The Mad Dog Gang meets Rotten Fred & Ratsguts -- Ian Mune

Guest post by Kelly

I can remember buying this book from Ian Mune himself sometime in 1977. The TV programme, which this book is based on, was pretty big at my primary school. The purchase was made from a bookshop in Devonport  that I remember as being called Evergreens but in fact was called Greener Grass.

I used my own money. Ian Mune signed it, which seemed kind of cool to seven or eight-year-old me.

Photo: Auckland Libraries (id 786-A008-6)

Apparently this is how Devonport looked in the 1970s. I don't think so. I remember it in colour. A whole world you roamed at will, often bored, but with agency. (In the background of that picture looms Mt Victoria. My Uncle Pat once told me and my brother about how he and his friends, sometime in the 1940s, rolled an empty truck off the top. I'm sure they were back home in time for dinner by six o'clock.)

Actually, this is what my childhood looked like but with less clouds and with more topless sunbathers. 

Photo: Auckland Libraries (id 996-10)

I am currently reading The Mad Dog Gang meets Rotten Fred and Ratsguts to my seven-year-old and last week he was curled up tight on the bed next to me with his hands pressed to his mouth, tense with excitement, filled with trepidation. The soon-to-be-formed Mad Dog Gang were creeping up on Rotten Fred’s shack. In this time, so removed from that past, his reaction to the book has been one of excitement, of pure enthusiasm.

He is desperate to know if The Mad Dog Gang will make friends with Rotten Fred and Ratsguts but I won’t tell him.

If you look around you can find the programme on Youtube (in colour too, but, like my memory, more than a little bleached by time). It’s not without its charms, I'm sure Seamus would like to check it out, but I would be reluctant to show him. It is not a patch on this book. The book is a masterpiece. The writing is taut and exciting. From cover to cover there is hardly a word out of place. Told from the kids' perspective, there is not a trace of sentiment.

If I was asked to describe the book in one word I would have to choose ‘classic’. Seamus has already opted for ‘epic’.

"It’s epic, eh Dad?" says my kiwi boy with an Irish mother.

Thinking about why I prefer the book to the programme I conclude that the book seems more dangerous. The details are more intense. The talk seems like the talk of my childhood. Mr Newman, (Pooman), the teacher at the school, while initially friendly enough is revealed as being a bit of a petty prick. Angela Marks, top of the school, is a source of contempt for natural born rebel Harvey Kepuni.  ‘Angela-Bangela-stuck-up-bitch’ he thinks when she reprimands him for picking on Tony and Suey, the new kids at school. Tony and Suey will soon be his allies and co-conspirators in after-school shenanigans. (This includes assaulting an angry orchard owner with a large stick, a scene Seamus found tremendously amusing).

Like any great read, The Mad Dog Gang meets Rotten Fred and Rats Guts is not one thing. There are not just laughs and adventures. It is also a book with a deeply serious side. In it children face death for the first time and it does not offer a tidy or easy or comforting lesson. Seamus was silent and somber in this part of the story but did not complain. This is stuff he has thought about and at an age much younger than his current seven-and-a-half. Mune knows children.

The world of The Mad Dog Gang is a world where you don’t tell adults a thing and you sort out problems yourself. This is a book where the children have agency.

In closing, here are a couple of images from the golden days when kids tv programmes featured seven-year-olds smoking cigarettes*…

…and dogs featured top billing in the end credits.

(*Seamus was scandalised. "He can't do that Dad, he's the the hero!" he said)

-- Kelly

Book cover photo and South Pacific promo clip from KiwiTV website

Robert Stone 1937-2015

Guest post by Kelly

(photo: New York Times)

There are books you hold gingerly, somehow aware that they exclude a charisma, demanding respect if not immediate understanding. That’s the feeling on first encountering Robert Stone's Dog soldiers, a book that has as much to offer now as when it was first published. 

(New York Times)

Robert Stone died last week. He was seventy-seven and in his time had written eight novels, two short story collections and a memoir. Not a huge count. Contemporaries such as Larry McMurtry, who attended the same university writing programme as Stone, have published well into the double digits. Hard living had something to do with that, but the fact is Stone's books are monoliths. Volumes carved out of hard truths, unflinching in their attempt to appreciate the harsh reality of his time and place. They must have demanded a great deal from him. 

(Buddenbrooks)

You can see some of the character which drove the creation of those books in online interviews. There is one from toward the end of his life. Stone is at a promotion event for his last novel, Death of the black-haired girl. He looks exhausted, flattened by the years and the chronic pulmonary disease from which he eventually died. His thoughts are unfocused and seem to wonder. The book he holds trembles along with his shaking hand. The host mentions Graham Greene and Stone suddenly springs into relief. He’s filled with piss and vinegar, furious scorn;

“I hate Greene. I hate Greene’s soul. I hate his guts. I hate everything he represents. I hate his hatreds. I hate his contempt’s. I hate his falseness. I really have a deep despising of Greene….So my feeling about Greene is really one of considerable despising, as I’m sure his would be about me. I mean Graham Greene was a really good writer, there’s no way around that. I wish I could do something about that….I don’t feel unconnected to Greene but my connection to Greene is really one of hostility and rejection, because I think he made claims to knowledge and to insight that he was not properly entitled to…”

The rant is not without humour, Stone has a twinkle in his eye as he delivers it, but at the core is contempt for lack of truth. It’s pure and it’s the opinion of a man that does not write ‘entertainments’. 

