Epilogue #5

The Castle
Franz Kafka



The final novel in the Vintage-released collection of Kafka's complete novels, The Castle, is one that's left me with a mixture of opinions and thoughts hanging in the ether -- much like, unfortunately, the story set up by Kafka in this unfinished work.

Out of the three novels, this is probably the strangest and most striking -- it's more strongly surreal than its predecessors, darker and also more absurdly humorous. We - like the protagonist, K. the land surveyor - are introduced to an odd small village that's seemingly in permanent Winter and ruled over by bureaucrats in the castle that overshadows it; we see the people who live there and their relationships with one another, we experience K.'s difficulty to do his job in this village (or even to figure out what it is) and the difficulties posed by the increasingly elaborate and deranged bureaucracy, as well as by the two comically incompetent and uncannily strange assistants assigned to him... and then...

Yeah. Unfortunately -- as well as being, in my view, the most atmospherically well-realised and gripping of Kafka's three novels -- it's also the most incomplete. Like the other two novels in the Vintage collection, this novel ends with a section put together posthumously from fragments and drafts... unlike with those two, though, this only serves to make The Castle end abruptly a little bit later than it originally would have done.

Nonetheless, it's worth reading for many reasons. The wintry, remote and peculiar atmosphere of the village is one of my favourite settings from Kafka's three novels; and the paranoia- and anxiety-inducing sense of bureaucracy that characterised The Trial is heightened with the seemingly incomprehensible system of government that oversees the village, while the novel also encompasses the more in-depth characterisation that could be seen in Amerika.

It's just a shame that it all ends so

New Storytelling: Gone Home / Kentucky Route Zero

Games telling stories is nothing new.

Within the ever-burgeoning indie scene though, there have been a spate of studios pushing the boundaries of how stories can be told within this medium. The two games I've played most recently -- The Fullbright Company's highly-detailed exploration experience Gone Home, and (what is available of) Cardboard Computer's intriguing, episodic magical realist adventure Kentucky Route Zero -- are two games that I've found particularly interesting in how - in very different ways - they pull the focus away from traditional game elements like strategy or reflex-testing and push it more totally towards narrative; crucially, without compromising the interactivity that separates the medium of games from film and (most of) literature.

Even though, as I said, games telling stories is nothing new; and though there are undoubtedly plenty of great games with brilliantly-executed narratives (to name a few, Grim Fandango, Bioshock Infinite, and the - for my money, unsurpassed - Deus Ex), the medium can run into unfortunate issues when trying to balance a well-crafted story with the crucial elements of interactivity offered uniquely by games. Especially if said game has a story that doesn't lend itself so much to gaming's traditional propensity for frequent violence.

I think the best example of this is Rockstar Games' 2011 game, L.A. Noire. An overall very good and ambitious game, with a complex and engrossing story and a highly commendable setting in the form of its beautiful recreation of 1950s LA; my only real problem with the game was with the unfortunate flaws in the gameplay. The interrogation mechanic was an admirable experiment, but suffered from overuse; and the more traditional gameplay styles on show -- shooting sections, car chases, quick time events, arbitrary collectibles, etc. -- sometimes felt kind of shoe-horned in for the purposes of adding some interactivity, in a way that limited the sense of immersion that is crucial to any story.

How, then, do my two examples deal with this problem? Especially given that, I should note, neither of them feature violence, puzzles, competition, or strategic elements to propel their stories.

What Gone Home does is take the attention to detail and focus on independent exploration that games like Deus Ex, Thief and System Shock --- (fun fact 1: Fullbright is formed from members of the Bioshock 2 team, making them sort of Looking Glass alumni by proxy; which is, fun fact 2: partly why my brain is hardwired to like their game so much) --- used to flesh out story and character details, and makes this the primary backbone of its narrative structure.

As Katie Greenbriar having returned from travelling around Europe, you piece together the whole story through what artefacts you find in the house -- letters, journals, books, photographs, amongst many others. This mechanic, though highly simple, contributes a hell of a lot to the game.

