The first word of the Illiad

Rage by Stephen King is a really weird book. I must have been about thirteen when I read it the first time. It's a short book and a real page turner, I probably read it a few times in my early teens. It probably kept me from doing something stupid at my school, at a time when I often fantasized about shooting death rays out of my eyes and exploding the heads of all the hordes of cruel, stupid people I felt I had to deal with every day.

I'm not saying King was wrong to drop the book from publishing. An intelligent maladjusted person can probably learn any lesson they desire from it. To kill or, in my case, not to kill. I probably would have done the same in his shoes.

But it's a really weird book. It's not about a school shooting. That's a mistake you might make if you hear what it's about second hand and find it in the libraries of a few teenage mass murderers. But it's about a school shooting as much as Grave of the Fireflies is about World War 2. That's just the background.

What happens in the book is this: Charlie Decker, American high schooler, murders two teachers and barricades himself in a classroom with some classmates for a few hours until a police sniper tries to murder him. It's in those hours between the gunshots where it gets weird.

See, Charlie doesn't hold these other kids hostage. He doesn't plausibly threaten any of them except for one, Ted, who tries to act like an adult. What he does with them has been described by reviewers in terms like "spellbinding" and "catalyzing" and "creating an otherworldly bubble where the rules of civil society and maybe our very reality get suspended". It occurs to me today (which is why I'm writing this), what Charlie does is create a safe space. A place where these kids can express themselves without fear. A place where they can drop their shields and be completely honest and vulnerable with each other for a moment. A place without adults.

They all, except for Ted, elect to stay there when given the explicit choice to leave. They say they have to finish "getting it on" and "working it out". This ineffable "it" Stephen King comes back to again and again - see "strapping it on" in Lisey's Story and It in, well, It. Something too primal to define in words, too personal, too frightening.

What they do with all this time is they tell stories about themselves, and this is spellbinding. Fascinating, tiny, utterly real stories about being ashamed of your mom for being poor, about sex in the backseat of a car where neither party knows what they're doing, about being little and thinking your daddy is a monster, about being fifteen and knowing your life is never going to go anywhere.

In the middle of all this senseless murder, and Charlie's and Ted's lives being destroyed, the kids find something raw and real and short-lived and more precious than gold. And you feel that when you read it. It feels like one of those conversations you have at most every ten years, usually sitting or lying still in the dark late at night, the ones that stay with you forever, even if you don't remember what either of you actually said. You just remember the feeling of closeness. Intimacy. Baring your soul. Getting it on, I guess.

I haven't made it through book 1 of 1Q84 yet but

I have this little monologue that runs through my head every moment I'm reading Tengo's parts.

1Q84, I should explain, is a book by Haruki Murakami. I love his short stories, but I don't understand this book. We have, so far, two parallel stories about two separate people who seem to magically have been transported into a slightly shittier parallel universe. Aomame, a professional killer of men who abuse women, and Tengo who's a writer of sorts. Aomame's story interests me, although it has the clear marks of a writer who definitely isn't a woman, but Tengo's is endlessly frustrating.

Tengo's editor, Komatsu, ropes him into editing a novel written by the young, dyslectic, probably Autistic Fuka-Eri. It's a credibly amazing story, but very badly written, so Tengo's work is extensive. He apparently rewrites the novel in ten days. And bit by bit he gets dragged into Komatsu's plot to - get this - hide the fact that Fuka-Eri's foster father and foster sister and Tengo all helped her write the book.

The haughty literary circles of Japan, we're told, won't accept a collaborative author effort. So they have to pretend Fuka-Eri wrote it herself. Virtually every page dwells on how Tengo thinks this is fraud and is never going to work, and everyone agrees with him it's incredibly dangerous and will ruin all their careers if it comes out. Which, the narrative insists, it will.

The five characters named so far are the only ones who have ever seen Fuka-Eri's original manuscript, and all of them want to keep the secret except the foster sister who doesn't seem to exist. There's actually no way anyone could prove that Tengo did the work he did on the novel. No evidence puts the pen in his hand. And even if it could be done, Fuka-Eri gives his edits her blessing and it's her story. There is no problem, except Tengo is so nervous and so consumed with fear of being found out he's almost certainly going to blow it.

The monologue, I picture Tengo saying at the press conference. It's mostly something like "I'm Tengo. I'm Fuka-Eri's editor. It's been my incredible pleasure to polish her remarkable story. It has been extensive work for everyone involved in making this book happen, you can be sure. But I'm sure we would do it all again twice over if we had to. This story is worth it, Fuka-Eri's story deserves all that. But I wanted to make one thing clear: While my editing work on the story has been extensive, maybe unusually extensive, I am but a humble editor. The story, from the first word to the last, is Fuka-Eri's. The credit is hers."

Just get in front of this dumbass scandal and control the narrative. It could (and will probably) be made to sound super bad. You could easily spin it as a cabal of sweaty old men simultaneously masquerading as, stealing the work of, manipulating and also profiting on a disabled teenage girl, and bamboozling the honorable literary elite on top of that. All of which is probably exactly what's going to happen because these five people combined don't have two brain cells to rub together to start a fire.

It's baffling to me. Murakami has published like fifteen books, it's not like this solution can have escaped him. And it can't be that interesting to write about people being bad at the same job you're good at. Maybe it will make sense later on, but I've chewed on this for like a month now and I have to write it down to maybe be able to get through the book faster.

Today I learned

In Neverwhere's Floating Market, they sell magic devices obtained by human sacrifice for paralyzing people so you can rape them.