My mission: the destruction of the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood in the race in order to realign the sexes, thus reducing population whMy mission: the destruction of the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood in the race in order to realign the sexes, thus reducing population while increasing human happiness and preparing for its next stage
What the what? What was that again, Myra? What next stage?
There is only the logic of a madperson in this novel: a gay author* writes a novel about a gay man who becomes a transsexual woman and who then rapes a straight man (she is the new American woman who uses men the way they once used women) which has the effect of filling, as it were, the straight man with rage so that he transforms from a gentle sex partner into a man who inflicts terrible violence on his current girlfriend, much to her great joy, as she loves the kind of rough sex that puts her in hospital. The modern reader’s head might be exploding at this point.
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There is a swingers party featuring members of a band called The Four Skins (of which there are five members, and sometimes that’s the level of humour here).**
This outrageous for 1968 and even more outrageous for 2023 novel is strewn with what-did-she-just-say run-that-by-me-again moments*** as Myra flings theories, dreams, schemes, insults****, denunciations and diatribes to the right and to the left, usually invoking references to 1940s movies and unremembered stars, as she rampages her way through the farcical mostly cringe-making plot.
As well as being grotesquely offensive, Gore Vidal is very funny. There’s a character called Uncle Buck who dictates various memos-to-self throughout, and he is hilarious. Would have loved more of him.
Now can I in all conscience recommend this rancid, dyspeptic, sly, lofty, over-educated, phallocentric satiroparodic jeux d’esprit?
I have to say : approach with extreme caution.
NOTES
1) SOMETHING I LEARNED
Until the Forties, only the upper or educated classes were circumcised in America. The real people were spared this humiliation. But during the affluent postwar years the operation became standard procedure, making money for doctors as well as allowing the American mother to mutilate her son in order that he might never forget her early power over him.
2) TWO LITERARY PREDECESSORS
Orlando (1928) – Virginia Woolf’s transgender classic; GV naturally loved Orlando but one can only imagine with a shudder what Mrs Woolf would have said about Myra Breckinridge.
Lolita (1955) – another surprise hit novel about sex written by a highbrow about which I wonder if most of the millions of copies sold were abandoned halfway. I mean, was this really what the eager purchasers of Myra Breckinridge were after? - He promptly took me in goatish arms, rammed his soft acorn against my pudendum, and bit my ear.
*****
*GV would have complained (imperiously, majestically) about this; he rejected the notion that there was such a thing as a gay person – he thought that there were only gay acts.
**I wonder if GV noted the arrival of English punk band The 4-Skins in 1982; and likewise wonder if the 4-skins ever read Myra Breckinridge
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***Such as her observation that young men in the 1960s are quite totalitarian-minded, even for Americans, and I am convinced that any attractive television personality who wanted to become our dictator would have their full support. !!! Or how about : in every American there is a Boston Strangler longing to break a neck during orgasm. Ours is a violent race.
****Not even I can create a fictional character as one-dimensional as the average reader...more
American authors in the 20s and 30s loved to write down every last possible detail of American life and two of them did it brilliantly (Sinclair LewisAmerican authors in the 20s and 30s loved to write down every last possible detail of American life and two of them did it brilliantly (Sinclair Lewis and Theodor Dreiser) and another one I have yet to investigate (John Dos Passos). This guy John O’Hara is writing later (1949) but is doing the same vast itemising and this time for me the magic didn’t work. I loved Sinclair Lewis’s ocean of minutiae in Main Street and Babbitt, but in the middle of those books are lovely characters and if you ain’t going to hook the reader with a strong plot, which Sinclair Lewis does not, you need great characters.
Mr O’Hara has the sardonic sociological eye for exhausting telling details (one page on all the courses at a banquet) but he does not have either the plot or the interesting characters. He throws us into the rich smug upper class of Pennsylvania circa 1900 and he thinks that’s enough to set us going on a 600 page novel.
Not for me… I finally (reluctantly) pressed the eject button. I got other fish to fry (tuna, salmon, halibut, mackerel, snapper, hake, trout, sardines, cod, herring and sturgeon).
Prince once said that if he’d begun his follow up album to Purple Rain with the kThis pandemoniac junk-shop of solitude
- Baudelaire
PRINCE AND FLAUBERT
Prince once said that if he’d begun his follow up album to Purple Rain with the kind of blazing guitar solo that concluded Purple Rain he would have had a huge hit but… he just didn’t want to do that. Too easy. So he made Around the World in a Day. It’s nothing like Purple Rain and the fans complained. I imagine Flaubert fans from 1874 could sympathise with that. For five years they had been waiting for the follow up to L’Education Sentimentale, that realist masterpiece, and here’s the new Flaubert, and what they got was the ravings of a third century Egyptian hermit that reads like a very bad acid trip.
