“Mimsy, Tedious and Woke”? #ReadingAusten2025

Jane Austen: watercolour by her sister Cassandra.

“I can’t bear Jane Austen’s tedious books,” thundered one recent pundit in a UK national daily newspaper (I won’t mention which one, I’ll leave it up to you to guess).¹ “Jane Austen’s so boring, even her culture war is dreary,” declared another recent hack who used to pontificate on fast motorcars for a living. And, in ancient history – 2013, to be more precise – another writer for Grub Street who should know better wrote, “So dull. So over-rated. Jane Austen doesn’t deserve to be on the £10 note.”

It won’t surprise you to note that the first two of these are males of a broadly rightwing – or at least firmly reactionary – persuasion, writing for papers owned by an over-powerful Australian magnate; the last is a literary critic (a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, no less, with a doctorate on Henry James and Freud) who commented in the pages of a rag owned by a secretive family firm based on an offshore tax haven. The first two have determinedly promoted an “anti-woke” agenda even before the term was invented while the last cattily described Austen as “a bitchy marriage-broker who never married.” Ouch, that’s Jane dismissed, the pretentious hussy.

Of course we’re all entitled to our opinions, are we not, whether we’re a highly qualified lecturer and author, a noted misogynist, a convert to farming to avoid inheritance tax or, in my case, a nonentity who blogs ignorantly about literary matters. My point is that the three professional writers are prominent contrarians – courting controversy on very public platforms with deliberately provocative statements; should we take their headlining assessments as anything more than mental barbs designed to raise our hackles?

Things done differently: #ReadIndies

Raymond Briggs, ‘Notes from the Sofa’.

Notes from the Sofa
by Raymond Briggs.
Unbound, 2017 (2015).

My cup runneth over. It went all down my trousers.

“Award-winning author of The Snowman” it says on the cover, but it could easily have added Father Christmas (1973), Fungus the Bogeyman (1977) and a few other Raymond Briggs titles which have delighted children of all ages. 

But his graphic novels, distinctive and idiosyncratically British, have also included the more serious Ethel & Ernest (1998, loosely based on his parents’ lives) and the dark and pessimistic When the Wind Blows (1982) in which Everyman and Everywoman Jim and Hilda Bloggs try to survive a nuclear attack launched by the Soviet Union.

What then is Notes from the Sofa? Touted as “his first book in a decade” it started life as a compilation of short pieces he wrote for The Oldie magazine, enlarged two years later with additional material to 189 selected pieces newly illustrated in his familiar style. In keeping with the magazine’s editorial stance these occasionally have ‘grumpy old man’ vibes, but there is more to them than mere curmudgeon.

The quest for home: #ReadIndies

Cover illustration by Tove Jansson, showing Moomins spotting Sniff for the first time.

The Moomins and the Great Flood
by Tove Jansson.
Småtrollen och den stora övervämningen (1945)
translated by David McDuff.
Sort Of Books, 2012.

Who’s this, creeping through the deepest part of a great forest, “so dim between the trees that it was as though twilight had already fallen”? Why, it’s Moomintroll and his mother, Moominmamma.

And why are they venturing through this strange wilderness with its glowing giant flowers, fearful of whom they might meet? They are searching for Moominpapa, whose wanderlust has taken him off to who knows where; and they are anxiously looking for a place where a house may be situated and where they may spend the winter hibernating.

For it is already August, and time is passing.

#MarchMagics2025 advance notice

CalmgroveBooks.wordpress.com

The old country proverb, In like a lion, out like a lamb, is a traditional weather forecast for the month of March — if it starts out windy.

But here’s another forecast: the meme which, following the death of fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones in March 2012, Kristen at WeBeReading.com inaugurated as #DWJMarch, and which subsequently morphed into #MarchMagics after Terry Pratchett’s death in 2015, will reappear here in 2025.

Just like last year (when I took over as host) the idea is for fans of both authors to read and share their enjoyment of their works on blogs and other social media, this time using the hashtag #MarchMagics2025. Want to know more? Just read on!

Literature breeds distress

Jim and the Lion, by Basil Temple Blackwood.

