review of
Paul Tabori's The Green Rain
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - October 27, 2017

When I was a kid, one of my favorite movies was The Boy with Green Hair (1948), ironically, I wd've witnessed it on a black & white TV. An online capsule description says this: "Peter (Dean Stockwell), an orphaned boy, is adopted by Gramp Frye (Pat O'Brien) after his parents are killed in Europe doing relief work. The boy feels safe with his new caretaker, but when he is taunted for being an orphan, he gets demoralized. The next day Peter wakes up with green hair. Enbarrassed and further ridiculed, Peter seeks solace in a nearby forest. To his surprise, he finds other orphans in the woods, who encourage him to spread the news of the injustices of war." At least he didn't wake up as a giant bug.

The film was directed by Joseph Losey, who I remember as a famous director even though I can't remember the names of any of his other films. Looking him up online I see that he studied w/ Bertolt Brecht, wch interests me. I see that he made Boom!, a movie I liked, & that he did a remake of Fritz Lang's M, wch surprises me. ANYWAY, as an adult, my childhood liking of The Boy with Green Hair is interpreted by me as having to do with intuitions of how anyone who deviates from the social norm, intentionally or otherwise, might be subjected to harsh societal pressure to conform. When I was 14, in early 1968, I started growing my hair long, against the strict instructions of my conservative mom, & was immediately subjected to what struck me as an insane amt of social hatred.

The Green Rain (1961) has a text below the title on the cover that reads: "A fantastic tale of a world gone made" wch is fair enuf but cd mean just about anything in an SF novel. The cover also has a somewhat Surrealism-inspired painting - something not too uncommon in SF at the time.

I wasn't familiar w/ the author, Paul Tabori, so I had no particular expectations. As it turned out, I probably did have some expectations b/c the bk took me somewhat by surprise. Just as I'm surprised to read that The Boy with Green Hair was partially an anti-war movie, I was surprised that The Green Rain seems to be partially an anti-racist bk.

Chapter 1 begins:

"SOMETHING WENT WRONG.

"Something always does, as Professor Pelargus used to say, smacking his lips. It was his pet opinion that humanity consisted entirely of bunglers—two and a half billion men, women, and children going industriously about their idiot affairs, creating—all unaware—monstrous linked chains of circumstance and consequence, and settling—still unaware—their own and everybody else's hash." - p 5

This bk was copyrighted & published in 1961. The world's human population is presented as 2.5 billion. I was born in 1953. I remember concerns about overpopulation appearing in the early 1970s, although I'm sure they appeared earlier. According to a Wikipedia article on world population the 1960 total was 3 billion - .5 billion more than The Green Rain wd have it. According to the same article, the population had increased to 4 billion by 1974. As of October, 2017, it's reputed to be 7.6 billion. That's quite the increase in a mere 57 yrs!! Some one alive today, born in, say, 2000, might be 74 when the population might 12.3 billion. A more conservative estimate from the UN has it at 11.2 billion by the yr 2100.

Plagues, wars, famine, & extreme weather conditions are the usual thinners of the herd & people are generally pretty unhappy to be exposed to any of those. I've been against human-inflicted misery my whole life - that means I'm against war, e.g.. Most people who think about these things are probably in agreement that humans cd act sensibly & curb population growth by more careful birth control & that, in turn, wars that result from attempted national boundary expansions & the like cd be curtailed, etc..

But will it happen? It doesn't seem likely. I was reading a very dry analysis of overpopulation in an impoverished place & details of economic conditions were the only data provided to explain the population growth. Nowhere was the pleasure that people get from sex mentioned. I found that quite strange. Isn't it obvious that if you're poor & living in overcrowded slum conditions that one of the few pleasures that might not cost you anything is fucking? & that fucking will produce more mouths that can't be fed? ETC?!

If people had fewer children, plagues, wars, famine, & even things like earthquakes might be less likely to happen. A generally better quality-of-life might result & people wdn't have to forego their pleasure from sex, just be more careful about family planning. Is that too much to ask? Alas, humanity seems to be like a race car driver ever more eager to drive faster & faster w/ newer models & in denial about the big wall that they're going to crash into ahead. But I digress.

"Perhaps they remembered the careful calculations of the German historian who asserted there had been only thirty-four years from the birth of Christ to the end of the nineteenth century when men were not trying to kill each other either with stone axes or high explosives" - p 13

In the unlikely event that those 34 yrs were contiguous imagine what an interesting time that wd've been to be alive in!

"In 1934 a sensitive, articulate and highly civilized writer named Aldous Huxley visited Guatemala. This visit set him to think about nationalism, war and hate. He decided that the three were more or less parts of the same whole; facets of the same horror. He quoted, with approval, Dr. F. Vergin's 'Subconscious Europe' in which the doctor contended that war was an escape from the restraints of civilization and that hate paid a higher psychological dividend than could be obtained from international amity, sympathy and cooperation." - p 14

So, what's the solution? Become a multiple-personality instead of having kids:

"The bottles, the whitewashed mural on the front of the house—and now this. Dr. Lukachevski's neighbors were all in his mind . . . if he was a schizophrenic he must have split into not two but three. Four if you counted his normal, brilliant, scientist-self." - p 10

Ok, I was kidding, I just wanted to segue to that last paragraph quoted.

