The Moon Pool

This is the book when I realized I was going to see Lost everywhere I looked. The Moon Pool itself has never been on the show, but people think that constant mentions of the moon pool -aka submarine dock- in the Looking Glass Hatch might be a reference to this classic early science fiction novel. Me, I'm not sure, but it was interesting anyway.

MP is a classic pulp science fiction adventure story from 1918 (Project Gutenberg has it). Basically, it's about this mysterious island and the people stealing monster it contains. Unlike our monster, this one is made of pure, shining moonlight. "The Dweller" or "The Shining One" steals people to feed off their emotions, and holds them captive thrall forever. The monster comes with an eerie cysteine tinkling sound, and when someones sees it their face contorts with "utter agony and utter ecstasy".

The story follows a very international little group, drawn to the island for different reasons. The main character, Doctor Walt Goodwin (spooky) is trying to find his old friend, who has been taken. He is joined by adventurous Irishman Larry, a Norwegian looking for his wife and child, and a evil Russian looking to harness the monster for his own sinister purposes.

So far it's very Lost, right? Well, I'm sorry to report that once they get to the Island, we break pretty hard with the show (at least as far as we've seen). On the island they find an ancient lost civilization, and the story gets really tangled in the technologies and politics of this world. And dwarfs and frog people. The plot is pretty standard science fiction stuff about two races, one dominant, lead by an evil priestess. The priestess and her ilk worship the shining one, the good people (including beautiful handmaiden Lakla) worship and older trinity called "The Silent Ones". Eventually there's an epic battle I'll talk about after I stop and explain some things.

There's some character alignments that are pretty eerie, although it might just be that everybody's using the same archetypes. The Irish guy, Larry, is a wisecracking, nick-naming, adventurous ne'er-do-well who's always clutching his pistol. He's the past's more innocent version of Sawyer. The Doctor is very Jack: earnest, brave, and constantly pointing out that he believes in science, not supernatural crap. Larry falls hard for native lady Lakla, and they hook up while the Doc looks on pathetically. The friend Doc is going after? His name is Throckemartin, called Throcke, and he chides the doctor for his inability to believe in higher power, or the unexplainable.

Back to the plot. It turns out that The Shining One was actually made by The Silent Ones. They're remnants of an ancient race, who believed that they had grown so wise that they could create powerful life. But this belief was prideful, and their pride infected their creation, and it became warped. It fed off negative emotions, and grew stronger. First they made sacrifices to it, but it's gotten out of control and started taking people. The evil priestess (and the evil Russian) are going to try to use the monster to take over the whole world, so its time for an epic battle between good and evil. The Shining Ones tell Larry that the only way to stop the monster is with great sacrifice. Larry and Lakla will have to throw themselves into the Shining One, and the force of their love and purity of their sacrifice will kill it. They choose to do this.

Except for no good reason, it doesn't kill them, just the monster. It dies, and its thousands of captives fall : "no longer dead-alive, now all of the blessed dead, freed from their dreadful slavery!" Yay. Larry and Lakla decide to hang around and help rebuild her society, and the Doc seems inclined to do the same, but all of a sudden the Russian (suddenly back from the presumed dead) knocks him out, and he wakes up locked out, with no way back in. Everything that was is covered by the sea. "There was no road to Larry- or to Lakla! And there, for me, the world ended." Poor lil' dude.

I have to say I see parallels. Or at least potential parallels. The show hasn't gotten close enough to the question of what the monster actually is, let alone the ancient lost civilization that the ruins have hinted at, for me to have anything but a feeling that this seems relevant. And the mix of ancient power and modern greed is very Lost. The idea of the captive dead fits for me too, depending on your interpretation of the way the whispers and visions work. It's interesting to consider the monster as a being that feeds off negative emotions and is rebuffed by positive ones, although I hope Lost could be a little subtler about it. Reading this book made me reconsider the importance of our monster, who's been lurking in the background lately. I wonder if the end of the show could include a similar final showdown with the monster, possibly including a parallel noble sacrifice.

I recommend this book if you like science fiction, especially older stuff. Anyone else is probably going to get bogged down in the middle. I think there's a lot that connects to Lost here, but I genuinely can't decide whether it's intentional, or if its just because they're both working from the same stack of sci-fi tropes and character archetypes. Either way, it's a good excuse to read some melodramatic pulp adventure, and I say take it.

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Evil Under The Sun: I think TV Mysteries are better than Book Mysteries.

