"Impress of the Seventh Surge" by Jessica Mae Stover

My sort of novel. It would be wrong to give a plot summary because a large part of the fun of the novel is working out what is going on; I got it about three-quarters of the way through and the triumph of enlightenment was more than worth the earlier puzzlement. 

I also thoroughly enjoyed the stream of consciousness style. Here's an early example:  "think of a place where you feel a sense of calm waving grass bumblebee pale breakfast sun violet bubble tent motionless focused calm calm pepper fountains focused calm breathed focused spitting fountains of pepper spray hazing horizontal smoke choking clinging red-capped waves maskless faces spreading white teeth white hands over steel barricades cheap hoodies patched body armor under pastel fresco canopy window glass under boots crunching hunting through marble halls lawn gallows hanging easy as fairground dunk tanks white dome through orange noose swaying live stream crowd crush air horn". What a wonderful paragraph! The 'sense of calm' is so swiftly replaced by threat and horror.

This makes it sound like hard work. But it is very short (it took me about an hour and a half to read the whole thing) and it gets a lot easier quite quickly. And you can feel the quality in the writing. This isn't just science fiction, this is fine literary fiction. 

Selected quotes:

• "Hey, Shan! Your inhaler came, but I’m going to keep it.⁠— —⁠What, why?⁠— —⁠Because you take my breath away.⁠—"
• "This is the way the world ends, delivery on demand."
• "Sound of chimes, descending. Abandons device on kitchen table. Black blank glass islanded by scrubbed wood. Gloves up, cuts up boxes, cardboard gaping, driveway dust puffing underfoot. Mows yard. Sun dipping. Anger sweating. Mallets one stake in ground, then another. Every hit echoing off hammered hills. Two poles, cables slant."
• "The sotto back-and-forth of birdie meeting strings, soft pings, counting score, pushing doom to margins, disappearing it into grass and blowing it away until it’s eaten by sunset."
• "You can try not to forget all the injustices, the ones we’re going to be powerless to stop, I’m sure a lot of people will try to remember, but memory’s written on the wind: it fades."
• "Lungs fused to ribs like a steak well done."

A great read: high-quality literary fiction.

November 2022

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Postmodern fairy tales" by Cristina Bacchilega

This fascinating book examines modern versions of Snow White, Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast, and Bluebeard and offers a postmodern critique. At best this opened up entire new vistas for turning old tales into fresh delights. In many ways this was an inspiring book. He points out, for example, that the use of a third person narrator in a fairy tale and the absolutist "Once upon a time" etc suggest that there is only one version of truth: "'There was', 'there are', 'she was' - such statements present the narrative's vision as the only possible one. Like the mirror, the narrator knows all" (p 34)

My favourite chapter was the one about Snow White in which the author focuses on the mirror, mirror on the wall, asking:
Who made it and why?

• "Whose desires does it represent and contain?" (p 28)
• Whose voice is the mirror's? Queen, SW, Father, Narrator: "the mirror's judgement as unquestionably authoritative" (p 33)
• "Mirrors should reflect more deeply." (p 47)

But he also asks about the Happy Ever After bit. What, for example, did Snow White think when she comes out of her coma to discover that she is naked with a strange man. In one tale the prince's response is to stick the needle back into her arm to make her unconscious again and give him the chance to think what he does next. And why does the Prince appear to adore a dead body? Creepy!

And SW is a liminal story: "Snow White has three parts, a structure which perhaps re-produces on a narrative level Snow White's three-fold nature and three-part initiation process (separation, liminality, and aggregation)." (p 43): in short: she is taken into the forest and left for dead, she lives with seven dwarfs, she eats the poisoned apple and has to go through death to be reborn.

This continues in the other tales. For example, one postmodern version of Red Riding Hood has a sad werewolf. Well why not? And Angela Carter has Beauty willingly undergoing transformation into a Beast. Well why not?

