A literary conceit about a group of dissatisfied flawed people on a beach who come across the living embodiments of Lewis Carroll's Walrus and the Car A literary conceit about a group of dissatisfied flawed people on a beach who come across the living embodiments of Lewis Carroll's Walrus and the Carpenter. It does not pack a punch as horror or dark fantasy because it is so intrinsically absurd but it stands as a well written short story....more
One of Arthur Machen's earliest short stories from 1895 which introduces the idea of 'evil' primeval troglodytic forces lurking under Britain's Wester One of Arthur Machen's earliest short stories from 1895 which introduces the idea of 'evil' primeval troglodytic forces lurking under Britain's Western mountains. It doesn't quite hang together and the final scenes exhibit hysteria but the theme of what lies behind the veil of normality creates unease. ...more
I came across this as an audio book and it was entertaining enough to listen to while off sick with a minor 'flu but not sufficiently to want to liste I came across this as an audio book and it was entertaining enough to listen to while off sick with a minor 'flu but not sufficiently to want to listen to, let alone buy, the previous two volumes in the trilogy. A very British bit of basic science fiction, reasonably crafted but not stunning. ...more
The British Library have been publishing 'lost' works of popular fiction from the past under their own label, possibly most successfully in the crime The British Library have been publishing 'lost' works of popular fiction from the past under their own label, possibly most successfully in the crime genre, This is one of a number of selections from genre short stories - the Egyptian mummy tale from the 1860s to 1900s.
Unfortunately, while historically interesting, if only as an insight into British colonialist attitudes and prejudices over time, nearly all these stories are second-rate. The series closes with a truly dreadful story, 'The Necklace of Dreams', written in 1910 by the scarcely known W. G Peasgood.
Many of the authors are little known and are writing in fairly transient magazines. The oft-anthologised Arthur Conan Doyle story 'Lot No. 249' stands as possibly the only item worth reading for its literary quality, perhaps alongside the stories of Guy Boothby and Hester White.
The introductions to each story are short and to the point and do not over-play the colonialist or even erotic undercurrents of this genre, allowing the reader to discover these for themselves but, truth be told, this collection is really only one for literary genre completists.
Perhaps the only literary lesson is that we should not see Conan Doyle's efforts or Bram Stoker's 'Jewel of the Seven Stars' as somehow creative bolts from the blue. The genre was well established by the time they were writing. These masters were simply doing a better job than most.
The genre, of course, is best known to us through film - thanks to both Universal and Hammer and is still 'alive' today. It also continued as a theme in Lovecraftian literature and recurs through Tim Powers in the byways of contemporary fantasy and steampunk. It is now part of our culture.
As we say, a book for 'completists' which gives us some background to the genre and links it more clearly to imperial adventurism in Egypt and to the erotic tensions in the English upper middle classes but it is not a collection to spark the modern imagination....more
A fairly entertaining adventure centred on the world of stage magic betwen the 1890s and 1920s in San Francisco. it was my second reading after a deca A fairly entertaining adventure centred on the world of stage magic betwen the 1890s and 1920s in San Francisco. it was my second reading after a decade and a half and it says something that there were only flickers of recognition that I had read it once before.
The author has done his research on the period but it is not a particularly realistic story (at times, almost ridiculously not) while the attitudes of the writer are those of the end of the twentieth century - an openly gay couple, damaged but strong and independent women and so forth.
The hero, Carter, sometimes seems to be the author's alter ago so that other characters lack depth and the plotting is, well, very like that of a decent Netflix job. It starts well and seriously but declines a bit into something more conventional. I can't argue against it but I can't really get enthusiastic either....more
Written in 1898 as an Australian contribution to the high imperial fantasy genre pioneered by Rider Haggard, this cannot be called great literature buWritten in 1898 as an Australian contribution to the high imperial fantasy genre pioneered by Rider Haggard, this cannot be called great literature but it is not entirely unworthy either. It is hard to know where to begin reviewing it since it mixes and matches so many sub-genres.
The best of it is a fine characterisation of the 'solid bloke', greedy and prejuduced but also hard-working and entrepreneurial, who created modern Australia. The matiness of the working man isolated in the outback is well drawn and convincing - the book is authentically Australian.
The worst of it is probably the utterly ridiculous central adventure involving a lost race of Lemurians, evil pygmies who are the dessicated creatures of an evil vampiric queen, a princess that is cross between Snow White and Ayesha and a cavernous mise-en-scene that is sub-Merritt.
Still, even the laughable plotting involving a bunyip (an aborigine monster), oodles of gold, the heroes living up a tree, a giantess and mesmerism is nevertheless fast-paced and (guilty pleasure!) quite a lot of fun.
Between the best and the worst is a derivative tale of reincarnation that is straight out of the world of the Mummy while the Lemurian angle is simply a rather weak use of contemporary pseudo-science to give cover to what is really a late Gothic story with a twist (no spoilers on that one).
All in all, it is worth a read, especially as Firth Scott likes to tell the tale in a rollicking down to earth manner with a bare minimum of pompous Victorian verbiage. I was also pleased to read that the racism was a little bit less sure of itself than might have been expected.
