Book Trilogies That Never Were: House Of Leaves, Nova Express, And Riddley Walker

house of leaves nova express riddley walker

You’ll want to strap yourself in for this – these three really aren’t for the fainthearted. Bluntly, they are not what we would consider normal novels – and if you’ve ever heard the name ‘House of Leaves’, you probably already knew that. Mark Z. Danielewski’s tale of a book about a film about a house has taken on a semi-legendary status in the horror community, and rightfully so. Bits and pieces from the book often turn up on creepypasta forums as little standalone slices of terror – although only bits and pieces from the early sections, for reasons which will become clear.

At its core, it’s a simple story of a family moving into a new house. As they’re measuring the floorspace to put in the new carpets, it turns out the house is quarter of an inch bigger on the inside. Then a door turns up that shouldn’t be there. The father makes a film, ‘The Navidson Record’, chronicling what happens next, and then a blind man writes a scholarly dissertation about that film, and then the blind man dies in mysterious circumstances, and then his notes are found and assembled by Johnny Truant, an assistant tattoo artist with issues of his own, and that’s how we read the story. All fairly simple stuff.

As you might imagine, with all these perspectives going on, each trying to stick their oar in through multiple page-long footnotes, the book ends up crowded and labyrinthine. True to form, the bits of the house that shouldn’t be there are also a labyrinth, and it’s here that the book’s title reveals itself not as something eerie, not something autumnal for when the sun starts going down earlier and everything gets colder, but as a cheap pun – ‘leaves’, here, is meant in the sense of ‘pages’. (Compare Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which sadly despite the title wasn’t a kind of 19th-century Mr Nice.)

The book is primarily remembered for its, shall we say, interesting formatting decisions, and when I say interesting I mean the kind of oblique stuff that attracts descriptors like ‘avante-garde’ and makes normal people sigh heavily. Here though, where it is meant to be unwelcoming – the book’s preface is simply ‘this is not for you’ – it works. Media which is actively hostile to the viewer is a genre, playwright Antonin Artaud developed something called the ‘theatre of cruelty’ which is exactly what it sounds like, but it’s very rare that examples get as successful or as widely known as House of Leaves.

One section, where the labyrinth narrows into a twisty little passage, sees the pace drop to a word per two pages, which start crawling around sideways and upside-down. But the real terror sets in the first time the format stops simply being complicated and goes completely to hell, with multiple narratives jostling for attention and a footnote which began pages earlier off in the corner of the page, still ticking off a list of all the architectural styles which the labyrinth isn’t. The blast of information on turning that page, drawing you further into the ever-darkening storylines with that weird red herring distracting the eye, is what the jumpscare of the film medium dreams of being.

Just to make trying to get a handle on it all a stranger and more eerie process, it’s hard to say how reliable any of the narrators are. Johnny frequently admits to lying to the reader and editing the account of the film. Zampano, the blind film critic, attributes reviews and reactions to many real-world figures, all of whom of course deny having ever seen the film, and cites many scholarly works about the film which do not exist. And, once very deep into the labyrinth, Jim Navidson, the filmmaker, actually pulls out a copy of House of Leaves to pass the time, which gets really complicated, particularly considering that Johnny – several meta-layers up from Jim – claims to have met Danielewski and given him the idea for the book.

Ultimately, Jim destroys the book, and in what obviously isn’t a coincidence escapes the labyrinth soon after – and, likewise, the format returns to something recognisable as a novel. In a real sense, the reader has gone through the same tangled journey as him, but whereas Jim navigated a maze made of…well, no known architectural style or material…the reader has navigated a maze of words, of letters and of pages. Make no mistake, this is not simply the power of narrative, this is the power of words themselves – I cite again that visceral shock-reaction of the format getting really strange.

But for all House of Leaves’s weird stylistic choices, it was at least written in full and coherent sentences. Where House Of Leaves was terrifying because of its dense, regimented use of language, William S. Burroughs’s Nova Express is the exact opposite. It takes a deliberately chaotic approach, so that – no longer hemmed in by the words – you have to navigate it yourself. Which of these is the more terrifying? That’s one for the philosophers, or possibly the secret recesses of the heart.

To look at Nova Express, you might think ‘holy god, did someone chuck this in a blender?’, and you wouldn’t be far wrong. The book represents the culmination of Burroughs’s experiments with the closely related cut-up and fold-in techniques, in which, having written out a page of type, the author then cuts it up and jumbles it, or alternatively folds it down the middle and lines it up against another folded page – in both cases creating a different page of type, one which is fragmented and jarring and often almost completely nonsensical.

