Double, Double

review of
John Brunner's Double, Double
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 6, 2013

Brunner has done it for me again. I've reviewed 5 bks by him now: The World Swappers ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2398747.The_World_Swappers ), Times Without Number ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6343227-times-without-number ), The Whole Man ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8699522-the-whole-man ), The Long Result ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3116771-the-long-result ), & Born Under Mars ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7444536-born-under-mars ).

In my 1st Brunner review, that of The World Swappers, I wrote "So what's my take on Brunner? Will he enter my pantheon of SF favorites? Will he join the company of Philip K. Dick, show more Samuel Delaney, Stanislav Lem, J. G. Ballard, & the Strugatsky Brothers? Not quite.. at least not quite yet.." Well, folks, that's all changed. He's entered the pantheon. I consider Double, Double to be writing on a par w/ that of the Strugtasky Brothers. High praise from me, indeed. By the time I reviewed The Long Result I wrote "I'm now a full-fledged Brunner enthusiast" & I think I'm beyond even that by now.

As is often my wont, I don't really want to give away the plot so I'll concentrate on a few details that pleased me here & there. The bk's copyrighted 1969, some central characters are a pop music band traveling in a brightly painted van. In other words, as they wd've been perceived at the time, "hippies". & Brunner portrays them in a completely positive light. Given that I was alive at the time & a guy w/ what was considered to be 'long hair' & given that when I walked around I got to hear more than my fair share of insults screamed at me by morons from passing cars, it's nice to read Brunner's more positive spin. I remember it being around 1969 when I was sitting in the kitchen w/ my mom. She was reading an editorial in the daily newspaper in wch it was asserted that all males w/ long hair were homosexual. My mom emphatically agreed w/ this. Since she was a robopath & highly susceptible to propaganda, she didn't let the presence of her long-haired & obviously not gay son disturb her acceptance of this bullshit. That's just a little anecdote to set the tone of the time.

Making things even better, Brunner's pop group is called "BRUNO AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION" (p 7) explained by a black man in the group thusly: ""Ran across it in The New York Review of Books," he said. "I saw where someone had written a book called Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, and I thought that was a hell of a name fro a pop group.["]" (p 15) For me, that's a great reference, I'm interested in Bruno & I read a bk by him. For those of you not familiar w/ him, he was tortured by the Catholic Church for 8 yrs & then brutally executed in public for doing things much like Galileo did.

Brunner manages to load alot into this one. There're plenty of diverse characters, there's a marine research center, an old lady living nearby in a partially burnt-out bldg, a polluting chemical company, police, a dog, &.. a "shapechanger". The same black man in BRUNO is reading Evergreen Review, one of those cultural details I delight in given that Evergreen Review was an excellent publication. AND there's a pirate radio stn: "You ought to be able to pick up Radio Jolly Roger from here—that's lying off Margate, isn't it?" (p 30) I'm hooked. (Samples of some of my own Pirate Radio programs can be read about, listened to, & downloaded here: http://archive.org/details/Radio2001 , http://archive.org/details/Radio2004 ). Indeed, there's a lot here to appeal to me:

"He lifted his bass out of its case. Silently the others copied him: Gideon with his guitar and Rupert with his collection of miscellaneous instruments including such exotica as Swanee whistles and a Jew's harp. His regular instrument was the electric organ, but that was already delivered and on-stage, like Glenn's drum kit." - p 66

Jew's harp? Yes! I just recently listened to Lukas Foss's fantastic piece entitled "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" that has the great percussionist Jan Williams playing a bit of Jew's harp. Of course, there're plenty of other great examples, but I'll confine myself to a plug for the latest CD I copublished called "MM 26" wch has 3 pieces by Zout on it that have Jew's harp in the instrumentation. (You can spend yr money wisely here: http://cdbaby.com/cd/mm4 )

"Rupert bridled. He was the most talented of the group, they all agreed to that—he had studied at the Royal College of Music and come away with a first-rate result. But he found his own talent boring; he played nineteen instruments competently, from harmonica to bagpipies, and lately he had been concentrating on the electronic effects he could wheedle out of a tape recorder with a score of curious attachments of his own design. Some of the items he had come up with were strangely disturbing, but so far the group had not found a way to integrate the latest of his discoveries into their stage performances, only into their records." - pp 66-67

In other words, a group after my own passions: a little Jimi Hendrix, a little Soft Machine, a little Stockhausen, perhaps? For a recent list of some of my own favorite records listened to from 1968-1974 go here: http://cruciblesound.blogspot.com/2013/07/some-favorite-records-from-tentatively... .

This was a thoroughly engrossing fun novel.. It's not really a substitute for the life I'm trying to have (&, apparently, failing at) but it's close enuf to keep me going. & it's got ye olde post-atomic-bomb-dropping worry in it that I can certainly relate to:

""What could have caused it?"

""You're asking me?" Tom sighed. "But I can guess, and so can you. In the past couple of decades we've put more mutation-inducing substances into the sea than you'd normally expect in several centuries—fallout from H-bomb tests, canned waste from nuclear power stations . . ."" - p 158

By the way, while I was writing this, I was listening to Paul Robeson's LP entitled Songs of Free Men * Spirituals. If you don't know Robeson, check him out. He sings in English, Russian, Hebrew, & Spanish (or is it Catalan?). What a fuckin' repertoire the guy has!! show less

A shape-shifting entity from the sea creates deadly duplicates of people in a rural English coastal town. A group of strangers, including a rock band, must stop this alien threat before it spreads. It is known for its 1960s British sci-fi B-movie atmosphere.

A mysterious, half-decomposed creature crawls out of the sea and begins duplicating people. The entity, a shapeshifter, threatens a local town, causing chaos as residents and visitors, including a band called Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, encounter their duplicates.

Sixties hipster rock group discovers the horrible truth behind mysterious disappearances near a scientific research station on the English coast. Chilling fun. A period piece.

this book is disappointing and rather juvenile. A THING comes from the ocean and eats people. Bon Appetite!

When I read this in 1973, I commented, “A disappointing book; the idea is old and well used, though handled in an original way, the characters are only half real, the plot lacks surprise. Some of the characters could have been interesting in a different book, but the book as it stands was not worth writing.”