Book Review: Scotch on the Rocks by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond

APRIL is MORE 'Dystopian Britain Novels' Month

Book Review: 'Scotch on the Rocks' by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond

2 / 5 Stars

'Scotch on the Rocks' first was published in the UK in 1968. This Warner Books UK paperback edition (224 pp.) was issued in 2001.

 

A five-episode BBC Scotland TV series based on the novel aired in the spring of 1973. A source of some controversy back then, the series never was re-run. According to a 2023 BBC article, apparently the reels for two episodes are lost, making a present-day re-airing difficult, if not impossible.

 

Author Hurd (b. 1930) is a UK politician, and former Foreign Secretary (1989 - 1995). He has published 8 fiction works (some of these with Osmond as a co-author) in the political thriller genre, as well as a number of nonfiction works on foreign policy, and biographies of prominent Britons.

 

'Scotch' is set in the 1970s, in an alternate UK where conditions for many Scots are grim, as the authors make clear in a vignette about an urban renewal project in Glasgow's Gorbals district that has gone awry:

 

 ...The sandstone tenements, blackened by a century of smog, still stood - though some barely, their facades slipping and crumbling into asymmetry, and others not at all, demolished before they collapsed, leaving an impression of a recent bombing raid: patches of exposed wallpaper, fireplaces hanging four floors up, jettisoned furniture and piles of rubble in the empty spaces....All but a few of the shops were boarded up, their clients evacuated to the suburbs.

 

But people still lived here, pensioners and Pakistanis, huddled together in the half-empty buildings. Here and there a touch of paint or a lace curtain was evidence of human survival. Some of these curtains twitched aside as the car drew up and shadowy faces watched the two men go into an abandoned laundry. It was assumed they came from Housing Department.

 

...They stood without speaking for another five minutes. Rennie was straining to catch the roar from Ibrox which would mean a goal for Rangers. Hart's eyes followed a girl across the clinker, unshaven legs lurching in ill-fitting shoes, face pop-eyed and knobby with deprivation. Oxfam would have thrown her clothes away.  

 

Angry over Britain's enrichment from North Sea oil revenues while their own country gets little from said resource, Scots have embraced the Scottish National Party (SNP) and its platform of independence. Also in the mix is the clandestine Scottish Liberation Party (SLP) which is partial to Marxist doctrine. The head of the SNP, a profoundly uncharismatic but crafty politician named James Henderson, takes care to disavow the SLP, preferring to use politics (as opposed to a Liberation Struggle) to chart a path to independence. 

 

Henderson's stance is not reassuring to the British, who have ordered an intelligence operative named Graham Hart to team up with Chief Inspector Rennie of the Glasgow police to insert a double agent into the ranks of the SLP. A 'hard man' and former Royal Army sapper named MacNair proves able to the task.

 

The novel's first 60 pages are occupied with introducing the large cast of characters and laying out the political machinations deployed by the Prime Minister, Patrick Harvey, and Henderson, prior to a spring general election. 

 

However, when the SNP fails to capture a majority, this catalyzes plans by the SLP to reject further negotiations and stage an insurrection. The goal: force both Harvey and Henderson to accept independence as a consequence of a popular uprising, rather than backroom wheeling and dealing. And because their cause is just, naturally, the SLP leadership isn't averse to sponsoring martyrs whose deaths will be a source of inspiration to the Struggle......

 

'Scotch' is not an easy read. Perhaps as a consequence of being co-written, the narrative has an abrupt, choppy quality. I often was forced to re-read sentences and sometime entire paragraphs to figure out what was happening to who, because of the terse nature of the prose. 

 

Readers hoping for depictions of bloody street battles between Royal Army forces and wild-eyed Scots, with RAF bombing runs on border towns, fields strewn with corpses, and Saracen armored cars set afire by Molotovs tossed by beret-wearing college students chanting in Gaelic, will be disappointed in 'Scotch.' The novel revolves around political dramas, with most action sequences (including sabotage of bridges) taking place off-screen. It's only in the novel's closing chapters that any sort of violence ensues, but this is subordinate to discussions and arguments between bureaucrats clustered in board rooms.    

 

Summing up, 'Scotch on the Rocks' has the restrained quality common in literature about near-future British dystopias. Maybe it's the restrictions imposed by the UK on personal firearms ownership, or perhaps the erratic psychologies induced by intergenerational vitamin D deficiency*, but the manic energy of American dystopias is quite absent in British treatments of the theme. If gun battles and mayhem are your 'cuppa,' then 'Scotch' likely will disappoint.

