"Sex and Rockets" by John Carter

 This is a biography of rocketry pioneer Jack Parsons which explains the 'rockets' part of the title. He was also a leading member of a group of ceremonial magicians following the Thelema school of magic of Aleister Crowley; the 'sex' part of the title presumably refers to the fact that sex magic was used during their rites.

The introduction, by Robert Anton Wilson, focuses on another key alleged interest of Jack Parsons, suggesting that he was a leading communist. This is unmentioned in the body of the biography.

At times, the book's scholarship lapses. For example, there is the claim that the original owner of the house Parsons leased, in which the rites of Thelema were practised, was Arthur Fleming, “a noted philanthropist and Nobel Prize winner who had made a good deal of money in the Canadian logging industry.” (Ch 5) A very small amount of research shows that he didn't win a Nobel Prize, although a Pasadena newspaper said he was awarded a noble [sic] prize for Civic Duty. There is also a flavour of credulity, for example where it mentions “An unconfirmed statement attributed to conspiriologist John Judge claimed that Parsons may have flown with the pilot Kenneth Arnold, who in 1947 saw several silver discs over Mount Rainier in Washington state and coined the term ‘flying saucer’ to describe them.” (Ch 10) The multiple qualifications - 'unconfirmed', 'attributed to' and 'may have' - mean that this statement is so far from 'evidence' that it really shouldn't have been included in a respectable work.

A far better biography of this fascinating man is Strange Angel by George Pendel.

Selected quotes:

• “The priest ... was a lean, dynamic little man with bright, light blue eyes, driven by a virulent hatred of God. ... he was the son of a British clergyman who must have been the real target of that savage animosity.” (58)
• “The rapport between Jack and Betty, the strong affection, if not love, they had for each other, despite their frequent separate sextracurricular [sic] activities, seem pretty permanent and shatterproof.” (94)
• “He must learn that the sparkle of champagne is based on sound wine; pumping carbonic acid into urine is not the same thing.” (95, quoting Crowley)

June 2026; 203 pages

Published by Feral House in 2004

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Do What Thou Wilt is a fascinating biography of Aleister Crowley, for those with an interest in him. 

Novels and books about Magic and Magicians reviewed in this blog.

"Strange Angel" by George Pendle

 This is a biography of American rocket pioneer Jack Parsons, whose actual first name was Marvel.

Inspired by science fiction, Parsons dreamed of constructing a rocket that would travel to the moon. But this was in the 1930s, after his wealthy grandparents had lost their fortune in the Wall Street crash and his privileged upbringing on Orange Grove Avenue ('millionaire's row') in Pasadena had come to an end. And, at the time, when aeroplanes were still in their glamorous infancy, rocketry did not exist outside a handful of amateur eccentrics. 

Not being able to afford a university education, Parsons began working in explosives for mining companies. Then he teamed up with schoolfriend Ed Forman, who was an engineer equally lacking in tertiary qualifications, and maths graduate Frank Molina, to persuade CalTech professor Theodore von Karman (an aerodynamicist who had explained the collpase of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge) to let them use CalTech facilities to test rocket motors, although they still had to fund the experiments themselves. They began working with the military who wanted to add jets to help bombers achieve take-off speeds on shorter runways. But they had problems with the powder fuel: there were always cracks between the clumps of powder grain so burning was uneven. After watching workmen laying molten asphalt on a road, Parsons made his breakthrough and turned the powder into tar which could be poured into the rocket engines. The 'Suicide Squad' founded NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the company Aerojet which still sends rockets into outer space.

Parsons was increasingly interested in magic and became the leader of the Agape Lodge in LA, a group following the Thelema teachings of occultist Aleister Crowley (whose biography Do What Thou Wilt by Lawrence Smith I read recently). Parsons moved the group to a large house on Orange Grove Avenue which he had bought and began performing sex magick ceremonies. According to this book, L Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, moved in and stole Parsons's girlfirend (but Parsons, psychologically dominated by Hubbard, put up with it). In the end it all went wrong and Parsons, having lost most of his money in a failed business venture with Hubbard, went back to making explosives. He blew himself up.

This was a brilliantly written book. I loved the way it clothed its story, by telling us the background: LA in the 1920s, a mix of “evangelists like Aimee Semple McPherson ... performing exorcisms over the new medium of radio ... while the social campaigner and writer Upton Sinclair was arrested for reading the First Amendment of the United States Constitution (the right to freedom of expression) in public." (Prologue). The core rocketeers, a group of young men, working like dogs and risking their lives for their passion, seem just like the young geeks who founded Google and facebook and Microsoft and the other IT start-ups of the internet revolution, or like rock musicians hoping to be big. And the 'also starring' cast has a host of other names such as Suicide Squad members Apollo Smith whose father had given his sisters the names Diana and Athena, his brothers the names Hermes and Orpheus, and the dog was called Cerberus and Tsien who “was descended from the tenth-century emperor Qian Liu Tsien", science fiction writers like Robert Heinlein, E E 'Doc' Smith, L Sprague de Camp and L Ron Hubbard, Jack Cornog who first isolated tritium, and  rocket pioneer Robert Goddard who lived in Roswell, New Mexico, 