The reader will get a feel for defiant and independent-minded Australian sensibilities, still British imperial at heart, and experience an interesting attempt to translate into one Australian text a series of standard literary genres (fantasy, imperial adventure, romance, romance, the gothic). ...more
This was a rather disappointing anthology but only because it promised far more than it could deliver in its publicity and after a poorly written and This was a rather disappointing anthology but only because it promised far more than it could deliver in its publicity and after a poorly written and rather pompous short introduction. It claimed to offer some sort of literary pathway into the actuality of the occult and did little of the kind.
What it is, however, is a standard anthology of occult-related horror with, as in all such anthologies, some good and some not so good with some poor writing and a little bit of editorial laziness along the way - pretty standard for this sort of thing.
My only regret is that, seduced by the claim, I shelled out full paperback price. I would have been much happier (indeed, perfectly happy) to have bought a paperback at lower price and perhaps been less irritated. But let's get the peeves out of the way to write about what was good.
There are 13 stories. It is lazy to have one good but already anthologised pre-war German bit of mildly misogynistic horror. The more poetic attempts at evoking the occult may please some but strike me as over the top and, with one exception, not hitting the mark out of ritual context.
Kenneth Grant's story confuses confusion with meaning but is a serviceable bit of Blackwood meets Machen and Lovecraft. Dale Pendell's uses an occult idea for a political purpose that should really be in a Penguin Book of Contemporary American Protest literature.
The exception is half-baked. Lee Morgan's 'On the Fetish Road to Otherwise' was almost painful to read in its first half, a dogged adolescent third party narrative of exceptional tiresomeness, that suddenly blossomed into a remarkably good evocation of how witchery and faerie might collude.
This leaves us with seven stories that make the collection worthwhile with one or two minor masterpieces. 50% being good is actually not a bad strike right in a contemporary anthology and the collection only lost a star on its presumptuous claims.
The usual suspects drive the inspiration - Lovecraft, Blackwood, Machen, - to which we can add Greek myth (two good examples), Robert E. Howard and Borges, this last providing one of the two best stories in the book, but none are quite breaking literary boundaries here.
Richard Gavin's 'Wormwood Votaries' comes closest to the original brief and, given that he was one of the three Editors, perhaps shows that it is he who is most trying to break new ground and finding it hard to uncover others. His story leaves you with vague questioning as it should.
This is precisely what was required - solid narrative building on a tradition that leaves an uneasiness about reality which remains unresolved. The story is not a masterpiece but it is a solid start which comes crashing down to earth in its near-hysterical successor.
Five stories later, Michael Cisco does something similar with 'Altar, Altar!' even if this is more conventionally Lovecraftian. Nevertheless, we have the same sense of unease and unresolved questions with some effective evocation of altered realities.
One of the two most effective stories is Sun Yung Shin's Borgesian take on the story of the Minotaur and Theseus, 'The Other Asterion', which, in my opinion, shows a serious literary talent. This is one of the most imaginative re-tellings of a Greek myth I have come across in a long time.
Brian Evenson's 'Any Corpse' struck me as something closer to dark science fiction than occult though it is evidently a tale of necromancy. The 'furnishers' have the quality of part-sentient machines ill-programmed in a post-apocalyptic society reduced to magic and cave-dwelling.
The second direct response to myth is Caitlin Kiernan's 'Andromeda Amongst the Stones' which, though marred a little by an attempt to be over-literary in form, is essentially a Lovecraftian take on the monstrous beast to whom sacrifice must be given. It is evocative and mostly well written.
Don Webb's 'The Red Rite' was perhaps an old-fashioned tale of magical reincarnation but written in a contemporary idiom with a solid psychological approach. This is the story I would recommend to someone just wanting a good tale to which they could relate as a general reader.
Finally, Daniel A. Schulke's 'Verger' sits alongside Sung Yung Shin as the best of the show. She wins on sophistication and subtlety but he wins on evocation of horror and narrative. Both are excellent. Schulke evokes a dark fantasy world with enormous skill that makes me want to read more.
All in all, a good introduction to some dark fantasy and horror writers (which is perhaps the purpose beyond the ostensible one) but only two writers and not the two best come close to teasing out the hopes of whoever wrote the blurb on the back of the book.
The art is surely not to make the fantastic real (as the best writers do here) but to make the real fantastic and unstable. Cisco and Gavin do this quite effectively as does Webb and Morgan in the last half of her story but the rest tend to the fantastic made plausible.
The occult is mostly presented to us as an excuse for the imagination rather than as an omnipresent reality lurking behind what is experienced and seen. We need the shiver in the spine that makes us believe that things are not quite as they seem.
This used to be a function of ghost stories but ghosts are taken less seriously now than a hundred years ago. Tales of other worlds are not easy to make real either - science has disposed in turn of lost continents, hidden lands, the hollow earth and planets we can reach.
The shiver factor now has to depend on just three things - dimensions enfolded into our own, the inner recesses of our minds and perhaps the mysteries of time. This is more than just imagining worlds. This is about ambiguities in the relationship between the world and our perceptions.
