Friday 12 September 2014

2001: A Space Odyssey, a Novel by Arthur C. Clarke (Hutchinson, 1968); Book Review

NB: Proffered for this Friday's Forgotten Books roundup.

The final book I bought during my recent fortnight's holiday was this:


A first edition/first impression of 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke, published in hardback in 1968 by Hutchinson, dust jacket design by Michael Brett (who also designed the wrapper for the 1966 Hutchinson edition of Andrew York's The Eliminator). I spotted it in Brighton Books – on Kensington Gardens in Brighton's North Laines – offered at what I thought was a very reasonable price; ex-library copies aside, on AbeBooks at present prices for the Hutchinson first range from £65 to around £300 (unsigned), and my copy is in better condition than most. I'd seen one or two first editions of 2001 prior to coming across this one – a couple at book fairs, one in a secondhand bookshop in Essex – but they'd always been prohibitively expensive. Whereas, comparatively, this one wasn't. So I nabbed it.


Why? Well, if I were to pick one film out of all the thousands I've seen over the years as my favourite, it would be Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). I must have been, ooh, all of seven or eight when I first saw it, on telly in the late 1970s, possibly even in black-and-white (we didn't get a colour TV in our house until late in the day), and even though I didn't understand half of it, it blew my tiny sci-fi-obsessed mind. I've seen it countless times since – mostly on television or on video, once at the cinema when a new print with digitally remastered sound was screened at the Curzon, Mayfair in, aptly enough, 2001 (there's a wonderfully breathless account of one of those Curzon screenings here) – but my passion for the film has remained undiminished. And Clarke's novel is an inextricable part of that passion.


I'm not sure when precisely I originally read the novel, but it was probably when I was in my early teens; doubtless I borrowed it from Beckenham Library, possibly even in this Hutchinson edition (or maybe the 1974 Hutchinson Educational edition, which has a different cover), which was published after the film was released rather than before it, reportedly at Stanley Kubrick's behest (as noted in John Baxter's Stanley Kubrick: A Biography [via Rob Ager's Kubrick: and Beyond the Cinema Frame]). According to Kubrick, interviewed by Joseph Gelmis in 1969, the book grew out of not only the film's screenplay, which Kubrick and Clarke worked on together, but a 130-page prose treatment for the film that the two of them wrote at the outset of the project. Kubrick told Gelmis: "...Arthur took all the existing material, plus an impression of some of the rushes, and wrote the novel. As a result, there's a difference between the novel and the film."

Actually there are quite a few differences, both small – the monolith which appears to the man-apes during "The Dawn of Man" section ("Primeval Night" in the book) is black in the film but "completely transparent" in the novel – and large: in the novel, Discovery's destination is Saturn, not Jupiter. But these discrepancies are much less important than what the book contributes to the experience of 2001, the way it expands upon notions and concepts which in the film are often oblique or downright cryptic. Clarke reveals more about the intentions and methods of the extraterrestrial intelligence which places the crystal monolith on the African veldt, making explicit that there are "replicas scattered across half the globe"; he posits that Saturn's rings are the byproduct of the creation of the massive monolith Dave Bowman encounters towards the end of the story – the "Star Gate" which Bowman travels through; and he embellishes Bowman's interstellar journey through the Star Gate, using everyday language to detail incredible sights: "a Grand Central Station of the Galaxy"; "a gigantic orbital parking lot".

None of this ruins the film's mystique; rather it enhances it, opening up a greater understanding of Kubrick's masterpiece whilst still leaving much inexplicable, unfathomable. Even with the differences between them, book and film are as one, the one feeding into the other, and vice versa. I'd go so far as to say that a full appreciation of Kubrick's film isn't really possible without Clarke's novel – a conclusion this contemporaneous New York Times review of the book also reaches – but if there were any lingering doubt as to its essential, inseparable nature, it's also the source of the frequently misattributed Dave Bowman utterance "my God – it's full of stars!", which doesn't actually appear in the film (it makes its film debut in the 1982 sequel, 2010: Odyssey Two).

Wednesday 10 September 2014

The Secondhand Bookshops Wot I Visited and the Books Wot I Bought on My Summer Holidays, 2014

Not that anyone will have cared or indeed even noticed, I'm sure, but there's been a relative lack of activity on Existential Ennui for the past fortnight or so, due to my having been on holiday. Sadly – or perhaps happily, depending on one's level of enthusiasm for such things – I shan't be mustering any kind of consequent report akin to last year's post-holiday multi-post extravaganza detailing the multitude of secondhand bookshops I dragged Rachel and Edie to, for the simple reason that I didn't drag them to anywhere near as many this year. Which isn't to say that I didn't buy any books; quite the reverse, in fact. Take this little lot:


Which I procured from famed book dealer Jamie Sturgeon at the start of the holiday. Jamie kindly invited me to his house to have a dig through his boxes of books, from which I extracted first editions of novels by, among others, Manning O'Brine, Peter O'Donnell, William Haggard, Simon Harvester – a good number of Harvester's Dorian Silk "Road" novels, which Jamie had set aside for me – Duncan Kyle, William Garner, John Bingham, Margaret Millar and Donald MacKenzie – some of them even signed and inscribed, no less. And then there's these:


In the front row, US first editions/first impressions of Elmore Leonard's Tishomingo Blues (Morrow, 2002) and the Get Shorty sequel Be Cool (Delacorte, 2002), both with dust jackets designed by Chip Kidd, and in the back row, a British first edition/first impression of John Updike's Rabbit omnibus Rabbit Angstrom (Everyman's Library, 1995), a 1986 Pan paperback of John Fowles's The Collector, and a British first edition of James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential (Mysterious Press, 1990), with a dust jacket illustration by David Scutt.

The two Leonards came from here:


Much Ado Books in Alfriston, which after closing off its entire first floor secondhand books department for a while, has now reopened one room upstairs and has expanded the selection of secondhand books available in the courtyard, all of which is jolly good news. The Leonard firsts were only three quid a pop, plucked from the very courtyard bookcase I'm browsing in the picture above, and though I have read Be Cool, I didn't own a copy of it, nor of Tishomingo Blues, so American first editions, which you don't come across every day in British secondhand bookshops, proved irresistible.

The Rabbit Angstrom omnibus I acquired from a local Lewes charity shop for a couple of quid, while the Ellroy first I also acquired relatively locally, from Wax Factor in Brighton, for a fiver. Both are books I've long had it in mind to try at some point, as is Fowles's The Collector, although that one came from further afield:


The Friends Secondhand Bookshop, situated in the grounds of Hylands House in Essex, which I coerced Rachel and Edie (and Rachel's folks, who accompanied us) into visiting on the pretense of Hylands Park being picturesque. Which to be fair it is – and is also, I learned once we arrived, the site of the annual V Festival, which I attended in, I think, 1997, so I'd unknowingly been there before – but I'd be lying if I were to suggest its attractively manicured gardens were my main reason for visiting. The bookshop is a donations affair in the courtyard of the Stables Visitor Centre, and in truth it's not dissimilar to a charity bookshop, with little for the proper collector, but it's still worth a casual browse, and even Edie briefly entertained the notion of going inside and having a look around.


Briefly.


Another secondhand bookshop of note I managed to get to during the fortnight was this one:


The Petersfield Bookshop, in, astonishingly enough, Petersfield, in Hampshire. I didn't buy anything there, but there are lots of rooms to explore with books piled everywhere, so I'd recommend a detour if you're ever in that part of the world.

I did buy one other book during the fortnight, again in Brighton... but I think I'll save that for a separate post.