More Holme Lee children's illustrations

Further to Harriet Parr: bibliography, "Tuflongbo", and a dog's life, here are some more of the off-the-wall illustrations from the handful of 1860s children's fairytale books by the prolific Shanklin, Isle of Wight, novelist Parr (who wrote as Holme Lee).

Harriet Parr: bibliography, "Tuflongbo", and a dog's life

Harriet Parr

While we're on Shanklin topics: I've expanded the 2014 Harriet Parr in Shanklin post to include a detailed bibliography, and I'm also delighted to say that I've finally found a portrait of her! Parr is another of those low-key writers who've turned out to be astonishingly prolific (in her case mostly as the pseudonymous "Holme Lee"). En route, I encountered her mid-career children's stories such as the odd "Tuflongbo" elf-saga, and the canine tear-jerker The true pathetic history of Poor Match. I'll only inflict the pictures on you.

Dean Spanley

A recommendation for a gem of a film: Dean Spanley (aka My Talks with Dean Spanley, 2008), which turned up on afternoon BBC2 yesterday. The film is a joint New Zealand and British production, directed by Toa Fraser and adapted by Alan Sharp from a 1936 Lord Dunsany novella, My Talks with Dean Spanley.

The Last Ringbearer

Another recommendation from over-Christmas reading: the 1999 fantasy novel The Last Ringbearer. I mentioned it in February 2011, and liked the concept a lot, but for whatever reason only just got around to reading it, after recent reacquaintance with Tolkien's world led me to a handy ePUB version that worked on the Kobo.

The Last Ringbearer, written by Russian paleontologist Kirill Eskov as Последний кольценосец and translated by Yisroel Markov, is a revisionist account of the events depicted in The Lord of The Rings. It works on a number of premises, one being a geologist's take on necessary consequences of Tolkien's geography of Middle Earth (the world has to be bigger than the part he shows) - but the most significant is the idea that The Lord of the Rings is a mythologised 'history written by the victors'.

The trio of chief characters of The Last Ringbearer are two from Mordor - Haladdin, an Umbarian academic turned field medic, and Tzerlag, an Orocuen sergeant (an orc, in fact, in this book a human ethnicity) - and Baron Tangorn, a disaffected Gondorian soldier-aristocrat. The three are thrown together in the deserts of Mordor after its fall: Haladdin and Tzerlag save Tangorn, who has been left for dead after he tried to stop an elf-led civilian massacre by mercenaries on his own side.

After this brief framing, we get a flashback of The War of the Ring told with a very different slant from Tolkien's. Mordor is an enlightened technological civilisation ruled by the unremarkable Sauron VIII against a general backdrop of barbarian feudal rival kingdoms such as Gondor and Rohan. It has, however, damaged its self-sufficiency by disastrous land irrigation mistakes, and this weakness is taken as cue for the warmongering Gandalf to advise a Western attack on it.

This attack succeeds through various factors. The "vast Mordor hordes" are a propaganda exaggeration. The Western forces have magic: they can create undead armies, have palantir communication, and got the Elves on their side by the loan of a powerful clairvoyant and magic-enhancing device, The Mirror. They indulge in various breaches of rules of engagement, such as failing to honour conventions on single combat. In the aftermath of the main battles, Aragorn seizes the throne of Gondor by engineering the murder of the de facto king, Denethor (with the unlikely cover story that the latter just happened to set fire to himself), and assures the compliance of allies by hostage-taking (he keeps Éowyn, sister of the Rohan heir Éomer, along with the genuine Gondor heir Faramir, under guarded exile). However, it's not all roses for Aragorn: Arwen will not consummate their alliance, as from her immortal Elvish viewpoint, he's little more than a primitive baby. The Elves also, naturally, won't give back The Mirror.

Haladdin, Tzerlag and Tangorn form an alliance, initially for mutual protection from Gondorian mop-up operations, and kill Eloar, the elf who was behind the massacre. Then, while on watch, Haladdin gets a visit from a Nazgûl, Sharya-Rana (the benign and rational spirit of a dead mathematician) who tells him what's at stake for the future. The world ("Arda") is at the interface of physical and magical worlds, and the Elves have plans to exploit this and lead Middle Earth into an Elf-dominated stasis. The only way to stop this is to disconnect the worlds by destroying The Mirror in the Eternal Fire of Mount Doom within 100 days: a daunting task since The Mirror weighs 1000 pounds and is installed in the totalitarian Elf stronghold of Lórien. Haladdin has been selected to do it because he has no magical abilities, and so is impervious to magical attacks. Sharya-Rana dies - or rather discorporates, having used all his energies - and Haladdin is left to contemplate how he can achieve this quest (of which more in a moment).

I was reading this book well into the small hours - I finished at nearly 5am - and was gripped. Eskov has thoroughly worked out the whole revisionist scenario, and it fits the Lord of the Rings timeline beautifully. The overall stance is humane and rationalist, fiercely polemical in its stance of outrage at misrepresented history. And, as Eskov has stated, it avoids alignment of good/evil with ethnicity or military side. It's thoroughly realistic in its portrayal of brutal Realpolitik and the double-edged aspect of espionage: for example, Baron Tangorn's personal shame is that he compiled for Gondor the open source intelligence report on food imports showing that Mordor was no threat, not realising that this very report would be used as the rationale for Gondor's unprovoked attack on it.