  

*According to a 2022 journal paper, a survey of 351,320 UK ‘Biobank’ blood samples taken from individuals aged 40 to 70 indicated that 53.75% of these individuals had serum vitamin D levels in the ‘insufficient’ and ‘deficient’ categories (i.e., < 50 nM / L). Vitamin D deficiency is linked to delirium.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7902418/  

Penthouse April 1976

Penthouse

April, 1976

April, 1976, and atop the Top 40 singles chart is 'Disco Lady,' by Johnnie Taylor. I remember 'Let Your Love Flow,' by the Bellamy Brothers, also getting quite a bit of airplay on the Top 40 AM channels. And of course, 'Show Me the Way,' by Frampton, would come to dominate the AOR airplay that spring.

Let's look through the pages of the April 1976 issue of Penthouse magazine, shall we ? 

 

Among the major contributors to this issue is Nick Tosches, a writer of numerous fiction and nonfiction books and articles during the 1970s, on into the 1990s. Tosches deployed a hardboiled style of prose that regularly approached (unwitting) self-parody. In this regard, his 1992 'biography' of Dean Martin: 'Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams,' is a great novel, but questionable as a work of nonfiction.......

In this issue of Penthouse, Tosches has this to say of the hapless Bay City Rollers:
 

Those five silly, meatless bodies ringed in Tartan Fauntleroys and smile buttons. Those five hideously bland faces with their frozen pasteboard grins and wide idiot eyes. And you've heard them. Those thin, autistic, sissy-voices singing 'Saturday Night,' a geld pasteurized vision of teen-age fun-fun-fun.  

Elsewhere in the media reviews pages, Karen Thorsen has good things to say about one of the first mainstream compilations of underground comix: 'The Apex Treasury of Underground Comix,' which I reviewed here.

 

These being the mid-70s, disillusionment over America and its place in the World Order is a major topic of analysis. 'The End of the American Dream,' by Jeff Greenfield, is typical of these treatments. It does have a great illustration from 'Cosimo.'

Reflecting Bob Guccione's and Kathy Keeton's interest in the future, 'Beyond 2001,' by Stephen Rosen, predicts all kinds of cool stuff awaiting us in the 21st century, including a 'people washer' egg-shaped chamber for personal hygiene; a nuclear-powered artificial heart; and 'eye movement command machines.'

The interview in this April issue is with Patti Smith, who in '76 was riding high as an object of worship by the New York City hipsterdom. I always regarded Smith as heavily over-rated, but it must be said that she was quite shrewd in her self-promotion. Smith recognized the value in contrasting her appearance and behavior with the wholesome female pop and rock stars of the mid-70s, like Carly Simon, Judy Collins, Olivia Newton-John, and Toni Tennille. 

In her interview, conducted with Tosches, she has this to say:

I got along better with the niggers, but they didn't wanna fuck me either.

I wrote a poem where this guy comes in this girl's window and she's sitting there and she has this real dense mind, so he simply takes a pistol and shoves it her mouth and shoots it. That's what I think of sperm - it's the shell that bursts brains, y'know ? I mean, women need their brains burst out.

I mean, to me Erica Jong ain't a woman; she's just some spoiled Jewish girl who'd rather whine than go out of her brain. 

When I write I may be a Brando creep, or a girl laying on the floor, or a Japanese tourist, or a slob like Richard Speck.

A word like Ms. is really bullshit. Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. And these assholes take the only fuckin' vowel out of the word Miss. So what do they have left ? Ms. It sounds like a sick bumblebee. It sounds frigid. I mean, who the hell would ever want to stick his hand up the dress of somebody who goes around calling herself something like Ms. ? It's all so stupid.

That's our Patti; quite the punk, back in those days......!  She remains alive and well in this year 2026, fifty years after that interview appeared on the newsstands.

Thankfully, our April Penthouse Pet, the lovely, dark-eyed, nineteen year-old Sandy Bernadou, is a more....... relatable......... young woman. We're told she likes to be outdoors, she goes swimming without a bathing suit, and once, she had sex atop a boulder overlooking a river. And her favorite drink is a Tequila Sunrise........that's the Seventies, for you !