Selected Cautionary Verses
by Hilaire Belloc.
Revised Puffin Edition
with the original pictures by B. T. B.
[Lord Basil Temple Blackwood] and Nicolas Bentley.
1964 (1940).

But not so Sarah! Not so Sal!
She was a most uncultured girl
Who didn’t care a pinch of snuff
For any literary stuff
And gave the classics all a miss.
Observe the consequence of this!
— ‘Sarah Byng.’

Though nothing irks more than a fib will,
Strike me down were I to quibble
Or seek to start a heated quarrel
Through damning stories with a Moral!
And yet here’s Belloc (first name Hilaire)
Belching Morals into still air;
I, whose instinct’s first to curse,
Am charmed by each improving verse.

His tales for children urge due caution
Lest hard lessons should be learnt:
You might prove the lion’s portion;
Telling lies might get you burnt.
Just in case you thought it funny,
Slamming doors could be your death;
Throwing stones could lose you money;
Eating string can stop your breath.

Cease to be like Tom or Peter,
Even Jim or wild Rebecca,
Or Matilda (little cheater!
Lying only served to wreck her).
Unlike proud Godolphin Horne
(Who lost his wealth, though manor-born)
Charles Augustus Fortescue
Got richer just by acting true.

Yet —

Intense and engaging: #ReadIndies

Mitchell Library, Glasgow. Image: GlasgowTimes.co.uk.

Hieroglyphics and other stories
by Anne Donovan.
Canongate Books, 2001.

His truck was lying in front of the fire, over on one side. She turned it round the right way, fished deep into the back behind the driver’s seat. She was there. She poked her fingers in, fiddling till Goldilocks fell out. She placed her on the bookcase next tae Daddy Bear. Night night, bears. She switched off the light and left the room. — ‘The Doll’s House.’

This collection of eighteen short stories – some vignettes, some miniature epics – gives the reader brief but telling insights of individual lives, all bar one set entirely in Glasgow, all bar one focusing on one female or other’s experience, all bar a few relayed in the distinctive dialect of Scotland’s second city.

Still, for all their seeming restricted visions Anne Donovan’s stories are universal: they deal with alienation, confusion, nostalgia, love affairs, fading memories, and many other benefits and ills that flesh is heir to and which we may well be familiar with, either personally or anecdotally.

And though each brief glimpse is a life lived differently there is an overarching sense of the seven ages of humankind, from mewling, puking infant to second childishness preceding oblivion: each story engages the attention from the word go, and reading them in sequence becomes an intense experience.

Brief encounters

Piet Mondrian: ‘No VI / Composition No II’ (1920), http://www.Tate.org.uk.

I don’t know about you but I do know I have to be in the mood for short stories. It’s difficult because my own creative instincts favour miniatures – short musical compositions, say, sketches instead of vast canvases, flash fiction rather than novels, even blog posts as opposed to ‘proper’ writing.

But there’s something about a singular or main plot spread across several chapters that’s inordinately satisfying, something to get your teeth into rather than the amuse-bouche offered by the conventional short story.

And when there are several short stories brought together in a collection – loosely or not at all connected, of differing quality or tone, perhaps by a range of authors whose styles vary hugely – then it’s at that point that I struggle; and it’s compounded by the fact that I seem to have accumulated a fair number of short story collections which, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve yet to tackle.

Lessons not learned

Nurse Matilda, by Edward Ardizzone.

Nurse Matilda Goes to Hospital
by Christianna Brand,
illustrated by Edward Ardizzone.
Nurse Matida series No 3.
Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 2005 (1975).

Once upon a time there were a mother and a father called Mr and Mrs Brown and they had lots and lots of children; and all the children were terribly, terribly naughty.

If this had been published before I reached the age of double digits I would very possibly have enjoyed this hugely; after all, I remember thinking the first couple of Norman Hunter’s Professor Branestawm books were wildly witty. The first in Christianna Brand’s series, entitled simply Nurse Matilda, featured the titular nanny as the perfect nemesis for the extremely naughty children of the Brown household.

