent thing I can hope to say about this book. It is all-but-indescribable and, if I did try to describe it, it would sound so ridiculous that you’d write it off without another look. And that would be an awful shame because it is, actually, rather enjoyable if you like a certain sort of fiction, as I do. Its scope ranges from the aggressively local (think ornery devil-worshippers in a country village) to the galactic (think a conspiracy theory as to why we’ve never made contact with any other life-forms in our solar system).
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The only things I have ever come across that are remotely like it are Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. I am far from being the first person to say this: it has been pointed out that Rankin’s attempts to create a new genre called ‘far-fetched fiction’ and therefore win a shelf to himself at the bookshop have been frustrated by people lumping him in with the other two in a most uncalled-for way. Not that they are similar in any specific sense, no, not at all. And comparisons between Adams and Pratchett, and Pratchett and Rankin have been known to get on people’s nerves, not least those of the authors involved. But the three do have this in common: that a good deal of their action takes place off the planet or on a fantasy world and that at the same time they manage to be peculiarly and extraordinarily English in their characters and settings. Oh, and all three have a wonderful facility with language, too.
Readers of this book will find themselves subjected to all sorts of authorial devices to remind them of the absurdity of what they are reading. Characters discuss the running gags from time to time and occasionally take an executive decision to drop them if they are not working. The author makes the odd bracketed comment himself – you can feel him hovering over your shoulder most of the time. A man with a clipboard points out he’s got a bit of exposition pencilled in for this scene. It’s almost Brechtian in its attempt to shunt the reader out of the narrative and remind them that this is just a rather far-fetched story, dammit. Another annoying comparison with Pratchett would be the cinematic nature of some of the big set-pieces. It’s a very visual book and you can sense the camera panning across the bows of the Victorian steam-punk space liner or jump-cutting its way through the circus parade. The difference here, however, is that it feels as if the author fully intends to make the reference rather than being influenced by popular cultural mores etcetera. It’s another level of irony, knowingness and distance.
It was inevitable that I was going to have to come to terms with this author eventually, as someone with a horribly intense family connection with those districts of west London where he bases much of his work. Apparently he was once writer-in-residence at a venue where I used to work – although this was some considerable time before I was there. They couldn’t afford such luxuries by then. He has a preoccupation with a lot of my favourite subjects – alien visitations and abductions, the End Times, the apocalypse, things of that sort. This encounter was absolutely inevitable, which may be one of the reasons that I put it off for so long.
Well, here I am, reading and enjoying, this first one, at least. I have one criticism, which may prove to apply only to this book or may be turn out to true of Rankin’s work as a whole. This is by, for and about men. There a couple of minor female characters – hopelessly objectified and/or one-dimensional. And that’s your lot. Now, this is not a criticism I have ever felt it necessary to apply to either Adams or Pratchett. In Hitch-Hiker’s there are women; one of them is both an astrophysicist and a major protagonist, for God’s sake, what more could you ask for? Pratchett writes in entire matriarchal societies; seldom has an author been safer from the claim that he can’t do women. But this, for me, is uncomfortably male in its tone and outlook – the psychic equivalent of smelling like the urinals in a rugby club’s locker room. Not unlike Tom Sharpe, now I come to think of it. That’s not enough to stop me reading either this or others (or indeed Tom Sharpe), but perhaps enough to stop Rankin being elevated to my personal list of absolutely essential authors, Brentford connections and millennialists notwithstanding.
Some links:
- Wikipedia entry
- The official Rankin fan club
- H2G2 article (contains the quote about the bookshelf, I think)
- The Bookseller: Life Among the Alien Chickens
- Explaining that reference to Brecht