Eskov takes a real joy in his world, too, showing vividly the multifarious cultures that thrive in a geographical area stretching across the equivalent of, say, NW Europe, North Africa, the Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe. He delights in food and wine and how they're prepared, in total contrast to Tolkien's descriptions that really seem to stem from the latter's dull and abstemious tastes. However, this joy does have a slight downside: Eskov occasionally digresses into cultural back-story that holds up the plot. There's a huge and not very relevant chunk about the history of Middle Earth's Africa analogue, and an interminable section (which really belongs in a separate novel) about Baron Tangorn's adventures as a spy in the port city-state of Umbar, playing off the various security services against each other.

That aside, The Last Ringbearer made very satisfying reading, rich in allusion to similar scenarios in real-world history (if you don't spot them, there's an appendix) and more than a few neat references - when the characters discuss the "World as Text theory" - to the whole issue of the fictionality of both The Last Ringbearer and The Lord of the Rings. Despite it being let down in places by longueurs, it's a superb book: a commenter to my earlier post called it "This is a true book of ideas in the Russian tradition". And it's freely available, now in a 2nd Edition.

The copyright is undoubtedly still very 'grey': free or not, this is still an unauthorized derivative work. The Tolkien estate is not known for its liking of derivative works, but there doesn't seem to have been any move from it lately on the matter. Here's the official page, and here is where I found the ePUB version.

(Check out also this striking Flickr image of Dubai by Rick's Images. A detail of this, which shows towers including the Burj Khalifa under construction in March 2008, was used as the cover image for the Tenseg Press edition I read).

- Ray

Spoiler warning:  I've completed the plot summary below, in white text. Mouse over if you want to read it.

So ... Haladdin works out a solution to the problem of getting The Mirror to the Eternal Fire of Mount Doom: do the opposite, and use a pair of palantíri to transmit the Eternal Fire to The Mirror. They obtain the palantíri (one of them by aiding a coup to free Faramir) and set up the second half of the plan. Baron Tangorn goes alone to Umbar, where he conducts months of espionage in order to contact the Elven underground with a forged letter and the fiction that Eloar is still alive but imprisoned. The Elves don't initially buy this idea, and Tangorn thinks he has failed; he plans to leave Umbar with his courtesan lover Alviss, but is tragically murdered by his pursuers when he steps out to buy her a gift. Ironically, the Elves take this as evidence of the truth of his carrying dangerous information; unknown to him, he has succeeded.

Haladdin's plan goes ahead: to subvert Eloar's mother, the high-ranking Elf Eornis, into setting up a palantír connection, thinking she can talk with her son. The Mirror, she is told, must be in sight at her end as a bona fide of her location. The palantír is dropped into Lórien from a glider piloted by the troll Kumai - trolls are another human ethnicity - and the Elves fail to find it (Eornis has glued it underneath The Mirror). Even though The Mirror is giving distinct warnings of impending doom, the Elves fail to act decisely because of their one weakness: a paranoid demarcation of decision-making among their politely bickering Politburo-like leaders.

However, as the moment approaches when Haladdin will drop his palantír into the Fire, Gandalf spots the danger and casts a spell on Haladdin's palantír to turn him to stone; it doesn't work, because of the latter's lack of magical nature. Saruman takes over, attempting to reason with Haladdin via the palantír, and tells him what's probably the truth: that Sharya-Rana's scenario is just one theory, and that destroying The Mirror may in fact destroy the world. However, fate intervenes when Tzerlag accidentally touches the palantír and begins to turn to stone. Haladdin takes the chance and destroys it to save his friend, who lives with just the loss of a couple of fingers.

There are massive detonations - and the magic simply goes away. Elves become just beautiful people without power or charisma. Magical items, such as Elven medical kits, cease to work. Arwen loses her power over Aragorn, and he goes on to a career as an enlightened king who brings in a long era of democracy in Gondor, and is ultimately succeeded by Faramir.

The book ends with a future perspective - a future in which history has gone more or less like ours, with another continent called Amengo discovered - discussing the historicity and modern media treatment of the characters in the narrative. A "Western literary adaptation" called The Lord of the Rings is one of them.

- Ray

A Barnstormer in Oz

1982 Berkeley trade p/b cover

I mentioned Philip José Farmer's A Barnstormer in Oz briefly before, alongside Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (see Keith Laumer ... and Oz, Sept. 2007).

Both are revisionist views of L Frank Baum's Oz mythos. I read Wicked a few years ago, and despite the rave reviews, I found it very ponderous. Its central thrust is that the Wicked Witch of the West (called Elphaba by Maguire, after "LFB") is a more complex character, driven into the role of wickedness by resistance to the Wizard's tyrannical policies concerning the rights of sentient animals in the world of Oz. Even though I like the Oz books and films, I didn't find much connection with them, because the majority of the events in Wicked are a prequel to the arrival of the well-known Oz characters. The whole handling seemed to me a very dull polemical exploration of the portrayal of good and evil, and the problems of Animals (sentient animals) vs ordinary animals, all countersunk by a study guide at the end posing various questions on the moral issues raised. Wicked just drips with its own sense of Significance.

A Barnstormer in Oz, which I finally read today, is completely different in tone. It's essentially a hard SF take on fantasy, whose central premise is that Oz is far more complicated than the Baum portrayal (within the book's mythos, it's written by Baum after interviews with Dorothy, but spun for the children's market).