 

 

 

Book Review: Noah's Castle by John Rowe Townsend

APRIL is MORE 'Dystopian Britain Novels' Month

  

Book Review: 'Noah's Castle' by John Rowe Townsend

4 / 5 Stars 

'Noah's Castle' first was published in 1975 in the UK by Oxford University Press. Various paperback editions were released, including a Puffin Books edition in 1980. The older editions are difficult to find and expensive. Both trade paperback and ebook editions from October Mist Publishing are available at amazon; I found the ebook to be well formatted and free of errors.

Author John Rowe Townsend (1922 - 2014) published a number of dramas and science fiction novels for young adults and children during the 1970s and 1980s. These novels were deliberate in their political framing; Townsend was an admirer of left-wing ideologies (as evidenced by his obituary in The Guardian).

'Noah's Castle' is set in the 1980s in an un-named city in the Midlands. First-person narrator Barry Mortimer is a teenager; he has an older sister, Nessie, a younger brother, Geoff, and a little sister named Ellen. Norman Mortimer, the family's patriarch, is the stereotypical postwar British male; something of a 'prig' (as the Brits put it), fussy, but also single-mindedly dedicated to the welfare of his family. 

As the novel opens, it's September, and Norman has decided to purchase a 'white elephant' of a house, the eponymous Castle. The family are unimpressed with the house and its solid, but unattractive, construction, and its retiring, even discreet, location. Barry is unhappy with having to leave the modest but comfortable middle-class home the family has been occupying. But it turns out that Norman is a forward-thinking man: there are signs that the UK economy is collapsing. For the Mortimer family, the new home is a redoubt.

As the novel progresses, the family are bemused participants in Norman's plans to stock the cellar with 'survivalist' goods:  

We went towards the nearest loaded shelf. The black polyethylene sheeting was tucked in at the edges under heavy, bulky objects. I drew it back unwillingly, apprehensively. There were cans on this shelf. Great big cans—cans of coffee, cans of drinking-chocolate, cans of peas and tomatoes, cans of stock essence—cans with familiar labels that I’d seen again and again in the shops, but bigger, giving a curious and alarming impression that they’d grown and might still be growing.

However, with the arrival of Winter, it becomes clear that Norman's foresight is of value. Author Townsend is skilled at depicting the liminal but ominous collapse of the British economy: 

Mid-January. It was a cold, gray, iron-bound January—the kind of midwinter month when sidewalks and lawns and gravel alike seem jarringly hard underfoot and there’s no give in anything. But it was dry: no snow and not much rain. Talk among the grown-ups was the usual kind of talk but much more anxious. Prices were still soaring. (“It’s no lark,” said our witty English teacher.) Everything was now five times what it had been the previous summer, and the tickets in the shop windows seemed to change almost weekly. It seems odd now, but for a long time, the realities behind the talk and the figures didn’t sink in.

While the Mortimers are shielded from the worst of the privation accompanying the economic collapse, it's only a matter of time before knowledge of their secret larder seeps out into the increasingly lawless society beyond the driveway of Noah's Castle. And when that knowledge is loosed, there will be consequences......

I should make clear that 'Noah's Castle' is very much a 'British' novel, and one intended for a young adult readership. It's subdued, and devoid of the sort of violent action and gunplay that marks American treatments of societal collapse and the survivalist ethos (such as Andrew J. Offutt's 'The Castle Keeps'). In this, it is much like John Christopher's novel 'Pendulum' (1968), also about a middle-class family's response to a UK Gone Bad.

'Noah's Castle' is at heart a political allegory; as the narrative progresses, the reader observes Barry's burgeoning humanism, and his awareness of the widening gap between the haves and have-nots. Will Barry succumb to the security of his father's 'family first' version of capitalism, or embrace socialism and the wisdom of the Collective, as exemplified by his friends in the 'Share Alike' community program ? I won't disclose spoilers, but Townsend provides an ending that is a little too 'safe,' one that side-steps the sharper edges of any discourse about political ideologies.

Readers comfortable with a contemplative treatment of societal collapse will find 'Noah's Castle' engaging, but it likely will disappoint if you're looking for a more action-centered examination of the topic. 

April is more 'dystopian Britain novels' month

 APRIL is MORE 'Dystopian Britain Novels' Month

 

Back in January of 2019 I devoted the month to reviewing novels about a near-future, dystopian Britain. In the ensuing 7 years I've come across some additional novels to read and review, being alerted to some of these by the Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence tome 'Scarred for Life,' which is a sort of 'Whole Earth Catalog' overview of UK pop culture in the 1970s.  

