“Really? Samuel Delany has written "unreadable garbage"? Would you care to share with us the precise nature of the stories or novels which qualify as such, or have you not, as I strongly suspect, actually read any of his work? I presume this is the same Samuel Delany who has been a professor of English and writing at numerous American universities, who was named a GrandMaster of the field? The author of "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones", “Babel-17” and “Nova”? That Samuel Delany? Or is it instead the case, as I suspect, that you have allowed yourself to fall foul of the cliché that if it's SF, then by its very nature, some of his work must be bad?”

That’s, more or less, how I answered someone who commented on the novel’s review back then.

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

I think I found it difficult in the sense of its denseness in fact. Well, I find it hard to answer the “difficulty” question with much certainty; I'm equivocating. I don't love it all equally no, that's not the case. There are parts that I prefer immeasurably to others however, simply because I prefer I'm not sure whether that persuades me that it would be 'better' in some sense without them. I don't have the figures for specific chapters with me but I do know that Joyce added a lot to some of the later chapters - from Oxen of the Sun to Ithaca I think - meaning that the manuscript expanded in proof. I think you notice this as you read it, right?

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

I'm about a hundred pages off finishing it for the second time, and I didn't even realise that February was the 10th anniversary. Either way, the second reading has been infinitely better than the first. There has been no grappling with the semantic and syntactical difficulties of the first read and, though I knew what was going to happen, I found I had no real idea of how we were going to get there. It's been almost like reading a different book. Almost. Also, it's suddenly occurred to me that I have found it so much funnier this second time around.

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

I will start this review off by suggesting that there is so much in this book that it deserves an entire blog post to itself, however I don't want to actually write one now because I would like to watch the film again. Unfortunately I just don't have enough time this weekend to simply put a couple of hours aside to watch the movie so that I can write a blog post to coincide with this review (not that I need to have a blog post to coincide with the review, but I would like those of you who like this review to at least have an opportunity to read the extended post). As such, I will post this review now, and when I get around to watching the film again (for the umpteenth time mind you – I love the film) I will repost this review with a link to the blog (minus this paragraph because by that time it will be obsolete). By the way, don't let the lack of a post on Flight Club prevent you from reading some of the <a href=”http://www.sarkology.net>posts on my blog</a>.

When considering this book I have to be honest and say that I actually preferred the movie. In fact when I first saw this book sitting on my friend's bookshelf I immediately thought that it was one of those really bad novelisations that you tend to come across every so often. However, as I was writing a review on a completely unrelated book (the name of which I can’t remember), and made mention of the fact that I believed that Fight Club was simply a novelisation of the film somebody politely corrected me and pointed out that the book came first. Well, since that was the case I decided that actually reading the book might actually be worth while.

First of all the book the grabbed my attention right from the beginning to the point that I found it really hard to put down. However, I also found that the film was much more crisp and polished than the book. In fact there were parts of the book that actually came out a lot better in the film than they did in the book (though there were also aspects of the book that were much better than the film). Normally this is not the case because it is really difficult, if not impossible, to turn what is in effect a classic book into a classic movie – the media are completely different and there things that can be done on the silver screen that would be impossible to translate onto the page and vice versa. However, occasionally, very occasionally, there comes a film that actually trumps the book, and I believe that Fight Club is one of those rare occurrences.

That does not necessarily mean that the book was bad – by no means – it is just that I found that the film was much better. Sure, there were aspects that the book handled much better, however I simply could not read the book without picturing Brad Pitt everytime Tyler Durden was mentioned, Helena Bonham Carter whenever Marla Singer was mentioned, and Edward Norton whenever the narrator was the central character, which was pretty much all of the time. Mind you, having two different actors playing the roles of the narrator (we actually never know his name) and Tyler Durden in the film does throw us a bit, but for those of us who have seen the film, and know the truth about the identity of the narrator, it sort of doesn't come as a shock when it is revealed (I would have put up a spoiler alert, but if you are reading this review then I assume that you have seen the film and know what I am talking about – if you don't, then you either haven't seen the film, or haven't worked it out yet, or both).