Relying on this mechanic -- in a way, a sort of reincorporation of gothic 'found' narratives for contemporary consumerist societies -- rather than on exposition or cut-scenes, allows the player to be told a linear story in a non-linear fashion without it in any way messing up the game (contrasting with my experience of the very open Fallout 3, where I travelled to Rivet City too early and ended up missing out an entire mission path); making this a truly and commendably interactive narrative, where there's the literal interactivity of playing the game merges with that of piecing together the story in your mind from the various objects and clues you find in whatever order you choose to find them.

It goes without saying as well that a major share of the game's appeal lies also within the most traditional aspect of it: the content of the story itself. I don't want to spoil it (this is really the sort of thing that's most rewarding to go into relatively blind), but I want to praise the Fullbright Company for their telling of an emotionally resonant and touchingly personal story, and in a way that frequently and intelligently plays on and with our expectations of what stories the medium of video games is capable of telling.

This experimental shifting around of boundaries where storytelling in games is concerned is one of few things that Kentucky Route Zero has in common with Gone Home.

At first glimpse, the game behind Cardboard Computer's dreamy story, which revolves around a truck driver named Conway's journey to make a delivery through an America that echoes the worlds created by the likes of David Lynch, Haruki Murakami and Franz Kafka in its juxtaposition of the highly surreal and the highly mundane, looks more traditional than Gone Home. In appearance and general gameplay, it strongly resembles a point-and-click adventure game; and in how its story is relayed to the player, there are clear cues taken from one of gaming's oldest genres: interactive fiction (or the 'text adventure').

As you play the game though, it becomes apparent that Cardboard Computer are dedicated to experimenting with and reshaping how video games can tell stories.

This will first become apparent in how decision-making works in the game; differing as it does from what we see in many games - whether it be the 'single-handedly-build-an-orphanage-from-twigs-and-your-own-hair-or-kick-a-sentient-being's-head-in-and-then-nuke-everything-in-the-universe'-style big morality of, for example, Mass Effect, or even the more nuanced, pessimistic approach of something like Deus Ex. The decisions the player makes in this game (what Conway might say to his dog about the current situation, for example, or whether to listen to a tape or have a conversation with the person who is playing the tape) are often curiously mundane, or even humbling; but they serve strangely (yet very effectively) to really increase your personal engagement within the interactive world. As KR0's creators said themselves in this highly-recommended feature on the game on Polygon.com, "[it results in] a more human experience, a more empathetic experience. Or also more kind of mysterious experience where they don't feel like they're in control. It's not a power-trip fantasy".

As you progress through the game, Cardboard Computer subtly introduce more and more formally unorthodox elements such as the very minimalist moments when the game presents the player with narrative vignettes reliant basically only on an evocative duo of prose and atmospheric, seemingly implemented with almost surgical care and precision, sound. Most impressive of these though is the playing with narrative perspective; something that first makes an appearance when you find yourself assuming control over the character of Shannon, making specifically the decision as to how she reacts to meeting Conway for the first time. This escalates as the game progresses and has reached its (thus far) apex with my personal favourite scene of the game: a scene that I won't spoil other than to say that it takes place in a characteristically surreal museum and is comparable in style to literary modernism.

It remains to be seen how Kentucky Route Zero is going to continue with its innovations in future episodes, but the recent 'interlude' piece - 'The Entertainment' - and some claims in this recent progress statement from the game's creators suggest that they don't plan on sticking to a formula.

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Both of these games have very good implications for the future of games as a medium for interactive storytelling as a whole; the independent scene, helped significantly by the increased availability of sophisticated production and distribution tools, is forever flourishing as a site for creativity and experimentation. There are tons of indie studios like Cardboard Computer and the Fullbright Company excitingly subverting and playing with gaming's traditional tropes and characteristics (for more of that, incidentally, see here), as well as those with ambitions geared more towards the unfamiliar and the avant-garde.

It'll be doubly interesting, too, to see how the mass of creativity within the independent scene will exert its influence on the bigger developers and the bigger games.