Agatha Christie is something of a new-comer to the LOST Literary List, and I'm a new-comer to her work. Evil Under The Sun, a complicated mystery set on an island, is read by Sawyer during 3X14-Exposé and Lostpedia says, one of Christie's best. In it, Hercule Poirot must find the killer of the beautiful, vamp-y Arlena Marshall amongst the vacationers staying at the Jolly Roger which is on a secluded island. This, helpfully, narrows down the number of usual suspects to a manageable list, some of the standouts including her husband, her step-daughter, her lover, her lover's wife, a spooky, certifiably crazy minister, and a jovial man involved in the heroin trade. Well, well, well.

I don't want to talk too much about the plot because I don't particularly want to give it away and its one of those complicated mystery plots. Instead, some plot elements that I thought were pertinent: good and evil (mostly Evil), an isolated island, heroin (yay!), the practice of witchcraft, and messing with time. The best part of this messing-with-time thing is a stealthy adjustment of a wristwatch. Would that our LOST time conundrums could be explained so elegantly and simply! Alas.. So what's it got to do with LOST? Beside those basic plot elements which I won't explain further, at the very basic level of being a mystery, it reminded me of the basic operations of interpersonal mysteries on the show. As a reader of Evil, you must be conscious of everyone and trust no one. There are specious alibis and informational gaps galore. There are overlapping and equally probable motives which cause characters to act in certain ways. No real surprises here.

Also, I think that it's particularly interesting that it was in Nikki and Paolo's episode. It's sort of fluffy: they're sort of fluffy. It's sort of conventional: They're sort of conventional! They do some unfortunate and deadly rich-person blackmailing, and there's some hint of that in Evil. Also, I personally, was a little let-down by their death, after being won over by them in the course of the episode, just as I was a little saddened by finding out the identity of the killer in Evil, as I'd grown to like them. Oh well.

Here's my favorite quote from the book though, as spake by the Crazy Reverend Guy, apropos of not much: "Nowadays, no one believes in evil. It is considered, at most, a mere negation of good... but, M. Poirot, evil is real! It is a fact! I believe in Evil as I believe in Good. It exists! It is powerful! It walks the earth!" ..He is a crazy reverend guy who was in the looney bin, but I think, going out on my own religious limb, that there's something to this statement. What with the prevalence of religious motifs on Lost, and the questions of morality it likes to pose, I think it takes Evil into account as a real force. Uhm. How? Meh.

I don't think this book is terrific--It made me realize how thankful I am that there are mysteries on TV--it's just not as easy to keep track of characters and all their motives, alibis, etc. in book form. I know, it's a little harsh, and I think it makes me sound lazy. Read it if you want to... Aurora's mentioned a weirder Christie,And Then There Were None, which is also set on an Island and has stronger character parallels. Maybe, if you're looking for something weird, check that out instead. Go ahead. I very well might.

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Laughter in the Dark

I'll talk about other things in the post, but part of me really thinks that the whole reason they showed us Laughter in the Dark is one quote. The main character is hooking up with his new mistress for the first time. "As in his most reckless visions, everything was permissible; a puritan's love, priggish, reserved, was less known in this new free world than white bears in Honolulu."

Charlie found LitD in Sawyer's stash in "Flashes Before Your Eyes", and Hurley picked it up and started to read it. It's from the same author as Lolita, but it's less disturbing, less sexy, and just generally less good. It's a long and twisty story, but here's a basic plot. A basically happy married dude, Albinuis, becomes infatuated with a teenager, and eventually leaves his wife and daughter for her. But she's no angel, manipulating him for his money and influence. She starts hooking up with an old lover, and Albinus doesn't notice for about 50 pages. He finally figures it out, but then he almost immediately drives into a telephone pole and is blinded. So he has to rely on his mistress for everything, and he convinces himself he was mistaken. Mistress and old lover sneak around him in all these crazy mean ways, and are only stopped when Albinius's brother-in-law steps in and saves him. Or he would be saved, if he didn't decide he had to shoot mistress. Do you remember he's blind? Not surprisingly, it doesn't go well, and he ends up dead.

So there's a little bit of Lost stuff in there, with the conning, and the attempted revenge, but I think it's a bit of a stretch. There's a couple of big coincidences—old lover just happens to be a business associate of Albinus's, Albinuis turns out to have a painting that's actually a forgery that old lover made years ago—but they don't seem like Lost to me. They're handled a little too ironically. The whole book has a detached melodrama to it that's not very Lost at all. So I guess I really think it was just the polar bear quote. It's a fine book, and I enjoyed it, but I can't see as it's very relevant to our beloved show. Read Lolita instead.