Anyway, Fight Club is your classic anti-materalist extistentialist novel (if there is such a thing). In fact it is still as relevant today as it was back when it was released. The world of Fight Club is dark and pointless, which very much defines the 90s. It is interesting that the nineties represented the final victory over the evil empire and what was in effect the end of history – tyranny had been defeated, capitalism reigned supreme, and everybody could look forward to peace, prosperity, and endless happiness – except that didn't happen. In fact the complete opposite happened – my memory of the nineties was that of the goth, and later the emo – of bands like Portishead and Radiohead, who were dreary and depressing – it was not that we had won, it was that in defeating the evil empire we had lost our way and our purpose. In a sense all that was left was the basic anxioms of capitalism – the accumulation of wealth, yet the accumulation of wealth in and of itself has no meaning, no purpose, and no soul. In a way we had defeated the commies, but in another way we had lost our soul.

Fight Club is not just a question of materialism but also a question of identity. In many ways we define ourselves by our job, by our car, by our house – in effect by our possessions. I guess this is why the scene in which the narrator mugs a convenience store clerk to force him to quit his job and pursue his dream is so important. It is also the reason why in the film they target is the credit corporations – it is debt that is actually holding us back. I see this around me everyday – people are prevented from reaching their true potential and from truly sucking the marrow out of life because they have bought the lie of the American dream. In the end they have gone to collage, got a degree (and a debt with that degree), got a job, married, had children, and taken on more debt to put a roof over their head. Ten years down the track they are stuck in a dead-end job with no hope and no purpose and the only incentive that they have is the fact that they get paid every fortnight. In fact it is that pay check that prevents them from realising their true potential.

However Fight Club endeavours to make us realise that the ordinary people are in fact the people that hold all of the power. Sure, the managers might say that those of us that do the ordinary jobs are the ones who make the company turn over and be the success that it is – those of us who sit in the trenches and cop the brunt of all of the crap that is thrown at us – however we return home to our appartment tired, in debt, trapped with no way out. Mind you the advertising industry doesn't help because they paint this picture of the perfect life that we buy into, but we can only afford this lifestyle by going into debt, which we do only to discover that we are now trapped in this endless existence from which we cannot escape.

There is actually a lot more to Fight Club than what I can really explore in such a short time, though I know that I am not the only one who writes incredibly long reviews exploring every aspect of a novel. However, since I have set up my blog I feel that I don't need to do that any more as I can do that elsewhere. However I still can’t resist exploring the themes expounded in the novel - in Flight Club the main idea is how we have become slaves to the machine and the novel seeks to open our eyes to the reality of this machine so that we might break away from it. However, in reality we won't, and Palahnuik realises this – we are sheep – pretty much all of the characters in the book are sheep. Sure, they are enslaved in their day to day existence, but Tyler Durden doesn't free them from that existence, he only becomes what is in effect another messiah for them to follow. Capitalism has let them down and he offers them another way out, and they follow him like sheep.

I guess that is the reason why the book didn't actually end the same way the film did and that is because in the end one of the things that the book is criticising is organised religion. The book (and the film) begins with the narrator and Marla cruising the support groups, which are in effect mini-religions, and finishing by creating a new religion through the fight clubs. What the book is suggesting is two things – even though they are sheep, the sheep in fact are incredibly powerful and can reach a point where the sheep actually take control of the religion – in a way the religion takes a life of its own and is moulded and developed by the sheep. The other thing – don't talk about fight club – is genius. If you keep something secret then people actually want to know it. In fact the interest lies in the mystery not in the answer – by not talking about Fight Club makes people so much more interested in Flight Club, to the point that it grows so big and powerful that it takes on a life of its own. In the end the Narrator, even though he is Tyler Durden, has lost control over it – Fight Club has become a monster with its own will, conscience, and identity. In considering this, it is interesting to note that Jesus Christ did refer to his followers as sheep – did he have an insight into human nature?