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Some further reading:

'Gaming and Fiction: Telling the Story to a Whole New Audience'. Lucy Prebble, 'The Guardian'

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/11/lucy-prebble-gaming-fiction-books

'On videogame debate, misunderstandings and the importance of keeping an open mind'. Tadhg Kelly, 'Edge'

http://www.edge-online.com/features/on-videogame-debate-misunderstandings-and-the-importance-of-keeping-an-open-mind/

'From Bioshock Infinite to Gone Home: The Story of the Fullbright Company'. 'Edge'

http://www.edge-online.com/features/from-bioshock-infinite-to-gone-home-the-story-of-the-fullbright-company/

'Breathe In The Road: Cardboard Computer and Kentucky Route Zero'. Charlie Hall, 'Polygon'

http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/4/11/4158338/breathe-in-the-road-kentucky-route-zero

'The Making Of: Kentucky Route Zero'. 'Edge'

http://www.edge-online.com/features/the-making-of-kentucky-route-zero/

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Gone Home is available for £14.99 from Steam

http://store.steampowered.com/app/232430/

Kentucky Route Zero's season pass is available for £18.99 from Steam

http://store.steampowered.com/app/231200 

Epilogue #4

The Rehearsal
Eleanor Catton

Eleanor Catton has received plenty of attention this year for her Booker Prize-winning novel, The Luminaries. It was an interest in this novel -- seemingly written in a historiographic metafiction-esque style, and compared by some to the much-beloved-by-me series Twin Peaks -- that led me to check out first (as I'll be reading The Luminaries at some point in the new year) Catton's comparatively short debut novel, The Rehearsal.

Funnily enough, The Rehearsal's small-scale, yet ambitiously and originally presented, narrative brought to mind Twin Peaks -- though presumably in a different way to how The Luminaries' story of murder and greed did to its critics. I say this because The Rehearsal's story - largely about how the discovery of an affair between a teacher and his student has a 'rippling effect' across a small community of people - echoes, in a way, how David Lynch and Mark Frost's series presented the cataclysmic aftermath of Laura Palmer's death; as well as in how such an aftermath reveals and explores in some depth the strange 'micro-culture' of secondary school-age teenagers, to which adults are (against their wishes) excluded.

Though Catton's experimentation -- a chronologically fragmented non-linear narrative, elements of metafictional play, an modernist / expressionist favouring of heightened subjectivity -- may initially seem daunting and off-putting to some, I personally felt that these elements were used very effectively. Catton has praised the ever-evolving narrative form of the 'box set' TV series, and I think it shows in this novel in how - like with series like The Sopranos or Lost - narrative complexity and unorthodox devices are utilised in a more accessible fashion; in a way that is intended more to propel the reader's interest and engagement with the story than to shock or subvert.

Overall, I highly enjoyed The Rehearsal's effortlessly ambitious and brilliantly observed microscope-view of its small-scale settings and characters -- managing even, with its sort of ironic punchline of an ending, to conclude the novel in a satisfying way and without compromising this dedication to its understated and grounded setting -- and I look forward to seeing how The Luminaries will present such exciting originality on a contrastingly larger scale.

Epilogue #3

Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared
Franz Kafka

Before I started reading from the compilation of Franz Kafka's three (unfortunately all unfinished) novels, Amerika was the one I had the least knowledge of. Little bits of information that I gained from the acclaimed literary journal Wikipedia had formed some expectations in my mind -- the description of the novel as more realistic and humorous in tone and the stated influence of Charles Dickens had me expecting something slightly different to what we may traditionally think of Kafka-esque.

As it happened, I was right in some ways and wrong in others. Though Amerika is less surrealist / absurdist in tone to some of Kafka's other works and is, in a way, more overt in its social commentary, there's still a lot about it that is unmistakeably from the mind of the Franz Kafka we all know, love, and credit for our profound feelings of anxiety about the contemporary, post-Twentieth Century age. His representation of the real nation of America, for example, is noticeably expressionistic rather than deliberately accurate in a realist sense (famously, Kafka never visited America in his lifetime, basing his novel largely on acquaintance's accounts and books about travel): it is presented as a sort of exaggeration of America in many ways -- sprawling, relentlessly fast-paced, modern and highly industrialised, bureaucratic, capitalist, and rife with social injustice.