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Of Bunnies and Ben

When I first saw season 3's "Ever Man For Himself", which features Of Mice and Men very prominently, I was confused. EMFH is the Sawyer episode where he recalls his time in prison (reading our book); Ben fakes him out about the pacemaker, and generally breaks his spirit. Sawyer makes a casual reference to the book, and Ben quotes him a long passage. At first, I couldn't figure out why they picked this book, but now that I've reread it, it makes more sense to me. I think this book is meant to connect particularly with this episode, and less with the larger show.

OMaM is a simple story about two wandering farmhands in the depression. Tough George and sweet, slow Lennie have been together for a long time. Lennie is obsessed with touch and soft things, but he doesn't understand how to be gentle. George tells Lennie again and again that someday they'll have a farm all their own, with rabbits for Lennie. They work on a farm, get a little ahead, and for a moment it seems like that dream might actually become a reality. Then this terrible woman tries to seduce Lennie. He gets his hand caught in her hair, panics, and accidentally snaps her neck. He runs away, and when everyone else on the farm finds out they set out to try and kill him. George finds him first, and, calmly telling Lennie about the farm for the last time, shoots him in the back of the head.

It's pretty brutal. Now, there's a lot in the story that has straight up nothing to do with Lost: the importance of a man working his own land, how the bossman sucks, how hard it is for a man to get ahead on an honest wage. Whatever. But there's one theme that makes sense to the show, and I think especially to this episode: the importance of "having somebody" in a mean world. Other characters, and George himself, constantly raise the question of why George puts up with all the trouble and hassle of Lennie. The answer is that a person can't travel alone, it's just no good. Here's the passage Ben quotes: "A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. It don't make no difference who the guy is, long as he's with you. I tell you, I tell you a guy gets too lonely and he gets sick."

Ben's making the point that no matter who Sawyer pretends to be, no matter how many times he tells Kate "It's every man for himself", it just isn't so. But, as OMaM shows, our inescapable bonds to other people come at a cost. Ultimately Ben doesn't break Sawyer with the pacemaker, or even the impossibility of escape. He, just like Kate and Jack, are held tight by bonds of love.

Okay, one more paragraph and I'll shut up. There's a great parallel between Ben and the character he quotes, 'Crooks'. Crooks "the Negro stable buck" is a bright but deeply lonely man, twisted literally and figuratively. A painful spinal problem twists his back to the left (which side was that tumor on?). Because he's black, he isn't allowed to bunk or assiociate with the other men, so he spends all his time in his room in the stable reading and thinking. In the scene the quote comes from, he toys with an unaware Lennie, taunting him with the idea that George will abandon him. When Lennie freaks out, Crooks apologizes, explaining his behavior with the quote. It continues "A guy sets alone out here at night, maybe readin' books or thinkin' or stuff like that. Sometimes he gets alone and he got nothing to tell him what's so and what ain't so....He got nothing to measure by. I seen things out here…" It's interesting to consider Ben as a man warped, maybe to the point of losing touch with reality, by isolation.

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Recent Discoveries

Yo dudes,
As webmaster par excellence (teehee), I am always thinking about the blog. Out of love.
And Lost, out of what I'm coming to realize is a debilitating obsession. Eh? To that end, I just started my mom and sister on the show.

For the blog's sake, I did a little serious google searching and found other sites dedicated to Lost Books. Here's the best one I've found, someone who is doing basically the same thing: Coyote Mercury! Way to go guy, I think you are awesome, and will try not to crib from you.
A different approach is going down at the the Lost Community Book Club, where readers are invited to read and discuss one book a month, this months is Watership Down.
Consequently, I'll be taking Watership Down and Evil Under the Sun on my trip this weekend.

But here's the real reason I'm posting, lets be honest. Aurora showed me a fan video yesterday, and it is just too good. So Ladies and Dudes, here it is: Sawyer/Gaston!

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The Third Policeman: DeSelby, Desmond, and the Living Dead

Weird books merit weird entries.
This book is actually summarized pretty well on Lostpedia, and also on Wikipedia..at least as well as you can explain a Flann O'Brien book. I don't even know where to start on this one. Thinking about it is terrifying me. The book is seen on Desmond's shelf in 2x01 and he grabs it as he leaves for his exile in 2x03: Orientation.