The official reception in 1874 was poor, indeed hostile. Saint Antony was criticised as inexact, immodest, chaotic, in bad taste, boring, a sure artistic suicide
But Freud was a big fan. No surprise.
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JOYCE AND FLAUBERT
When you read this book you get the same feeling that you had when you heard He’s So Fine by the Chiffons. Wait a minute, you say, that’s the same tune as George Harrison’s song My Sweet Lord! In this case you think – this is totally where Joyce got the idea for the Circe chapter of Ulysses from. It’s the same. And there’s another connection. Flaubert took 25 years to finish Temptation of St Antony. He wrote three separate versions of it. So he was in love with this stuff, this really mad stuff. Joyce, after Ulysses, took 17 years to write Finnegans Wake. Another totally unreadable book and another colossal waste of time. His friends thought he’d gone mad. I agree, I think he went mad.
KITTY MROSOVSKY AND FLAUBERT
When I read the dense 50 page introduction to this edition, written by the translator Kitty Mrosovsky, I was mightily impressed by the vastness of her brains – she is dealing with Foucault, Freud, Sartre, Valery, Christian mysticism, Hieronymous Bosch, Odilon Redon, Joos van Craesbeeck…you get the picture. She says stuff like
For Sartre, Flaubert is the great technician of irrealisation whose sense of his own void or nothingness is looking for assuagement in the metaphysically virulent void he creates.
That’s a humdinger in anybody’s language.
I thought – who is this woman? So I did my own research, like you are supposed to. I found out that she was born in Oxford in 1946, parents Russian – is she still alive? No, she died in 1995, from Aids. Are there any photos of her on the internet? No, not one. Anything else? She was the partner of Craig Raine who is a big shot poet and literary establishment guy. There are lots of photos of him. Did she write anything else? Yes, one novel of 160 pages called Hydra, published in 1984 and hardly read and never reprinted – I wonder why?
In a simple room in an American city, a tutor and a paralysed student meet to discuss Euripides's drama, Herakles
Hmmm – does this explain why not a single person on Goodreads has read this book?
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SIMON AND FLAUBERT
I kind of drifted away from the subject there… Well, I found a fabulous review/analysis of The Temptation of St Antony by a guy called Simon (no last name) who does a blog called Books and Boots. It says everything that needs to be said! Check it out!
ME AND FLAUBERT
Flaubert loves to itemise and describe, like this
She wears very high patterns – one of which is black, and sprinkled with silver stars, with a moon crescent; the other, which is white, is sprinkled with a spray of gold, with a golden sun in the middle. Her wide sleeves, decorated with emeralds and bird-plumes, leave exposed her little round bare arms, clasped at the wrist by ebony bracelets; and her hands, loaded with precious rings, are terminated by nails so sharply pointed that the ends of her fingers seem almost like needles.
Frankly, it’s yawn-inducing. Just say “she was dressed to the nines” and get on with it. But in this book there’s no “it” to be got on with. You are not going to find an “it”. Kitty says : “Estimates of Saint Antony depend on attitudes to dream”. Well, I hate it when people tell me their dreams, and when I find a dream described in a novel I skip it. So it could be I was not the ideal reader. But really, this is not anything like a normal novel, it’s more like outsider art. It’s more like the 19th century novel’s version of Trout Mask Replica..
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For instance. Let’s open this book at random. Page 182 :
O Neith, beginning of all things! Ammon, lord of eternity, Ptha the demiurge, Thoth his intelligence, gods of the Amenthi, distinct triads of the Nomes, sparrowhawks in the blue, sphinx at the edge of the temples, ibis upright between the horns of the oxen, planets, constellations, shores murmuring winds, mirrored lights, tell me where I can find Osiris!
I found one thoroughly delightful paragraph in this dismal thinks-it’s-so-funny chunk of mid-fifties ultraEnglish autofiction. Here it is - Laura is hI found one thoroughly delightful paragraph in this dismal thinks-it’s-so-funny chunk of mid-fifties ultraEnglish autofiction. Here it is - Laura is here thinking about patriotism :
I went on musing about why it was thought better and higher to love one’s country than one’s county, or town, or village, or house. Perhaps because it was larger. But then it would be still better to love one’s continent, and best of all to love one’s planet.