So, stand by for reviews and commentary on novels where it's an alternate UK, sometime in the 1970s, and things aren't going well. Plagues, economic collapse, dour Scots insisting on forming their own country (we all know what a catastrophe that would be !) will force our doughty Brits into confronting lives of privation and desperation. 

 

 

And remember: in the UK, it's extraordinarily difficult to acquire firearms. If you live on a rural estate you might have inherited an ancient shotgun, for Birding, from your great-great-grandfather Lord Argyll, but that's pretty much it. So Radioactive Rambos are noticeably absent from postapocalyptic Britain. Ingenuity and edged weapons, that's the trick....! 

Planet of the Apes Adventures: The Original Marvel Years

Planet of the Apes Adventures:

The Original Marvel Years 

Marvel Comics, 2022

During the 1960s and 1970s, few sci-fi franchises held the imagination of the popular culture as did the Planet of the Apes movies, which led to five feature films, a TV show, toys, merchandising, and lineages of comic books that persist till this day. 

The first Apes comic book was the one-shot Beneath the Planet of the Apes, issued in 1970 by Western Publishing / Gold Key.  

In 1974 Marvel comics acquired the rights to publish comic books based on the Planet of the Apes movies, Gold Key having given up its licensing with 20th Century Fox. Marvel began with a black-and-white magazine, titled Planet of the Apes, but in October 1975, the company released an 11-issue color comic book series: Adventures on the Planet of the Apes.

Adventures on the Planet of the Apes recapitulated the storylines of the initial two films in the Apes franchise. The script was by Doug Moench, the artwork by George Tuska (the first six issues) and Alfredo Alcala (the final five issues). George Roussos is credited with the colors, but there is no letterer credited.

Unlike the case with Gold Key, Marvel's licensing deal with 20th Century Fox apparently did not include the rights to the features of the actors, so in the comics, we are given 'generic' appearances for the lead characters.

Planet of the Apes Adventures: The Original Marvel Years (PotAA: TOMY) compiles all 11 issues of the 1975-1976 series in a larger, 'deluxe' hardbound edition. Aside from the 11 issues there's not much else: no draft art pages, draft script pages, promotional materials, letters to the editor, etc.

Moench's script sticks closely to that of the films, so there are no real surprises plot-wise. Tuska's artwork was mediocre to begin with, and this compilation doesn't do much to improve it, save making the colors more intense.

PotAA: TOMY has a cover price of $100, which is ludicrous for a 224-page, 'oversize' hardbound edition of comics that weren't all that special when they first appeared in 1975. I don't know if the pricing was something dictated by 20th Century Fox or not, but I only purchased this volume when I saw it at a Bargain Outlet for $25. And even that seems a little steep.........

In my opinion, PotAA: TOMY solely is for those fanatics who have to have every single comic or graphic art manifestation installment of the Apes franchise. if this doesn't pertain to you, then you are better off passing on this 'deluxe' edition. 

 

Book Review: The Pyx by John Buell

Book Review: 'The Pyx' by John Buell

1 / 5 Stars

'The Pyx' (127 pp.) was published by Popular Library in 1959. The cover artist is uncredited.

Canadian John Buell (1927 - 2013) was a university professor. He published 5 novels in his lifetime, one of these, 'The Shewsdale Exit' (1972), I read and found underwhelming. So I was hoping 'The Pyx' would be more engaging........

The novel is set in Montreal, in the summer. A cabbie driving through an affluent neighborhood sees a dreadful sight: a woman falling to her death onto the sidewalk in front of his car. A world-weary detective named Henderson arrives on the scene and identifies the dead woman as one Elizabeth Lacy: young, beautiful, and not disposed to suicide. Henderson investigates the penthouse suite of the apartment building from which Lacy fell and judges that it was the site of some illicit activities.

'The Pyx' is a crime novel, and the reader travels alongside Henderson as he conducts his investigation. It's no spoiler to say that Lacy was a higher-quality call girl, and her clients lodged on the kinkier side of the moral ledger. As the plot progresses there are additional deaths, and these are unambiguous.

The novel culminates in revealing Whodunit, along with some mild allusions to the supernatural and / or occult; not enough to declare 'The Pyx' as a murder mystery crossed with (say) 'Rosemary's Baby.'  