The metamorphosis she undergoes as her charges start to learn the error of their ways is shown to be, both literally and metaphysically, magical: the fearsome governess figure of Victorian experience – ably captured by the original Mary Poppins books and earlier by Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid in Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies – becomes the cuddly maternal archetype if and when the children reform their ways.

But by this, the third in the series, the well-tried formula has become stale and repetitive, as if the lessons not learned by the Brown tribe had not been learned by Brand either.

A world gone mad: #ReadingMajipoor

Created using https://dream.ai.

Lord Prestimion
by Robert Silverberg.
Volume 2 of The Prestimion Trilogy.
HarperCollins Voyager Books, 1999.

‘I had the greatest difficulty in detecting it. It moves as though under cover of perpetual night, even in daytime.’
‘Of course. The cloud of unknowingness again!’

A civil war has just come to an end and the victorious Prestimion, the designated Lord Coronal for the giant planet of Majipoor, has just been inaugurated as co-ruler with the retiring Coronal. Peace reigns, life goes on, and everything is as it should be.

But is it? For all is not well: there are swathes of Alhanroel – the chief continent – that have been incomprehensibly devastated; an  important personage has been incarcerated and no one knows why; and all over the planet disturbing reports are emerging of individuals exhibiting strange behaviours before throwing themselves off high places.

Only three individuals – the new Coronal Prestimion and his confidants Septach Melayn and Gialaurys – know about the cause of the devastation, who the prisoner is and why he is dangerous; yet even they are in the dark as to why incidents of insanity are proliferating. And then the unthinkable happens: the prisoner escapes.

Bookwise 2025/1

We’re fast approaching the end of January and I reckon it’s about time I took stock of where I’ve got to and where I plan going – bookwise, at any rate! And the whole of 2025 is set to be quite a literary year.

Opening a book to me often feels like opening a door and stepping into a new world – not just a science-fictiony place but maybe also a looking-glass world that’s like our own but subtly different, with people who only exist on the page or set in familiar landscapes or streetscapes but graced with alternative names.

It also seems to me to be a privilege that gifted writers allow us into their minds, to inhabit the existences they’ve conjured up from their imaginations, fully-formed as if by demiurges. So it turns out that I’ve been to some extraordinary times and places in just the course of a few weeks.

The well-borne burden: #NordicFINDS

© C A Lovegrove.

The Blue Fox by Sjón.
Skugga-Baldur (2004) translated by Victoria Cribb.
Telegram Books, 2008.

Leve fit, quod bene fertur, onus. — ‘The burden that is well borne becomes light’: Ovid.

A poem, whether in prose or verse, distils and condenses complexities down to an essence; its metaphors and allusions portray a reality beyond what appears illusory; at its most effective it presents a riddle, a puzzle, a mystery to be considered and, maybe in time, solved; and it can have an emotional impact sometimes greater than a corresponding novel.

This I found to be the case with The Blue Fox, Sjón’s novella set in 19th-century Iceland. This taut yet twisting tale is highly poetic – lyrical at times, rich in imagery and symbols, allusive and bordering on magical realism – yet it’s written as historical fiction.

But the more I ruminated on it the more complex and subtle I found it. For example, the English title is seemingly unrelated to the Icelandic title Skugga-Baldur, which appears only to refer to one of the characters in the tale. But in the island’s folklore a skuggabaldur is not only the offspring of a tomcat and a vixen but literally also a ‘shadowy’ spirit which does evil things. Knowing this helps to gain a sharper focus on Sjón’s narrative.

Do Not Enter: #VintageSciFiMonth

Detail from the Hell panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’.

Hard to Be a God
by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
Translated by Olena Bormashenko (2014),
introduction by Ken McLeod,
afterword by Boris Strugatsky (2014).
No 4 in The Noon Universe.
Gollancz / SF Masterworks, 2015 (1964).

Pashka shrugged his shoulders. “It’s a very old highway,” he said.
“An anisotropic highway,” declared Anton. Anka was standing with her back to him. “It only goes one way.”
“The wisdom of our forefathers,” Pashka said pensively. “You drive and drive for a hundred miles, then suddenly — boom! — a do-not-enter sign. You can’t go straight, but there’s no one to ask for directions.”

