Odd John and Sirius (Paperback)

Bertrand Russell has a story that Macaulay never spoke until the age of 6, when hot tea was spilled over him at a children's party and he reassured his fussing hostess with 'Thankyou madam, the agony is abated'. The early story of Odd John Wainwright, the son of slightly eccentric and moderately talented parents, started by reminding me of this, but I knew I would soon have to take it seriously. Odd John is a superhuman and he knows it. He is not cruel or evil, but like Stapledon's Star Maker he has more important priorities than, say, human life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Life will be calmly sacrificed if it interferes with his mission. His 'property-is-theft' attitude to the local tycoon is probably a mask for the kind of early-20th century socialism that appealed to Stapledon, and John's early sexual mores have a touch of Bloomsbury about them -- the activity that dares not speak its name would seem to be obviously incest, except for the fact that it does not appear to create any downstream waves in his later relations with any of his family. The thought crossed my mind that I might be on the wrong track altogether. What could be equally unmentionable, something on which the taboo is almost as much cosmic as human? But on folk-dancing I dare not dwell.

Odd John will not wring your emotions the way Sirius ought to do. It has other virtues. The creativity that conjured such a riveting series of human species in Last and First Men and would later create the planetary civilisations in Star Maker is at work here with the freakish superhumans, including one that is surely the most hellish being in all literature. The book is also obviously the main inspiration for Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End, in which the writer surpasses himself and achieves a stupendous reinterpretation of the whole legend of God and Satan. In Odd John the supreme being is not showing his hand regarding his ultimate intentions for humanity, but all in a way more reminiscent of the Overmind in Childhood's End than of the terrifying Star Maker. The main difference for me is not the stylistic gulf between the two authors but that in Childhood's End I am always conscious that I am reading a colossal piece of imagination. Stapledon, like his Sirius, upsets me by giving me the uncomfortable sense that he may be sniffing around the truth.

Sirius ends up seeing the full range of human life, from bad to good, and more. He is also not a true dog, and finds himself not only alienated from human beings who cannot accept him fully (with a handful of exceptions), but other dogs who are like cretins to him especially his "lovers" (as the book puts it). Despite having difficulty speaking and writing (he devises ways to get around that), Sirius has an advantage over other dogs through his intelligence, and over humans in his hearing, sense of smell etc. What we get is not only a satire on English life during WWII, but an almost autistic view of the world, seeing everything but not able to integrate oneself into it.

Of course some of the writing is dated, and Stapledon at times takes a very colonial view of the Welsh and their language (Sirius is originally brought up on a Welsh farm by English academics). Some of the style is very dry and typical of the period (for example when Sirius spots a holy roller farmboy pleasuring himself, Stapledon calls it "something unspeakable". Fortunately Victorian hangovers like these are not common).