In Robert McCrum’s book The 100 Best Novels in English we find
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner Scoop by Evelyn Waugh Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
The first two are so-so, the last one is diabolically awful, and yet here they are in a book listing the 100 Best Novels in English EVER. So there is a tradition of critics loving extremely lame tame mildewed comic writing. The Towers of Trebizond fits neatly into this horrible little list. It’s a deadpan travelogue about some posh religious types who think that the thing to do would be to travel to remote north Turkey with an amusing camel and convert the Muslims to the Anglo-Catholic sect within the Church of England. The first 20 pages are almost perversely designed to put off any reader not intimately interested in the 60 major subdivisions of the Protestant faith with which the author makes so much innocent fun and I salute all readers who trudge through that ghastly thicket into the more normally boring travel writing with its endless minor aggravations and endless mild spoofing of every foreigner and endless self-congratulatory self-deprecation that the English used to weaponise so efficiently.
No doctors had to be called to stitch up my sides after splitting them laughing so hard at this book which I gladly DNFed at the half way point....more
Knockabout farce written by the 25 year old V S Naipaul all about amusing/endearing/silly/ exasperating types running an election campaign, buying votKnockabout farce written by the 25 year old V S Naipaul all about amusing/endearing/silly/ exasperating types running an election campaign, buying votes, bribing other amusing/endearing/silly/ exasperating types and so on. Much fun, if that’s what you call it, is had with a starving mongrel dog that everybody thinks is obeah. Even in this borderline fatuous short novel dragged down by its British sitcom level elbow in the ribcage guffaws it’s obvious Naipaul is going to do something great very soon, and he did. ...more
My name is Maud and I’m only 17 and I’m a total feeb, seriously. I’m literally scared of my own shadow! But really, who wouldn’t be? Those things follMy name is Maud and I’m only 17 and I’m a total feeb, seriously. I’m literally scared of my own shadow! But really, who wouldn’t be? Those things follow you around. And they’re so quiet. What are they up to? I live in a vast stately home because my father has more money than the Bank of Freaking England. I don’t get out much, really what is there to do round here except clog dancing and killing animals, but I have noticed that every man I meet falls at my little dainty feet. I wondered why that might be, and I came to the conclusion it’s probably because of my stunning beauty. So given all of that, what could possibly go wrong? Well, just imagine for a moment that my dear papa should have a stroke and die and because I am under the age of 21 I should then be shunted over to the care of my even more reclusive borderline personality disorder Uncle Silas who is thought to have murdered a man and who is sinking under a mass of accumulated gambling debt piled up years ago before he discovered the more tranquil delights of opium. Surely no harm could befall me in the clutches of such a repulsive individual, to whom it may just have occurred that should I die before I attain control over my staggering wealth he would inherit the lot, or, maybe Plan B, possibly he just might marry me off to his boorish rakehell of a son who looks exactly like Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes. Now read on for another 350 pages....more
This started well and within 50 pages was exactly what I was hoping it would be, an eye-opening unflinching look at something I’d never thought about This started well and within 50 pages was exactly what I was hoping it would be, an eye-opening unflinching look at something I’d never thought about before – foster care in Appalachia. I love big socially crusading novels! Turns out that in Virginia in the 90s foster care = child exploitation. Either you cash the DSS cheque and starve them (simple version) or you cash the DSS cheque, starve them and make them work eight hour shifts after school doing some crippling job no one else would do (sophisticated version).
That part of the book was great. Then like a drug deal where they all end up dead it went bad real quick.
To get to the second Big Issue that Demon Copperhead was going to deal with, which is the very famous American opioid addiction crisis, we follow our sparky poor white trash kid through his rescue from the horrible exploiters and his adoption by the local school football coach whose name is Coach and his month by month growing up into an aggravating smart-mouthed kid with all the usual preoccupations of girls, dope, drink and cartooning (and people who have zero interest in American football might want to know that there are many pages devoted to the subject), and it turns out that as soon as this poor kid stops being pounded on and tortured quite so much he becomes very tiresome very quickly. I had been told by reviewers in some big fat newspapers that this was a page turner and had a propulsive plot that never stopped. They lied. The plot keels over onto live support around page 150.
But it wasn’t really the wheezing broke-down plot that was the problem. I jacked in this Pulitzer Prizewinning but not Booker Prize longlisted novel because I could not stand this kid’s voice. Every sentence is crammed with quippy slangy smartarseness. This kid is drenched in rueful self-awareness, wagging his head sorrowfully yet smirkily yet self-deprecatingly, and he never goes to a party or a funeral without describing everybody there & their relation to everybody else & what they were wearing and what they were drinking and what car they were driving or would want to have been driving. This kid thinks he’s wise and funny. He doesn’t seem to think he’s very annoying. And neither does Barbara Kingsolver. He is always saying stuff like
Good people, bad people, what does that even mean? Get down to the rock and the hard place, and we’re all just soft flesh and the weapon at hand.