The occult is what is behind the world that we cannot see. It is either there or it is imagined. It is easy for us humans to imagine fantastic things. It is much harder to believe in new things that were not taught us by priests and elders. To believe in what is behind the veil because we have seen it.
One school of new belief is to take our imaginings for cultic reality - Christianity is the model for this. Another is to pretend that the altered states of drugs or other means are reality despite science knocking these out of the game as much as it has done green men on Mars or Hyperborea.
Occult literature ought to be able to use the imagination in a different way - simply to destabilise our sense of reality through exploring possibilities but also evoking the uncanny (which most of us experience) and then developing it into an intrusion into what is behind our perception of things.
This is a tall order. I see what Gavin in particular may want to do. But it is going to require more work and less compromise and, in effect, a dumping of conventional imaginative literature including the best two writers in the anthology!...more
This still stands up as a classic espionage thriller nearly half a century since it was written. It has spawned an excellent TV version with Alec Guin This still stands up as a classic espionage thriller nearly half a century since it was written. It has spawned an excellent TV version with Alec Guinness in 1979 and a film in 2011, both of which might even be regarded by some as better than the book.
There is not much to say other than to point again to the superb characterisation and the way it captures a peculiar moment in British history when its elite was losing confidence in itself after the loss of empire and before Thatcher kick-started their self confidence once again.
Whether it is a true and faithful account of British espionage operations in the mid-Cold War is moot. I have always had my doubts and seen the book as 'mythic', the construction of an alternate reality expressing some truths in an unreal setting.
There are weaknesses. The McGuffin that is the Rikki Tarr story is not entirely plausible but I have taken this character to be a bit of a satire on the Ian Fleming type sociopath that had led the field in the previous generation of espionage thrillers.
Whatever the reality of the mise en scene, Le Carre characters of this period are infinitely more real than the comic book male fantasy characters of Fleming though I wish I could say the same about his more recent work. His best novel remains for me 'A Perfect Spy' (1986).
Le Care is better at exposition than denouement and the closure seems hurried - faults that struck me as corrected in the later TV and film versions which are paced better - but these are quibbles. It is deservedly a classic and will last as long as Buchan, Ambler and Fleming....more
This is a companion publication to Scottish Myths and Legends also published by Lomond for the Scottish tourist market and which we reviewed at https: This is a companion publication to Scottish Myths and Legends also published by Lomond for the Scottish tourist market and which we reviewed at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....
In this case Lomond appears to have jammed together at least two and probably more texts that are out of copyright to create a mish-mash that has its virtues in the first half but far fewer in the second.
The stories in the first half have attractive illustrations, are well told and most really fall into the category of fairy tales. The tales in the second half have no illustrations, are told in a thumpingly dull archaic style and are mostly legends of doubtful provenance, possibly fictions in some cases.
There is not much more to say. Some of the stories are entrancing. Others deadly dull. There are even partial repetitions but, at this price, it is fine for the library. But don't expect provenance, notes or anything to guide us as to authenticity or meaning.
There is only one last thing to note. Some of the final tales (there are around 70, so you get your money's worth) are rather disturbing insights into the insane turn inwards of Scottish superstition, under the influence of Protestant Christianity, towards the witch hunt.
There has always been something unpleasant about Scottish communitarian Protestantism and the contrast between the first half of folk and fairy tales that see a faery world as troublesome but part of the whole and the sheer nastiness and fear of the later era is instructive.
These are two different sensibilities pushed together willy-nilly by the publishers for quick and reliable profit. You may find it strange to go from the light of the first stories to the dark of the final stories without warning. If you want to stay happy and entertained, stop at page 247.
To be honest, I thought this book was rather lightweight, reminiscent of Italo Calvino's over-rated Invisible Cities. In my review of Calvino, I refer To be honest, I thought this book was rather lightweight, reminiscent of Italo Calvino's over-rated Invisible Cities. In my review of Calvino, I referred to philosophical platitude and I am afraid that I find the criticism can be repeated here. There is not much more to say....more
A very short well written 'literary' exploration of the author's fascination with the masculine world of the first world war with some thoughtful almo A very short well written 'literary' exploration of the author's fascination with the masculine world of the first world war with some thoughtful almost jealous comments on male 'sacrifice' and heroism from a transatlantic lesbian perspective.
In fact, the exploration (dated 2002) for all its virtues is somewhat narcissistic with that embarrassing appropriation of 9/11 as some life-changing event (they should have been in Tokyo in 1944!) which was de rigeur in American literature in the two or three years after the attack.
But, putting that to one side, her romantic view of 'sacrifice' and heroism is troubling, part of a turn towards the appropriation of the less attractive and frankly somewhat dumb proto-fascist aspects of late imperial masculinity by self-defining feminists.
There are aspects of this in the current blind allegiance of such feminists to war hawk Hillary Rodham Clinton but the real symptoms lie today in terrible machines of war painted pink to raise awareness of breast cancer and women lauding other women as nuclear strike commanders.