From the very first chapter (which is also, under the name of 'The Stoker' published as a short story in many collections of Kafka's fiction) we are introduced to this portrayal of America -- the first sight of protagonist Karl Rossmann's new life in America is the Statue of Liberty holding a sword (a factual error viewed by many as deliberate symbolism), and as this first chapter develops, the reader - without even being taken off of the boat that Karl comes in on - gains a small, yet highly detailed (and, in some ways, foreshadowing) glimpse of America, its brutally hierarchical nature, and the simultaneous wealth of fascinating opportunities and terrifying perils that this nation has to offer to Kafka's protagonist.

As with The Trial, the ending of Amerika is of particular note. Once again, the novel's ending is a fragment chronologically removed from the previous chapter -- this is particularly noticeable in Rossmann's delight at re-meeting a character that was never present in the completed sections of Amerika -- and, again like The Trial, this lends an even stronger Kafka-esque sense of dreamlike strangeness and sinister surrealism to what would already have been a dreamy, strange, sinister, and surreal closing chapter. Though, in many ways, detached from the rest of the novel; I nonetheless felt that this ending fragment did serve as a very fitting conclusion to the novel, especially as I read its blend of optimism and off-kilter strangeness as a sort of warped mirror of the novel's opening chapter's curious blend of optimism and melancholy bleakness; raising the interesting closing question as to whether this new beginning will just end up like Rossmann's other less well-fated 'new beginnings' during his time in America.

Although Amerika isn't considered to be as influential or canonical as works like 'Metamorphosis' or The Trial, its nonetheless another fascinating, if tragically unfinished, novel from a fascinating, unique writer; and, with its social commentary and questioning of aspirational, individualistic American values and of the idea of 'the American Dream', undoubtedly is a novel that invites comparison with a multitude of later more widely-acclaimed works of fiction that have trodden that ever-fertile thematic ground.

Expect a final Kafka Epilogue on The Castle soon, once I've read that (which I'll likely get to after reading Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal).

A bit of news

I originally meant to announce this as the final Hallo Halloween II post; but, as the week's been pretty busy, I lately announce a new release from my music project Mute Branches.


Lodge / Saint Helena is a collection of two tracks that are tangentially based around Halloween-related things and that attempt to evoke those sort of atmospheres.

And, on another note, fellow Soundcloud user xciv produced a great remix of my track, Sol Delay, too.


To close this post, I'll say that I'm hopefully going to sort out a belated Hallo Halloween II post about Ti West's film, The Innkeepers.

Hallo Halloween II: Beelzebub Gets His Groove Back / Slow Walkers - 'Slow Walkers'

I'm currently typing this sentence for the first time on a bleak-looking grey, rainy day. Definitely a fitting time to listen to and write about Slow Walkers -- the collaborative release on LA-based label Peak Oil of experimental musicians / sonic artists Liz Harris (better known under the name Grouper) and Lawrence English.

The collaborative project (also named Slow Walkers) was described on Pitchfork in 2011 as being "a multi-media project about zombies [taking] the form of an album, video installations and a live audio-visual concert". Listening to the album, the conceptual links to zombies and to the genre of horror and horror cinema are not explicit, as such -- certainly not in the same way as, for example, Boards of Canada's more overt references to horror cinema by way of the soundtrack work of John Carpenter on this year's Tomorrow's Harvest -- but this overriding concept is something ever-present in the music and in the atmosphere of the music.

English and Harris' slow, crumbling, minimalist compositions make perfect use of noise and lo-fi drones to establish a bleak, cold, lonely mood and to create the impression of a wide, sparse, empty and abandoned space. Listening to these six tracks (which, for the most part, segue into one another) made me feel, in my head, as if I was Cillian Murphy's character in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (I know it technically isn't a zombie film, but - come on - it really is) walking through the vast and deserted streets of London: the once bustling, functional environment having collapsed completely within a very short period of time.

It's by no means a particularly 'easy' listen (if you're looking for a place to 'start' with both of these artists, this probably isn't it); but Slow Walkers is a conceptually rich and sonically detailed 40-ish minutes of dark, uncompromising atmosphere that is stopped throughout from seeping into the background (a potential risk when working within such abstract 'ambient' territory) through the compelling snatches of more kind of traditional melodic structures that we hear as degraded and broken (akin, significantly, to the structures of society / urban environments after a zombie epidemic), as well as through the fact that these deep and detailed tones and sound manipulations are all strongly characteristic of Harris and English's own distinctive artistic styles.