But, as with Burroughs, that word ‘almost’ didn’t end up here by mistake. As mixed and matched as it all is, all the seeds of the raw material that became Nova Express are still there, still present – and while the vast majority of it seems like heavy, weird Beat poetry, as you read on certain recurrent phrases and ideas will begin to present themselves. While the cut-up technique predates Burroughs, he came to it through his collaboration with artist Brion Gysin, as a way of appropriating the concepts of the collage and the montage for use with the written word.

The main character, Inspector Lee, is presented clearly enough, but exactly who and what he’s investigating stays on the far side of murky. Oh, we get their names – Jacky Blue Note, Izzy the Push, The Subliminal Kid, and the rest of the Nova mob, all names worthy of hardboiled pulp fiction – but what exactly they are remains a mystery. ‘Human’ is a wild guess in a story that whirls off to Uranus every so often. ‘Virus’ seems like a safer bet, as they represent little packets of information which reproduce themselves within a living host, in this case the human mind – and, true to form, one of Burroughs’s more famous maxims was the straightforward ‘language is a virus’.

Nova, though, is a far simpler concept. Through any number of subtle, insidious means, most involving select use of words and images, the Nova mob attempt to control all conscious thought they can get at. One major technique of theirs is sowing conflict, which was particularly relevant at the time Burroughs was writing it, during the height of the Cold War when at any time there was a strong possibility all life on earth would end in a nuclear holocaust – but blind, tribal conflict is still knocking about today, as you may have noticed.

“Take two opposed pressure groups – Record the most violent and threatening statements of group one with regard to group two and play back to group two – Record the answer and take it back to group one – Back and forth between opposed pressure groups – This process is known as “feed back” – You can see it operating in any bar room quarrel – In any quarrel for that matter”
– Nova Express, William S. Burroughs

A method which may ring a few bells, given how big a chunk of today’s newsertainment media focuses purely on the supposedly outrageous things said and done by ‘the other side’.

At this point, Burroughs’s unusual style may be making slightly more sense – it’s a means of resistance to the use of language as thought control. You’re not obliged to take him at his word on this, but put it this way, if you wanted to indoctrinate someone, the fold-in technique is probably the last technique you’d reach for. (Burroughs reckoned it was the only way to artificially imitate spontaneity – and that, in a kind of ‘thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters’ way, that it could work as a form of divination.)

Speaking of indoctrination, though, there’s also a fair few mentions of Scientology peppered through the book – and, in a move which, nowadays, is arguably more transgressive than any of Burroughs’s incessant mentions of heroin and boys (two of his favourite pastimes), it isn’t all negative. It should be remembered that Scientology started off as one of any number of ‘60s-era new age self-help programs, with the kooky religious dogma basically an afterthought.

Burroughs, for his part, thought they had some effective methods, particularly approving of their idea of ‘engrams’ – suppressed painful memories which could be triggered by certain words or images – but ultimately found them too authoritarian for his taste. (My lawyer advises me not to add that I heartily agree – nor to suggest that the curious look into the whereabouts of Michele ‘Shelly’ Miscavige, wife of David Miscavige, the current leader of the Church of Scientology.)

The pulpy science-fiction plot, involving Uranians and robots, quickly takes a back seat to the consideration of how this depraved mess reflects on real life – because make no mistake, no matter how much garbled nonsense about interstellar travel is laid over it, the use of words and images as thought control was and is relevant to everyone on earth not in a pre-literate society. However, that isn’t to say the dense, jangled text isn’t a pleasure of its own – if you enjoyed Ginsberg’s Howl, you’ll enjoy Nova Express. And the book is a primo example of how the latter half of the twentieth century, before even the anxieties over nuclear war, still bore the scars of World War II (with its own sordid history of thought control) in a major way. When the word ‘oven’ comes up, that’s not part of anything culinary.

Whereas with House of Leaves the challenge was to get a handle on the narrative strands, and with Nova Express things got hazy on the level of the sentences and paragraphs, our final instalment, Russel Hoban’s Riddley Walker, screws with the words themselves – chopping up polysyllables and having a decent stab at imagining what modern English might one day become given some bad breaks. Further muddying the water is the fact that it all bears a strong phonetic Kentish accent, so your best bet is to read it out loud.

While Riddley Walker’s post-apocalyptic setting is explicitly post-nuclear – with nuclear energy referred to as the ‘1 Big 1’, and raised to the level of dangerous god – given the parallels in their unconventional uses of language, it’s not hard to imagine House of Leaves as harbinger of the linguistic apocalypse, and Nova Express as a glimpse into the chaos of it all going down. It’s in a far-flung future, so it’s hard to tell just how much destruction’s taken place in the meantime – though the sea level’s far higher than it is now, as the map of ‘Inland’ is just about recognisable as a waterlogged Kent (with Dungeness, for instance, becoming an island called ‘Dunk Your Arse’).