Dorothy's son, the stunt pilot Hank Stover, flies through a mysterious green cloud and lands in Munchkinland. He's initially detained - for reasons of disease quarantine - and immediately finds the place to be a complex and sophisticated culture. The Munchkins are not infantilised dwarfs, but pygmy descendants of Ostrogoths who passed through a dimension portal to the Oz analogue of Earth, Ertha; they speak a slightly Latinised Germanic language, which he has to learn. The country is run as a benevolent dictatorship by the centuries-old Queen Glinda the Good, with some democracy at a regional level, and is a bizarre mix of cultural features: for example, there are strict rules for population control via a herbal spermicide, but the same spermicide allows wide pre-marital sexual freedom (Hank, though he yearns for Glinda, rapidly forms a relationship with the blonde guard Captain Lamblo). Despite the mediaeval formality, Munchkin culture has extremely syncretic Christian / Norse / pagan religious practices, some of which Hank finds abhorrent, such as its primitive tribal funerals with painted naked mourners and ritual bloodletting. The issues of sentient animals are addressed in far more concrete details than in Wicked, such as the taboos on killing sentient animals, and the accommodations that let sentient carnivores indulge their instincts under certain circumstances.

Hank, as a pilot with wartime experience and an armed Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" biplane, rapidly finds himself involved a key player in two conflicts that are brewing, both involving territorial ambitions. One involves an invasion of Erakna the Uneatable, a new Wicked Witch with armies of sentient hawks and flying monkeys. The other is an attempt at invasion by the USA, which in a project instigated by Warren G Harding has discovered how to open the portal to Ertha, and sends in an expedition force ostensibly seek diplomatic contact to "protect" Oz (an offer that Hank knows will rapidly repeat America's exploitative history when the US visitors realise Oz's wealth of precious stones and metals). Despite his loyalties as an American, Hank takes the side of Oz. This is helped along by his plans to marry Lamblo, and the friendly but cynical manipulation by Glinda, who spots him as a powerful wildcard who is free to use guns and explosives that would be taboo for Oz inhabitants.

During the military campaigns, which involve an undercover attempt with a couple of folksy rogues to assassinate Erakna, Hank encounters more mysteries about Oz. The chief one is his attempt to understand the nature of 'firefoxes', a form of ball lightning that possesses animals and inanimate objects with sentient intelligence (hence the lion, scarecrow and tin man) - in a thunderstorm, the same happens to Hank's biplane Jenny. He concludes that firefoxes and anomalous creatures such as the flying monkeys are the creations of the "Long-Gones" (reminiscent of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones), the original inhabitants of the Oz dimension.

The US invasion is forestalled first by Glinda's devastating attack on the ill-equipped military expedition - as this is 1924, an era before large-capacity passenger air transport, the US sends a small suicide mission arriving through the portal in a multifarious collection of co-opted commercial aircraft. Although further missions seem inevitable, the US is ultimately warned off by a terrifying demonstration of Glinda's ability of precise magical teleportation from Ertha to Earth. The book ends with a magical battle to the death between Erakna and Glinda, who Hank ultimately concludes would be better named "Glinda the Ambiguous".

The Wikipedia article mentions critical disagreement:

Inevitably, critics have disagreed on the value of Farmer's contribution to the literature of Oz. Jack Zipes called the novel "splendid," while Katharine Rogers considered it "revision to the point of debasement."
- A Barnstormer in Oz, retrieved 27 Sep 2012

I go with the "splendid". It was an enjoyable and intelligent afternoon's reading, with interesting footnotes on Farmer's ideas about the evolution of the Munchkin and Quadling languages mentioned in the book, as well as an analysis of the flora and fauna of Oz in terms of other Earth regions and cultures scooped up in the dimensional warp.

See the Official Philip José Farmer Web Page for other reviews, some of which mention other Oz adaptations. The Royal Timeline of Oz also has an extensive collection relating to the literary history of Oz and its various spinoffs, both faithful and revisionist: see, for instance, The Dark Side of Oz and Beyond the Deadly Desert.

- Ray

Vincent Ward: monks and monsters

I recommend the Vincent Ward Films site for a remarkable concentration of interesting content.

Vincent Ward is a New Zealand born film director and screenwriter (his involvement as storywriter for Alien 3 is probably his best-known connection) but also a visual artist in a variety of media: painting, photography and digital). Ward's filmography includes Vigil (1984, director and writer); The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988, director and writer); Alien 3 (1992, storywriter); Map of the Human Heart (1993, director, producer and writer); What Dreams May Come (1998, director); The Last Samurai (2003, executive producer); River Queen (2005, director and writer); and Rain of the Children (2008, director, producer and writer). If there is a common factor to his work, to me it seems that they focus on outsiders in an ethnic, archaic or apocalyptic setting.

The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey is one of my favourite, and seldom-shown, films (see the trailer). It begins with monochrome Boschian scenes in a Cumbrian mining village under threat of the plague in 1348. A boy called Griffin, who is known for his gift of second sight, has a vision that disaster can only be averted if they "Make tribute to God. Place a spire on a distant cathedral. Do so before dawn or the village will be lost". Perhaps in another vision, he joins a characterful group of fellow miners as they tunnel through the earth - to emerge in full colour to culture-shock adventures in modern-day New Zealand. Visually impressive - see production stills - and backed by an eclectic ethnic soundtrack by Davood Tabrizi, it's by turns witty, horrifying and poignant: it rightly won a number of (admittedly esoteric) awards.

And also on the medieval front, there's Alien 3: Unrequited Vision. The third in the Alien series, set on a prison planet, it was watchable enough, but it radically dumbed-down Ward's original concept, as described in David Hughes's 2008 The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made:

‘It wasn’t a retread kind of sequel it was a completely new idea rich with religious imagery, iconography and metaphor.”

Top: detail from "A star approaches from the east". Bottom: the classic 'Flammarion engraving'.

