| Tuesday, December 07, 2004 |
 | An end and a beginning last week.
Finally, after a process long delayed by the problem of having my eyeballs itch, bleed and attempt to liquefy themselves in their sockets every time I essayed more than a page at a time, I have finished Avon: A Terrible Aspect, by the mighty Paul Darrow. There is every possibility that this is the worst book ever written, potentially worse even than Schrodinger's Baby, which for future reference sucks donkeys. Notionally a tale of the early days of Kerr Avon, cultest queer icon this side of the young Lex Luthor, A Terrible Novel actually concerns itself first with the misadventures of his father, the risibly-named Rogue Avon. Rogue Avon is a roiser-doister, a man of action, and a man who loves the ladies. Incredibly briefly.
She took him fiercely, as if she were a bird of prey and he was her victim. Her breasts were pliant beneath his hands, her lips moistened his, her legs and arms entwined him.
He burst inside her, emitting a long groan of pleasure. "What," cries that portion of the readership not struck blind by the sheer horror, "already? That didn't take long."
But she was not satisfied (the reader nods without surprise) and forced him to love her again.
When they had finished, she licked the perspiration from his neck.
"If you're going to die," she said, "I can think of worse ways to go!"
To describe this as fan fiction is unfair to the writers of Blakes 7 fan fiction, much of which is exceptionally good and certainly far better than this. Shortly hereafter, we discover that Rogue Avon's nemesis is his half brother. He is also a cyborg. And a dragon. And a werewolf.
Anyway, if that wasn't eye-poppingly awful, once Avon fils actually turns up Darrow sets about making things worse. Every relationship in the entire book is either utterly unconvincing or queasily incestuous. Considering how often we are told that Avon père and fils are cold-blooded killers with steel traps for minds, they are both incredibly stupid. Every other bit of oratio recta (and never was it more appropriately named) ends in an exclamation mark. Women are willowy and bosomy, men all come bearing a twin-bladed knife with serrated edge. Not a twin-bladed knife without serrated edge, nor a twin-bladed knife with a serrated edge. Every single bloody knife in the book is described with that exact phrase. It's as if one prolific but unimaginative bloke from Sheffield cornered the market during the Planetary Wars. Likewise, every gun is a pump-action gun. I know not whether the author found himself a few words short of contract and quickly inserted these epithets, or whether he honestly didn't notice. Given the generally execrable proofing, I suspect that author and publisher alike just rushed it out as quickly as possible in the anticipation of a brief influx of money, and then silence. The fools knew not what they were creating. When friend phoned me to tell me that she had found it in a charity shop and ask if I wanted it, it was as if I had been told that a mermaid had been discovered washing her armpits in a Holy Grailful of the blood of John the Baptist. It's the culmination of a life's ambition. I'm actually not sure whether, now that I know the series of events that quite clearly did not lead Avon to his fateful rendezvous with Blake because they make no cocking sense whatsoever, I can go on.
I'll go on.
Fortunately, arriving from Amazon just in time to fill the Darow-sized hole in my life (svelte young Darrow, obviously. A hole the size of the mature Darrow and I would have bled out) was Half Life 2. I had for a while convinced myself that this would simply not run on my desktop, and the dodgy video card on my laptop would kill my joy (which at least is somewhat true - early indication suggest that it is rather like negotiating a hunting trip organised by Jan Svankmajer in its fuzzier, jumpier moments). Regrettably, my eyes were dazzled with tales of scaleable delights, I recalled that I had never actually bought a computer game at full price before, I pondered whether this was what had actually driven me to install a DX9-compatible graphics card, and before you know it I was the Amazon.co.uk equivalent of naked in Tesco.
It's a regrettable fact that I lose the ability to resist computer games when I'm in troughs. I very nearly lost my degree to a potent cocktail of depression, alcohol abuse and Championship Manager. To think that my father thought he'd be helping my studies by giving me his old PC... When I count the hours I have wasted on computer games, I could weep, but I know that in the main that time would not have been spent usefully otherwise, because I would just have alphabetised my scalpels (s for sharp, p for pointy), laminated some old correspondence or copied all my emails into a single huge word document in case there was an... accident.
Except Half Life 2. From now on, I will be playing Half Life 2 when I'm awake. Some will say that this will interfere with my life. Fortunately, Half-Life 2 is more realistic than life itself, so that shouldn't be a problem. And that's just on medium detail. It's a bloody good thing I don't have a) a next-generation video card or b) a crowbar. Or a date for tomorrow, because me and Ms. Alyx Vance got a good thing going on... I know you'll say that bump mapping ain't no substitute for bumping lips, but I tell you - I haven't felt this way about somebody since everything went wrong with Anna Navarre. I'm ready to love again. If by "love" we mean "not get any sleep and smell funny". And when don't we?
Actually, maybe real life isn't so bad after all...
1 Comments:
You used the word "execrable". A firm favorite of mine when talking about those best selling high quality books by J.K.Rowling. Am I the only one who finds this series as delightful as shit sandwiches?
Hope you are well.
Damian.
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