The situation where 'equality' has become little more than the right of educated women to participate in the sociopathic death, economic and social control and administrative machines of the system starts with thinking like that expressed in this book - simpatico for stupidity.
The talk of heroism and sacrifice plays into the hands of those who would order us around to their benefit and our destruction. These people were killed on a false prospectus - insufficient information to make an informed decision. This was sacrifice - not by but of a generation.
Something similar is happening today but the sacrifices are economic and in today's equivalent generation. It is depressing to see how identity politics has constructed, since this otherwise thoughtful short book, a means of strengthening and not weakening the machine.
The problem with defining yourself around an identity (then detourning it into appropriating the other against whom you define yourself) is that success in attaining equality becomes absorption into a unequal system as an equal component of it not in making a society of true equals.
While not accusing Ms. Castle of this directly, feminism under late liberal capitalism, reaching its apogee in the probable/possible next President of the United States of America, has increasingly become the expression of the educated middle class' desire to have a stake in a rotten system.
This book gives us a hint of the dark alleys down which this leads - not into a critique of the exploitation of young men for imperial gain but admiration of their ignorance and a yearning to be good little imperialists (albeit liberal ones) instead of serious egalitarians.
This is not an idle concern if the new President, if that is what she becomes, is not just electorally cynical in her appropriation of the war hawkery of the neo-cons but sincerely believes that she can only represent the equality of her gender through the use of war.
This is a solid enough police procedural with its selling point being that it is set in the Scottish Western Isles. It has excellent characterisation, This is a solid enough police procedural with its selling point being that it is set in the Scottish Western Isles. It has excellent characterisation, a fast pace and some very good descriptive writing. I enjoyed it even if it was bloody obvious who the murderer was two thirds of the way through.
This sets me a problem. I don't do spoilers and this is a detective novel but I have a complaint about this book that is really a much broader complaint about a disturbing cultural trend. I am going to have to dance around this and try and mislead you as to the killer while telling a truth.
That truth starts with procedural crime being read mostly by women. Women are understandably and naturally predisposed to fear violence from rogue, unbalanced or sociopathic men. Ergo, crime novels and TV series are increasingly about violence perpetrated on women.
Is this really because criminal activity is centred on sexual violence of an extreme nature on women or is it because the concept sells? I think it is the latter. All human beings, men or women assuage their fears and express their aspirations and dreams through the imagination.
This is as true of the wonderful Marvel and DC fantasy films for the adolescent in us and for the masculine action thriller as for the sexual or existential depredations of the crime or horror genre. Let's work through our fears and desires. Nothing wrong with that so long as we know it is fantasy.
Unfortunately, the tropes are having a deleterious cultural effect in the case of the criminal procedural whether produced by the BBC, Scandinavian production companies on a roll or cynical publishers. They calm old private fears but create new social fears that are now neurotic.
Feminists are beginning to complain from their perspective about the repeated images of women being raped, brutalised, trafficked and killed but they are missing the point. They seem to think that men get some deviant pleasure from this but it is not men who watch or read this stuff at all.
It is women who are being catered for. The initial fantasy is that 'men are potentially like this' but this becomes the fantasy that 'men are actually like this'. What starts off as the working out of a natural if often irrational fear becomes opportunistically marketed as something more.
It is men who suffer from the constant reinforcement that they are a threat or socially problematic when there is no evidence of anything of the kind (at least to the intense degree implied by the memes involved) - and yet is women who are the true social victims here.
It is women who are constantly placed into a psychological position where they are surrounded by threats. Most see through it but some do not and so we see in our culture a rising neurosis of fear - similar to the hysterical paranoia over terrorism.
The chances of being killed in a terrorist attack are very limited and yet our entire culture has been skewed, especially in terms of expenditures, by the small threat that there is. Women too live in a culture of fear constructed as a negative aura in social discourse.
The truth is that there are a few seriously deranged and disturbed males out there and women are well advised to be pragmatic and realistic about placing themselves in risky situations. Society needs to recognise this and go the extra mile in small things like street lights and large things too.
But the level of fear and anxiety engendered in commercially opportunistic literature and film by the market is damaging women, not because of the much mooted 'objectification' (the radical feminist argument) but because it is a lie. The exaggerated crimes that fuel these genres are rare.
This is not to diminish the lack of respect and molestation in society that needs dealing with - preferably in draconian ways when proven - but such every day stories do not 'make good copy'. Things seem to need to be hyped up in order not only to entertain but create catharsis.
A few great works of art would normally help in doing this, waking us up (especially men in this case) to the wrongness of treating women as mere objects of use. But this is not what is happening in our culture. What is happening is the normalisation of extreme terror for entertainment.
It is rare to find myself on the same side as the radfems but we converge on this. I think their analysis is mistaken but they are noting the same phenomenon that disturbs me - the exaggeration of sexual violence for market reasons. In fact, it demeans men as much as women.
The tragedy of this book is that a rather good writer has allowed himself to be trapped into this mode with its plot cliches, p0ssibly because he or his publisher thought it was 'marketable' to be so. It certainly meant that the killer was far too predictable (a caricature) far too soon.
