My Weekly Book

Here’s my projected reading list for the next four weeks:

• Diamond Mask – Julian May
• American Gods – Neil Gaiman
• 59 Seconds: Think a little, change a lot – Richard Wiseman
• Dockers and Detectives – Ken Worpole
• The Unofficial Countryside – Richard Mabey

Diamond Mask is part of a long-term household project to get through the entire Saga of the Exiles and Galactic Milieu series which sees us in sight of the end, if not actually in the final volume yet. American Gods has been on the list (and the shelf) for ages and was brought back into focus by the Crowdsourcing reading project on Twitter, but got shunted forward a month. Richard Wiseman’s new book was going so cheap on Amazon that it was a no-brainer, really.

Perhaps the most interesting are the last two, both bought from the Newham Bookshop stall at the British Humanist Association’s recent event on Humanism, Philosophy and the Arts. Ken Worpole, author of Dockers and Detectives, was one of the speakers and we came away with both this volume and his book Last Landscapes which promises to be a fascinating look at funerary architecture and landscape design. The book mentioned here is described on its back cover as “a pioneering study of working-class reading and writing” focusing on Liverpool and the East End of London. Also picked up there was Richard Mabey’s Unofficial Countryside, about those half-forgotten places like an overgrown footpath or a patch of waste ground glimpsed from a train, where all town- and city-dwellers experience nature daily.

Should be an interesting month.

We seem to have been reading Julian May for ever. This is partly because her Saga of the Exiles and Galactic Milieu series run to quite a number of books and partly because each of those books is long in its own right. Also, the world she has created in their pages is on an operatic scale and mightily absorbing.

This includes both her speculative-fiction take on the future of an earth whose inhabitants have become psychically operant and joined with five other ‘exotic’ (or alien) races who have achieved the same, and the fate of those denizens of that world who manage to travel back aeons back into Earth’s prehistoric past. Only things don’t happen in quite that order. It’s complicated, but also very rewarding.

I say “we”. I’m privileged to have a Julian May fan handy who’s prepared to read them out loud – a lovely way to experience fiction. We’ve already done the same with the whole of the Modesty Blaise oeuvre, but he is balking at Patrick O’Brian’s 21-volume Aubrey-Maturin series of naval novels. For some reason…

The four-volume Saga of the Exiles was a pleasure to read. (Given that it encompasses themes like genocide, slavery and reproductive coercion this is necessarily a somewhat qualified statement.) Next came Intervention, the first of the Galactic Milieu books, which bridges every scale from intimate personal relationships to global power struggles and galactic politics, and includes characters ranging from idealistic visionaries wanting to secure the future of the human race to psychopathic maniacs struggling desperately to destroy it. (I should note here for enthusiasts that I’m talking about a big, fat, spine-broken copy of Intervention that includes both the Surveillance and Metaconcert sections rather than splitting them off into separate novels.) So that’s quite an undertaking, since it’s not the most cohesive work of fiction ever written, and I must admit we did have to pace ourselves.

Now we are out the other side and we’re back with our old friend and guide Uncle Rogi, the boozy, misanthropic, bloody-minded, foul-mouthed Franco-American anti-hero of the whole 20-21st century saga, a man cursed by a complex of immortality genes to witness the progression of his sizeable Catholic Remillard clan from backwoods Canadian immigrants and New England lumbermill labourers to rulers of the galaxy by way of incest, murder, alliance-building, misplaced idealism, politics on the global stage and – most importantly – the development of a set of metapsychic superpowers that makes them literally the most mentally powerful entities in existence in the whole of the Milky Way.

Of course, they do all this through a shocking degree of inbreeding thanks to the fact that nearly every operant metapsychic in North America is initially descended from Rogi’s no-good yet promiscuous and charismatic twin brother Donny. (Rogi himself is mercifully sterile after a childhood dose of the mumps.) And the family tradition of marrying cousins and even unacknowledged half-siblings really comes home to roost in Jack the Bodiless when the most powerful Remillard yet, the eponymous Jon of the title, narrowly escapes abortion in order to be born with a genetic blueprint so apparently flawed that he shouldn’t have survived out of infancy. How he does, and how his survival impacts on his extraordinary teenage sibling Marc, his powerful politician father Paul, his reserved academician grandfather Denis, his devoted several-times-grand uncle Rogi and the rest of the family is the subject of this novel.

The struggle of Jack and his supporters to get him born, at which time Galactic statutes will protect his right to medical care despite his abnormalities, and despite the reproductive crimes of his parents, constitute a satisfying thriller plot. And, continuing the tradition of both The Saga of the Exiles and Intervention, there’s a mystery at the novel’s heart. There the reader was invited (although not compelled) to work out the identities of first the mysterious Lylmik entity that rules the Galactic Milieu and then of the Fantome Famille – the ‘family ghost’ that protects and bullies Rogi in about equal measure. Those in the know can have a little chuckle here. In Jack the Bodiless we are introduced to two new malevolent and murderous entities who are too close to the dynasty for anyone’s comfort – Hydra and Fury. Hydra’s identity is not too hard to work out and is in any case revealed by the time the credits roll. Fury’s is frustratingly difficult and the mystery is not resolved until the next book in the series, Diamond Mask.