It'd certainly be interesting to see how well the album synced with the beautifully bleak shots of deserted London from Danny Boyle's 2001 film, 28 Days Later.
(image from The Phoenix)

With those distinctive styles in mind -- here are two recommended tracks from Harris' and English's
discography:

Lawrence English - 'Coda for a Fading Timeline'
I'll be honest; I'm much more familiar with Harris' work than with English's; but this, from Headphone Commute's excellent 87-track ambient / post-classical compilation, ...and darkness came, probably tells me that I should rectify that. Much in the vein of the work on this collaboration, the track is an short texturally-based work of broken-sounding ambient music in the vein of people like William Basinski and Fieldhead.
 
Mirrorring - 'Drowning the Call'
This is from Mirrorring: another collaboration of Harris', this time with Jesy Fortino (who performs under the name of Tiny Vipers). I reviewed their album, Foreign Body,  for BeardRock here, and talked about how effectively (in a way similar to that that can be heard on Slow Walkers) Harris' unique vision crossed and mingled with that of Fortino to create something that sounded unique and special to their collaboration. As well as that, I'd say that Mirrorring's album would be an excellent recommendation for someone interested in introducing themselves to Grouper's discography -- Foreign Body's dreamy, drone-folk showcases Grouper's distinctive approach to recording and production albeit within a more accessible context that borrows from Fortino's slightly more traditional singer-songwriter-esque approach.

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Slow Walkers was available on vinyl from http://www.thisispeakoil.com/
and is still available for download (£7.99) from iTunes.

Check out the video for 'Wake', below...

'Wake' from Slow Walkers - Lawrence English / Liz Harris from ROOM40 on Vimeo.

Hallo Halloween II: Son of Hallo Halloween / A Small Assortment of Things That Terrified Me As A Kid

After the 'haunted childhood artefact' feel of Anodyne I wrote about; I thought that, in this bit of the run-up to Halloween, I'd write about an assortment of things that harrowed me as a young'un. An interesting subject, because I don't think - in adulthood - that we ever really experience in the same way that particular thrill of really feeling scared of a safe, constructed work of fiction.

Given the nature of childhood, some things I was scared of then are kind of dumb things to relate with fear (case in point: I remember an episode of Extreme Ghostbusters freaking me right out), but this list is mainly consistent of some legitimate (primarily) '90s-based recommendations (though, I'll warn you now, one of them is borderline impossible to find (save maybe through torrents or eBay or something)).

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The Black Riders in BBC Radio 4's 1981 adaptation of The Lord of the Rings

I think the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, is my favourite part of J.R.R. Tolkein's influential fantasy saga; there's a smaller-scale mystery and creepiness to it all that, when contrasted with the cosy rural idyll of the Shire, creates a tone that I prefer to the later volumes' huge, epic-scale battles and quests.

One major reason for me having this opinion is probably down to my first exposure to the story being through the 1981 BBC Radio 4 adaptation of The Lord of the Rings -- which incidentally I had no idea was from 1981, having listened to it as a kid in the '90s (usually around Christmas time; and in the dark for extra atmosphere), thanks to them having been released on about a billion cassette tapes. I remember particularly my infant mind being creeped out by the Black Riders -- who really represent more than anything else this sense of the cosy warmth of the Shire being broken by the mysterious, evil goings-on in the outside world.

Part of it, I think, was the fact that, with this radio version, I had only the atmospherically rich sounds - the creepy voices of the Black Riders, the scared responses from the innocents they encountered in their search - to use in constructing an image in my head; in a way giving these characters this really effective sense of 'formlessness' in my imagination (the sort that's well-trodden ground in horror: think Lovecraft's descriptions of monstrosities impossible for the human mind to comprehend, and how Ridley Scott hides his own Lovecraftian horror creation from the audience throughout much of his 1979 classic Alien).