As reported by Dan Jolin in Empire magazine - Alien 3: The Lost Tale Of The Wooden Planet - Ward's concept was a decaying Gothic wooden space station inhabited by monks, and Ripley crash-landing there would bring the Alien mythos into an effectively mediaeval world that would see the alien in terms of demons. The concept foundered due, it seems, to creative differences and production pressures, There are, however, some 'fossils' of it in the final Alien 3, such as the quasi-monastic community of the prisoners, and the means of the alien's destruction (it was originally to have been in the monks' glassmaking vat).

The Vincent Ward site has a number of concept drawings, and is telling the story as a serialized graphic novel, Alien III Unrequited Vision. It's very nicely done, and is rich in visual allusion, such as the above unmistakable Flammarion quote.

- Ray

Skye location

image from the Prometheus international launch trailer

A quick geographical jump. I'm probably about the billionth person to notice this, but I was interested to see the above scene of rock formations at The Storr, Skye, at around 0:40 in the international launch trailer for Riddley Scott's Alien prequel, Prometheus. A number of newspapers have carried pictorial features on this Skye location, such as the Daily Record (Scottish connection to stunning Alien prequel Prometheus) and the Daily Mail (A Skye-fi thriller: How Scottish island became the perfect landscape for new Alien blockbuster Prometheus).

The Storr, Skye, image by "Wojsyl", reproduced under
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

I visited Skye in the summer of 1977, and am not sure I fully appreciated it. I was in a poisonous mood, angry and depressed after finishing Cambridge with none of the "glittering prizes" (good degree, interesting job, relationship, lots of friends) I'd hoped, expected even, to come of it . In addition, I felt actively cheated by family and other advisors who'd dangled those prizes in front of me as a certain outcome of going there and staying the course, and also enraged at what I felt was my own weakness in failing to achieve these goals. Not a fun time, really, but a planned holiday in awesome surroundings seemed the right thing to do.

Anyhow, the Skye landscape at least remains a positive memory, particularly that of the Trotternish peninsula. It's vaguely pertinent to recent weblog posts here, as it has strong resonances with the kind of undercliff landscapes I like in southern England, though writ very large. It is a kind of 'Jurassic coast' - the rocks at sea level are soft Jurassic shales - but these are overlaid with thick Tertiary basalt lava flows (see Scottishgeology). As with the Lyme Regis and Isle of Wight undercliff coasts, this hard-over-soft geology gives rise to landslips; but the greater coherence of the overlying basalt means the slipped blocks tended to be larger and to stay more intact, and the colder climate means this geology doesn't get overgrown.

Trotternish is some 30km long, and contains some of the most spectacular scenery of Skye, notably The Storr, with its eroded rock pinnacles (the tallest is the "Old Man of Storr"); and the Quiraing, an area of escarpment edge with features such as The Needle, The Prison, and The Table - a slipped grassy plateau surrounded by towers of rock, and only accessible by ascending a stone chute.

Quiraing - by "Stinging Eyes"
reproduced under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

The Trotternish landslip is one of Britain's most unusual landscapes, and Prometheus isn't the first film to use it. The Quiraing featured as one of the locations in the 2007 Stardust, the extremely good adaptation of Neil Gaiman's fantasy novel Stardust.

- Ray

Shepherd aesthetes and Barry Pain

For a long time I resisted getting an Internet-capable phone, but it has proved invaluable on holiday for pursuing trains of thought that come out of conversation. A couple of days back, on the train to Portsmouth, Clare recalled a snippet of a song she'd had to learn at school. Googling found rapidly it was The Shepherd's Song: one of the Seven Lieder of Edward Elgar, a cycle of songs with lyrics by various authors. Here it is on YouTube sung by Mackay Choral Society's Male Chorus - The Shepherd's Song - and here are the lyrics:

Down the dusty road together
Homeward pass the hurrying sheep,
Stupid with the summer weather,
Too much grass and too much sleep,
    I, their shepherd, sing to thee
    That summer is a joy to me.

Down the shore rolled waves all creamy
With the flecked surf yesternight;
I swam far out in starlight dreamy,
In moving waters cool and bright,
    I, the shepherd, sing to thee
    I love the strong life of the sea.

And upon the hillside growing
Where the fat sheep dozed in shade,
Bright red poppies I found blowing,
Drowsy, tall and loosely made,
    I, the shepherd, sing to thee
    How fair the bright red poppies be.

To the red-tiled homestead bending
Winds the road, so white and long
Day and work are near their ending
Sleep and dreams will end my song,
    I, the shepherd, sing to thee;
    In the dreamtime answer, answer me,
    In the dreamtime answer, answer me.

The Eliza Stories, the 2002
Prion Classics collected edition

I find it fairly ludicrous; this narrator is in the long tradition of shepherd aesthetes with idyllic lifestyles (this one involves admiring poppies and going for long starlit swims). However, I was interested that the lyrics are by Barry Pain, author of the 1900 Eliza.

If you like observational humour of the style of George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody, Eliza is very much in the same vein, a gentle send-up of late-Victorian social aspiration. It tells of the long-suffering Eliza and her husband, a pushy junior clerk who is trying to get them up the social ladder from working class to lower middle class. Do check it out: Eliza, Project Gutenberg E-Text 23783.

When Barry Pain is remembered, if it all, it's generally for Eliza and its sequels. But I hadn't realised, until I looked at the Wikipedia page and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, the breadth of his writing. As a contributor to Punch and the Cornhill Magazine, much of his work was humour and parody, some of it very barbed (though, like a lot of historical parody) a trifle inaccessible when its targets have been forgotten. A couple of his classics in this area are Marge Askinforit (Gutenberg #26204) , a parody of the self-obsessed and name-dropping autobiography of Margot Asquith ...