Much like 'The Shewsdale Exit,' 'The Pyx' heavily is padded with psychological passages; these are overwritten, and made me feel as if the novel was twice as long as its page count:

....She couldn't afford that: the thoughts she had demanded oblivion or complete alertness. In an in-between state they would possess her and grow more inconsistent and stay in the mind like a frenzied cosmos excluding everything else and feeding on her own cerebral energy until mere exhaustion brought her back to the real world and the ever-present causes of it all. When breakdown comes, she thought, it will be something like that. But then they say some people attain a sort of peace that way: the exhausted juggler is no longer a juggler.

Encrusting what is a simple and unadorned mystery narrative with this stuff is not productive, and I bestow upon 'The Pyx' a One Star Rating. I finished the novel thinking that postwar noir writers like John D. MacDonald or Lawrence Block could have taken the premise and done something memorable with it. But unless you've a high patience threshold, this novel can be left on the shelf. 

Book Review: The Traveler in Black by John Brunner

Book Review: 'The Traveler in Black' by John Brunner

1 / 5 Stars

'The Traveler in Black' is a fixup novel constructed from four novellas and short stories first published in various science fiction and fantasy magazines over the interval from 1960 to 1971. Multiple editions of the novel have been issued, some of these retitled 'The Compleat Traveler in Black', which is available in print, and as an ebook. 

 

In 1979 Brunner published a fifth Traveler tale, 'The Things That Are Gods,' which is included in The Compleat Traveler in Black. 

 

The Ace Books edition (222 pp.) reviewed here was published in 1971, and features cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon. 

 

The eponymous Traveler is a small man, cloaked in black and wielding a magic staff with the power to grant wishes; 'he has many names, but one nature.' His adventures take place in quasi-medieval settings, in a past (or perhaps future) era where the forces of Chaos gradually are giving way to those of Law. The Traveler apparently has been tasked by the Creator to serve as a Change Agent for this process.

 

The Traveler makes his way to cities like Acromel, Ryovora, Barbizond, Teq, and Ys, whose rulers greatly are troubled by the recession of Chaos, as this recession voids the power of the gods and deities which historically have governed the welfare of said cities. Deprived of the ability to truck with the supernatural, the rulers are beset with anomie and despair. The Traveler offers counsel, but the rulers tend to scorn his assistance. Likewise, the people residing in these cities often are as self-centered, and as dismissive of the Traveler, as their rulers.

 

A plot device used regularly in the novel is for the selfish, corrupt, and malevolent persons in the abovementioned cities to wish for something to improve their station in life; by striking his staff on the ground and announcing "As you wish, so be it," the Traveler grants the wish, but always in a manner that is the opposite (in a bad way) of what the wisher expected. 

 

In the past, I've tried several times to read the entirety of The Traveler in Black and given up, mainly because the novel has the self-consciously 'artistic' sensibility of the New Wave era and a prose style that is wordy and obtuse:  

 

Yet the rule bound him, and the traveler's nature was not such that he should complain. Forth he went on paths grown unfamiliar, and spoke with many people in many places, as for example in Wocrahin, where once-

 

Memory ! Memory ! He had never foreseen that that intangible, binding the fluid nature of eternity into the sequential tidiness of Time, would also hamper the will like age itself ! Almost, he began to envy those who could die..... 

 

The novel is filled with these empty phrasings, which obviously Brunner hoped would come across and Enigmatic and Profound, but they are a chore to wade through.

 

This time I completed my reading of the novel, and I was underwhelmed. While the reviews of 'Traveler' posted online are quite laudatory, I am comfortable with giving the novel a One Star Rating. 'Traveler' belongs to the fables / fabulations sub-genre of Speculative Fiction, and if that sub-genre appeals to you, you'll find the novel rewarding. All others should pass. 

National Lampoon March 1981

National Lampoon

March, 1981

March, 1981, and Blondie has the top single in the USA, with 'Rapture.' 

The latest issue of National Lampoon is out on the stands, and it's clear that the magazine has taken a hit in terms of faring in this new decade. As compared to the mid- and late- seventies, the volume of advertising has thinned, with no comedy LP promotions to be found. Under editor P. J. O'Rourke, the text features in this issue are lame, and show fatigue. The momentum generated by the success of Animal House, now three years in the past, well has receded. By mid-decade circulation would drop, and in 1986 the magazine would reduce its publication schedule to bi-monthly. 

 

In this March issue, 'Foto Funnies' perseveres, in its own corny way......

The comics are worth scanning and presenting, so here they are: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And that's what you got for your $2, back in that long-ago March of 45 years ago.........