— Prologue.

Three children – Anton, Pashka and Anka – are playing at being adventurers in deserted woodland when they come across a warning notice: ‘Do Not Enter’. They’ve been pirates, reenacted William Tell and the apple, but – as clearly hinted at from their names – they’re also acting as stand-ins for Athos, Porthos and Aramis in The Three Musketeers.

But aspects of their play suggest that this novel will be more just than three friends having fun out of school. For Anton’s fanciful suggestion that the road is anisotropic is a reminder that the progress of their lives may lack uniformity, varying according to the direction they choose to travel and where the observations are taken from.

For we soon realise that they’re living on Earth in some future century, a time when it’s possible to become a trained observer embedded in alien social structures on a distant planet. How then can their imaginative childhood games come in useful in the situations and dilemmas in which they might find themselves?

Dropped from the sky

Worn button © C A Lovegrove.

A few days ago I saw something glinting on the ground near the birdfeeder in our back garden. After I rubbed off the excess mud – it has been a miserable winter after all – I could see it was a battered button, less than 20mm across or about the size of a 5p piece, with a shank on the back for attaching to a garment with a thread.

But I puzzled over the design on the front, until I realised I was looking at it upside down. When turned the right way up I started to see shapes which reminded me strongly of Celtic Iron Age designs for horses. In fact, it soon became obvious I was looking at a two-wheeled chariot drawn by four horses, with a small enigmatic figure lying prone over the whole design.

In time, after a bit of research, it was clear this button not only looked like a coin but that its design was actually drawn from a particular style of coin; this then drew me down interminable paths and even began to suggest a narrative for how the object was brought to my attention.

Belgravia to Vienna

Giant Ferris wheel, Vienna, 1947.

The Third Man and The Fallen Idol 
by Graham Greene.
Penguin Books, 1971 (1950).

‘Evil was like Peter Pan – it carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth.’

Two novellas – one being little more than a short story – make up this volume; they’re linked by the fact that both also became postwar films from director Carol Reed. The Third Man is much the more famous movie but its immediate predecessor The Fallen Idol was well regarded too.

Superficially, though, they may seem to have nothing in common. One is set in the ruins of postwar Vienna, in a shady world of black marketeers and incipient Cold War tensions, whereas the other takes place in a mansion in during the late Victorian era in London’s Belgravia, the epitome of bourgeois respectability and comfort.

And yet both reveal where lies and deceit can lead to innocents becoming embroiled in sudden tragic death, regardless of whether the protagonist thinks himself a man of the world or presents as a trusting seven year old boy.

Effervescent epistles: #ReadingAusten2025

‘The Love Letter’ (ca 1790) by Thomas Rowlandson.

Love and Friendship
by Jane Austen,
foreword by Fay Weldon.
Hesperus Books, 2003.

‘Beware of the insipid vanities and idle dissipations of the metropolis of England; beware of the unmeaning luxuries of Bath, and of the stinking fish of Southampton.’

Collected in this slim volume are three works taken from Jane Austen’s juvenilia, written in her mid-teens. They belong to the genre termed epistolary fiction, with Austen supposedly inspired by the works of the 18th-century author Samuel Richardson and others; each narrative consists of written correspondence conducted between its fictional characters.

But the first work also takes the form of what might now be termed a novelette – in other words, light fiction a little longer than a short story but without any pretensions of being a novella let alone a novel. Moreover, it’s possible that Love and Friendship may have been ‘serialised’:  the late Fay Weldon suggests here that the teenage Jane could have read the ‘letters’ aloud in instalments to amuse her family.

Ultimately, though, it’s a tremendously cheeky parody of social customs as well as certain literary tastes in the late 18th century. More than two centuries later it’s still possible to view it as trenchantly funny, provided the reader doesn’t view themselves as too sophisticated to be amused. But I’ve yet to even mention the other two offerings in this selection: are they on a par with the opening piece?

Destroying an empire: #ReadingMajipoor

Created using text-generated imaging © C A Lovegrove.

Sorcerers of Majipoor
by Robert Silverberg.
Volume 1 of The Prestimion Trilogy.
HarperPrism, 1998 (1996).