Selected quotes:

• “John Whiteside Parsons had gone from being a young genius dead before his time to the most overworked, hackneyed, science fiction cliche of them all." (Prologue)
• “The world is drowning - that is exactly why it will clutch at a straw.” (Ch 6, quoting Crowley)
• “Magic, like science, was an attempt to control events by performing technical acts.” (Ch 6)
• “Bob Cornog remembered stumbling into Parsons’ room one morning to find Hubbard and Betty entwined, ‘like a starfish on a clam’.” (Ch 11)
• “The Parsonage, as it had come to be called, had briefly been an adult playground saturated with philosophical hopes and pungent romanticism, fruit brandies and fencing, bohemians and scientists, poetry and rockets.” (Ch 11)

A fascinating story told by a born storyteller.

Novels and books about Magic and Magicians reviewed in this blog.

June 2026; 307 pages
First published in the USA by Harcourt in 2005
My paperback edition was issued in the UK by Weidenfield and Nicholson in 2006

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Magician" by W Somerset Maugham

An early novel by a master story-teller, inspired by WSM's encounters with Aleister Crowley, the occultist whose biography I reviewed, in  Paris in the early 1900s. It's an entertaining story, though very Victorian Gothic horror in style, occasionally straying into Grand Guignol. WSM himself, in a prologue to my copy, states: “The style is lush and turgid, not at all the sort of style I approve of now, but perhaps not unsuited to the subject; and there are a great many more adverbs and adjectives than I should use today. I fancy I must have been impressed by the ‘Écriture artiste’ [a highly mannered and impressionistic style favoured by, among others, Edmond de Goncourt] which the French writers of the time had not yet entirely abandoned.”

Arthur Burdon, a young British surgeon, is engaged to his ward, Margaret, who is presently living in Paris, sharing a flat with her friend Susie, to study art. At a restaurant, they encounter Oliver Haddo, a self-styled magician whom animals instinctively fear. Arthur is sceptical of Haddo's claims and, when Haddo kicks a dog who bites him, thrashes Haddo. Humiliated, Haddo vows revenge ... and what could be sweeter than to seduce Margaret. 

Selected quotes:

• “The formal garden reminded one of a light woman, no longer young, who sought, with faded finery, with powder and paint, to make a brave show of despair.” (Ch 1)
• “The eyes of most persons converge when they look at you, but Oliver Haddo’s, naturally or by a habit he had acquired for effect, remained parallel. It gave you the impression that he looked straight through you and saw the wall beyond.” (Ch 3) This is more or less repeated in chapter 6. WSM, in his prologue, remarks that it was a characteristic of Aleister Crowley, whom he knew.
• Elemental forces, such as the wind, have an existence which depends upon “the continuance or some natural object, and hence for them there could be no immortality. They must return eventually to the abyss of unending night, and the darkness of death affected them always.” (Ch 3)
• “Magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love, and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the scene is the measure of the unseen.” (Ch 3)
• “Magic ... may be described merely as intelligent utilization of forces which are unknown, contemned, or misunderstood of the vulgar.” (Ch 3)
• “If the adept is active, pliant, and strong, the whole world will be at his command. He will pass through the storm and no rain shall fall upon his head. The wind will not displace a single fold of his garment. He will go through fire and not be burned.” (Ch 3)
• “No well-bred sorcerer is so dead to the finer feelings as to enter a room by the door.” (Ch 4)
• “If he sought for gold it was for the power it gave him, and it was power he aimed at when he brooded night and day over dim secrets.” (Ch 7)
• “Only he who desires with his whole heart will find, and to him only who knocks vehemently shall the door be opened.” (Ch 7)
• “Naked and full of majesty he lay, the outcast son of the morning.” (Ch 8)
• “The hours passed with lagging feet.” (Ch 15)

Notes:
Mackenzie Crook, the writer of the BBC TV sitcom Small Prophets must have been inspired by The Magician (or both WSM and Crook were inspired by the same original source) since this description is growing homunculi is very close to the instructions given by Michael Palin in the sitcom: “There were ten homunculi - James Kammerer calls them prophesying spirits - kept in strong bottles, such as are used to preserve fruit, and these were filled with water. ... The bottles were closed with a magic seal. The spirits were about a span long, and the Count was anxious that they should grow. They were therefore buried under two cart loads of manure, and the pile daily sprinkled with a certain liquor prepared with great trouble by the adepts. The pile after such sprinklings began to ferment and steam, as if heated by a subterranean fire. When the bottles were removed, it was found that the spirits had grown to about a span and a half each; the male homunculi were come into possession of heavy beards, and the nails of the fingers had grown. In two of the bottles there was nothing to be seen save clear water, but when the Abbé knocked thrice at the seal upon the mouth ... the water turned a mysterious colour, and the spirits showed their faces.” (Ch 7)

This is an enjoyable and entertaining read but it is not in the first league of WSM books.

Novels and books about Magic and Magicians reviewed in this blog.