"Chlorophyll, as any botanist will tell you, is a mixture of two green and two yellow pigments. The greens predominate; one is called Chlorophyll A and its chemical formula is C55 H72 O5 N4 Mg, while Cholorphyll B has been determined as C55 H70 O6 N4 Mg. The yellow pigments are carotin (C40 H56) and xanthophyll (C40 H56 O2)—if you insist." - p 12

What if I don't insist? What if I, instead, propose what Daniel Tonzig has suggested to me that Chloroplasts be used to pigment the skin to enable humans to draw nourishment from the sun - inspired by the interview that I link to next. Check out how Tonzig explains it in this section of my movie Don't Walk Backwards ( https://youtu.be/kODzM_2_bRM ): https://youtu.be/kODzM_2_bRM?t=4h32m12s .

"There are some plants that have no chlorophyll—fungi and a few flowering plants, among them the Indian Pipe." (p 12) Fancy that, I just happen to have footage of the latter in a different movie of mine, Spectral Evidence, wch you can witness at 1:06:52 at https://archive.org/details/SpectralEvidence

Tabori's writing is such that he uses the plot as an excuse for introducing various factoids that help enrich one's perception of the overall theme &, for me, are just generally fun to read:

"Green us one of the three primary colors. A green house is a house painted green but a greenhouse is a glasshouse for the growing and preservation of especially rare and delicate plants. Greengages are yellow-green plums which Sir Henry Gage made popular in England; he wasn't so successful with purple or blue gages." - p 27

When I really started to get interested was when Tabori started parodying racism, starting off w/ a parody of South Africa, wch was still in the grip of apartheid at the time:

"In the shadow of the Great Table Mountain the Trial of the Century entered its forty-first year. There were only sixteen defendants left; the others had died of old age or various ailments and of the original two hundred and thirteen twenty-two had actually been discharged for the lack of a true bill. The trial had used up over a dozen prosecuting attorneys—and because they were more advanced in age—over twenty judges." - p 32

So begins chapter 9. Something has happened worldwide that's causing people to turn green. Imagine the fuss that cd stir up in a society that's dependent on a skin color hierarchy:

""Are you a doctor?"

""No, but I could get one. What's the matter with Judge Prenger?"

""He . . ." the usher took a deep breath as if he needed extra strength for the enormity of his news, "he . . . he's started to turn green. . . !"

"He pushed the journalist aside but the two of them reached the exit at the same time. The reporter sprinted for the telecommunications room, pondering how he could get this dispatch through the ever-vigilant All-White censorship." - p 35

""Why beat around the bush? IS a nigger a nigger when he was turned green? That's what I want to know!"

""Precisely," the Foreign Minister was unquenchable. "or you may put it the other way round. Is a white man a . . ."

""Don't say it! the Prime Minister intervened hastily, "Don't even think of it!"" - p 36

Ha ha! Tabori spares no political creed in his mockery but he does seem to have a special thing against the USSR - wch is herein called the "UPPR":

"M. Vertbois, the French delegate asked what the attitude of the UPPR was to the alleged revival of the Green International? There had been reliable reports that several thousand members of this organization had been executed and over a hundred thousand had been deported to Siberia. Was this discrimination or not?

"Mr. Zelonnee declared that this was typical slander by the capitalist press; that the Green International, if it existed, was a counter-revolutionary organization of Fascist hyenas, the descendants of kulaks and murderers. The UPPR was entitled to take any steps necessary against those who threatened her internal security. He would also like to remind M. Vertbois of the millions of oppressed colonial subjects who were still groaning under the yoke of French imperialism. He, Mr. Zelonnee, had no wish to acerbate the discussion but perhaps he might quote a Russian proverb: "An owl should not tell a sparrow that its head is too big!"" - p 54

I have to wonder what the political inclinations of Tabori were. The only use of the word "anarchy" that I noted was pejorative in the mouths of the South African racists. Ha ha!

"this is the moment of danger, the most terrible test of our great All-White Republic! It is for us to fight for our sacred principle—that blood is more important than color, that race is rooted not in surface pigmentation but in the ancestry and blood line of any human being. Unless we find an immediate solution to our problem—to differentiate clearly and swiftly between a green-white and a green-black—out heritage will be destroyed, our country driven into anarchy, our very name wiped from the earth.["]" - p 69

"When G-Day came, the first thing the greenbods did was to cut all telephone cables, destroy all electronic communications so that the All-White Republic was suddenly isolated from the rest of the world." - p 85

Sounds good to me!