I was christened Margarine, of course, but in my own circle I have always been known as Marge. The name is, I am informed, derived from the Latin word margo, meaning the limit. I have always tried to live right up to it.

We were a very numerous family, and I can find space for biographical details of only a few of the more important. I must keep room for myself.

My elder sister, Casein—Casey, as we always called her—was supposed to be the most like myself, and was less bucked about it than one would have expected. I never made any mistake myself as to which was which. I had not her beautiful lustrous eyes, but neither had she my wonderful cheek. She had not my intelligence. Nor had she my priceless gift for uttering an unimportant personal opinion as if it were the final verdict of posterity with the black cap on. We were devoted to one another, and many a time have I owed my position as temporary parlour-maid in an unsuspicious family to the excellent character that she had written for me.

... and If Winter Don't (Gutenberg #27375), a parody of the style and format of ASM Hutchinson's family saga If Winter Comes. In the introduction, Pain comments on the fashionable stylistic foibles of the time, ridiculing novelists who would write the tongue-twister (or drunkenness test) “She stood at the door of Burgess’s fish-sauce shop, Strand, welcoming him in” as:

Across the roaring Strand red and green lights spelling on the gloom. ‘BURGESS’S FISH-SAU.’ A moment’s darkness and again ‘BURGESS’S FISH-SAU.’ Like that. Truncated. The final —CE not functioning. He had to look though it hurt him. Hurt horrible. Damnably. And his eyes traveled downward.

Suddenly and beyond hope she! Isobel-at-the-last. Standing in the doorway. White on black. Slim. Willowy. Incomparable. Incommensurable. She saw him and her lips rounded to a call. He sensed it through the traffic. Come in. Calling and calling. Come in.

“Come in....

“Out of the rain.”

Barry Pain, from the 1891
In a Canadian Canoe

This kind of thing wasn't to everyone's taste. Pain was caught up in the controversy over what was characterised as "the New Humour" (as exemplified in the works of Pain along with writers such as Jerome K Jerome, WW Jacobs, Israel Zangwill, JM Barrie and William Pett Ridge). Critics considered it arch, self-conscious and over-written, as described by this critique by Andrew Lang (Mr Andrew Lang on the new Humour, Press, Rōrahi XLVIII, Putanga 8040, 8 Hakihea 1891, Page 2, syndicated from Longman's Magazine).

But humour was just one aspect of Pain's highly varied output. As the ODNB says:

... it was his serious writing that earned critical acclaim during his lifetime. He was admired for his narrative ability and economy in a range of books that included novels, fantasies, a theological study, a detective story, and a series of parodies that were widely admired. In all, he wrote over sixty books and a mass of uncollected articles and short stories in every conceivable vein.
- N. T. P. Murphy, ‘Pain, Barry Eric Odell (1864–1928)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35362, accessed 28 May 2012]

A sampler of other Barry Pain works online:

• In a Canadian Canoe, The Nine Muses Minus One, and Other Stories (1891, Internet Archive inacanadiancano00paingoog) - his first collection of stories and essays, many originally in Granta, the style varying through humour, whimsy, reflective essay, and fantasy. This is the work that Andrew Lang so disliked as "the New Humour".
• The Octave of Claudius (1897, Internet Archive octaveofclaudius00painrich) - a macabre fantasy/SF novel about an impoverished young would-be novelist who is given £8000 by a mysterious benefactor as long as he agrees to be the subject of an experiment (which turns out to be along the lines of Dr Moreau).
• De Omnibus (1901, Internet Archive deomnibus00paingoog) - these Cockney humorous stories may not be to everyone's taste, but Pain comes up with the occasional gem, such as his narrator's garbling of the well-known riddle as:
  Mothers an' fawthers 'ave I none,
  But this man's sister was my brother's son.
• Lindley Kays (1904, Internet Archive lindleykays00paingoog) - a then long-awaited serious novel from Pain, telling the story of a man who breaks away from a stultifying trading family to become a successful dramatist.
• The Memoirs of Constantine Dix (1905, Internet Archive memoirsconstant00paingoo) - a collection of crime stories featuring the anti-hero Constantine Dix, a gentleman of leisure whose public life is devoted to helping criminals go straight, while privately he is a successful thief.
• The Exiles of Faloo (1910, Internet Archive exilesoffaloo00painuoft) - a dystopian novel set on a Pacific island, and focusing on the increasingly tense politics within the "Exiles Club", an elite governing group formed of criminals and outcasts from English society.
• The New Gulliver and Other Stories (1913, Gutenberg #33542) - a collection of satirical fantasy stories, the lead one concerning Gulliver's visit to the dystopian Ultima Thule, where the late-Victorian class system has been exaggerated into a society ruled by an intellectual/technical oligarchy.

- Ray

Animations

Firefall cinematic trailer - best seen in full screen.

I'm continually impressed by where animation is going these days. The above is the cinematic trailer for the Firefall multiplayer SF combat game; the particular scenario involves space marines protecting a mineral extraction device from the local wildlife it attracts. It's naff on many levels: hardware-obsessed, stereotypical gender exaggeration, unfeasible armour, dispensable ethnic character ... And yet the animation is so polished in terms of lighting, depth, chiaroscuro, attention to detail, and overall atmosphere, that I find it compelling to watch.