March 2026; 233 pages

First published by Heinemann in 1908

My Vintage paperback edition issued in 2000

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Novels and short-story collections (designated SS) by William Somerset Maugham

• Liza of Lambeth (1897)
• The Making of a Saint (1898)
• Orientations (SS, 1899)
• The Hero (1901)
• Mrs Craddock (1902)
• The Merry-Go-Round (1904)
• The Bishop's Apron (1906)
• The Explorer (1908)
• The Magician (1908)
• Of Human Bondage (1915)
• The Moon and Sixpence (1919)
• The Trembling of a Leaf (SS, 1921)
• The Painted Veil (1925)
• The Casuarina Tree (SS, 1926)
• Ashenden (SS, 1928)
• Cakes and Ale (1930)
• Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (SS, 1931)
• The Book Bag (SS, 1932)
• The Narrow Corner (1932)
• Ah King (SS, 1933)
• The Judgement Seat (SS, 1934)
• Cosmopolitans (SS, 1936)
• Theatre (1937)
• Christmas Holiday (1939)
• Princess September and the Nightingale (SS, 1939)
• The Mixture as Before (SS, 1940)
• Up at the Villa (1941)
• The Hour Before the Dawn (1942)
• The Unconquered (SS, 1944)
• The Razor's Edge (1944)
• Then and How (1946)
• Creatures of Circumstance (SS, 1947)
• Catalina (1948)
• Quartet (SS, 1948)
• Trio (SS, 1950)
• Encore (SS, 1951)

"Do What Thou Wilt" by Lawrence Sutin

 

A biography of Aleister Crowley, creator of the Thelema rite of ceremonial magic, dubbed by the British press: the most evil man in the world.

He was born in 1875; his father was a Plymouth Brethren preacher who died when Aleister was 11. The boy was eventually inherit sufficient money not to need to work, but he spent his fortune pursuing his dreams: mountaineering (he attempted Kanchenjunga), poetry (almost all through paid-for publishing) and magic. Throughout his life he had sex, sometimes under the guise of sexual magic, with both male and female partners, fathering at least three daughters, two of whom died very young, and a son. His publications included erotic verse and books of magic. He founded the religion of Thelema whose motto was 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law' and set up a temple on Sicily where he would instruct disciples until he was banished by Mussolini's police.

In some ways, the man's life is summarised on page 2: “A spoiled scion of a wealthy Victorian family, who embodied many of the worst John Bull racial and social prejudices of his upper class contemporaries, a blisteringly arrogant opportunist who took financial and psychological advantage of his admirers, an unadmiring and even vicious judge of most of his contemporaries, a sensualist who relished sex in all forms, a hubristic experiment in drugs who was addicted to heroin for the last twenty-five years of his life.”

The problem with writing a biography of a man like this is that the reader quickly becomes wearied of the details of yet another sexual partner, yet another magical rite, and yet another publication. Oh, he's fallen out with somebody else. The book itself didn't make things better by the use of long chapters whose contents were sometimes so diverse that I wondered whether they had a theme, other than covering another few years of Crowley's life. 

Perhaps the most interesting thing was the long list of people I would have thought respectable who participated in magical rites (and sometimes had sex) with him. He was involved with the mystical order of the Golden Dawn, of which Yeats was also a member. One of his big mates Allan Bennett (another one) went on to become a Buddhist monk and edited the journal of the International Buddhist society. Frederick Charles Fuller was “one of the premier military theorists of all time” yet befriended Crowley for four years (though he was eecentric, later joining the British Union of Fascists, and attending Hitler’s 50th birthday celebrations in April 1939). Victor Neuberg, disciple and gay partner, later became a literary reviewer and discovered Dylan Thomas. Other acquaintances included Dennis Wheatley, Dion Fortune, Tom Driberg and Somerset Maugham (who based his novel 'The Magician' on Crowley.

The most shocking moment came when he was the leader of the Kanchenjunga expedition and three climbers, together with three porters mutinied and left camp. On the descent they triggered an avalanche which buried and killed one of the climbers and all three porters. The next day Crowley left the mountain, passing the ongoing rescue attempts without offering his help, and returned to England. The letters he wrote to the papers to justify himself led to widespread condemnation and the end of his mountaineering career. 

He died in a guesthouse in Hastings.

There is one mistake, I think. The Book of Four, published as a square, was priced at four groats. Sutin mistakenly equates this to a shilling but a groat was 4d and therefore 4 groats = 1/4d.

