"I'm-a gonna break-a you down! Into the leetle cubes!"
—Michael Kupperman, "Pablo Picasso: His Amazing Life"
It’s hard getting an education in the United States. Take history. Sure, I was lucky enough never to get one of those teachers who was hired for his coaching abilities and who thinks “Tippiecanoe and Tyler Too” was the slogan for a nineteenth-century microbrewery. But I still did not learn a great deal about the world outside the United States. This left me unprepared for life. If some guy ever jumps out of a dark alley, holds a gun to my head and demands to know the approximate causes of the Hundred Years War, I’m pretty much screwed. I have to avoid those kinds of neighborhoods.
I was also unprepared to read History 101. This book deals with the Spanish Civil War, a period which wasn’t covered in those history classes and which I have never had enough interest in to research on my own. So I know three things about the Spanish Civil War:
There was some kind of civil war during the 1930s. In Spain.
Someplace called Guernica was bombed, causing Pablo Picasso to paint a big painting which we had to look at in art class.
Ernest Hemingway was in there somewhere. Possibly selling peanuts, although now that I think about it that may have been Chico Marx.
So it’s partly my fault that History 101 confused the hell out of me. I think it assumes a certain level of knowledge about the Spanish Civil War which I have not attained.
On the other hand, I think it’s partly just that History 101 is a confusing book. I mean, I think I’ve worked out the plot, but parts of it don’t make any sense no matter how I look at them, even with the help of mind-altering over-the-counter allergy medicine. Working through the plot, in tedious detail:
The Absolute sets up shop in Barcelona as part of a project to compile an accurate hisorical record by hanging around and observing everything that ever happens. For some reason, the Absolute sees time travelers as flickering in and out of existance. None of his people have ever noticed this before. You’d think someone would have run into a time traveler by now, especially now that everybody and his dog has a time machine. But maybe they have just not been paying attention. We’ve all had days like that. You spend all day at the office, then stop for groceries and to pick up the dry cleaning. By the time you get home you’re just so tired that it doesn’t even register that that guy walking past is blinking on and off like a No Vacancy sign at two in the morning. So we’ll just let this one pass.
Sabbath doesn’t want anyone to have a record of his escape from that ceremony mentioned in Adventuress. So he gives an agent a pair of glasses which allows said agent to see the Absolute. So he looks at the Absolute, and the absolute looks back and sees him flickering, and somehow it all ends up with the Absolute able to read people’s minds. Or maybe the mind-reading thing had nothing to do with it, and I just missed something. I felt like I missed a lot, reading this book. Mostly, as in this instance, I missed the sense of cause and effect. The plot of History 101 was like a set of dots that I couldn’t find any sensible way to connect.
On to the next dot. The mind-reading thing confuses and frightens the Absolute. Different people look at the same facts — and have totally different interpretations of them! Like, whoa, dude! Major head trip!
I’m sorry, but I just didn’t buy this at all. How could this be a new concept to the Absolute if his people have been observing things on such a wide scale? It’s a simple concept — people have opinions and make assumptions, and those assumptions affect how they interpret the world around them. Humans figure this out by the time they’re toddlers, but apparently it is too much for the Absolute. Oh, well.
Instead of deciding to collect facts about these newfangled “opinions” — i.e., it can be said that is a fact that person A believes B, even though the belief itself is subjective — the Absolute goes nuts. He starts screwing with people’s heads, removing their doubts and uncertainties, making them really, really convinced about their beliefs. How this is supposed to help is unclear, but I was used to that by this point. Oscar Wilde could have shown up with an army of flying monkeys on page 200 and it would not have surprised me at all.
So then the Absolute decides that his big crowning achievement will be to make everyone believe that somebody else bombed Guernica. How this is supposed to help is, again, unclear, but he goes ahead and does it anyway.
Here, before we learn any of the above, is where the Doctor comes in. He goes to see Picasso’s Guernica at a museum, and thinks it’s kind of blah. But an identical reproduction from the TARDIS is powerfully affecting.
There are at least a couple of ways in which this scene makes no sense whatsoever. First of all, the bombing of Guernica should be pretty damn horrifying no matter who did it, and Picasso’s painting would be an impassioned response either way. Secondly, there’s some confusion here over the nature of perception. The Doctor claims that the painting and the reproduction are identical, and that the difference is due to the perceptions of the viewers. But perception is something that happens inside people’s heads, not an external force. If the TARDIS crew’s opinions and assumptions are causing the difference, and the Guernicas are identical, then the paintings should inspire identical reactions. Instead, the scene treats perception as some sort of radiation eminating from the pictures and screwing with people’s brains. If that were the case, everyone would have the same reaction to Guernica. They’d all gaze up at it and think “My, what a nice painting,” in unison. Instead, people are free to think other things, including “That’s not art! Where are the happy trees?” and “Dude, I shouldn’t have eaten that burrito.”
This was about the point that the book lost me. I just read the rest to see what happened to Sabbath, who at this point is more interesting than the Doctor.
I’ve kind of ripped into this book, and I’m sorry. But I was expecting much more from it, and felt a bit let down. Also, if I complain about all the bits that I didn’t understand, maybe someone will point out something I missed that will cause some of it to make mose sense.