And then there's this second one, Sintel. Its origin is interesting: it's one of a number of collaborative animation projects produced by the Blender Foundation, the non-profit group responsible for the development of the open source 3D animation package Blender. The central character Sintel (Dutch for "ember") is a feisty teenage girl in a generic fantasy world, and she finds a dragon. Though it's entirely opposite in spirit to the Firefall one, it too is compelling, and for more than just the technical quality. It's possibly not safe for work, but not for the usual reasons: it is ... very moving.

Sintel - best seen in full screen.

- Ray

The Time of Achamoth

Yesterday afternoon I did a first-pass reading of a book I'm sure I'll return to: Michael Kennedy Joseph's 1977 science fiction novel The Time of Achamoth. MK Joseph (1914-1981) was a British-born New Zealand author and academic who wrote in fairly diverse genres (historical, war, adventure, and SF), all tending to be characterised by erudite historical and literary interests, traditional morality and philosophy, anti-war views, and a distinct interest in experimental writing. I've enthused previously about his experimental SF novel The Hole in the Zero (see The Hole in the Zero and the Update), so it was an opportunity I couldn't miss when I found an affordable UK-sourced copy of The Time of Achamoth on Amazon; it's moderately rare, and was only published in New Zealand.

The Time of Achamoth is a time-travel novel set initially in  near-future New Zealand. It begins with the historian protagonist, Mark Hollister, suddenly finding himself with a rifle in the Waitomo Caves about to shoot an Asian military officer. He doesn't do so, but while fleeing the scene he meets a young man called Harry who somehow knows what has happened. Harry takes him to Tau Station, a secluded research establishment, where he is rapidly recruited into a group called Tempo that is conducting time travel experiments.

Hollister is sceptical, so Tempo offer to send him to "some nice safe neutral spot" as a demonstration. In fact it sends him into the thick of battle in the World War One trenches, where he finds himself as a British officer and only narrowly escapes with his life. On his return, he gets the full explanation: that Tempo is using mental time travel into past lives, mediated by telepathy and the "The Man Upstairs", a shadowy figure from the future.

Hollister goes on three further trips: to the final days of the Paris Commune in 1871; to a jousting tournament (closely modelled on the Eglinton Tournament) at the faux-mediaeval estate of a Victorian aristocrat; and to a house party at a Georgian mansion, where he finds himself using anachronistic methods to solve a murder mystery.

During these trips, it becomes increasingly clear that the Tempo travellers are being attacked by hostile rival travellers from similar projects in the USA and Russia. However, this investigation is curtailed when Hollister returns to find Tau Station under attack by an armed student protest group. While escaping, he is captured in a gas attack, and finds himself imprisoned along with Russian and American travellers, at the Chinese equivalent of Tempo. Although Feng, who heads the project, is initially suspicious, they compare experiences and conclude that they are being set at each other by some unknown party, which is orchestrating the destruction of time travel projects. They agree to cooperate and undertake the dangerous experiment of going forward in time, in the hope of gaining information.

Feng tries, and dies. Hollister goes second, passing through many glimpses of the centuries to come: a dystopian New Zealand of feral teenagers and gated communities; neo-Puritan book burning at Oxford University; a wandering cleric plying airports; a child being told as a bedtime story a far-future mutated retelling of The Emperor's New Clothes; various glimpses of an increasingly decentralised low-population future as humanity eventually reaches the stars ("new planets named such like Poenamo, Elsinore, Merdeka, Kamikaze") ... Ultimately he finds himself in an android body talking to "the Caretaker", who is the "Man Upstairs" who has been guiding the travellers. In fractured English the Caretaker explains to Hollister that their common enemy is a Gnostic sect (headed by the demiurge Achamoth) which seeks to bring about the premature end of humanity by possessing individuals to commit destructive acts at key points in history (this is evidently what had happened to Hollister at the beginning of the novel). In Hollister's era, its instrument is the evil and ancient telepath Achamoth, and the Caretaker gives him a vision of its lair, a stone tomb with a giant head.

Hollister returns to his own time, where he and his colleagues identify the location: Karl Marx's tomb in Highgate Cemetery. Police reports show a recent enigma: the finding in a vault of a giant corpse shot with nylon-tipped arrows, and that of a Russian clerk. Achamoth, it seems, is already dead - but to close the timeline, Hollister and another traveller, Kornilov, have to go back make sure this showdown plays out exactly as history records. Hollister survives the encounter, and finds himself back on his original timeline in the abandoned ruins of Tau Station.

Just viewed as time travel SF, it's a well-constructed novel (its structure is strangely reminiscent of Keith Laumer's Dinosaur Beach). But it works on a number of other levels, primarily as a take on the problem of evil - in fact the same territory as tackled by Colin Wilson in The Mind Parasites, an attempt to explain the perception that history has repeatedly and spectacularly been driven by the dark side of humanity over the past few centuries (the Caretaker and Achamoth are not explicitly identified as God and the Devil, but the implication is there). Joseph's anti-war sentiments also show through, in his vignettes of the horrors of conflict; in a prefatory note, he credits the World War One poets Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden.

As with The Hole in the Zero and Joseph's mainstream novel I'll Soldier No More, the narrative makes strong use of existential vignettes - snippets of time that Hollister experiences - and Joseph's vivid and erudite prose conveys these powerfully. Many of them appear to be allusions to other writers and works: for instance, Hollister experiences at one point the mind of HG Wells as he coins the word "Morlock", and at another he becomes one of the prisoners in a scene clearly referring to Doré's classic engraving of Newgate Exercise Yard. I'm sure there are other allusions that I haven't yet identified. The Note says:

Readers may recognise that Hollister's narrative has association with the work of other operatives in the field including Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Karl Baedeker, Frank Jellinek, Ian Anstruther, Arthur Bryant, Dorothy Stroud, James Bruce, Steven Runciman, Hans Jonas and, of course, Herbert George Wells.