Selected quotes: 

• “I reached a point where my physical reflection in a mirror became faint and flickering. It gave very much the effect of the interrupted images of the cinematograph in its early days. ... “the real secret of invisibility is not concerned with the laws of optics at all; the trick is to prevent people noticing you when they would normally do so.” (Ch 3)
• “The assignment of a governing true will to an entire gender seems to contradict the sense of self-discovery that lies at the heart of Thelema.” (132)
• “The aged god Saturn can only counsel despair; Jupiter is impotent; Mars is beset by lust and lacking in wisdom; Apollo the Sun is slain because he cannot harmonize the good and even natures that battle within him; Venus lovingly mourns Apollo but her sorrow lacks redemptive force; Mercury possesses the seeds of magical wisdom, but he can no longer server psychopomp to humankind.” (Ch 6) 
• “The psychological task of concluding his ‘Autohagiography’ ... must have been severe. he had lost both his Abbey and his reputation and no longer had a publisher for the massive work on which he laboured. The tone of the ‘Confessions’ reveals none of this - throughout, it is all but unremitting in its braggadocio.” (Ch 9)
• “Magick is the Science and Art of Causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” (Ch 9)

February 2026; 419 pages

Published by St Martin's Press, New York

Novels and books about Magic and Magicians reviewed in this blog.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Magus" by Anthony Grafton

“This book traces the rise of learned magic, from its medieval origins to the synthesis that Agrippa created in 1533.” (Introduction)

I think it is written for the specialist rather than the general reader. I found it confusing. Part of the reason for this is the structure of the book: each chapter focuses on the work of one or more scholars, for example, Nicholas of Cusa, Roger Bacon, Pico della Mirandeola, Johannes Trimethius and Agrippa. This meant that the information on, for example, 'natural' magic was broken up as we considered, in turn, what each of these authorities felt about it. I gained the general sense that the issue facing each of them was how to distinguish 'natural' magic (which seemed to mean the marvellous effects that could be produced by science and engineering) which was somehow 'good' from the rest which were snares and delusions set by the devil and his demons. (I suppose this equates with the issue facing alchemy - usually just off-stage in this book - of how to distil what we now call chemistry from the dross of superstition.)

Other reasons I was confused was that sometimes the author seemed to expect me to know more than I did. For example, in chapter 3 he states: “The established Latin magical library came from polyglot sources: Jewish and Muslim but also Greek. Some texts, such as the Latin Picatrix, derived their contents from even more exotic quarters.” What were these 'more exotic quarters'? I wondered. Unfortunately, he doesn't say, nor could wikipedia help.  (107) [It does n’t say where, which is frustrating. Wikipedia suggests that it is primarily Arabic; it doesn’t suggest it goes any further than Arabic, German, Greek, Latin and perhaps some early Christian]

I got even more confused about a polyglot called Samuel bin Nissim Abulfaraj who was baptized as Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada and used the pen name Mithridates VI Eupator Dionysis of Pontus. Having given all these names, Grafton then refers to him without warning as ‘Flavius’. Grafton gives no clue as to the identity of Flavius. I had to resort to Google to discover that Flavius was the first name of Mithridates. 

Selected quotes:

• “The masters of the art of hydromancy ... believed that God had not created water since the Book of Genesis described the spirit of God as hovering over the waters.” (Ch 2)
• “‘Meeting monks is generally considered an evil omen, and all the more if it takes place in the morning. For that sort of man lives mostly from the charnel house, as vultures live off corpses.'" (Ch 5, quoting Agrippa)

Heavy-going.

July 2025; 219 pages

First published in 2023 by Harvard University Press, USA

My paperback edition was issued by Penguin Books in 2025

Novels and books about Magic and Magicians reviewed in this blog.

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

"A History of Magic and Witchcraft" by Frances Timbers

This history of Witchcraft from the middle ages until the present day is scholarly yet extremely readable. The author debunks many of the myths (eg the Spanish Inquisition used less torture and more common-sense in hunting witches than in several protestant countries; there is no independent evidence of witches attending a sabbat until the demonologists suggested it:“The addition of the sabbat to the concept of heretical witchcraft was mostly a top down phenomenon imposed by the dominant literate culture via inquisitors and judges.”; Ch 4) and uses original sources to describe a phenomenon which was fuelled both from the bottom-up (village communities needed healers/ midwives and 'cunning men') and from the top-down (theologians trying to make sense of the Problem of Evil). The result is a most illuminating end enjoyable read.

Selected quotes:

• “One culture’s religious practices can be another culture’s magic.” (Ch 1) 
• “Fear was a key emotion in the propagation of Christianity ... The fear of involvement with bad spirits helped to convert the masses to the new sect. At the same time, the burden of guilt could be lifted from any wrongdoing by blaming evil spirits.” (Ch 1)
• “Demonologists were anxious to prove the reality of witchcraft ... it was just a hop, skip, and a jump from discounting the power of Satan to discounting the power of God.” (Ch 3)
• "It was not possible for a human to metamorphose into another animal, because man was made in God’s image” (Ch 3)
• “The satyrs loved sex, wine, and frenzied dancing (who doesn’t?)” (Ch 4) 
• “Another account, recorded by a Byzantine historian in the sixth century, described a group of Frankish men who were called up in the night to go down to the sea and row special boats to the opposite shore. The boats appeared empty, but they sat low in the water as if they were full, implying that they were occupied by spirits.” (Ch 4) This particularly interested me because in Dante's Inferno, Charon realises that Dante is alive because the ferry is lower in the water than normal because spirits have no weight.
• "holy water was Devil’s urine (It seems that sometimes the demonologists forgot that the Devil did not have a physical body.)” (Ch 4)
• “Magicians were almost exclusively educated, elite men, including aristocrats, physicians, clerics, and lawyers. This is the same class of men who practised alchemy ... A magus needed to be able to read the Latin manuscripts that held the instructions and the long invocations. A knowledge of astrology was also useful, and theological training came in handy ... both of which were learned in the university setting.” (Ch 6)
• "Magic was also employed in treasure hunting, which was a very popular past time [sic] in early modern Europe. Without banks to deposit money into, people often buried their valuables." (Ch 6)

An illuminating and enjoyable read.