Voice is crucial to a book in the first person and it’s not easy to get right. Raymond Chandler does, DBC Pierre doesn’t, Irvine Welsh does, JD Salinger doesn’t, Charles Dickens does. My does might be your doesn’t. But if you are one of the many who think Barbara Kingsolver does get it right, then it’s your lucky day, because there’s 548 small-type pages of it.
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The reviewer deciding to give up Demon Copperhead...more
1) After the horrible misstep of The Mark and the Void I am so happy to report that Paul Murray is BACK.Skippy Dies is one of my all time favourite n1) After the horrible misstep of The Mark and the Void I am so happy to report that Paul Murray is BACK.Skippy Dies is one of my all time favourite novels and I knew it couldn’t be a one-off, and here is the proof.
2) Paul Murray has a rare, exquisite gift for writing about kids and the way they think and talk without looking like your dad in a nightclub. Poor PJ (aged 12) – we agonise along with him so much as he overthinks and applies way too much logic to his life. And he is like a tiny but just as annoying Bill Bryson - did you know that the human body contains two litres of non-human bacteria? No, me neither. Thanks PJ.
3) The Victorians had an excuse for writing freaking long novels, there was nothing else to do but read back then, it was either novels or catch smallpox or polish something or clean a mountain of shoes. They couldn’t even phone each other back then! But these days when I am frequently told TikTok and Instagram have destroyed modern attention spans and no one can concentrate for more than 23 seconds authors constantly deliver unto us enormous beasts like this one, 646 pages, what happened Hamish Hamilton, did all your editors die? This novel is more than somewhat too long.
4 ) It’s Flashback City. Paul Murray concocts some very excruciating situations for his colourful cast of characters - say for example a Big Decision – your character will be streaming their consciousness as they drive in their car (a lot of driving) towards the Big Decision and they will be forever flashbacking to the various bits of the story that led up to this moment (which we have already been through once). And this finally started to get on my nerves, I have to admit. Stop blathering about The Past all the time! I was heard to howl. Just get on with it! Please! This once! In fact one character berates another for doing just that, but actually, they all do it. And do they ever get on with doing the thing we've been waiting for them to do for the last 100 pages? Nope, this lot, they are the wild procrastinators, they never get on with it, never reveal feelings, never admit stuff, never leave, never explain except in their own minds where they explain and mull and ruminate about that thing that happened and that wedding day or that car crash. It wears you down.
5) I hate these fucking places, Caleb says. Everyone’s so self-congratulatory. Acting like they’re Che Guevara because they’re wearing their mam’s earrings? He looks round at the crowd and scowls. I bet you a million euro that when they’re not here performing their category, ninety percent of these people work for some tech firm that runs on tax evasion and Chinese labour camps.
Modern novels that are set in contemporary times have this perpetual tendency to turn into bitter black-humored sociological commentary – it seems to be inescapable. Bret Easton Ellis and Edward St Aubyn do it all the time, and it’s all over such novels as The Slap, The Ask, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Animals, Dietland and a trillion that I haven’t read.
6) This book is full of things that don’t happen. And it makes you think that your own life is also full of things that didn’t happen. Some of which we should be very glad about.
7) Two favourite quotes :
She’d opened the door and found him there and got a shock – though really it was more the shape of a shock, without the feeling, like the postman bringing you a letter with nothing inside it.
The girls are scrolling through a dating app and saying stuff like OMG that is literally the most terrifying man I’ve ever seen. "Have my own business with van” – great, perfect for disposing of your body
Then :
That’s a nice dog though. I would actually date that dog. Me too, they should have an app for available dogs.
8) If it wasn’t for all the flashbacking which makes your neck ache, being yanked this way and that way, and the one hundred pages too many, this is a 4.5 star novel.
Well, this was kind of fun and also very silly. So silly that it would be silly tThis novel should have been called
RATATTACK!
Or maybe
RATPOCALYPSE NOW!
Well, this was kind of fun and also very silly. So silly that it would be silly to describe how silly it is. Giant mutated flesh eating black rats attack London! Which has to be evacuated! The effect on the tourist trade would have been considerable! I was expecting a scene in which the Queen armed only with a poker and a bent tiara confronts a giant rat in Buckingham Palace, but that didn’t happen.
What is the difference between pulp fiction and literary fiction? Pulp fiction cuts to the chase, and literary fiction never does that. In fact there might not be a chase at all. But literary authors could learn a trick or two from James Herbert. If there were giant black flesh eating rats in Buddenbrooks I might have finished that sucker. On the other hand if Thomas Mann had written The Rats, the rats wouldn’t really have been rats, they would have been symbols of something enormously profound. In James Herbert the rats are rats. I appreciated that.
The painful woe-is-me poor little rich boy journal of an autistic Harold Lloyd lookalike babe magnet. Spoiler alert : it doesn't end well.