There is one final thing I wish to touch upon before I go and that is the idea of masculinity, which is evident in both the book and the film. In a way it is one of those very uncomfortable truths and that is that men are basically defined by their John Thomases, and it is interesting that at the beginning of the book you find the narrator in a support group of men who suffer from testicular cancer. However, fast forward through to the end and we discover that the members of the Fight Clubs will deal with people who are seeking to shut them down by threatening to castrate them. Interesting considering that only men can be castrated, however in many cases it is the men who are very much in control. In fact the whole idea of the fight club is that men are seeking to re-estabilish their primal and brutish nature in a world in which they are effectively being castrated. Fight Club is not a story about collapsing civilisation, it is a story about returning us to our brutish past and that the trappings of civilisation only exist as a thin veneer over this brutish reality. In a way one of the main reasons that the fight clubs become so successful, and literally run out of control is because there is that underlying desire to cast of civilastion and return to that primal instinct that is always wanting to well up from inside of us and completely engulf us.

I'm really not sure how to approach this book because, well, while the story and the intrigue are pretty good, I found it to be a real slog to get through and finish. A lot of the chapters (or even part chapters) seemed to have a short section where the characters did things and then the rest seemed to fall into some philosophical discussion on the nature of good and evil. It seemed that much of the book got really bogged down into some of these discussions which ended up putting me off the story as a whole.

It is not that I did not like the story, far from it. I thought that the concept of writing a novel of the events of [book:The Wizard of Oz] from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West, and in doing so giving her a name and a motive behind her actions, worked really well. It is not that this has not been done before, [book:Wide Sargasso Sea] did the same thing with [book:Jane Eyre], but what that involved giving a voice to a character (Antoinette Cosway) that spent most of her time locked away in the attic, and also by making Rochester much crueller than he appeared to be in the former book (though one still has to question what possessed him to lock her away in the attic in the first place).

However, let us consider this book rather than another book that does a similar thing: which is changing the entire nature of the original book (a concept that I learned in English I referred to a intertextuality). As suggested above, Wicked explores the concept of evil, and opens up the world of Oz and the background to the readers to help us understand why the Witch (Ephalba) was portrayed as being evil in the original. Now I am loathe to go too much into this because the musical does digress from the book substantially. For those who has seen the musical will be aware that Ephalba isn't referred to as 'the Wicked Witch of the West' (or at least not from what I can remember), and we end up sympathising with her. This is not really the case in the book <spoiler>(and, by the way, the ending is different, in that she does not climb out of a hatch in the ground and runs off with her lover, who, as it turns out, wasn't murdered by the wizard)</spoiler> because as the story progresses Ephalba becomes bitter towards her enemies to the point where she ends up taking the law into her own hands and thus alienating those who once supported her.

As I said, the concept is really good, and there is a lot of political intrigue in the story where we have the wizard usurping power in Oz, and a campaign against the talking Animals to strip them of their rights because, well, they are not human, they are animals. There is also the idea of the 'Unseen God', a not too subtle dig at Christianity, though there does not seem to be any real criticism of the religion, just an understanding of its existence.

So, in this story, which the setting is reminiscent of the late 19th Century America (and the sections of Oz representative of parts of the continental United States) explores a number of concepts, such as the dehumanising of certain races (which is a not too subtle dig at white supremacy), the nature of evil (in that the reason that the Wicked Witch is considered evil is because a group of people say that she is evil, and because they say that she is evil, people begin to believe that this is the case – though we should also note that Ephalba begins to accept this label by referring to herself as 'The Wicked Witch of the West'). The main reason that she ended up with that label is because she ended up taking a stand against the dehumanisation of the animals, which ended up alienating her from certain powerful elements in Ozian society.