And, yes, I would read the next and other books in the series if only because the teasers in the book clearly directed the reader to more 'realistic' tales of organised crime. I do not condemn the writer - he is a victim of our market culture as much as the rest of us. ...more
You will probably find this as a cheap edition, without notes, introduction or index, in any one of a number of Scottish tourist locations. It is publ You will probably find this as a cheap edition, without notes, introduction or index, in any one of a number of Scottish tourist locations. It is published by Lomond Books on the same principle as Wordsworth - just get the text out there dead cheap and let the reader do his own assessment.
Having said this, one should not be a snob. You get your money's worth with tales that cover most of the main themes of ancient, medieval and early modern Scottish popular culture. Between 50 and 60 stories give a taste of a distinctive network of cultures in these islands.
I write 'network of cultures' because the manufacture by nationalists of a single Scottish culture is as false here as it is in every case where petty nationalists get their grubby fingers on the education system and the museums. Scotland is a damned complex place culturally.
We start with a mythological nature religion that personifies mountains as giants and the seasons as gods and goddesses. In the Western Isles and around the coast there is a mythology of a land beneath the waves that men may visit and of mermen and mermaids who shed their skins.
The old nature religion re-emerges later as laird and crofter struggles with ghostly giants and spirits, mermaids who return to the sea when they recover the skin stolen by their earthly husbands and helpful brownies who are always chased away by insensitive offers of payment.
Many of these stories contain hints of the culture behind the story. On one side, men contesting the elements and having to fight for resources. On the other, women having to be submissive - most revealingly when faeries are found plotting to replace the good wife with a bad one of wood.
Interestingly, the Christian religion plays only a small role in this book though that may be because of editorial choices. We really have only St. Columba, a bit of superstition about water in caves and, rarely, good presbyterian ministers chasing off naughty spirits but that's about it.
There is a rich heritage of faery lore across the land, shared with the English, an entire parallel world which we humans deal with at our peril. We have to remember that the lawless borders were never clearly Anglo-Saxon or Celtic, Scots or English until quite late in British history.
The faeries play their role in border ballads that can sometimes be about the medieval courts of the Scottish kings but are just as likely to be about ordinary folk (though predominantly 'bards') who find themselves losing years of their lives in attending a faery orgy in a mound.
Politics comes into play with the Scots' legendary stories that sometimes speak of the English as Rangers' fans speak of Celtic F.C. and you sense the struggle of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce but also of the robber barons on either side of the Scots-English border behind them.
Since the Western Isles with their Nordic heritage were as likely as not to be allies of the medieval English and the Scots be stirring it up against the Plantagenets in support of France, these stories tend to represent the culture of the loyal Scottish lowlands.
Then there are the folk tales and fairy tales (not Faery tales) with their things done in threes, their princesses, their brutal moral lessons, wise old men and talking animals that have their analogues with much of the rest of Europe and speak to a common European heritage.
Towards the end the sources of some of the stories become clearer in the round-about Victorian circumlocations of the authors suggesting antiquarian folklorists re-envisioning the tales for a genteel and sentimental urban reading public.
A lurid Galloway Gothic tale of haunted ships strikes me as about as authentically ancient as a Glasgow Tikka Masala. And there are the heavy-handed peasant jokes wrapped up as folk tales and hints of a widespread peasant belief in witchcraft which led to vicious persecutions in history.
You might spend a lot of time analysing each and every story but that would take half the fun out of the reading. Overall, I would treat this book as an entertainment and, as an entertainment, it is value for money ...more
I am frustrated but probably no more than the author is (Paul is a friend so bear that in mind in the review). This is the conclusion to an earlier na I am frustrated but probably no more than the author is (Paul is a friend so bear that in mind in the review). This is the conclusion to an earlier narrative Beneath The Pleasure Zones which, in turn, followed The Qliphoth.
This second part relieves the initial frustration to a great extent but not entirely. It is still a very good read, bringing the whole story to a natural conclusion but it jumps into the story without any reminders or preparation. One book ends. The next starts. But three years have passed.
We now have short multiple narratives that require the first part to have been read. The two parts are one book and should be published as one book. If they had been published as one book, some judicious editing might also have made the whole more satisfying.
I am not complaining about the publisher here or the author because I suspect both are victims of a very tough book market. It is good to see both parts in print at all but I hope that they can be brought together one day and published with The Qlipoth as a Collector's Edition.
What, I think, is a minor masterpiece reflecting our times and its troubling uncertainties and anxieties may not easily be recognised as such because of this jarring. The reader is expected to remember detail from three years before in order to make sense of it all.
So I won't give more information about The Polyverse because anything I say is likely to be an inintended spoiler for anyone who has not read The Rupture.
But let's not do a 'Game of Thrones' either and bore us with a 100 pages of reminders in what would then be a sequel. Together, the 2-3 books as they stand give us a unique take on a world where the Last Trump may have much more specific meaning in November.
My recommendation? Make sure you read The Qlipoth if you can but don't read The Rupture until you have The Polyverse next to it. Then read the last two in sequence and don't leave too long a gap between them. And then enjoy!