Typical senThe painful woe-is-me poor little rich boy journal of an autistic Harold Lloyd lookalike babe magnet. Spoiler alert : it doesn't end well.
Typical sentence :
Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know, and I am at once seized by a shivering violent enough to make me dizzy.
Typical melancholy sentiment :
I seem to be deficient in the faculty to love others. I should add that I have very strong doubts as to whether even human beings really possess this faculty.
So, you know, no barrel of laughs.
Note : if you love books of self-loathing like this one, check out
Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky The Room by Hubert Selby Jr The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek Hunger by Knut Hamsun A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
SOUNDTRACK
Sister Ray by The Velvet Underground Machine Gun by the Peter Brotzmann Quartet When Big Joan Sets Up by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band Womblife by John Fahey Suicide is Painless by Lady and Bird Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking for her Hand in the Snow) by Yoko Ono Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong
This is a strange feverish novel all about Dostoyevsky. Susan Sontag describes the author’s unique style in the introduction perfectly :
Each paragraphThis is a strange feverish novel all about Dostoyevsky. Susan Sontag describes the author’s unique style in the introduction perfectly :
Each paragraph indent begins a long, long sentence, whose connectives are “and” (many of these) and “but” (several) and “although” and “and so” and “whereas” and “just as” and “because” and “as if” along with many dashes, and there is a full stop only when the paragraph ends…. A sentence that starts with Fedya and Anna in Dresden might flash back to Dostoyevsky’s convict years or to an earlier bout of gambling mania…then thread onto this a memory from the narrator’s medical student days and a rumination on some lines by Pushkin
The narrator is unnamed but it's Leonid Tsypkin himself who is interweaving his own pilgrimage to Petersburg to visit Dosto sites with mostly agonising scenes from his hero’s anguished life. So you get 1) Leonard’s travels; 2) Dosto and Anna’s travels and misadventures; 3) flashbacks to Dosto’s early life; and 4) comments on Russian literature all weaving in and out of each other, all written in a breathless helterskelter rush where – dashes – have replaced the humble full stop as if the author had been told he only had three hours to live. So as the prose rushes forward the poor reader has to slow down all the time to try to figure out what is going on. This produced in me a form of travel sickness.
As well as all that, the re-imagining of scenes from Dosto’s life are kind of spurious if like me you happen to have read a couple of years ago Joseph Frank’s magnificent Dosto biography. As Bob Dylan said
And me I wait so patiently, waiting to find out what price You have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice
If they’d asked me for a one word blurb for this back in 1929 I would have said :
"Putdownable!"
If they had asked me today I would have offered :
"UnpicIf they’d asked me for a one word blurb for this back in 1929 I would have said :
"Putdownable!"
If they had asked me today I would have offered :
"Unpickupable!"
It’s a shame – I loved J B Priestly’s next novel Angel Pavement, written only a year after this one. But there’s a relentless sunniness and a ghastly fixed-grin quality about The Good Companions that you often see on the faces of ventriloquist’s dummies. Curmudgeon that I am, this began to wear me down.
JB Priestley took a very leisurely time (260 pages) to introduce me to three characters and get them by various improbable means to all meet up in a cheap & cheerful gaff in a town no one’s heard of. There’s a concert party troupe there (comedians, singers, soft shoe shufflers), all staring glumly into their pallid teacups. They’ve just been stranded out in the cold but still they wouldn't trade it for a sack of gold – yes, left high and dry by their rascally manager who scarpered with the money. But wait! Help is at hand in the form of Miss Brant! Because…
Well it’s all too tiresome. And you've kind of heard it all before. Stretching out before me was the prospect of 400 more pages of show people who smile when they are low, accompanied by a crowd of goodly hearted English jolly working people who perpetrate English stereotypes at the drop of a bowler. So I thought let’s not go on with the show. Not this one anyway.
I finished this magnificent, more-than-half crazy 1120 pages long novel! It was one of my most amazing reading experiences. Do I recommend it? Hmmmm… I finished this magnificent, more-than-half crazy 1120 pages long novel! It was one of my most amazing reading experiences. Do I recommend it? Hmmmm… no! Unless you want to be enraptured, aggravated, exhausted, thrilled, toyed with, baffled and thunderstruck, that is.
What’s it like? Just an ordinary year in the life of 35 or so inhabitants of a sleepy rural town in which a cultural war is being waged between a guy who can raise the dead & who wishes to start a new religion (the only true religion) and three other guys who establish Communist rule over the town, and another guy in the third corner who is the big bad capitalist who is confident he will outlast these idiots.
WHY GLASTONBURY?
One character says
There are only about half a dozen reservoirs of world-magic on the whole surface of the glove – Jerusalem…Rome…Mecca…Lhassa – and of these Glastonbury has the largest residue of unused power.