Great lines:

• "In folk and fairy tales the hero is neither frightened nor surprised when encountering the otherworld" (p 8) I've just been reading Kieran Egon's The Educated Mind and he suggests that this is developmental; he states that for a kid aged 5 "magic is entirely unobjectionable" but when he reaches 10 he wants to know the details. So perhaps this feature of folk and fairy tales identified here is due to them being aimed at a young audience. 
• "Magic is invoked through the tale's matter-of-fact, artfully simple narrative that relies on dialogue and single strokes of color to produce a feeling of familiarity and wonder at the same time." (p 28)
• "The ambivalence of the word 'to fuck' in its twinned meanings of sexual intercourse and despoliation: 'a fuck up'" (p 52)
• "Cupid ... as boy with no manners or respect, as erotic god of love, as invisible presence in the dark, and as faithful husband in the end" (p 74)

A thought-provoking perspective on a well-thumbed genre. August 2017; 146 pages

"The Road to Xanadu" by John Livingston Lowes

Despite the title, the bulk of this book is about the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Lowes seeks to explain where each element of the story came from before it percolated in what he calls the "deep well" of Coleridge's imagination to emerge as classic poetry. This book is a brilliant feat of scholarship: he leaves no stone unturned and every image (so it seems) is traced to its source (and often multiple sources). It is an extraordinarily impressive work, although obsessive, exhaustive but sometimes a little exhausting.

I was interested initially because of my work on liminality but well before the end I was determined to read more of Coleridge, his biography, his criticism, and of course his great poems. This man was so much better than Wordsworth!

Mariner is all book work: he had never been to sea before he write the work. He seems to have been a voracious reader with a prodigious memory: he talks about ocular images which suggest that he had a photographic memory. He was also extreme when he talked: he seems to have subjected his listeners to a stream of consciousness that ranged from subject to subject demonstrating an incredible breadth of knowledge and understanding: he was interested in everything. He would have been an amazing person to have met (but perhaps a bit of a bore and certainly a monopoliser of conversations).

For example, the Ancient Mariner experiences:

The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.

About, about, in reel and rout

The death-fires danced at night;

The water, like a witch's oils,

Burnt green and blue, and white

and Lowes finds the sliminess is a description of Captain Cook, which Coleridge read; the oiliness from voyages of Father Bourzes; the burning from Purchas; the witches from Macbeth (and they go "about, about"); the death-fires from Priestley's Opticks when he describes light from putrescence and Will o' the Wisps in burial grounds; and the crawling things from Frederick Martens accounts of a voyage to Greenland and Spitzbergen!

In another example the poem talks of "snowy clifts" and Lowes tracks down travelogues which talk of cliffs or clefts or even clifts until he finds a Captain Wood who writes of 'snowy clifts'.

Lowe also speculates about the famous Albatross. This, he suggests, is not the huge white bird most people know but the rather smaller black 'albitross' which is mentioned in another travelogue and is of a size where it might be possible to be hung around someone's neck.

Far from being a fantasy, the Ancient Mariner has science woven deep into its fabric. The very journey could be traced on a map; he sails down into the South Atlantic, rounds the Horn, is becalmed in the Doldrums near the Equator, crosses the line twice and circumnavigates the globe.

The Ancient Mariner himself, Lowe shows to be partly based on The Wandering Jew ("the deathless stranger passes still, like night, from land to land") , an old myth and a key part in The Monk which was a best seller as Coleridge was writing the Mariner (pp 225 - 228). But Coleridge also knew the Sicilian's Tale, in which a Franciscan monk holds the guests at a wedding spell-bound (p 229) and mesmerism was in fashion (p 231) and he tried writing with Wordsworth a poem about the Death of Abel and of course Cain is a killer doomed to wander the earth (pp 233 - 235). Don't forget the Flying Dutchman (p 253). All of these influences merged together in Coleridge's mind. There is the scary bit in the poem where male and female demons, Death and Life-in=Death, play dice for the soul of the Mariner and Life-in-Death wins: "For the Mariner's fate at the fall of the dice is the fate of the Wandering Jew - the doom of the undying among the dead." (p 256) Finally, of course, the Mariner is Ulysses (p 262).

Coleridge read and read and read.

Lowes describes the imagination as an "incongruous, chaotic and variegated jumble" (p 4) which waits for "the informing spirit which broods over chaos ... the formlessness out of which eventually form was wrought." (pp 6 - 7); "Chaos precedes cosmos ... surging and potent chaos" (p 12). What Coleridge called the hooks-and-eyes of the memory "will lead us to the very alembic of the creative energy." (p 41). This then is a journey through "chartless tracts" (p 51) which "assumes the existence of what Coleridge called 'the twilight realms of consciousness' [in Biographia Literaria 2: 120]" (p 51); to find the origins we need to disengage "the strands of an extremely complex web" (p 51). "The web of creation, like the skein of life, is of a mingled yarn" (p 60): we separate the threads and lose the integrity of the whole (p 60) And Coleridge talked of the streamy nature of association , which thinking curbs and rudders [Anima Poetae, p46]. But "the difference between art, in whatever sphere, and the chaotic welter of the stream of consciousness lies not in their constituents, but in the presence or absence of imaginative control." (p 85)

Most true it is that I have look'd on truth

Askance and strangely.