This is a fairly lightweight collection of Burgess' stories, a mix of imaginative reconstructions of literary and political events, pastiches and tale This is a fairly lightweight collection of Burgess' stories, a mix of imaginative reconstructions of literary and political events, pastiches and tales from his time in Malaya 'doing a Maugham' - that is, observing very late colonial Brits and the natives.
It is entertaining enough and Burgess cannot write badly but little is going to be truly memorable in a year's time. His Attila the Hun novella reads like the playbook for a Hollywood epic that perhaps he would like to have been in on - a good read but not really quite true to life or history.
He also shows off his intellect far too much ... boondoggling the reader with detailed arcane knowledge and literary 'insider' stuff. We know he is intelligent and talented. He really does not need to show off. At times, he is classically too clever by half.
But this was not a disappointing collection only because I was not expecting too much from a rather obvious pulling together of bits and pieces from an illustrious career towards the end of it - a sort of completist collection for fans.
Having said this, the best lies in the two very short Malay stories and both of them gain their strength from a subtle exploration of sexual meaning or rather how meanings are manipulated or misunderstood within the social reality of a dying colonialism.
The theme of 'The Wine of the Country' reminded me a little of Alberto Moravia's exploration of how male and female expectation and assumptions of the correct and appropriate can be so much at odds while 'Snow' is an acute evocation of power shifting as the old colonials lose their place.
Mostly enjoyable, sometimes frustrating, sometimes cavalier or offering writing as intellectual exercise to keep in practice, the book is, as I say, for completists but look out for the two Malay stories if they are anthologised elsewhere and if you are not interested in the collection as a whole. ...more
An old-fashioned type of book that reminds one of the polymathic style of a Jung or a Huxley or any number of pre-post-modern autodidactic (in the sen An old-fashioned type of book that reminds one of the polymathic style of a Jung or a Huxley or any number of pre-post-modern autodidactic (in the sense of having self taught themselves out of some learned specialist category) general thematic histories.
In this case, Gyrus (disclaimer: we have met and like him but this does not change our critical faculties) looks at the 'mind of man' (a common theme of such texts) as a relationship to the sky and to the polar (arctic and antarctic) cosmologies that often underpin our intellectual history.
The style is dry but readable, well in the tradition. There are insights and I can rarely fault the judgments on specific matters but it left me with the nagging doubt that such books tell us more about the writer than they do about the world he is trying to describe.
In Gyrus' case, this is made unusually explicit in a nightmare epilogue, a dream sequence, that suggests that we are seeing here is writing as psychotherapy - a formal intellectualism finally imploding in some rather obvious personal anxieties about the stability of being.
Doubts increase when his personal values intrude - especially value judgments about what it is to be human that personally do not resonate with me. One suspects that the tale has been structured more as a covert morality tale than a demonstration of the reality that I and most others know.
None of this detracts from the text if you do not expect more than an intellectual entertainment that offers one possible interpretation of the meaning behind some of the vast range of cultural artefacts that we have inherited as part of a literate Western civilisation.
But the underlying position represents the paradox of our time - a deeply conservative eco-ideology emphasising an unattainable wholeness and seeking after some form of lost tranquillity set in an implicit claim to radical resistance to order and the dominance of the 'head'.
Perhaps this text is best appreciated as a sign and symbol of the confused pseudo-progressive eco-conservatism of a generation, a last or the latest burst of that romantic impulse that places man within a web of essences rather than as a stable reasoning manipulator of his own condition.
Antithetical to all I see as valid in the description of reality, this world view must nevertheless be understood even as it is being displaced by new values and ideologies in the wake of 2008. In that context, it is learned, humane and may appeal to those adding to their stock of acquired meanings.
I simply retain my doubt that developing a thematic approach based on set texts, some anthropological and archaeological research and the mental mapping of significant thinkers tells us very much about how real people really thought in past real worlds.
The book feels like a fact-based 'invention' rather than a 'discovery', based on an invented narrative to try to tie down some relationship between discoveries - to create, in short, meaning and wholeness, neither of which may actually be there.
It is a personality thing. Some people thrive on fragmentation and a chaos which they order as autonomous individuals. Others demand that their selves be integrated with something greater and project their selves onto the world. Others simply distintegrate into given roles.
This book is of the second type - the desire for wholeness and for things to hang together even if they hang together in a way that might induce pessimism as to our condition. This reviewer just happens to be of the first type, impatient of those claiming histories rather than creating futures.
First published in 1743 as a literary conceit that made use of the scandal surrounding the notorious gangster and thief-taker Jonathan Wild, this edit First published in 1743 as a literary conceit that made use of the scandal surrounding the notorious gangster and thief-taker Jonathan Wild, this edition has an excellent introduction (1982) by David Nokes and includes Daniel Defoe's profiteering pamphlet of 1725 as well as other information.
There is not too much to say here. Fielding, a radical Tory magistrate and humanitarian as well as novelist, uses the story of Wild primarily to satirise the corrupt administration of Robert Walpole and posturing notions of GREATNESS in public life.
