Better late than never. Ok, first of all i enjoyed...

2009-05-25T19:54:03.350+01:00

Better late than never. Ok, first of all i enjoyed it alot more than the movie. And yes the whole authority story is as good as ever, the ingredients are all there, but the way he uses the situations, and the situations themselfs are so exaggerated. I found the conflicts immature, dumbed down. Same with the insanity in a way, its too specific where it shouldnt and and not specific enough in other parts. It kinda felt like a boys novel in parts, you know, like the westerns and agent books at the grocery market. Big, strong, muscles looking all cool and badass. Yeah, i know, metaphores. But it could have been done better, smoother, more adult even :)
I really expected it to dig deeper, show more. Still enjoyed it though, but i kinda want to learn that there is a full version available.

You know, I found myself feeling slightly uncomfor...

2009-04-02T13:57:00.000+01:00

You know, I found myself feeling slightly uncomfortable about some of the descriptions of the "black boys". There seemed to be a very deliberate sense of creating a goblin-esque class of underlings who served the wicked white queen. The orderlies are portrayed as slovenly, grunting, hunched, vicious yet cowardly. And always emphasised as being black.

Of course, this is all from a privileged 21st century perspective. I expect it was the case that the menial jobs like this were taken by the poor, black underclass in 50s America. There's even a quaint kind of ethnic-hierarchy in place - the downtrodden, oppressed native American looks down on the more downtrodden, oppressed black men. Nonetheless, it was quite jarring to read.

Also, it's interesting that you picked up on the similarity to previous literature that dealt with the encroaching wave of industrialisation. I felt a very strong similarity with Tolkein's Lord Of The Rings, which deals with similar anti-industrialisation themes. Tenuous, but it was there.

After one strike-out for the Book Club, this was a...

2009-04-01T19:34:00.000+01:00

After one strike-out for the Book Club, this was a major home run. One Flew Over was an extremely absorbing read. Twenty or so pages in I was already deeply sucked into a world of great realism (and surrealism) created by a seriously able writer. You can read good books year in, year out. Great books, like great music are a qualitatively different experience. OFOTCN hit that spot, with confidence, from the beginning. Like all great books, it hands out pleasure and insight in equal portions and managed to invoke intense feelings of great amusement, flesh-creeping tension and anger.

The combined influences of One Flew Over and acid more or less wrecked the author. The book wrecked him because he felt that novelists’ later work is a dilution of their first piece and that he could never live up to it again. With the acid, like all stimulants, the initial gifts it gave at first in the shape of insights and the creation of the book later gave way to an opportunity cost of the LSD frying him up pretty good for life.

Famously, before the book was written, Kesey participated in legal drugs’ trials within an asylum and afterwards got a job there as an assistant. It doesn’t take much of a reach to see how the schizophrenic views of the Chief might have evolved from a man who lay on a bed looking out of a tiny window while tripping his tits off and then who came back to look at others and one presumes therefore back at himself in the dual states of the drugged-up and the straight.

Later, after the book and a much less successful second novel was published, he got famous for riding around on a bus in the sixties with his Merry Pranksters evangelising the societal change potential of the mass ingestion of psychedelics. Ironically, for someone who wrote about the conflict between raw human instinct and values versus “The System” in One Flew Over, his group and Timothy Leary’s appear not to have been able to live the hippie spirit of getting on together and had fairly notable (if one imagines, relaxed) series of disagreements about how the psychedelic revolution should be handled. Kesey bought a farm, stuck a sign up in the drive that said “No” to dissuade his previous comrades from contacting him again and then under the influence of the legacy of the book and all those tabs, didn’t write another thing for a quarter of a century.

I’d echo many of the things that Dave and Shedir said above. All the themes they talk about are central and I’ll just add a couple of additional, rather than replacing, thoughts. I should add, if you’ve seen the film, you still know bugger all about this book and the pleasure that can be got from reading it.

Above all, as previously stated, it’s a book about collision. Collision between natural behaviour and constrictive rules and regulations. It’s a book written in 1959 about the collision of the old and the new which works both for the fifties in themselves and also for the fifties beginning to morph into what would become the sixties. McMurphy’s initials are RPM, a fact I would never have picked up but for the forward, but there’s a nod to the epoch-changing effect of rock and roll that was seen as a fundamental and very real threat to the fabric of society. Not a big point, but one that sets the tone for how this book works at different levels simultaneously.