I cannot recommend that you read Jack the Bodiless. I have to instead recommend that you read the entire Saga of the Exiles and Galactic Milieu series, a considerable undertaking and one that you should only attempt if you like the space-opera genre. Although that is perhaps misleading since so much of this story takes place on an individual human and family level. It’s a bit like setting out to read everything to do with Middle Earth.

But, like everything else in life, the amount of reward you get tends to be at least related to the amount of effort you put in. One book from the end, we’re certainly reaping that.

• Internet Speculative Fiction Database: Julian May
• Yahoo Groups: Julian-May-discuss
• SF Bookcase: Julian May
• Wikiquote: Julian May

Books this post is based on:

Introducing Jungian Psychology – Robin Robertson

1992, part of the Newleaf Popular Psychology series

The Saga of the Exiles series by Julian May

Titles include The Many-Coloured Land, The Golden Torc, The Non-Born King and The Adversary. Published between 1981 and 1984 by Houghton Mifflin in the United States and Pan in the UK.

A year or so ago, I read and greatly enjoyed The Saga of the Exiles, on the recommendation of someone who had first come across them in childhood. Much more recently I became interested in Jungian psychology as one of the very few areas where science meets mysticism on terms that are not complete and utter nonsense. I read Robin Robertson’s Introducing Jungian Psychology which proved to be an excellent overview of a very complex subject. I was aware that May had reportedly written her series with reference to Jungian archetypes and I read the Robertson book with that in mind.

A basic summary of Jung’s ideas on personality types

Robertson says that Jung identified four basic components to the personality – the functions of thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. His contention was that these exist in opposed pairs, so thinking is the opposite of feeling and sensation the opposite of intuition. Each of us has one function that is our primary way of relating to the world, but is forever incapable of properly developing its opposite. So, if you are primarily a thinker you will be weak at feeling and vice versa. Secondary functions can be developed, but the inferior function never can. However, most excitingly, Jung saw what he called the “inferior function” as the gateway to the collective unconscious.

In addition each of us is either an introvert or an extravert, something which adds an extra dimension of complexity to the above system. Extraverts relate to the world through external factors such as people and situations while introverts like to have a good think about things in order to understand before acting. So, taking this into account, if you are an introverted sensate your inferior function will be extraverted intuition.

For more information on Jungian personality types click here.

This was later extrapolated into the well-known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a psychometric questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. Learn more here.

Jung and May’s characters

It occurred to me that it would be very interesting to see how the eight characters in Group Green fitted into this system. And they fitted well enough that I thought it worthwhile to write this blog post. Now, some of the group matched up very obviously, examples being Elizabeth, Claude, Aiken and Bryan. Others, such as Amerie and Stein, seemed a lot less obvious and required considerable thought. I’m not claiming to be an expert on Jung – just someone who read a few books and saw some similarities. I’m also not claiming that the attempt to match up May’s characters with the personality types is perfect or definitive in any way. But I found some of the similarities striking and interesting (thinker that I am) and I hope you will too. I also dealt with the characters as they are at the beginning of the series, especially using the descriptions of each which is used to introduce them, as they undergo considerable development in the course of four books.

If you have not read the books, you might find that one or two plot details are given away in the following, so avoid reading further if you wish to remain in complete ignorance.

With those provisos, here it is:

Extravert thinker – Elizabeth Orme

According to Robertson, the extravert thinker is a character who like rational conclusions, tidiness, order and rules by which to organise their lives. They often seek roles in life such as executives or government officials. Elizabeth, the star redactor who was in goverment service before her journey into exile, and whose arc through the series involves her coming to terms with her inferior function of feeling, is a classic extravert thinker.

Extravert feeler – Aiken Drum

Robertson seals the comparison on this one with the use of just one word: “flamboyant.” He also says that the extravert feeler is a “people person,” comfortable in any social situation and rather prone to tell people what they want to hear rather than presenting them with uncomfortable reality. They only feel fully alive when surrounded by other people and will acquire philosophies and belief systems wholesale rather than doing the hard work of sorting them out for themselves. Aiken’s arc through the book is a journey from complete irresponsibility to ultimate responsibility – something that forces him to engage with his inferior function and become more thoughtful.

Extravert intuitive – Felice Landry

Intuitives are never interested in the past or present, always what is coming next over the horizon, a characteristic personified by Felice’s pursuit of the golden torc. Felice is another person who never feels truly alive unless surrounded by others and has the extravert intuitive characteristic of picking out similarities where most would only see differences – most notably between herself and Amerie. Among many other very, very damaging aspects to Felice’s personality she is poor at dealing with life’s practicalities and, indeed, at some points during Group Green’s journey expects these things to be taken care of for her by the others while she keeps her eyes fixed on the (to her) far more interesting possibilities of the future.

Extravert sensate – Claude Majewski

The typical career for an extravert sensate is in science where these people can put their talent from drawing physical data from the world around them to its best use. Robertson also says that extravert sensates are the ultimate realists, who accept the world as it is and deal with it – as Claude accepts the death of his wife and the decision of Amerie to go into exile.