September 2022; 188 pages

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

"The Secret History of the Hell-Fire Clubs" by Geoffrey Ashe

This is a hugely comprehensive history of the tradition of immoral dissent in post-mediaeval western society from Rabelais to Charles Manson, taking in the hell-fire clubs, the Marquis de Sade and Aleister Crowley on the way. I think it has little pretence to be scholarly, it never questions its sources and it repeats stories that other authorities regard as made-up. Even in what is quite a long book, such a massive breadth means it is a little difficult to have much depth. But as an introduction to the subject it is well-written and easy to read and I learned a number of things I hadn’t known before (including all of the stuff about Rabelais - the author was clearly very well read and has prompted me to add yet more books to my tbr pile).

His thesis is fundamentally that the Hell-Fire clubs first thrived in the atmosphere of optimism during the Enlightenment following the middle ages and that they were given an essential impetus because of the number of bored young men, rich and aristocratic, who, during the long Whig ascendancy under Walpole in George II's England, had no outlet for their energies, the Tory party of the time being disorganised and tainted with Jacobite sympathies, “they dwindled into a mere scattered grumble, with a literary tinge”. (Ch 3)

He very much makes the point that all the idealistic societies proposed in which a group of people could dispense with normal morality depends on (a) them being part of a select elite, both rich and good-looking and (b) on them being served by others:

• “Anti-moralists tend to believe in privilege and selection.” (Ch 1)
• “magic tended to be an affair of elite groups with elite ethics . . . or nonethics.”
• “Unbridled freedom could work only inside a select club. When the random myriads began doing as they willed, or as they pleased, they required curbing. Universal, benign, liberating Nature was not to be trusted.” (Ch 11)

Having said that, the appeal is obvious, and repeated time and again:

• “Is it so absurd to suggest that the secret of freedom and fulfillment is to be free and fulfilled?” (Prologue)
• “Everybody should accept Nature’s guidance, say “yes” to life, and try all things, good-humoredly, uninhibitedly” (Ch 1)
• “if Nature was benign and the rational way to live was to obey her ... then why not be wicked, if that ... was how Nature prompted you to assert your freedom, what right had the sourpuss of Respectability to complain?” (Ch 3)
• “What lunacy to believe that God has created us to act in ways which go against Nature, and make us miserable in this world! That he wants us to deny ourselves everything which satisfies the senses and appetites he has given us!” (Ch 5)
• “Nature dictates sexual enjoyment, but she does not dictate “normal” sexual mores, and outside western Europe hardly anyone pretends that she does.” (Ch 13)
• “Anybody not blinded by Christian or post-Christian prejudice must admit that Nature wouldn’t allow men to enjoy (for example) sodomy if such conduct offended her.” (Ch 13)
• “if so-called vice gives you greater pleasure, then the natural and proper course is to scrap virtue. Which will usually be the result if you face facts, because virtue is weaker. Virtue means not doing things. Virtue means timidity, obedience. Virtue means conforming to custom. Vice, on the other hand, is (or should be) bold and adventurous and enlarging." (Ch 13)

Selected quotes:

• “Organized goodness has had a long inning and, it must be confessed, often a painful one.” (Prologue)
• “The golden rule, as Shaw said centuries later, is that there are no golden rules.” (Ch 1)
• "When he [the Messiah] failed to arrive, the Kabbalah offered the ghetto-weary a path of release” (Ch 2)
• “In 1736 Bishop Butler—one of the few Anglican clerics of high mental attainments—declared that most educated men had ceased to regard Christianity as even an object of inquiry, ‘its fictitious nature being so obvious’.” (Ch 3)
• “the less gifted could make hay while the philosophic sun shone—and, having made it, could roll in it.” (Ch 5)
• “No one in England was prepared—yet—to condone stealing or murder also, on the ground that “natural” promptings can inspire crime as well as fornication.” (Ch 5)
• “When inmates become sick or unattractive, and cease to please the rest, they are swept out of sight to live in a basement, with nothing to do but fret over their symptoms.” (Ch 7)
• “Omne animal post coitum triste est, praeter gallum gallinaceum et sacerdotem gratis fornicantem—Every creature is melancholy after sexual intercourse except a barnyard cock and a priest getting it for nothing.” (Ch 9)
• “The real-life Hall-Stevenson was an unbalanced anti-Catholic witch hunter, collector of dirty books, and hypochondriac. Whenever an east wind blew he retired to bed in the belief that he was dying.” (Ch 11)
• “Pleasure—your own—is the sole object worth pursuing. This should be done in a scientific spirit, with no restraints whatsoever. The only authentic pleasure is sexual. Other kinds are feeble and limited and should never be allowed to compete. Perversion, so-called, is a higher pleasure than normal intercourse, which has distracting associations of love and parenthood. Furthermore, the essence of the pleasure in sex is egotistic and manipulative. Hence it reaches its height where there is the most selfishness, the most cruelty, the most tyranny over the partner, or rather victim.” (Ch 13)
• “Since the secret of the supreme thrill is (in conventional language) evil, an ever-widening repertoire of evil can be built into your sex practices and be made the basis of ever-more-fiery, ever-more-exotic thrills. This is the royal road to an anti-moral superhumanity, which the null virtuous can never hope to rival or to stand up against.” (Ch 13)
• “Sade, and Sade alone, pointed out that the only way the Age of Reason could put its philosophy together again was by embracing the consequences. ‘Nature isn’t well planned or benign. She is at best neutral, at worst appalling. But live according to Nature still. Be appalling!’” (Ch 13)
• “Love? Merely an entanglement best forgotten. The physical thrill should be the whole thing.” (Ch 13)
• “One of his characters does believe in God, for the very logical Sadian reason that God can make life more horrible. You can hope to get your victim damned in the next world as well as tortured in this.” (Ch 13)
• “She loved the games men played with death,” (Ch 14)