It’s also a book laden with sex. McMurphy is a walking fucking and fighting animal with charges against him for rape – statutory so he claims. The orderlies in the asylum may have sodomised inmates. Billy is repressed beyond belief and finds redemption in the arms of a golden hearted hooker before the bitter consequences that follow. Harding and his wife are fighting their relationship issues with assertions of rampant sexuality while denying the real problems below. Even the Chief’s memories include a dream-like recollection of the seductive power of a meeting with girls working at a cotton farm. Nurse Ratched, for everything else that she stands for, wears starched uniforms that tightly constrict and minimise her very ample breasts. As a physical expression of essential human spirit which is outside of the system of the Combine, she tries to cover up and deny them. Kesey uses sex as a clear, in-the-contemporary-reader’s-face, assertion of the power of normal human instincts and their universal presence in everyone. 50’s Combine America could attempt to reject Kesey’s other arguments but they couldn’t deny the basic truth of the natural versus the artificial which is the issue at the heart of the whole book.

I also liked the way Kesey writes up McMurphy with his failures and issues. He doesn’t try and proselytise his cause through a virtuous martyr. McMurphy is rough, he doesn’t mind taking money serially off the other inmates as much as he comes to sacrifice himself for them, he has a rape charge (but not conviction) against him, he foolhardily treats his confinement as a game of no consequence until he realises he has no release date, his knuckles are all scarred up from a hundred fights, he learned his sex off a nine year old girl as a child himself – not a fifteen year old, as if to make the point, he’s impotent to save characters who die brutally in the book. Above all, he is clearly conflicted between his selfless encouragement of the others and the will for self preservation throughout. He plans an escape on the final night but succumbs to drunkenness to pass out and be conveyed not to the electric shock therapy that he sees off so magnificently but to a mechanical drill to his brain.

Kesey seems to be saying ‘yes it’s raw and uncivilised’ but compared to the Combine, McMurphy is a natural reality infinitely preferable to the multiple fails that the Combine of society and the asylum has inflicted on all of its inmates. It’s also no coincidence that many of the inmates are voluntary. It underlines McMurphy’s central message to everyone, characters and readers alike, to make a deliberate conscious decision to overthrow the crap that is imposed on them. The whole book is a cry to arms for valuing basic humanity for all its possible failures and rough edges and having the confidence to reject the moralistic, self-serving culture of authoritarianism.

Whether McMurphy is dealing with the black orderlies, the inmates, the hookers in his life or Nurse Ratched, he does so with an open and honest heart. It’s no coincidence the Chief is an American Indian for the issues of race (and of course the allegory of an untouched America before society and system is imposed) and that should clearly see off the laughable undergrad accusations of racism in the book.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest reminds you, without plagiarising, of a host of books before it that deal with Big Issues when people still wrote literature that tried to tackle Big Issues. McMurphy is the product of a prior era running head first into a conflict with 50’s laced-up morality. He’s out of date but has a brutish integrity. The language around the black characters in the book is jarring today but is another of Kesey’s mechanisms. He’s a mash up of, weirdly, the purity of Tess of the D’Urbervilles who represents an allegory for rural England being overrun by the industrial revolution and the Carbine of landed gentry exploiting simpler people, the intellectual revulsion of Winston Smith in 1984 and the raw human sexuality and anti-bullshit of a modern 60’s about to start.

The great thing about this book is that it sparks a hundred different thoughts. It is a very very easy read but a hugely provoking one. Just like all great literature. If you missed this, get it now. Great call, Shed.

I think I've been a victim of a keylogger, basical...

2009-04-01T16:03:00.000+01:00

I think I've been a victim of a keylogger, basically Dr Dave has taken all my writings and blatantly passed them off as his own.

An outrage the combine itself would be proud of!

The book was fantastic, I enjoyed it far more than the film. Once again it proves with your own imagination the written word can take you to places motion pictures just simply can't.

The books breakdown of characters was beautifully done, explaining the nuances of Ratched's emotionless visage works far better than just seeing an old sow on screen.

Randall is a mans man. Big, brawling, boisterous, boozing, bullying bear of a man. He uses is sheer force of character to bully the patients into finding inner strength to regain their manhood.

In a good twist this crystalises in the moment he finds out just how powerless he is in the asylum. It's all down to his hated enemy nurse Ratched when, indeed if, he is released. No clock watching like a hardened jailbird, its all behaviour based.

After initially attempting to toe the line, he sees the impact this is having on his fellow men and reverts to type. Ultimately sacrificing himself to give the others the capacity to change and escape.

The journey is well worth the investment, but the chief is the absolute star of the peice. His imaginary enemy "the combine" and it's global infiltration and pollution is a great idea. Well implemented and his escape from that more important than leaving the actual asylum.

The social commentary is of course utterly damning and scathing. Sparing to blows in letting the reader know that their idylic society comes at a heavy cost to many others.

A real page turner, which is still very relevant today. Loved it.

Comments on Eat Electric Death: EED Bookclub Month 2: One Flew Over The Cuckoo's N...

Better late than never. Ok, first of all i enjoyed...

You know, I found myself feeling slightly uncomfor...

After one strike-out for the Book Club, this was a...

I think I've been a victim of a keylogger, basical...