Is it true, as is often said, that there are no new plots in literature? That every story we hear or read or imagine has appeared countless times before? Whether there is just one basic plot or seven or whatever number one can conjure up — and the numbers do vary, despite one theory that there are only seven — it can be argued that pretty much every narrative conforms to an ur-pattern. One might think that there is no need to create new tales when they already exist in one form or another.

Well, of course there are infinite reasons why we continue to invest in narratives, many of them explicable in psychological terms. It’s maybe worth looking in detail at our need for novelty: if there are indeed no ‘new’ plots it’s how we dress them up that creates originality, as when mannequins are arrayed in different clothes and accessories.

In any given narrative it’s the combination of elements, often reminiscent of other narratives, that gives it distinction, and this is certainly true for Robert Silverberg’s Sorcerers of Majipoor.

Recreating the past

The royal cemetery of Ur: excavations.

Murder in Mesopotamia
(Poirot No 4) by Agatha Christie.
HarperCollinsPublishers, 2016 (1936).

A little smile just hovered on his pain-twisted lips. ‘You would have made a good archaeologist, Monsieur Poirot. You have the gift of re-creating the past.’ — Chapter 28.

A country house, a vicarage, an island, a locked room or some exotic means of transport – all these are the kinds of places where one expects Hercule Poirot to be investigating misdemeanours, especially murders. And they’re the kind of crime scenes that we as readers naturally feel familiar with as we try to match our powers of detection with the little grey cells our Belgian investigator brings to bear in solving his cases.

However, instead of a river steamer, say, an express train or a library, in Murder in Mesopotamia we’re confronted with an excavation on the site of a dusty ancient palace; as a reader who has himself been involved in various archaeological investigations I was curious to see how the author was able to introduce her own familiarity with such techniques into the sleuthing narrative, being married to an archaeologist with experience in Iraq and Egypt and herself spending time on digs.

In the event Poirot’s sleuthing involves murders committed in closed rooms, but there’s enough circumstantial detail to satisfy my requirements for verisimilitude in Christie’s chosen setting, one of the murder weapons even being an archaeological find.

Poll and Johnnie

The Peppermint Pig by Nina Bawden.
Puffin Books, 1977 (1975).

It was the tiniest pig she had ever seen. She touched its hard little head and said, ‘What’s a peppermint pig?’
‘Not worth much,’ Mother said. ‘Only a token. Like a peppercorn rent. Almost nothing.’ — Chapter 4.

We’re in the dying years of the Victorian era; Poll is the youngest of four children in the Greengrass family, with a father who paints coats of arms on carriages for a London firm. The family is fairly well off, enough to at least have a maid, and they seem set to continue comfortably for some time – until Mr Greengrass comes home with news for his wife which Poll overhears.

Although she doesn’t quite understand the whys and wherefores, she only knows that everything is about to change for the family, and that it’ll entail leaving the only home she’s known.

Off she goes with her mother and her three older siblings – George, Lily, and Theo – from the capital to a town, not too dissimilar to Swaffham, near Norwich in Norfolk while her father travels to America to team up with whatever enterprise their uncle is engaged in. Their parents may have connections with the town but the children have to cope with new surroundings and straitened circumstances. What difference will a peppermint pig make?

Mixing genres: #ReadingMajipoor

https://majipoor.fandom.com/wiki/Majipoor

Tales of Majipoor by Robert Silverberg.
Gollancz, 2013.

“They came from Old Earth.”

When a Prologue begins with portentous words like these you might automatically assume you’re reading a science fiction title. Especially when you’re told the colonists have migrated to Majipoor, a giant planet with low gravitational pull, three large continents to inhabit and expand into, an indigenous population to interact with and aliens from other worlds to transplant onto.

And yet, science doesn’t feature too much in these short stories, though fiction of another genre does. Of the seven tales, three are specifically about magic, one implies magic with the ‘sending’ of vivid and detailed dreams and another includes what can only be called magical talismans to call up images of past events. We are indubitably in the realm of fantasy now, albeit fantasy on another planet instead of a supernatural Otherworld, and with intelligent alien life forms instead of elves and fairies.