The book begins with young Riddley marking his passage into manhood (here, the venerable age of 12 years old) by killing a wild pig. Despite what this suggests, the end times haven’t reduced society to sticks and stones. Sure, there’s plenty of (comparatively) barbaric practices, but also some level of technology, a rough-and-ready form of centralised government, and, more importantly, a religious mythos that is equal parts garbled understanding of nuclear physics and the story of St. Eustace. This mythos is perpetuated through puppet shows, which might seem childish if it wasn’t deadly serious.

When it comes down to it though, puppet shows aren’t all that childish. The use of puppetry as not simply entertainment, but also as religious and state propaganda, is far more common than the alternative throughout history, and is speculated to date back to Ancient Egypt. Further, the traditional British Punch-and-Judy shows involve wife-beating, child abuse, and, ultimately, execution. Mr Punch, the cheerfully anarchic leading man of these dramas, features heavily in Riddley Walker – Riddley unearths a Mr Punch puppet, which prompts him to start asking some dangerous questions, not least because of its hunch (the post-nuclear society seeing any deformity as an unspeakable taboo, and – presumably – murdering the disabled at birth).

Bisection is a recurrent theme throughout, and not just with longer words having been chopped up by years of degradation. Their warped version of the fall of man centres upon Eusa, their iteration of St. Eustace, in his vanity physically pulling apart another of their important mythological figures, ‘the littl shynin man the Addom’, a fairly obvious play on both ‘Adam’ and ‘atom’. And, with Eusa having split the atom – well, the older residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could tell you what comes next.

Thus, humanity fell to the now-degraded state depicted in the book, and ‘clevverness’ in particular became distrusted, seen as leading to nothing but trouble – an idea enforced by the sermonistic puppet shows, and embodied in their name for Satan, ‘Mr Clevver’. (Albeit Lucifer never tends to be depicted as a dimwit.) Ironically, the colloquialisms of the book are still full of references to technology, such as the punning ‘Addom’, and the ‘puter (i.e. computer) leat’ being the pointy-heads responsible for the ‘1 Big 1’. And while this decline has resulted in a return to a state of nature, it’s a decidedly Hobbesian one, with the numerous packs of wild dogs – man’s former best friend – now being one of the main causes of death.

However, the alternative – forging a path back to mastery over technology – doesn’t come off much better. When proto-politician Goodparley gets his hands on a copy of the myth of St. Eustace, written in standard English (which, naturally, he sees as a bizarre code akin to how readers of standard English might see the rest of the book), the comedy of him reading the word ‘hamlets’ and reasoning ‘well thats litel pigs init’ gives way to unadulterated horror when we realise that he’s accidentally figured out the recipe for gunpowder.

There’s a few points which seem woefully drippy-hippy, especially compared to the frighteningly well-realised rest of the narrative. The degradation of the environment is, at one point, speculated to be down to the ‘o zoan’ layer becoming damaged – which, yes, would explain the rising sea levels, but seems far too specific a reference when nuclear physics have become tangled up with Judeochristian fables, and worse yet, seems to be trying to teach us a very important lesson. More harmlessly, although just as inexplicably, a major commodity in this society is ‘cuts’ of Rizla (rolling papers) and hash – the production of either would be far beyond the iron-age technology level we see. But these are fairly petty complaints, only jarring as compared to the book’s usual level of quality.

As you might expect for this third in our series, when you’ve gotten through it, you’ll likely feel like you’ve gone on just as much of a journey as Riddley himself – even if you haven’t trekked through a good chunk of southern England. Hoban certainly felt that the writing of it was a journey, noting ‘I can’t spell properly any more, but what the hell’. At its core, it emphasises the sheer fragility of all these carefully regimented structures we take for granted – from conventional spelling through the housing market all the way up to nation-states, it’s all one good mind-shattering event (which, remember, in this trilogy setup, we had over the course of House of Leaves and Nova Express) away from crumbling back into dust.

There’s an old adage, variously attributed to everyone between Picasso and the fourteenth Dalai Lama, that one must know the rules before one breaks them. That’s not exactly what’s going on with these three – Hoban and Burroughs were both respected and prolific, but Danielewski’s second book, Only Revolutions, fell flat, and his screenplay for the proposed TV adaptation of House of Leaves was shaky at best – but it’s something to think about, given that they’re all to some extent defining themselves against what we think of as ‘normal’ for a novel.

If anything, the idea of having to know the rules first applies far more to the reader than the authors. Someone who had never read another novel coming across any of these either wouldn’t know what was going on – or otherwise, come away with some very strange ideas about what a novel is, about the English language, about architecture…

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