"They reached Los Angeles, the biggest city on the American continent—its merger with San Francisco was to be decided by a referendum in a few weeks' time as the suburbs of the two metropolises were now only a few miles apart" - pp 80-81

HHmm.. waddya think Rump's take on such a thing wd be? I think maybe he'd have a wall built between the 2 cities, maybe mine the intermediate zone? Put some billionaire buddies in charge of each city? Contract Haliburton to build the wall? Or is Haliburton out of favor now that Cheney & the Bush whackers are gone? I'm thinking a new highway shd be built across Washington DC that just has to cut the White House in half. Sorry about that but the urban planners know best. Is nothing sucrose?

Tabori's full of interesting ideas:

"Mimosa even developed the counter-plagiarism or 'theft-by-attribution'—he would trot out one of his dreary and shabby clichés and make it decisive, important and brand new by ascribing it to Lenin, Aragon, or any other approved Communist deity." - p 88

It's interesting that the Surrealist writer Louis Aragon is thrown in there w/ Lenin, I don't think that wd happen these days even tho he was a long-term Communist Party member. I've only read one of his bks, Paris Peasant (barely reviewed here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/12739936 ) but I'd like to read more. As for "'theft-by-attribution'"?: I can think of at least one writer who'd take to that like a rat to a garbage can.

"There was a comparatively wise one among them who put it all into the mouths of a cockroach who could use a typewriter; it was all about a toad named warty bliggens:

"a little more
conversation revealed
that warty bliggens
considers himself to be
the center of the said
universe" - p 95

That's one of those cultural references that wd've been widely recognized in 1961 that might only be remembered by a very few in the yr of writing this review (2017). The quote is from "warty bliggens the toad" wch I have as part of a bk called "archy and mehitabel" by don marquis. I have a "dolphin book edition: 1960". Here's the ad copy from the back cover:

"Don Marquis first introduced archy the cockroach and mehitabel, a cat in her ninth life, in his newspaper column, "The Sun Dial," in 1916. In a previous incarnation archy was a free-verse poet, while mehitabel's soul once belonged to Cleopatra. She is toujours gai, but archy is more philosophical. It is he who records their songs and observations on the boss's typewriter late at night. But he is not strong enough to make capital letters so it all comes out lower case:

"the main question is
whether the stuff is
literature or not.

"It is."

The green-skinned people become more powerful - mainly b/c the people who were accustomed to seizing & wielding power before they were green now have a new excuse for doing so. Their cult issues commandments:

""Thou shalt obey no laws, decrees, commands, or temptations that are not hallowed by Gloriana.

""Thou shalt multiply in greenness and increase the ranks of those Chosen to be Green and shalt have no intercourse with any female who is not green." - p 103

&, this being a power struggle, those who win are those who play the dirtiest. Personally, I'd like to see that change in favor of integrity & mutual aid but I may very well be in the minority.

"Just two weeks before the Chicago Convention, the 'Byelo letter' was released. It was infinitely more skillful a forgery than the Zinoviev letter that had cost Labor so dearly in a historic" [Ah, English!, 'shdn't' that be "an historic"?] "British election earlier in the century." - p 137

The 1st paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on the "Zinoviev letter" states:

"The "Zinoviev letter" was a controversial document published by the British Daily Mail newspaper four days before the general election in 1924. It purported to be a directive from Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow; to the Communist Party of Great Britain, ordering it to engage in all sorts of seditious activities. It said the resumption of diplomatic relations (by a Labour government) would hasten the radicalisation of the British working class. If true, it was a deeply offensive interference in British politics to the detriment of the Labour Party. The letter seemed authentic at the time, but historians now agree it was a forgery. Historians also agreed that the letter had little impact on the Labour vote, which held up in 1924. However, it aided the Conservative Party, by hastening the collapse of the Liberal Party vote that produced a Conservative landslide. A. J. P. Taylor argues that the most important impact was on the psychology of Labourites, who for years afterward blamed their defeat on foul play, thereby misunderstanding the political forces at work and postponing necessary reforms in the Labour Party." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinoviev_letter

"Exactly twenty-one months to the day since the coming of the Green Rain, Gloriana was inaugurated in Washington and a Demo-Republican (or as some called it, a Repu-Democrat) administration was installed in the great Republic." - p 139

I find the above particularly interesting b/c of the use of "Demo-Republican" & "Repu-Democrat". Political activist occasionally say Demmicans or Republicrats to mock the insufficient differences between the 2 parties. Note the voice of Mumia Abu Jamal in "Tails from the Unconvention" (2000): https://youtu.be/b-HKzrINS3M?t=12m41s .

This was written in London from January-July, 1960. Even tho. in some sense, it's an eco-disaster novel, it's more of a parable about human foibles than it is a warning about probable outcomes of current eco-insensitive practices. It even predates J. G. Ballard's 1st eco-disaster novel: The Wind from Nowhere (1962) but not M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud (1901). I'll definitely be reading more by Paul Tabori if I can find anything by him. ( )