Introvert thinker – Bryan Grenfell

Introverted thinkers are far more interested with the ideas and concepts that occupy their minds than the reality of facts and people around them. And if there’s a conflict, guess which wins! A better description of Bryan’s ill-fated obsession with an idealised Mercy, one that bore little resemblance to the actual woman, is hard to imagine. With feeling as an inferior function, he also struggled to articulate his emotions. And, when presenting his thesis on the consequences of human-Tanu hybridisation, he had no concept of its practical consequences for him, only of the importance of his ideas.

Introvert feeler – Stein Olesen

This is one of the more unlikely-sounding of the psychological types, since Robertson suggests that it is almost invariably female, and a more masculine figure than Stein is hard to imagine. But, even so, the similarities are striking. Introvert feelers judge the present by comparison with the past, something Stein does constantly in his yearning for former days. They cannot articulate their feelings or easily express them – Stein experiences many humiliations and frustrations which are revealed to the reader through his internal monologue, but never expressed to those around him. Such people often appear outwardly banal or childish while possessing a profound internal depth. Robertson describes them as “the consciences of the world,” a role Stein plays in particular when trying to dissuade Felice from genocide. Perhaps most importantly, Stein’s arc through the book leads him to find a soulmate who teaches him to articulate his feelings.

Introvert intuitive – Richard Voorhees

Richard’s complete failure to live in the present is his downfall when, with his eyes fixed on the prize of a huge bonus for delivering a cargo on time, he ignores the distress calls of another ship. Before his exile his whole life has been lived in this way, a study in perpetual motion, always going forward, always seeking whatever is over the horizon. His assumption of the guise of the Flying Dutchman could not be more apposite. And that Richard is an introvert is not in dispute – until he arrives in the Pliocene his idea of fulfilling contact is the functions on his spaceship that are programmed to have human voices.

Introvert sensate – Sister Amerie Roccaro

Robertson characterises the introverted sensate as like a photographic plate soaking up information with the senses. One of our first proper views of Amerie is of her sitting silent and immobile on a hillside with Claude shortly after the death of his wife, doing exactly this to the exclusion of all else including Claude’s words to her. I struggled at first to place Amerie as an introvert, as I did Stein, since her vocation is one of the ultimate ‘people’ roles. But then I realised that part of her journey through the book is to the realisation that her vocation was misplaced and an attempt to compensate for highly traumatic events early in her life. The key is the internal processes of the character rather than the face they present to the world.

So there it is. Comments, feedback and politely-expressed contrary views are, of course, very welcome.

We’ve started this series (once again being read out loud) in an attempt to fill the hole in our reading lives opened up by the completion in March of the entire sweep of Modesty Blaise novels. Feeling daunted by the sheer scale of Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey/Maturin saga, and yet wanting something with a bit of staying power, this eight (or sometimes nine) volume science fiction epic seemed like an excellent choice – and so it has proved.

This opening volume tells the story of an ill-assorted group of humans who, weary of life on 22nd-century Earth and its colony planets, decide to make the ultimate trip west. They do this via a discovery made by a French scientist of a one-way ‘time gate’ leading to the Vosges region of France during Earth’s Pliocene epoch – six million years in the past. However Professor Guderian was acutely aware of the limitations of his discovery – the voyage through the time-gate was a one-way affair, to a fixed point in the past, and no traveller had every succeeded in getting a message back to communicate information about what lay across the threshold.

After the death of the professor his widow ran the time-gate as a commercial concern for a time, and then with an almost evangelical belief in the service she was providing. Eventually, consumed with curiosity and guilt about what lay on the other side, she made the trip herself. Now the human part of the Galactic Milieu sees the time-gate as the ideal way to get rid of its undesirables and no-one is asking questions about what fate awaits them. The first volumes in this series follow the adventures of the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ who make the journey (although in what sphere they succeed or fail, and who does the judging, I’ll leave you to find out for yourselves) and shows how they react to their new-found circumstances.

This summary, in its attempt to avoid spoilers, seriously fails to do justice to the plot of The Many-Coloured Land which, written firmly in the tradition of the best golden-age science fiction, has an imaginative scope and a richness of context that is enviable and unusual. Cover blurbs predict that it will one day attain the status of Tolkien; I suspect that it is far too unsentimental ever to earn itself that accolade. But it does have that sheer, absorbing scale combined with a jeweller’s eye for details which makes for the very best alternative universe fiction. And the setting is not foregrounded in such a way that it gets under the feet of the plot.

Really major recommendations include the ability to weave plot strands together without losing hold of any one of them; confident handling of a large cast of ensemble characters; a cogent underlying mythos; and a depth of engagement with both science and folklore that is not frequently found in contemporary fantasy or science fiction (this was published in the early 1980s). I love May’s explanation for how various recurring tropes and archetypes in western culture came to achieve their dominance, but I was also caught up in the story. The best recommendation I can give is to say that we picked up The Golden Torc, the second volume in the series, and read on more or less straight from where we had left off at the beginning of The Many-Coloured Land.