Glastonbury is a small town in Somerset which is now famous for the festival but before the current headliners were born, before their grandparents were born, it was famous for something else. Two something elses, both mythical. First was King Arthur, he’s buried there. Second was that Joseph of Arimathea came over from Palestine and founded the first Christian Church anywhere right there, and brought along the Holy Grail, and also shoved his walking stick in the ground which then sprouted into the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury which survived until 2010 when some vandals chopped it down, and he died there and his tomb may be seen to this day.
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DID YOU CALL IN SICK TODAY?
The tone of this vast book is unique. Most of the time we are affectionately and comedically following the sometimes scandalous lives of these Glastonbury folks but out of the blue will come weird theological statements or mini-lectures about the First Cause, which is JCP’s name for God. But here the First Cause a) has a dual nature, being both Good and Evil, b) is intimately concerned with the least most measly decision made by human beings (did you decide to call in sick today? The First Cause will note this with interest) and c) is also intimate with every living thing and I mean every one, tiny little beetles, plankton, everything. Everything is thrillingly, soulfully, electrically alive and the First Cause is right there, mostly, it seems, expressing irritation.
At one point there is a conversation between two tiny beetles.
At another point one character has a profound cataclysmic vision of the Grail, then has to visit an old man to administer an enema as he has been suffering from dreadful constipation. And we get a description of that procedure. This is not a normal book!
THE THEOLOGY
JCP is not very helpful about all this. He does not explain his vision of how the universe (it seems to be a multiverse) works. There are hints and partial revelations and crackbrained paragraphs that leave you scratching your head. Quite early on, the Sun (the one in the sky) is introduced as a sentient being who has great influence on human consciousness. At one point the Sun gets involved with the Vicar of Glastonbury’s musings about Jesus and takes a dim view:
“Let his Christ protect him!” thought (if we can call the titanic motions of super-consciousness in such a Power by the name of “thought”) this great outpourer of life heat.
On p 322 the Sun pokes his nose in again:
As he spoke Mr Dekkar took off his hat and wiped his forehead. This gave his superhuman enemy, the sun, his supreme opportunity, and he poured down his burning noon rays upon that bare grey head with redoubled concentration.
What about prayer? Glad you asked.
The magnetism of their prayer shot like a meteorite out of the earth’s planetary atmosphere… and drove it forward beyond the whole astronomical world, and beyond the darkness enclosing that world, till it reached the Primal Cause of all life.
We then get a dense paragraph about what the First Cause does with received prayers. It’s a fair question. We read:
Even though the cry of a particular creature may reach the First Cause, there is always a danger of its being intercepted by the evil will of this Janus-faced Force.
So be careful what you pray for. One character is a sadist and at one point is enjoying some scenes of cruelty in an old book. How is it that this character responds in this way?
Such abominable wickedness came straight out of the evil of the First Cause, travelled through the interlunar spaces, and entered the particular nerve in the erotic organism of Mr Evans which was predestined to respond to it.
Some of this stuff does seem unhinged, or maybe just incomprehensible. One guy is so happy he thinks he is TOO happy when he visits his girlfriend, and JCP comments :
The great suction-process of cosmogonic matter – always waiting to drain up in its huge, blind, clay belly, these rapturous overtones of its foster children – was soon at work, sucking up the spilt drops of his happiness.
Sometimes the author (not one of the characters) can’t contain himself any longer and has to lay out some truths, such as :
There is no ultimate mystery! Such a phrase is meaningless, because the reality of being is forever changing under the primal and arbitrary will of the First cause.
The lecture continues :
The composers of fiction aim at an aesthetic verisimilitude which seldom corresponds to the much more eccentric and chaotic dispositions of Nature. Only rarely are such writers so torn and rent by the Demon within them that they can add their own touch to the wave-crests of real actuality as these foam up, bringing wreckage and sea-tangle and living and dead ocean monsters and bloody spume and bottom silt into the rainbow spray!
NOT ENTIRELY UNIQUE
Yes, we can see other artists drank this koolaid too – Dylan Thomas, Stanley Spencer, William Blake, Robin Williamson, all loved to invent their own pantheistic pantheons. And lately Alan Moore in Jerusalem, which I would like to try to read (but not yet!) – that one sounds kind of similarish.
WHAT THE COMMUNIST SAYS
Under a just and scientific arrangement of society which they have achieved in Russia, our human values begin to change. People feel ashamed of having money. It becomes a disgrace, like the reputation of a thief, to have more than the essentials.
WHAT THE ATHEIST THOUGHT
If only he knew that there were a God who for one second had an ear open, what things he would pour into that gaping, hairy stupid orifice.
