The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds
by H.G. Wells
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

At one point in The War of the Worlds, the protagonist runs into another survivor and they discuss plans for surviving underground as a human species in a world controlled by the Martians. It's a funny sort of post-apocalyptic novel where the apocalypse does not actually happen.

The Golden Notebook

The Golden Notebook
by Doris Lessing
read: 2014
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

I've read few books that have as much depth and as many themes as The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing's magnum opus can be viewed as feminist literature, exploration of Communist society, or the tale of one woman's inner journey. It has themes of sex, politics, race, motherhood, infidelity, and the relationship between men and women.

The metafictional elements of the novel bring the thematic components to a new level. In the introduction, Lessing writes that "fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record." The protagonist of The Golden Notebook, Anna, a writer herself, also recognizes this paradox. Unable or unwilling to publish anything after a moderate initial success, she writes in notebooks of different colors. Some of these stories feature Ella, a woman whose biography bears a strong resemblance to Anna's. Is Ella just Anna roman a clef? If so, why the veil of fiction at all? Or are the two characters different? Even Anna struggles with this: "Why a story at all - not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?"

In the titular Golden Notebook, Anna writes the story of an affair between Ella and an American, but when we see the story of Anna's affair outside of the lens of the notebooks, it plays out very differently. Is this a sign that Anna has broken from reality? Is it a sign that she's ready to write again? The layers to the fiction can be read many ways, giving the novel terrific depth.

The Island of Doctor Moreau

The Island of Doctor Moreau
by H.G. Wells
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

I saw the Val Kilmer / Marlon Brando movie when it came out in 1996. The premise - that a reclusive scientist makes a race of beast men on a remote island - makes more sense in modern times with all the advances we've made in genetic engineering than it did 100 years prior when Wells wrote the novel. Wells' Moreau employs not genetic engineering but vivisection techniques: cutting up animals, grafting on parts, and physically transforming animals into man via surgery. This is a lot less realistic than genetic engineering, but it is a lot more horrifying.

The Time Machine

The Time Machine
by H.G. Wells
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

I guess you can't write a novel about the future without making it some kind of political commentary, and The Time Machine is no exception. Wells' Time Traveler finds himself in the year 800000-something, and humanity has splintered, with a weak, stupid race living indolent communal lives above the earth while an underground race of cannibals toils for them. Wells paints this in a Marxist light:

At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position.

He goes on to lament that the "human intellect ... had committed suicide." The novels takes the pessimistic view that man's progress "must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end." 

I, Claudius

I, Claudius
by Robert Graves
read: 2014
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #14, James Tait Black Prize

It's hard to read Graves' characterization of Caligula and not think George R. R. Martin drew from it heavily in his depiction of King Joffrey. The two share their young age, cruelty, and inflated sense of importance. A Song of Ice and Fire owes a lot from I, Claudius - the story brims with plots and conspiracies, assassinations, strategic marriages, affairs, incest, murder, war, and intrigue. It was a lot more fun and readable than I expected a book that's 80 years old (and is written about things happening 2000 years ago) to be.

There are some interesting meta-textual elements to the novel. The story is written as autobiography. Claudius writes:

This is a confidential history. but who, it may be asked, are my confidants? My answer is: it is addressed to posterity.

There's an early argument between historians Pollio and Livy about the proper way to write history. Pollio holds the truth above all else, eschewing the easy or dramatic narrative for the way things really happened. Livy is willing to take more poetic license, saying, "If I come across two versions of the same episode I choose the one nearest my theme." The young Claudius sides with Pollio, yet I, Claudius is written in Livy's style. This is explained late in the story, with the idea that Claudius gains access to the empire's "secret archives." "Even the mature historian's privilege of setting forth conversations of which he knows only the gist is one that I have availed myself of hardly at all." Is Graves winking at us here?

The Naked and the Dead

The Naked and the Dead
by Norman Mailer
read: 2014
Modern Library #51, Guardian 1000 Novels

The Naked and the Dead has both a more limited and a more expansive scope than other war novels I've read. I say "limited" because it doesn't deal with the whole war, but rather one campaign for an island in the South Pacific. I say "expansive" because the story jumps between third-person perspectives, so we see how the war affects the whole platoon, plus General Cummings, Lieutenant Heard, and a other leadership figures in the unit. We see how the men in World War II fight, march, sleep, get letters, fire guns, eat, get medical attention, live, and die. We get glimpses of the decisions Cummings makes and the consequences to the Recon platoon.

There are a few action scenes where Mailer captures the danger and adrenaline of combat, but the bulk of the story is spent in day-to-day affairs. Danger is a fairly uncommon opponent - fatigue, the damp jungle, weakness, uncertainty, and loneliness beset the platoon much more frequently. Compared to what I'm used to from war stories, the novel spends a lot of time dwelling on day-to-day life. Consistent with this theme, the campaign is ultimately won not by some strategic master stroke or feat of individual heroism but because a shell hit a supply depot, resulting in the Japanese army's stores being depleted and their forces nearly starving.

I often think of World War II as a triumph of the Allied powers over the evil, anti-Semitic Nazis, but The Naked and the Dead reminds us that plenty of rank-and-file Americans harbored no love for the Jews. We see this in the blatant anti-Semitism of Gallagher and even Cummings, but also just in the subtler alienation that Goldstein and Roth feel throughout the story. It's an interesting angle.

Jaws

Jaws
by Peter Benchley
read: 2014

I've read that Benchley had some regrets about the anti-shark hysteria that has sometimes followed Jaws (especially after the movie), but I found it pretty reasonable. Benchley clearly did a good amount of research, and even with the greater knowledge nowadays (Shark Week didn't even exist back then!) there isn't much that's blatantly incorrect. I wasn't impressed with the prose, however; it felt almost pulpy.