Shakespeare Sonnet 110

"The imagination is an assimilating energy. It pierces through dissimilarity to some underlying oneness in which qualities the most remote cohere." (p 105)

"Not only on the fascinating fringes of early maps, but universally, the advancing territory of the known is rimmed and bounded by a dubious borderland in which the unfamiliar and the strange hold momentary sway." (p 105)

"The borderland between the unknown and the known keeps merging on its hither edge with the familiar, at the same that its outer edge is pushing on into the unexplored." (pp 105 - 106)

A dead dog at a distance is said to smell like musk [so scandal viewed from afar isn't too bad; Coleridge's Notebooks]

That which is firme doth flit and fall away,

And that is flitting doth abide and stay.

Spenser Ruines of Rome 3

There are two forces in life: the deliberate and the chance: Epictetus says that one should carefully and skillfully make use of what is thrown ... Outward things are not in my power. To Will is in my power.
Epictetus  The Encheiridion Book 2 Chapter 2

He mentions Setebos, a demon first described by Magellan. In further reading (Coleridge was always looking up his sources!) I have discovered that Setebos, who is also mentioned by Shakespeare in The Tempest and Robert Browning in Caliban Upon Setebos, was one of twelve demons who appeared when a Patagonian 'giant' died.

It seems that every image in the Ancient Mariner has been traced to its source material. Then he does the same with Xanadu, a much shorter poem and one avowedly based on a dream. We learn about the Old Man of the Mountains who allegedly gave his followers hashish and transported them while asleep into a pleasure garden and when they awoke convinced them they had been in Paradise so they would go and murder anyone he asked even at the expense of their own lives and that is why we get the word assassin from hashish. He explains why the damsel with a dulcimer came from Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, where the Nile (a sacred river) was supposed to be sourced near a kingdom called Amhara which might have melded into Mount Abora. And the man with floating hair is taken from a memoir of Speke about an Ethiopian Ras on the warpath.

And Lowe more or less debunks the idea that Coleridge wrote poetry under the influence of opium. The meticulous research that lies behind each of the images of the Mariner (perhaps not so much Xanadu) suggests a tightness of control that drug addicts can rarely achieve. The essence of creativity is the remixing of ideas. We all do it. The difference with a genius is the obsessive research, the intense control and, perhaps, the ability to select the word that encapsulates all the ideas in one extraordinarily vivid image.

This is a superb book. May 2016; 397 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Dedicated to..." by W. B. Gooderham

Mr Gooderham buys second hand books. Some of these have fly leaf inscriptions. Some of these he has recorded in this unusual little book. Thus Oscar Wilde's 'Ballad of Reading Gaol' was given to Mo in May 2005 and the donor, Claudia, has written: "Sometimes 'only when it is dark can you see the stars'." 'A Book of Surrealist Games' given to Ted is inscribed "My period is 3 days late." On Valentine's Day 1976, Ben explained that his gift of 'Papillon' "is not a text book of how to get out of the wedding." And Dad writes in the front of 'Bawdy Ballads' "Mum says it is disgusting: I say it may encourage you to learn the piano."

My favourite is the dedication in Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Words' (which quotes him on its cover as saying "I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it") which is "To Mummy".

A delightfully quirky little book. March 2014; 181 pages.

"50 Literature Ideas you really need to know" by John Sutherland

I think I expected this book to be more about creative writing than it was. It started well with Mimesis (which just means imitation ie writing that tries to mirror reality) but very quickly it got into the world of literary criticism. What is a classic? Does a text belong to the writer or the reader and where does the meaning reside? Deconstruction means that every text is inherently indeterminate of meaning. Where does plagiarim begin and hommage end; where does this leave fanfic and the e-book? These topics might be fascinating to an academic but most of them came nowhere near my conception of the 50 Literature ideas I wanted let alone needed to know.

Disappointing.

December 2011; 203 pages