Then what are we to make of the faintly philosophical themes that Silverberg touches on, themes such as the ethics of restoring historical artefacts, or claiming ‘divine inspiration’ as your own creation, or the nature of sacrilege and how that conflicts with scientific truth?

From which you will gather that Tales of Majipoor, no less than many another novel, declines to be constrained within any one genre, be it hard SF, pure fantasy or literary fiction. Instead, the material of Silverberg’s patchwork cloth is of itself, like those tints resulting from overlapping circles of different primary colours.

Bitter stuff

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
by Yukio Mishima.
Gogo No Eiko (1963)
translated by John Nathan (1965).
Vintage Classics, 2019.

Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.

Mishima’s novel Gogo No Eiko (which could I think be rendered variously as ‘The Afternoon Tow’ or ‘Tugging in the Afternoon’) was given the more literary – and portentous – title of ‘The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea’ when it was first translated into English, which rather predisposes the reader to see it as a tragedy.

Which it is, of course, but I think this rendition may misdirect the reader to identify a certain individual as the only tragic figure when in fact all of the principals will be unduly affected by how matters pan out.

But as an indication that the Shinto notion of kami – the reverence due not just to deities and semidivine human beings but also to natural phenomena such as the ocean – is not only at play in this novella but also forms a principal focus, this English title turns out to be not so wide of the mark.

The largest specimen

‘Babar et l’arbre de Nöel’: scénario et dessin par Laurent De Brunhoff, Hachette 1971.

Babar and the Christmas Tree
(Babar et l’arbre de Nöel, 1971) 
by Laurent De Brunhoff.
Little Babar Books 16,
Methuen Children’s Books, 1974 (1972).

It was soon going to be Christmas. Babar went with Zephir the monkey to choose a tree.

With this straightforward opening the story of how Babar and friends acquire, install and decorate the seasonal tree is a simple reminder of one of the annual rituals many families around the world still regularly follow.

Selecting the largest specimen may at first have been a mistake, however, presenting difficulties with transport (a bus has to be commandeered), bringing it into the house (it’s too large to fit in the door), and standing it up (it’s too tall) but solutions are bound to be found.

And then there’s the matter of last year’s broken ornaments. Will everything eventually be made ready for the big day?

Hibernating ideas

© C A Lovegrove.

The Wood at Midwinter
by Susanna Clarke.
Illustrated by Victoria Sawdon.
Bloomsbury Circus, 2024.

It was winter, just a few days before Christmas. A few flakes of snow fell on the quiet fields. Along the lane that led to the wood came a carriage, driven by a young woman. Her name was Ysolde Scot and her sister, Merowdis, sat at her side.

How to describe this short but disconcerting offering from the author of Piranesi and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell? A modern fairytale? Yes, it is this, though just occasionally the whimsy slightly defuses the uncanny feel of magic. A beast fable perhaps? There are indeed talking animals, even trees, but there’s no moral implied. A Christmas ghost story? True, it’s set at midwinter in Victorian times, but there’s no male antiquarian dabbling with supernatural matters to be seen, nor any decaying mansion with dark corridors.

No, what this dreamlike tale most reminds me of are the Breton lais of Marie de France, with natural magic invading the liminal space separating it from the everyday human world. As the author writes in an Afterword, she’s fascinated by characters “who are bridges between different worlds, between different states of being, characters who feel compelled to try and reconcile the irreconcilable.”

This liminality is, I feel, what links the approach of Susanna Clarke and her medieval counterpart, cemented I believe by her use of Anglo-Norman names and Arthurian motifs.

Across a sea of stars: #ReadingMajipoor

Artist’s impression of an Earth-sized exoplanet Kepler 186f orbiting within the habitable zone of the red dwarf star Kepler-186 (NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech).

Majipoor. — Even the name sounds fantastical with its verbal echoes of both magic and a city on the Indian subcontinent. But no, this is the giant planet that I’ve previously mentioned (here) which features in the planetary romances of Robert Silverberg, and which I’m going to discuss a little bit more before I complete all my rereads, and reviews, of the first three ‘prequels’ in the series: Sorcerers of Majipoor (1997), Lord Prestimion (1999) and King of Dreams (2000). But first, a bit of science.