Full of fascinating ideas. June 2022

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

Also read:

• The Hell-Fire Clubs by Evelyn Lord which is rather more critical of its sources.

"The Tangled Lands" by Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias S Buckell

This isn't a novel but four novellas, two written by Bacigalupi and two by Buckell, loosely linked, set in the city of Khaim and the neighbouring lands.

In Khaim, magic comes with a cost: it makes poisonous bramble grow, one prick from which can send a human into a coma from which hardly anyone recovers. But it is hard to stop using magic when someone you love is very ill and the only cure is a magical one. Everyone has an excuse to use a little bit of magic ... but the cumulative effect of all these little individual actions is the loss of land to the bramble, the loss of cities, the loss of empire. So the rulers of Khaim have decreed that anyone caught casting spells will be executed. 

In the first story an poverty-stricken alchemist finds a way of destroying bramble but the authorities want to use his invention for their own ends. In the second the daughter (and stand-in) of a public executioner loses her sons to raiders from Paikan so she embarks on a quest to find them. In the third a boy and his sister, rich children fallen on hard times, are working as peasants collecting bramble seeds when she is pricked; he can't afford to keep her alive so should he cut her throat? In the fourth a blacksmith's daughter has to make a suit of armour for a corrupt nobleman.

There is a clear allegorical meaning to the novel. Magic, I think, represents science: we all individually have good reasons for wanting scientific progress - it makes us healthier, wealthier, and more comfortable - but our inability to cut down on things like cars have led to global warming which threatens the world. Responses might include a police state and Draconian punishments for polluters (magic has a sulphurous smell) with exceptions for those at the top of society who won't abide by the rules they set for everyone else. "Every spell maker has a reasonable excuse. If we grant individual mercies, we commit collective suicide." (1.6) Alternatively, in Paikan, the response has been religious: the magic-denying 'the Way'. This, with its pilgrimage, and its fanatical jihadists (and even the name of the city, which so resembles Pakistan) seems to be a metaphor for an Islamic solution.

But if the allegories are thinly disguised, and the characters rather too obviously either good or bad, the world-building is brilliant. Bacigalupi provides baroque, gloriously over-the-top, descriptions: "A month later, as the muddy rags of cruel spring snow turned to the sweet stink of warming earth ..." (1.3) And the action never ceases: in each story the protagonist gets themselves into an impossible situation from which they can only extricate themselves with some form of sacrifice.

Selected quotes:

• "They ... starved themselves so that their ribs were like the hulls of half-finished ships." (2.4)
• "Your inability to run your business effectively is not my problem." (4.1)

A fascinating concept provides the backdrop to four very readable stories. 

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

I noted coincidental similarities with my forthcoming novel Don Petro de la Hoz:

• The excecutioness returns to consciousness and travels in a merchant's wagon
• The steep-streeted city
• The Paikans

But DP has no magic and, I hope, more complex characters.

"The Changeling" by Victor LaValle

 "A fairy tale moment, the old kind, when such stories were meant for adults, not kids." Set in New York, in which the magical buts up against the mundane. Apollo, seller of rare books, meets librarian Emma; they marry and have a baby called Brian. Then Emma starts to believe that they have a changeling, a creature from myth, not their own baby. Her dreadful reaction, followed by her disappearance, leads means Apollo must travel into mythic and magical realms (within New York) on  a quest whose purpose shifts as we understand more of what is happening.

I thought the first half of the book was brilliant. 

But it was rather like those horror movies in which the tension builds up until you see the monster, at which point it becomes too hard to suspend disbelief. The first half of the book crackled with mystery. The second half was a straightforward adventure story.

