Douglas Mercer
November 21 2024
Toward the Victorian Pleasure Palace the pumpkin coach with the Technicolor Dream drove, and the men in their long black cloaks approached the immense building which lay at the very top of an icy mountain to the North Of London. Inside they found a field resembling a fair ground, it was so large that a band could play at one end without disturbing another at the opposite end. In the middle stood a towering Helter-Skelter, a conical white tower wrapped by a multi-colored spiral slide down which came flying costumed figures as in a playground; on the walls were shifting shapes and exploding fly’s eyes of a fabulous cathedral light show; on the floor was in igloo from which men were dispensing banana skins with the makings of marmalade; the morning sun was saluted by a group, poised high on a scaffold, before a rose window with red fractal cracks, shrieking the stone age sounds of the piper at the gates of dawn.
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The title Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End of the World contains a reference to the 1962 pop hit The End Of The World, written by Arthur Kent and Sylvia Dee and sung by Skeeter Davis. Davis' version reached No. 2 on both Billboard's Hot 100 chart and Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart. A cover version released in the USA by Herman’s Hermits in 1965 reached No. 1 in that country as the B-side of I’m Henry VIII, I Am.
The reference to The End Of The World is obvious in Japanese editions of the novel because an epigraph quotes from the lyrics and credits for the song are appended at the end. For some reason, however, neither epigraph nor credits are included in the English translation, which obscures the musical reference and has led one critic to mistakenly identify the song as originating with the Carpenters in the 1970s.
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Notes:
In the world of literature, the concept of "the end of the world" falls under the rubric of the legal concept of scene a faire, that is it is a common theme in the genre, and no one can patent it, and everyone is free to use it with infinite variations.