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a clip on YouTube -- but here's the theme music from the radio series (which is probably available in more contemporary formats than tape).



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Sephiroth, from Final Fantasy VII

Playing Final Fantasy VII as a kid in the age where the Internet wasn't such a big deal (the slow-loading forest of GeoCities sites that it was) is - despite how utterly tediously nerdish a topic it looks on paper - something that I do find quite interesting.

To my eyes, Final Fantasy VII wasn't just a game. It was a three-disc enigma; a hugely immersive world filled to the brim with fascinating secrets, amongst them the creepily elusive Emerald WEAPON (I could write a thing about that, but it'd just be pretty much "saw a creepy-looking monster in the underwater depths, went up to it, died instantly, learned to respect the boundaries of this madly ominous beast") and the - to my childhood self, especially - mindblowingly deep layers of hidden backstory (I once got really excited because I thought I'd discovered a cut-scene that no-one else had found; I think I remember feeling very slightly offended at the juxtaposing ambivalence of my parents when I told them the world-changing news).

One mysterious enigma that really got to me when I first played it though, is actually one of the most major parts of Final Fantasy VII: Sephiroth.

I knew virtually nothing of the game or its settings and characters when I first picked it up and, reading the character list in the manual, I noticed Sephiroth's entry and how it's ridiculously vague - no picture, no age, a brief description of him having disappeared, and virtually nothing else. Then, gradually, this mysterious character sneaks into the story - bringing with him this huge sense of dread, frighteningly competent displays of violence, and twisted, tormented, borderline batshit motives for his world-threatening evildoing - and had me scared, as well as enthralled and immersed into the world of the game.

The extent to which I found Sephiroth scary can be seen in the instance when I woke up in a frightened jolt having, in my dream, come across what seemed to be Sephiroth's driving licence (or some standard form of identification, anyway).

Now, what the hell is that all about?



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Assorted episodes of The X-Files

I remember that I impressed someone at school with the revelation that I'd been allowed to stay up and watch The X-Files. My Fonz-level veil of coolness at that point would have smashed into a billion pieces if I had revealed that I had resultantly been unable to sleep (more like refused to for fear of alien abduction / a Jersey Devil mauling) and that my parents decided I probably shouldn't stay up and watch The X-Files again.

For all the show's wit and humour, I think the main thing I got from it was the threat of imminent attack by paranormal entities. In the West Midlands. It turns out I may have had a point (though I probably didn't).

Not much else I need to say about The X-Files; stick to the early seasons for guaranteed quality.


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The Realms of the Haunting

I think it's borderline impossible to find nowadays, but if you ever get the opportunity (getting past the whole DOS compatibility issues, etc.), I'd definitely recommend at least having a look at Gremlin Interactive's 1996 game The Realms of the Haunting.

The game is a first-person-shooter / horror adventure that puts you in the shoes of Adam Randall, who must explore an abandoned mansion in order to investigate the mysterious (and, as we find out, supernatural) circumstances surrounding the death of his estranged father.

There's a lot about Realms that's rather dated now - most notably the full-motion video cut-scenes (actually used a lot more effectively than many of its contemporaries) and the early 3D; but there's equally lots about it that stands up today and, in some cases, was ahead of its time. For example, there's the then-novel blending of the action-orientated first-person-shooter genre with the narrative elements and puzzling of the graphic adventure (this is two years before Half-Life received considerable acclaim for imbuing its first-person action with more sophisticated narrative elements); and the fact that the player has this expansive, haunting, excellently-realised environment of the house (and of the myriad strange places it leads you to) to explore, which is only really hindered by the fact that the player is required to switch between the four CDs irritatingly frequently in order to so.

My memories of playing it as a small child aren't exactly expansive, because I refused to exit one of the rooms out of sheer terror at the fact that I would be confronted with the game's first enemy; but, as I got older, I mustered up the psychological strength to soldier on and I can safely recommend this as a great, underrated and, unfortunately, largely forgotten game. Ideal if you're interested in seeing a relatively early example of an action game having the ambition to ramp up the atmosphere and story.



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Dr. Fred's voice from Day of the Tentacle

Messed me right up.