It is an achievement to have written a text that, at times, can still raise a smile over 250 years after it was published although, equally, it is a literary concoction that is best appreciated by those with a taste for the classical allusions and sentimental tropes of the era.
Fielding tells us more about himself than about the real Wild. The author is a type we all know even today in English society: the middle class observer outraged by the hypocrisy, delusions and self-seeking behaviour of the age, indeed, trying not to be outraged by humanity itself.
This is a barely repressed rage that men do not behave as they should according to the lights of religion and decency and, of course, we can reflect that books rarely change manners except amongst those minded to change their manners.
The best that might be said here is that Fielding's outraged cynicism albeit hiding the exact opposite - the belief and hope in a better world - was part of the slow process by which the eighteenth century introduced humanist and even egalitarian values to the wider world.
The language of the eighteenth century is much easier to read than that of the preceding centuries as you would expect but casual readers should be warned that the formal style needs some concentration at times. The notes are excellent. ...more
These are the collected plays of a friend of mine so bear in mind that friendship as you read the review. You might also note that the Paul Green in t These are the collected plays of a friend of mine so bear in mind that friendship as you read the review. You might also note that the Paul Green in the author box to the right of the Goodreads entry was not the Paul A. Green of this book when this review was written.
Paul Green has a distinctive voice and now lives in that thoroughly eccentric English seaside town of Hastings. His themes are well outlined in the book's Afterwords which, unusually, I would suggest reading first to get a feel for the man and his interests, some might say obsessions.
The man is gentle and mild-mannered though you can sense something volcanic lurking beneath the persona - an interest in the occult, sexual energy, jazz, counterculture and a love of the rush of words in free poetry and a beholdness to English eccentricity suggest a Dionysiac manque.
As in all collected works, some items are more successful than others but it helps to understand that Paul's natural medium is radio drama with its ability to evoke imagery in the mind through spoken words. Ideally you would read through closed eyes.
Sadly, his work seems not to have been fully appreciated by the dear old BBC as much as it might have been. I suspect much potential work has never appeared for this reason but he also has an equally frenetic body of novels that are also word hoards, two of which we have reviewed already.
At the less successful end is the experimental Obo Cocteau, based on a collaboration with the author of a short story. It strikes me as striving to be an art film script without the discipline of having the text edited by the realities of production. It is obscure but we see what he is trying to do.
The greatest successes are where he restrains his love of words (as in his novels which are otherwise excellent and amusing reads) in order to concentrate on the dynamics of the drama. What he does well is pace events fast when not entranced by the word in and for itself
The central piece in this respect is Babalon about the life of Jack Parsons which I would dearly like to hear performed on Radio 3 as I saw it once performed in a wonderfully enthusiastic and semi-professional production under the direction of the author at a moot in London.
But there are other good pieces, all of their time and place and reflective of very personal concerns about the nature of reality, the way we are all bound by our circumstances and the threats in a cold world of authority and institutions without any hidden soul but much hidden manipulation.
The first radio play (from 1974 and, I believe, from his time in Canada) is a Ballardian paranoid fantasy of dream control. The second a chanting horror inspired by the Nazi Wewelsburg myth: I find it startling that a less anodyne BBC actually broadcast it in 1977.
The Mouthpiece is a 2002 occult monologue about artistic inspiration transferring the world of 70s jazz (Green is definitely a child of the 70s in his cultural preoccupations) into the world of dark myth - Resonance FM gave this its home. Astral FM is similar but more of an indulgence.
The Terminal Poet is a rich fantasy where the author's love of language does have its appropriate home in a tale of satiric paranoia even if the charcters are 'types' rather than persons. This was performed in public in Hereford in 2004.
The Voice Collection is, like The Mouthpiece, a proper little chiller, performed on RTE (Eire), that plays to the medium, radio, in the way that Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape played to the medium of television. Again, the theme is of an uncertain reality that verges on the paranoid.
The final two plays seem to be unperformed and would be so much more interesting than the tired old social service dramas that Radio 4 delivers to us week in week out - they are biocasts of two occult eccentrics, the jazz musician Graham Bond and the fraudulent Montague Summers.
No, these are not going to play at the National Theatre but they are interesting, entertaining and (subject to the occasional orgasmic word excesses) worth reading as a window to a world view that should have excited more listeners on national radio.
It is not my imagination that radio drama was once richer certainly in the UK. The BBC has definitely shifted from the imaginative word to more music and more didacticism. It has become po-faced. Green laces his paranoia with great humour and the effect is (mostly) stimulating.
This is a talent that needed an official outlet to flourish. The lack of commitment to art radio drama by the BBC since the managerialists appeared is one of an increasing number of black marks against it. It is not that Paul should be favoured but that the opportunity should have been there.
One thing the bureaucrats have not understood is that radio is not just about mature adults exchanging tips on savings in Money Box or getting outraged at something Jenni Murray has got upset about. It is also about stimulating mental pictures - especially amongst the young.