The highlight, apart from the episode in which Emma gives birth on a subway train with the help of four break-dancers, was the relationship between Apollo and Patrice "Usually they were the only two black book men at local estate sales. They might as well be two unicorns that happened into the same field. Of course they’d become close." There is a lot of insult trading as in the best buddy movies and Patrice has a fantastic way of anchoring their adventures in reality, such as when the two young men are seeking to break into a cemetery and Patrice points out that in this (white) neighbourhood the police often shoot first, ask questions later. "We can be heroes,’” Patrice said. “But heroes like us don’t get to make mistakes.”; "Some 'concerned citizen’s' anonymous phone call had killed many a black man before him."

But there were lots of fantastic authorial asides, reflecting on parenting, and the American way of life as seen by a black protagonist in New York City.

But in the end I was terrifically disappointed that a book which promised so much, for so long, dissipated its impact in a fantasy story. 

Selected quotes:

• "Meeting her felt like finding a rose growing in a landfill."
• "They spread wickedness wherever they went."
• "What was waiting on a woman to forgive you compared with having your father beat you up and steal your first paycheck?"
• "In the dark she held his hand. Though they wouldn’t have sex for another three hours, it would be accurate to say their first child—their only child—was conceived right then. A thought, an idea, a shared dream; parenthood is a story two people start telling together."
• "Unsupervised reading is a blessing for a certain kind of child."
• "This was the era of Bernhard Goetz shooting black boys on the subway and many white folks in the city cheering him on. Every kid with excess melanin became a superpredator,"
• "He found a snapshot of the old duo tucked in the pages of a grimoire. They looked like the old man and wife from that movie Up, but this version of Carl and Ellie Fredrickson had been stockpiling volumes of sorcery."
• "Aleister Crowley. A quick check online verified Crowley had been a famed occultist in the early 1900s, called “the wickedest man in history.” Accused of Satanism. A recreational drug user and sexual adventurer back when such a thing was scandalous rather than just a part of one’s online dating profile."
• "When he looked up to greet Apollo, the man’s eyes were lost in a shadow. Since his mouth stayed shrouded in darkness too, it was impossible to see his lips. He looked more ghoulish than gallant."
• "Thirty-eight weeks pregnant, and she looked like a hummingbird that had swallowed an emu egg."
• "Tipsy people are chatty, drunks harangue."
• “'There’s a nude photo of your wife in an art gallery in Amsterdam,' Nichelle said. Is there a proper response to such a revelation? 'Color or black and white?' Apollo asked."
• "Nichelle trailed them by half a block shouting words so slurred they became an invented language."
• "Six weeks was the most time Emma could take off from work before her salary vanished. In the United States this counted as generous."
• "The New Dads. So much better than the Old Dads of the past. New Dads wear their children. New Dads change the baby’s diaper three times a night. New Dads do the dishes and the laundry. New Dads cook the meals. New Dads read the infant development books and do more research online. New Dads apply coconut oil to the baby’s crotch to avoid diaper rash. New Dads bake sweet potatoes, then grind them in the blender once the baby is old enough for solid foods. New Dads carry the diaper bag—really a big old purse—without awareness of shame. New Dads are emotionally available. New Dads do half the housework (really more like 35 percent, but that’s still so much better than zero). New Dads fix all the mistakes the Old Dads made. New Dads are the future, or at least they plan to be, but since they’re making all this shit up as they go along, New Dads are also scared as hell."
• "Apollo brought a frying pan to the stove, poured a capful of olive oil, set the fire, and quickly chopped an onion and garlic clove. He paid inordinate attention to the process in an effort to keep his mouth closed."
• "It was like catching a glimpse of the glittering soul inside a rumpled passenger on a subway train."
• "If our relationships are made of many small lies, they become something larger, a prison of falsehoods."
• "He walked into the kitchen swatting the air, his confusion swarming him like flies."
• "Every human being is a series of stories; it’s nice when someone wants to hear a new one."
• "History isn’t a tale told once, it’s a series of revisions."
• "When I was starting out, you got by on one income, and that was enough, but these days you’ve got to be poor or rich to survive on one income. You want to stay afloat in the middle, and you both are hitting that nine to five.”
• "Vampires can’t come into your house unless you invite them. Posting online is like leaving your front door open and telling any creature of the night it can enter.”
• "Knocking someone unconsciious is incredibly difficult. Apollo wished it was easier."
• "A bad fairy tale has some simple goddamn moral. A great fairy tale tells the truth.”
• “The Scottish called it glamer, ... Glamour. It’s an old kind of magic. An illusion to make something appear different than it really is."
• "No matter the circumstances children are always listening. It can be easy for adults to forget this."
• "He wished, for just a moment, there was an adult present. Lacking one of those, he would have to do."
• "Overcast morning. The snow hadn’t stuck, so the park sagged everywhere, as if a damp blanket had been cast over the land."
• “No one wants to learn their history ... Not all of it. We want our parents to provide but don’t want to know what they had to sacrifice to do it. No nation was ever built with kindness.”
• "You, I know you. One of these special new fathers. You’re going to document every moment, every breath of your child’s life. You take videos of them while they’re sleeping and slap them on the computer before the baby wakes up. You think you’re being so loving. You’ll be a better father than the one who raised you! Or the one who was never there at all. But let me tell you what I see instead. The neediness of it. The begging to be applauded. As if the praise of a thousand strangers would ever make up for the fact that you didn’t feel loved enough as a child."
• "The world is full of glamour, especially when it obscures the suffering of the weak."