(Salem Press Inc)

The knowledge at the centre of Stone's rancour is probably esoteric as much as political. Greene's problematic Catholicism does not match up with Stone's search for a truth, (or, probably, with Ston'es early life experience in a Catholic orphanage after his mother was hospitalised with schizophrenia.) His novels are full with questers, mystics but theirs is not a guilt ridden struggle with conscience, or a way of getting your leg over, but rather a search for transcendental reality. It’s a quality which became more developed as Stone's career progresses and is most apparent in novels such as Outbridge reach, Damascus gate and Bay of souls. In his Paris Review interview Stone described himself as a theologian but it would probably be closer to the mark to say his inclinations were gnostic, not interested in theory but, rather, direct spiritual experience.

In a memoir on The Jewish Daily Forward website Abe Mezrich talks of Stone's fascination with the Kabballah. Mezrich attributes Stone's attraction to the teaching that God is a force withdrawn from the universe, likening it to Stone's own experience of being abandoned by his father soon after birth. The rooting of the numinous in concrete, painful experience is one which Stone returns to again and again in his writing. The process is perilous, dangerous and quixotic, the cost is huge, but for Stone this is where the spark is found. 

(The Morning News)

Stone was also concerned with place. His novels are set in Central America, Mexico, Jerusalem, Haiti, Vietnam and the open Atlantic Ocean. Even in the American novels settings are marked, New Orleans and California in the late 60s. Places with character. Places with their own mythologies. There is a romance in their portrayal, appreciation of strange dangers and exotic attractions, of the tiny details and customs that make up their charisma. Stone himself admitted that his luck of productivity could be at least partly attributed to his wanderlust, something that it is hard to begrudge given the tantalising lucidity in which he presents these locales.  

(Interview Magazine)

Though there was pleasure to be had in his sense of place, that satisfaction was always eclipsed by serious purpose. Stone was concerned with those areas for their political significance, for the ready example they offered of 20th century American adventurism and its consequences. It seems a pity that we are to be robbed of his vision just as his novels reached the cusp of our modern world. The Death of the black-haired girl portrays the post 9/11 world but does not touch on the many wars in the Middle-East or the moral fallout of these conflicts on the world and American society. It seems that had he lived and produced one more novel Stone might have shown that we have not learned much over the course of his lifetime. That we have come full circle and back to the Dog soliders years.

-Kelly

Links

The Art of Fiction no 90 - Paris Review interview.

The TotalAntitotalist Robert Stone -  InterviewMagazine interview

Referenced Youtube interview (Graham Greene comments start at 16:39)

Why Robert Stone was one of the greatest non-Jewish Jewish writers – TheJewish Daily Forward.

Available form Auckland Libraries

-Dog soldiers

-Children of light

-Damascus gate

-Death of the black-haired girl

-Fun with problems: stories

-Prime green: remembering the sixties

War comics

Special guest blogger Kelly Sheehan writes comics and, also, interesting things about comics, such as this:

Born too late for personal recollections of the Second World War my generation still managed to inherit a strong cultural memory of that great conflict. Games of war were a normal way of passing the time and small plastic soldiers, tanks and planes were a staple part of any boy’s toy box. Comics, which were then a more integrated part of a child’s life, featured a host of characters still fighting the war decades after it ended. Any New Zealand comics fan in his 30s or 40s would have vivid memories of Commando comics and Battle Picture Weekly, not to mention sundry characters such as Captain Hurricane who would routinely tie knots in the gun barrels of Nazi panzers without breaking a sweat.

One of the more bitter experiences of my childhood was going to hospital for a couple of days. I have no idea why I went but I have a very clear memory of the intense disappointment and sadness I felt when I discovered the huge cache of war comics, generously given to me by my older cousins, had disappeared from the locker next to my bed during the night. After that being in hospital kind of sucked.

^{(Picture from Sir George Grey Photograph Collection, 7-A13520)}

There is part of me that wonders if my father was responsible for those comics vanishing. Certainly, he would have felt I should not be reading anything that glorified war. If it was Dad, he was mistaken. While the Commando’s featured pretty straight forward tales of Tommy fighting Jerry, Battle Picture Weekly was a subversive little rag that undermined those simplistic conventions and threw a whole new light on what goes on during war. Written by such luminaries as Pat Mills and John Wagner these were stories that dealt with the unfairness and inhumanity of war, not to mention class, wayward authority, fear and the brutalising effect of violence. Anyone who was ten when they read the episode of Charly’s War featured below did not walk away thinking the First World War was in any way glamorous:

The library carries a number of recently republished comics from Battle Picture Weekly, most notably Johnny Red and Charley’s War. Each volume is lovingly put together, with introductions and afterword material that give the strips, and the historic events featured in the stories, context. The Johnny Red volume features an introduction by Garth Ennis, the Irish writer responsible for comics such as Preacher, Hitman and The Boys.

Ennis has always been effusive in his praise of Battle Picture Weekly. He was a fan growing up, indeed he had a letter published in those hallowed pages:

It is hardly surprising that Ennis is one of the few of his generation to put his own mark on the genre of war comics. Reading interviews with him it is clear that this is where his heart lies. Published under the umbrella titles of War Stories and Battlefields each of the stories covers different characters, circumstances and theatres of war.

A number of Ennis’s stories are undoubtedly responses to various strips featured in his beloved Battle Picture Weekly. Johann’s Tiger featured in War Stories Volume 1 bares a strong resemblance to Hellman of Hammer Force, Nightingale in the same volume can be yoked with H.M.S Nightshade, and the recent Night Witches and Motherland draw heavy inspiration from Johnny Red and his struggles on the Eastern Front during the Great Patriotic War. These are not Boy’s Own narratives. War is shown as brutal and chaotic. If there is there is sentimentality it is hard earned and the price paid for survival is high.
I like to think that Ennis has a secret plan. That, at the end of his career, he will have completed a vast novel composed in parts over the years. An epic novel in pictures that will document the gigantic, tragic history of the Second World War.

- Kelly