The Third Policeman starts out like a regular old book. Our beloved narrator tells us of his sad childhood and his current situation, running a pub with a friend named Divney. Divney decides they need to kill a man named Mathers and steal his black box full of money. They do kill him, gruesomely, with shovels, our narrator (somewhat unwillingly) giving the final blows. Divney refuses to give him any of the money, instead hiding it, only telling him where it is after a year has passed. The box is hidden in the floorboards of the murdered man's home. As our narrator goes into the house to get it, the book moves into its second movement: the one where nothing makes sense and there is no real plot.

It's basically one long hallucination. Our guy finds himself in the house, unable to get the box, but in the company of two policeman whom, he eventually realizes, know that he killed Mathers, and are preparing to hang him. In the meantime though, he walks around his town, I guess, and describes ill-defined buildings which he is stuck in, has arguments with them about the nature of bicycles, and goes to sleep a few times. Ugh. And did I mention the extensive footnotes (written by the narrator) on the non-existent philosopher DeSelby which hoard page space in otherwise reasonably long chapters? It's fun at the exact moment that you are reading, but once you close the book, you have no idea what you just read and no idea what you'll be coming back to when you start reading again. It's pretty futile for much of the book, and all you need to know is that something went terribly wrong when he went into the house.

The LOST connections are pretty well outlined, the most interesting of them being a map on the ceiling of the police barracks which shows a map of the town... one policeman avers that "I did not [make it] and nobody else manufactured it either. It was always there and MacCruiskeen is certain that it was there even before that." The policeman also says that it shows the way to eternity. Does that bode well or ill for the Hatch map?

So they go to "eternity" by way of some sort of elevator. In Eternity, no-one ever need shave since their hair never grows (hmm...Jack?). Also, they come upon a cabinet/machine that produces objects which "lacked an essential property of all known objects"--it reminds me of the smoke monster...there is a certain unexplainable, or as Charlie points out in 1X02 "a certain gargantuan quality" about it.

The Third Policeman also contains a suspicious story about an incident with a hot-air balloonist: when his balloon was pulled back to earth, he was nowhere to be found--but when the balloon was sent back up without him 2 weeks later and then brought back to earth, he was in it "without a feather out of him." What? I don't get it either.

Finally, there's the issue of the titular of the Third Policeman. HM! He apparently never comes into the police station, and no one sees him, and he's busy all the time...He's sort of Jacob character, hazy but important. So whats up? Wait for it...when the narrator finally meets the third policeman, he seems to be Mathers, the man he killed! It turns out that the narrator's been dead this whole time, and he's in a sort of hallucinogenic hell! The book ends with the narrator finally tracking down Divney, in a classic ghost story moment where he doesn't realize that he's the ghost. It's been 16 years, and Divney has a wife and kids, but the sight of our narrator gives him a heart attack and kills him. The end of the book starts the whole cycle over again, with Divney going through the same things alongside the narrator, and no one the wiser, including US, the readers.

So wow. What does this really have to do with our beloved show?
Well, first of all, it seems to give some (more) credence to the Purgatory theory, which, I know, I know, has been debunked, but nevertheless continues to serve as a guiding force for the way the show toddles along, passing judgment on its characters through the smoke monster. The blurry line between the living and the dead, and the punishment meted out to the narrator by his victim (like the visions of Eko's Brother or Ben's mother) also seem quite Lost-like.

Less positively, the inclusion of this book also suggests to me something about the dead ends, and things that just don't make sense on LOST..they might very well not get explained. To some extent, as with The Third Policeman, analysis is futile. I'd like to think that just some of our analysis is futile. To spin that another way, I think this could be some sort of indication of Desmond's psyche more than anyone else's--the inhabitant of the Hatch and "flash" sufferer that he is. I'm going to go out on a pretty shaky limb here and say that he isn't experiencing reality in quite the same way as everyone else, having more than the just the flashes to worry about... I don't think we need to doubt everything we're seeing on the island, but we may need to be more skeptical of some characters' perception of it. UM. yep.

As crazy as this book is, it hasn't stopped people from reading it. In fact, after being featured on LOST, it was bought by so many fans that an extra print run was warranted.
That's awesome. I just wonder what all those Lost Fans thought after they read it.

In other news, Desmond's one fine-looking crazy guy.