The author writes brilliantly and there was so much to enjoy in the first half of the book ... but I felt let down by the second half.

November 2021

• Somewhat strangely, I have just finished The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing which deals with what once might have been thought of as a changeling and its effects on a family in a totally realistic way. I recommend it utterly. 
• Another book about a changeling,  reviewed in this blog, is The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue. This time the story involves magical creatures from the start.

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

"The Weirdstone of Brisingamen" by Alan Garner

Colin and Susan go to stay for six months at a farm on Alderley Edge with a Cheshire farmer called Gowther Mossock and his wife, who used to be the children's nurse. The book was written in the 1960s, so the middle-classness is rather taken for granted. Susan's 'tear stone' turns out to be the Weirdstone of Brisingamen, stolen from a nearby cave where wizard Cadellin keeps watch as one hundred and forty knights lie sleeping, to be awoken "when England shall be in direst peril". Tolkien-esque adventures ensue with friendly but sword-wielding dwarfs, witches and warlocks, elves and troll-spawn, and all the bestiary of fantasy.

Garner borrows heavily from Norse mythology. The place where the arch-fiend dwells is called Ragnarok, the Norse Gotterdammerung; the goblins are called svarts (in this magic white represents good and black bad), the chief witch is the Morrigan, from Irish legend (she casts spells in Latin, like Harry Potter), the baddies control the weather, bringing fimbulwinter, which in Norse myth is the winter that destroys all life on Earth as an immediate precedent to Ragnarok; Managarm is the wolf that chases the moon.

In common with books of that era, it is allowed a slow start. Recognition that Susan's 'tear' is the Weirdstone doesn't happen until the 25% mark; it is almost instantly taken from them. There are no moral ambiguities although the dwarfs are experienced, efficient and ruthless killers who boast to one another about how many they have killed. There is little scope for character development. Perhaps more seriously, there is little opportunity for the heroes to display strengths other than endurance. Whenever the children are faced with a challenge they are aided by yet another magical helper who appears from nowhere, such that the deus ex machina is almost a leitmotif. It is only at the end that triumph and disaster become imposters, and for that the children are bystanders and witnesses. 

What lifts the book beyond the ordinary is the two journeys that the children, with accompanying dwarfs, make: one through mine shafts and tunnels, fleeing from goblins, and one through the surface landscape. In both cases minute attention is paid to descriptive detail. The author must know ar first hand what it is like to wriggle through tunnels little bigger than yourself, sometimes flooded, and to climb down rock faces. He must know every rock of the landscape he describes: "Any movement would have set the leaves dancing at the end of their snake-like branches. It was as though they were dangling in a snarl of burglar alarms." (Ch 16) In this book the hills and forests and rocks and caves are characters more vividly described than the humans.

Some great moments:

• "Owls ... fly like drunken elves by day." (Ch 7)
• "Men thought to drain that land and live there, but the spirit of the place entered them, and their house were built drab, and desolate, and without cheer; and all around the bog still sprawls, from out the drear lake come soulless thoughts and drift into the hearts of the people." (Ch 7)
• "He did not like witch-magic: it relied too much on clumsy nature spirits and the slow brewing of hate. He preferred the lightning stroke of fear and the dark powers of the mind." (Ch 9)
• "This crude magic had weight. It piled force on force, like a mounting wave, and overwhelmed its prey with the slow violence of an avalanche." (Ch 9)
• "The yellow walls were streaked with browns, blacks, reds, blues, and greens - veins of mineral that traced the turn of wind and wave upon a shore, twenty million years ago." (Ch 10)
• "They cried or laughed, each according to his nature, but the sound in all cases was the same." (Ch 14)
• "It had the tumulus's air of mystery; it was subtly different from the surrounding country; it knew more than the fields in which it had its roots." (Ch 17)

A fairly standard fantasy hero's adventure story, written for children, but lifted into excellence by the quality of the descriptive writing.

October 2020; 236 pages

Garner is author of a number of novels, mostly aimed at children, in which ancient legends and magical worlds impact upon everyday life:

• The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, its sequel The Moon of Gomrath, and the distinctively different concluding part to the 'trilogy', Boneland.
• Elidor, a Narnia-style children's fantasy
• The utterly brilliant Owl Service (aimed at young adults)
• Red Shift, also aimed at young adults and perhaps the darkest of Garner's novels. A line in Elidor - "The legend says that there was once a ploughboy in Elidor: an idiot, given to fits. But in his fit he spoke clearly, and was thought to prophesy." (C 6) - seems to be a link with one of the characters in Red Shift.
• The definitively adult Thursbitch
• The hugely allusive Treacle Walker, perhaps Garner's masterpiece

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