A SORRY STORY
JCP “hoped for the Nobel Prize & being knighted by my sovereign & receiving the acclamation of Europe & seeing the book translated into all languages”
JCP's biographer writes :
Six months after it was published (March 1932) it was obvious that the book was a financial failure. It sold only 4000 copies; while he and Phyllis were hoping to make $3000 on it they received only $750 and out of that they had to pay $500 for its typing
And then, on 22 Feb 1934, JCP was sued for libel. A Captain Hodgkinson who was a bigshot businessman in Glastonbury decided that the character Philip Crow was a libellous version of himself. After some back & forth JCP accepted an out of court settlement & had to pay £1100. So he lost a lot of money on his life’s masterpiece. Maybe he just hadn’t kept his hat on that February morning.
THIS MAY BE THE MOST FLAWED FIVE STAR NOVEL EVER
It could lose 200 pages easily & be a mere 900 page monster. There are many accounts of the 35 interwoven lives and the teaparties and the flower arranging and the swooning of this young lady over that young man and vice versa. And the book’s title looks more like a subtitle and I guess might put readers off – to call this mighty work a Romance doesn’t do it any favours.
But wow – all of that is froth – this is something else....more
Two points about this odd, sour, sometimes zippy but more often quite tedious novel that Wells thought was his greatest work.
I really love that well-kTwo points about this odd, sour, sometimes zippy but more often quite tedious novel that Wells thought was his greatest work.
I really love that well-known guide 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die Horribly, it’s true book porn, all those mug shots of authors who I hardly thought had faces at all (ee cummings, Thomas Mann), some of which seem to be chosen to be the least flattering as possible (Peter Esterhazy, Mario Puzo). But sometimes this book seems to be playing games with us. Do they really really deep down in their hearts think everyone should read Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit by John Lyly (1578) or Aithiopika by Heliodorus (250 AD)? And sometimes the short essay about the book in question seems, well, quite off-putting. As is the case with Tono-Bungay. They say
The work is loosely structured, replete with often suspect or woolly generalisations about the state of England and contains various anti-Semitic and racist features.
And ends up with
Wells seems to be almost in love with the cynical greed that he depicts
As recommendations go, I have read more enthusiastic.
Second, this novel has comedy sections and serious sections, there’s no mistaking one for the other, the gear changes are screechingly loud, and the story of George’s first marriage is very serious, almost the best part. He is a very inexperienced young man and falls in love with a woman named Marion. She doesn’t seem so keen on him but he turns up the pressure until they get married. Only then does he find out she has a horror of physical contact. But there’s more :
I do still recall as the worst and most disastrous aspect of all that time, her absolute disregard of her own beauty. It’s the pettiest thing to record, I know, but she could wear curl-papers in my presence. It was her idea, too, to “wear out” her old clothes and her failures at home when “no one was likely to see her” – “no one” being myself. She allowed me to accumulate a store of ungracious and slovenly memories.
Poor George. Then I remembered a Burt Bacharach song from 1963 called "Wives and Lovers". It covers the same territory. Here’s how it goes:
Hey, little girl, comb your hair, fix your makeup Soon he will open the door Don't think because there's a ring on your finger You needn't try anymore For wives should always be lovers too Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you I'm warning you
Day after day there are girls at the office And men will always be men Don't send him off with your hair still in curlers You may not see him again
Could be Hal David, the lyricist, had been reading Tono-Bungay or maybe just reflecting on his own life. When the great Burt died in February I didn’t notice this one was listed amongst his greatest works. Can’t think why.
[image]
Look how serious Jack is about warning you girls!...more
He continually jumpcuts from one scene to another and then doesn’t identify who he’s talking about for a few sentences so it’s like a series of unneceHe continually jumpcuts from one scene to another and then doesn’t identify who he’s talking about for a few sentences so it’s like a series of unnecessary and annoying puzzles figuring out who this is, who is that; so that was tiring. And although I think that the glazed, not-quite-making-sense feel to the numbed characters in their stunned cloud of post 9/11 horror was probably appropriate (and all due respect to DD for having the nerve to write a 9/11 novel in the first place), the cumulative effect was tentative, almost too respectful of the aftermath of the ghastliness, too elliptical, too considered, too polite. A room temperature novel about 9/11 seems wrong.
This tiny funny bitter black book is a parody of some stuff none of us are likely to have read but that doesn’t matter at all. At one point in IrelandThis tiny funny bitter black book is a parody of some stuff none of us are likely to have read but that doesn’t matter at all. At one point in Ireland there was an idea that the purest most Irish of all Irish people were the ones who still spoke Gaelic and didn’t speak any English at all; and since all Irish people were tragically poor and ate only potatoes these Gaelic people were naturally even poorer than other Irish people and ate even more potatoes. There was a craze for Dublin people to visit and condescend to these hapless Gaels who of course lived in the most remote western part where it rained torrentially every single day instead of every other day as in the rest of Ireland. So this is a tale of extreme poverty and extreme Irishness.