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Lancelot.

I think I am getting suckered by this whole quest to read all the books from LOST, because, well, I've enjoyed every book so far (with the exception of Rainbow 6, in progress)... Lancelot ,by Walker Percy, in particular. Sawyer is seen perusing this book in 2X15 Maternity Leave. I'm still puzzling over it being in this particular episode.

Lancelot has some superficial connections to Lost. So here's the plot, where the superificial connections are. There's a guy in the looney bin (like Hurley) named Lancelot, who was once a sort of twisted sort of Southern gentleman (like Sawyer) and at the same time an emasculated overly-educated middle-aged loser who loves his Bowie knife above all (oh, Locke, I love you). The book revolves around his discovery that his wife was cheating on him and had a child with another man (Sun+Jin-esque), a fact he didn't figure out until his daughter was about 6. When he figures it out, he plots revenge on the culprit, which ultimately results in the explosion of his home. He narrates the story to a friend of his from his youth who in the intervening years became a doctor and then a priest (Jack/Eko?...I'm pushing it). He talks about how he's (creepily) into the girl in the room next to his in the asylum (Libby-like)...

There are also an important Kate connections, I think...
Sawyer's Kate predicament echoes Lancelot's, since Lancelot's wife is at once his and not his. Lancelot notes a couple of things in particular: that he could "gauge her sexual desire by her freckles," and spookily that his "jealousy is an alteration in the very shape of time itself. Time
loses its structure. Time stretches out."...it's also worth noting that Kate blew up her father, sort of the reverse of Lancelot..although Lancelot manages to get his daughter out of the house first. I'm not sure what to do with that.

Then there's the way the house getting blown up occurs. Lancelot goes to punish Jacoby, who is sleeping with his wife. He ends up cutting his throat in the glow of a kerosene light in the middle of a hurricane. The whole scene seemed sort of eerie in a Man Behind the Curtain sort of way.
After Jacoby is dead and Lancelot's wife is pleading with him, he relights the lamp which somehow blew out. This spark ignites a methane leak which destroys the house and blows him out of it, "wheeling slowly up into the night like Lucifer blown out of hell, great wings spread against the starlight." Could another shadowy exchange with LOST's Jacob end this way? Um, I hope not.

There are broader literary connections too--The narrative style is retrospective, flashing back to the main events of the story. The narrator is constantly concerned with the past, present and future, especially when it comes to morality and restoring it: "I will not tolerate this age. Millions agree with me and know that this age is not tolerable, but no one will act except the crazies and they are a part of this age." Finally, and I don't think I'm pushing here, he's effectively trapped in a Purgatory of his own making, mixing delusion with the truth and morality with perversity at every turn. In particular, the final pages of the book turn into a cryptic dialogue with what may be the listening friend (who is hazily defined) or may simply be his own troubled conscience (a device also used in The Third Policeman)...he states that he's getting out of the asylum but the final feeling is one of extreme, inescapable claustrophobia: he's never really getting out.

My strongest feeling about this book didn't have much to do with Lost, however. Lancelot, when all was said and done, seemed not unlike Humbert Humbert of Lolita (whose progenitor, Laughter in the Dark, is on our reading list)--He's a major creep who forces you to be in his head alone. Lancelot says pretty crude things about the people around him, particularly women and black people, while at the same time insulting the morality of others, and assuming that people think he's enlightened (he's a sometimes-civil-rights-lawyer and a historic home repairer)...when he knows, and we know, that he's not. He reflects nostalgically many times on his first wife (who sounds like H.H.'s childhood sweetheart Annabel) and his final confrontation is with a portly naked man (like Quilty in Lolita)...is there a Humbert Humbert in the LOST world?

If I had to add it up, I'd say this book was Lolita+Kurt Vonnegut+Lost.
As with most of these books, I don't think it has a ton to say about the big questions themselves, but it does say well that personal morality is a tricky thing...the choices we make and the way we execute them are often quite hard to understand outside of our little heads. Also, to crib from Aurora's words, I'm realizing that LOST uses a lot of standard literary tropes, which is why we are seeing so many connections--and that's a good thing. Its skill is really in the way it weaves them together. Good Job, LOST.

P.S. Check out near the end of Chapter 5 starting with "Lock, I need a favor..". I think it describes Locke pretty darn well. adios.

Coming up: The 3rd Policeman, addenda to TOTS and Of Mice and Men...

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