It is obvious that small children no longer are likely to get much out of radio because their parents do not see this aspect of the case although my life-long love of historical narrative was triggered not by a TV but by a schools broadcast on the Emperor Chin as a seven year old.
Those who might get something more from it are adolescents and young people whose framing of reality is still imaginative and open and who might get benefit from constructing imaginative pictures from language rather than having imagery thrust at them to which they passively respond.
Radio 3 classic plays played that role for me when I was young. I remember to this day the power of Calderon's 'Life is a Dream' which also dealt with questions about the nature of reality much as Green does. Green's work is most valuable in stimulating this same sort of reaction.
Green is that teacher who opened eyes. Radio drama is not the same as the audio book. Radio drama allows the world be constructed out of an interplay of voices, leaving the listener to reconstruct reality as participant in the drama. It can be more powerful than staging for some.
I am pleased to see Bibliotheque Rouge publish these collected works and only hope that the commissioning editors of radio will do more for imaginative radio drama in the coming generations than they have done for recent ones. it is, after all, quite cheap to do by standards! ...more
This is surprisingly good, surprisingly so because it is a short graphic rather than lengthy text-based description of one of the most difficult 'scho This is surprisingly good, surprisingly so because it is a short graphic rather than lengthy text-based description of one of the most difficult 'schools' of Western philosophy which I am reluctant to label 'existentialism' following Appignanesi's own scepticism about the term.
Let's start by saying that it is not really introductory at all. If you want a cogent introduction I would start with one of the many other general textual introductions - I began with Mary Warnock's many years ago but Appignanensi has delivered one of his own quite recently.
Appignanesi compromises little in his limited space in trying to reach deep into the thought of the 'existentialists'. Many readers are going to find it very obscure and difficult without a grounding in the history and ideas on which the text is based - but I think you might like to persevere.
If you have read already in the subject, he has insights that make the difficulty worthwhile. What I like is his avoidance of the tum-ti-tum standard narrative that takes us from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche via Dostoevesky through Heidegger to Sartre and Camus.
He restores the often forgotten core of the school, Husserl's phenomenological turn, and then sets the very different yet dialectially challenging Heideggerian and Sartrean world views in the context of the critical business of choice and survival in the second quarter of the twentieth century.
Occasional digressions into the broader literary culture and into the politics of the era are suggestive and apposite. The book is the philosophical equivalent of a haiku - many deep thoughts compressed into surprisingly small space. The images entertain but do not distract.
I would argue that this school of thinkers still provides the greatest challenge to the liberal group-think of our age. The logic of their thinking towards intensive introspection and liberal science (Husserl), Nazism (Heidegger) and Marxism (Sartre) remains thought-provoking.
Attempts to moralise the last two out of their decisions and choices would be seen as futile by any decent 'existentialist'. The silences and refusals to apologise epitomise not the worst but the best of humanity faced with our technologisation and simplistic expectations.
The post-existentialists have contributed important criticisms of the existential turn. Foucault in particular has helped us to understand the nature of power relations and Derrida the role of the text but the turn has been taken too far - there is a cultural evasion here with political effects.
The 'existential' turn is terribly terribly dangerous to modern liberal society. Yet it is true to our relationship with Being. The challenge of this critique has scarcely been explored. The result is that modern liberal society has been taken by surprise as the new populism emerges.
Elite liberalism has been in denial for far too long about that relationship to Being and our personal choices in a world of roles and material things. The panopticon approach, the attempt to create social hegemony, could never succeed against the raw resistance of those who think apart.
Somewhere and somehow radical thought will reappear to take this problem that existence precedes essence and the phenomenological anaysis of our situation and so create the humanism required before transhumanism is possible - and offer a 'poetic' attitude to being in the world.
Personally, poetry bores me. If something needs to be said, let it be said, and, if not, let it be experienced in direct relation to Being. The text is the very source of our alienation. Yet Heidegger's stance suggests that that which is poetic or spiritual links to the human core.
Husserlian 'scientific' investigation of the mind's relationship to itself, Sartrean concern with our performance in the world and Heideggerian investigation of our relationship to Being provide (in this book) the start of an inquiry into a sufficient rebellion to preserve us against new intelligences.
We are in the midst of a revolution in which the post-moderns and the academics appear increasingly surplus to requirements much as monks became in the age of printing. A philosophy to cope with this exists already in the formative work of this school if only we knew it.
A sound if difficult and challenging guide to a difficult and challenging way of thinking. Grasp it correctly and you will never be the same. Its assertion of mind against 'science' is life-affirming, The reading list at the back, though not all there is to say on the matter, will be useful. ...more
This is quite a good basic introduction to the Arthurian mythos even if the author has insisted on interpolating his own creative writing (not to my t This is quite a good basic introduction to the Arthurian mythos even if the author has insisted on interpolating his own creative writing (not to my taste and rather overblown) and story illustrations more suitable for a children's book.
There is a lot of sensible information and interpretation here and the book might be a good gift to a bright teenager who wants to know more of a story that provides one of the great themes in Western culture. This is a book written by a man who loves his subject yet maintains his critical faculties. ...more
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