Here’s a flavour of the kind of acidulous humour in this cruel little tale. Our narrator’s first day of school does not go well. The teacher bawls at him in English “What is your name?”. A kid kindly translates this for him.
I looked politely at the master and replied to him: - Bonaparte, son of Michaelangelo, son of Peter, son of Owen, son of Thomas’s Sarah, grand-daughter of John’s Mary, grand-daughter of James, son of Dermot… Before I had uttered or half-uttered my name, a rabid bark issued from the master and he beckoned me with his finger. By the time I had reached him, he had an oar in his grasp. Anger had come over him in a flood-tide at this stage and he had a business-like grip of the oar in his two hands. He drew it over his shoulder and brought it down hard upon me with a swish of air, dealing me a destructive blow on the skull. I fainted from that blow but before I became totally unconscious I heard him scream: - Yer name, said he, is Jams O’Donnell! …He continued in this manner until every creature in the school had been struck down by him and all had been named Jams O’Donnell. No young skull in the countryside remained unsplit that day. Of course, there were many unable to walk by the afternoon and were transported home by relatives.
4 stars – this was my kind of thing. But may I add that if you’re going to read one book by Flann O’Brien it should be At Swim-Two-Birds, that one is genius.
This classic was sooo baaad. You know in these fancy introductions when these big shot professors are frothing about how brilliant this thing is that This classic was sooo baaad. You know in these fancy introductions when these big shot professors are frothing about how brilliant this thing is that you are now about to read, well, in the introduction to this book the guy tells you right there he’s sorry but this is a baaaad book
The dream origin of The Castle of Otranto has been mentioned more often as an explanation for its shortcomings than as a cause for enthusiasm. From the start, its wildness invited derision…wooden characterisation….the amateurish self-indulgence of its supernatural effect…
Guy says that the only reason to read this is not because it’s any good but because it was the first – the first Gothic novel. Well, there’s another reason – it’s short. That is a very good thing. Any longer and you would be launching yourself over a vast precipice with a wild unearthly howl.
This story is about Manfred, lord of this Italian castle, whose feeble son is getting married that day, but then a servant rushes in to say there’s been a nasty accident. Manfred goes to check it out :
He beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet.
This helmet is really big. How it fell on top of this guy’s son is something I was keen to discover – where do gigantic helmets come from? This is not something that happens every day. But (spoiler alert) we never get to find out. Anyway they drag the dead son away. A little later there’s an uppity peasant who irritates Manfred and so he puts the giant helmet to another use. The peasant is
kept prisoner under the helmet itself, which he ordered his attendants to raise, and place the young man under it, declaring he should be kept without food
That’s the way this Manfred rolls. If you annoy me I will trap you underneath a giant helmet which has only just appeared.
Next thing that happens is that Manfred has a brainwave – the woman his son was going to marry is a hot babe, so he thinks – hey, I just realised that an inexplicable giant helmet appearing from nowhere and crushing my son to death is a sign that I should divorce my wife and marry this hot young babe who was going to marry my son! Now I think about it, it’s obvious! When presented with this change of plan, Isabella, the bride to be, is not impressed.
Words cannot paint the horror of the princess’s situation.
But he then proceeds to use a bucketful of them anyway. When Manfred’s wife is informed of his plan to divorce her, she likewise is unimpressed, but her maidservant offers some salty advice
Oh madam, said Bianca, all men use their wives so, when they are weary of them.
And later
A bad husband is better than no husband at all.
So you can’t write her down in the list of great feminists. Now I thought the mad twists of giant body parts and improbable escapes and duelling and stabbing the wrong person was going to make this a fun read – after all Manfred comes out with likes like
Have done with this rhapsody of impertinence
And
Thou shalt experience the wrath with which thou darest to trifle
Which is excellent, something I will be using myself when I next get a snooty waiter. Actually everyone has a very laborious way with words – sample dialogue:
"Impede me not, or thou will repent having provoked my resentment."
"Thy purpose is as odious as thy resentment is contemptible."
But the last half of the book is just a horrible tedious series of interminable arguments between the four or five gentlemen and ladies involved, all of them revealing they were the real Lord of Otranto because of their father had a giant foot or they were kidnapped by savage corsairs or they gave birth to a giant foot in a convent which can now be revealed as the real Lord of Otranto. Blah blah blah. I think whatever Horace Walpole had taken when he started writing this thing, it had clearly worn off by half way, and he should have bought some more....more
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