Frank Jellinek in particular must be the source for the Paris Commune segment; his 1937 The Paris Commune of 1871 is a classic account from a Marxist perspective. Ian Anstruther's 1963 The Knight and the Umbrella undoubtedly informed the segment based on the Eglinton tournament. The book cover is recognisably Karl Marx as depicted on his tomb; the New Zealand Book Council biography mentions that Joseph attended St Aloysius's College, Highgate Hill.

Tomb of Marx, Wikipedia photo by 'JohnArmagh'

Very little seems to have been written about The Time of Achamoth, but Bruce Alvin King rates it highly in his 1991 The Commonwealth Novel since 1960:

The Hole in the Zero (1967) and The Time of Achamoth (1977) ... were also the first New Zealand novels, possibly since Erewhon, to move into any variety of fantasy, apart from Frame's more psychic variations. Again, Joseph surpassed the realists, for instance, in Achamoth's vivid historical episodes, and in futuristic scenes that rival Wells and Burgess at the same time as they graciously allude to them. Achamoth neatly flips over the conventional role of New Zealand in futuristic fiction as post-cataclysmic haven, by presenting that notion from the local point of view.

- Ray

Conan the Barbarian

The trailer for the 1982 Conan the Barbarian entirely emphasises the violent action sequences, missing out its many character-driven and reflective scenes.

Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of. And unto this, Conan, destined to wear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow. It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure!
- introductory voiceover, Conan the Barbarian

Since the previous post on Total Recall not unnaturally mentioned Arnold Schwarzegger, I thought I'd follow up with a post on the film with probably his most iconic role outside the Terminator series, the 1982 Conan the Barbarian.

The movie has its roots in the "sword and sorcery" stories of Robert E Howard, an American pulp writer of the 1920s-1930s, but its plot is an original story - scripted by John Milius, adapting a draft by Oliver Stone - drawing loosely on episodes and characters, including Conan himself, from Howard's mythos of the fictional Hyborian Age (with more than a few homages to other movies). It's an epic and violent adventure - filmed in Spain around Madrid and Almería - that tells first of Conan's early life, starting with his enslavement as a child and training as a captive warrior, then moves on to his quest to kill Thulsa Doom, the magician-warlord who killed his parents.

The casting was unusual but effective. Arnold Schwarzenegger was perfect by physical type, and James Earl Jones charismatic as Thulsa Doom, and there were smaller roles for seasoned character actors: Mako (Mako Iwamatsu) as Akiro, Conan's magician mentor, and a cameo from Max von Sydow as King Osric. But the remaining characters were played by actors whose specialisations had hitherto not been in acting: Sandahl Bergman (Valeria, Conan's lover) was foremost a dancer; Gerry Lopez (the archer Subotai) was a champion surfer; and Ben Davidson and Sven-Ole Thorsen (as Thulsa Doom's sidekicks Rexor and Thorgrim) were an American Football player and a bodybuilder. This brought a confident and vigorous physicality to the roles.

Even with the relative lack of dialogue, there's never any doubt about what anyone, including Conan, is thinking and feeling. The film's emotional power is further driven by the acclaimed score by Basil Poledouris. The soundtrack is Wagnerian in its use of leitmotifs, the Conan theme - "The Anvil of Crom" - starting in epic form, then being requoted in calmer scenes and as the Love Theme. Thulsa Doom gets a choral leitmotif reminiscent of O Fortuna from Orff's Carmina Burana, but in fact based on the Dies Irae, and the film ends with a more explicit statement of the Dies Irae. It's good orchestral music by any standard, and I've appended YouTube links to Poledouris conducting Conan: The Symphony, an orchestral workup of the soundtrack.

Despite its generally macho storyline, I find Conan the Barbarian a strangely reflective film. Underneath all the action, there's a subtext of a personal journey. Conan begins as a traumatised dehumanised individual who knows nothing except fighting. Yet as the film proceeds, he acquires friends, learns of love and loss, and ultimately chooses full self-determination and freedom from the quest that has dominated his life. At this level, its story is about becoming human, and it's one of my favourite films.

I haven't seen the 2011 remake, but the reviews haven't been good, and in any case it shares little with the 1982 film except the character name.

- Ray

---

Wikipedia: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)
The Filmgoer's Guide to Conan the Barbarian - analysis at The Blog That Time Forgot
Conan the Barbarian - Music Soundtrack Suite

Conan The Symphony, Basil Poledouris:
Part 1 (Anvil of Crom - Riddle of Steel / Riders of Doom)
Part 2 (Gift of Fury / Atlantean Sword / Love Theme)
Part 3 (Funeral Pyre/ Battle of the Mounds)
Part 4 (Orphans of Doom / The Awakening)
Part 5 (Anvil of Crom - Encore)

Addendum: Julie Heyward - thanks! - just drew my attention to The Whole Wide World (1996), a film exploring the relationship between Robert E Howard and  Novalyne Price (Ellis) based on the latter's memoir of her friendship with Howard, One Who Walked Alone, during the final years of his life before his suicide (see book review). Both the book and film look interesting.