Perhaps even the most unscientific of us — and I include myself in this company — has heard of Goldilocks planets: these are worlds that exist in circumstellar habitable zones that prove to be “just right” for life (that is, they support liquid water) and possible future human habitation (the ambient temperatures are neither too hot, nor too cold).

Such worlds are called ‘extrasolar planets’ because they orbit a star other than our own sun, or exoplanets for short. So, although the word exoplanet hadn’t achieved currency when Silverberg first imagined his Majipoor in the late 70s, it proves to be just such one of these worlds. Only different.

Memories and desire

View from The Peak of Hong Kong Island and Victoria Harbour, 2005.

Old Filth by Jane Gardam.
Introduction by the author, 2013.
Abacus, 2018 (2004).

“You’ll be a lawyer. Magnificent memory. Sense of logic, no imagination, and no brains. My favourite chap, Teddy Feathers, as a matter of fact.” — ‘The Ferment’.

Who exactly is Old Filth? Does any one really know him? Does he really know himself? If this acronym for Failed in London, Try Hong Kong is clever but not an entirely accurate description, will we as readers ever get any closer to discovering who or what is the essential Edward Feathers?

Jane Gardam’s magnificent novel examines the life of an enigmatic man born in the early 1920s and surviving through to the early years of the 21st century, a man who realises that all his life, ‘from my early childhood, I have been left, or dumped, or separated by death, from everyone I loved or who cared for me.’ And he wants to know why – as do we.

Being a semi-orphan, his mother dying early, and as a so-called Raj Orphan, sent from the outposts of Empire back ‘Home’ to be brought up and sent to boarding school, he has not known familial love, nor has he in his eight decades retained any long-lasting close relationship based on true love – companionship, yes, but not desire. He thinks: “Memory and desire — I must keep track of them. Mustn’t lose hold.” But is it too late?

Strange places: #ReadingMajipoor

Created using Wombo.art © C A Lovegrove.

One April afternoon in 1978 the author Robert Silverberg heard what he called “the old familiar voice in my head whispering things to me.” Rushing into his office he reports scribbling this on the back of an envelope:

“The scene is a giant planet-sized city — an urban Big Planet, population of billions, a grand gaudy romantic canvas. The city is divided into vast subcities, each with its own characteristic tone. The novel is joyous and huge — no sense of dystopia.

“The book must be fun. Picaresque characters. Strange places – but all light, delightful, rafish [sic] …”

This was the germ of his idea for Lord Valentine’s Castle (1980), leading in time to a series of science fantasy novels set on the giant planet of Majipoor. I’ve already reviewed Kingdoms of the Wall here (1993), a sort of prequel in all but name, and updated reviews of a collection of novellas and short stories (aka ‘novelettes’) entitled Tales of Majipoor (2013) and of Sorcerers of Majipoor (1997) are scheduled to appear here soon; and now I’m planning a reread of all the remaining novels and of another, earlier, short story collection called Majipoor Chronicles (1995).

My reviews, I hope, will give a flavour of what I find attractive about the series for those who aren’t yet acquainted with it and, for those who do have that familiarity, perhaps provide a somewhat oblique view of why some of the entries in the sequence work better than others.

The scent of guilty blood

© C A Lovegrove.

The Wanderings of Balthus
by Aonghus Fallon.
Independently published, 2023.

‘Not all young men are fools, not all old men wise.’

Venerated as St Balthazar but now known as the Dark Wanderer, Balthus is the central character in this composite novel of short stories, a mini sword-and-sorcery epic which is rather more than simply heroic fantasy.

For Balthus, as well as being on a personal quest in an alternative Europe, is a truly composite figure: a medieval detective using a combination of deductive reasoning and intuition who’s also judge and executioner of guilty parties, appearing to all in the guise of an uncanny knight.

But there’s more: he happens to be a vampire who has survived for over half a millennium. What rendered him thus and what drives him on to wander by night across the length of this fictional Mitteleuropa?