William Adams: The Old Man's Home

Pursuing a continuing thread about little-known Isle of Wight authors, in The Autobiography of Elizabeth M. Sewell (1907, Internet Archive autobiographyel00unkngoog) I just ran into a reference to the clergyman and author William Adams (1814-1848).  Adams was an acquaintance of Miss Sewell in the final six years of his life; he retired to Bonchurch suffering from tuberculosis, and died there at the age of 33. He's buried in the churchyard of the Old Church, Bonchurch (see page 69, Illustrated Handbook to the Isle of Wight, Volume 1, Edmund Venables, 1860). There's a blue plaque at his Shore Road house, Winterbourne - see Open Plaques - where, incidentally, Dickens wrote part of David Copperfield and the watercolourist Myles Birket Foster stayed when he painted On the beach at Bonchurch.

During his final years, Adams wrote a series of "Sacred Allegories", which were well-received in their day. While their didactic religious style tends not to be to modern taste - each section is followed by a concordance explaining the allegory - they're nevertheless classifiable as fantasy novelettes, and interesting in that light: see William Adams' Sacred Allegories in Jessica Amanda Salmonson's excellent "Weird Review" series.

image of Undercliff from 1882 Rivington edition

The most successful (and most accessible) of the Allegories was The Old Man's Home, which is set in the Isle of Wight, and begins on a cliff path near the village of B— (undoubtedly Bonchurch):

There is a scene on the coast of the Isle of Wight with which I have long since become familiar, but which never fails to exercise a soothing influence on my mind. It is at the eastern extremity of the landslip. Large portions of the cliff have fallen away, and formed a dell so broken and irregular, that the ground has the appearance of having at one time been agitated by an earthquake. But Nature has only suffered the convulsion to take place, in order that afterwards she might bestow her gifts upon this favoured spot with a more unsparing hand. The wild and picturesque character of the landscape is now almost lost sight of in its richness and repose. The new soil is protected from the storms of winter by the cliff from which it has fallen, and, sloping towards the south, is open to the full warmth and radiance of the sun. In consequence of this, the landslip has, as it were, a climate of its own ; and often, when the more exposed parts of the country still look dreary and desolate, is in the enjoyment of the blessings of an early spring. Such was the season at which I first visited it. The grey fragments of rock which lay scattered on the ground were almost hid by the luxuriance of the underwood, and countless wild flowers were growing beneath their shade. Below, the eye rested upon a little bay, formed by the gradual advance of the sea ; and all was so calm and peaceful, that as I watched the gentle undulation of the waters, I could fancy them to be moving to and fro with a stealthy step, lest they should disturb the tranquillity of the scene.

I have said that a visit to this favoured spot never fails with me to have a soothing influence. I feel as though I were treading on enchanted ground, and the whole scene were allegorical; for it reminds me that, in like manner, the wreck of all our earthly hopes and plans may but lay open our hearts to the influence of a warmer sunshine, and enrich them with flowers which the storms of life have no longer power to destroy. But I cannot now tell whether these thoughts have their origin in the scene itself, or in an incident that occurred the first time I visited it.

It was on the evening of the 18th of April, 1843. I had been long gazing upon it, and had imagined that I was alone, when my attention was arrested by a sigh from some one near me. I turned round, and saw a venerable old man seated upon a fragment of the fallen cliff ...

The man, a benign but somewhat confused 93-year-old called Robin, says he is "on his way home" and wants to get to B—. The narrator helps him toward the village, where a group of men unexpectedly take Robin into custody: he is an escapee from the asylum at the nearby town of N— (Newport) and, his minders say, has been mad for more than 50 years.

The narrator decides to investigate Robin's background, and the next day - with a strong intuition that Robin's "going home" is actually a metaphor for his impending death - goes to N— asylum and enquires.  Robin has indeed died (peacefully) overnight, and the asylum superintendent tells the narrator his story; that Robin was a formerly violent inmate who in old age had acquired a kind of saintly calm through the continuing delusion that he had a wife and family "at home", and would soon join them. This belief had proved infectious, with a calming effect on other patients, as well as on the superintendent's young daughter, Annie, who it turns out is seriously ill and later dies.

Finally, the narrator, determined to save Robin from a pauper's grave, pursues the only clue: a Bible belonging to Robin and dedicated to a Susan Wakeling. He enquires around the village of B—, and eventually finds an elderly widow who has very vague recollections of a Wakeling family. She does, however, strongly recall an epidemic of fever many years previously, and suggests that the narrator look in the churchyard. There he finds a tombstone that explains both the old man's destination on their first meeting, his firm belief in having a family, and the cause of his insanity: his wife and three children died in the epidemic 60 years previously. Robin - whose real name was Robert Wakeling - is finally "home" with his family.

While pious and sentimental, it's actually a rather good investigative and psychological mystery story: a plausible account of a benign delusion told in a highly realistic setting, so realistic that you suspect Adams of having built the story around a real person. But as Edmund Venables wrote, concerning the Old Church, Bonchurch:

It may not be unnecessary to inform the readers of "The Old Man's Home" that they will search in vain for the tomb of "Robert Wakeling" and his family, who are entirely creations of the author's fancy.

- p214, The Isle of Wight, A Guide, Edmund Venables, 1860

... and Adams himself was obliged to give a disclaimer in the preface to the third edition of the standalone volume of The Old Man's Home:

The Author is induced to annex this statement to the present Edition, in consequence of an erroneous impression which has prevailed, that the Old Man's Home is a true story. He trusts that he may look upon it as a sign that the picture of poor Robin has not been overdrawn; he enjoyed very peculiar advantages in the delineation of its outline, from having been long in the habit of hearing his father speak of the softened form which mental disorders assume under a gentle system of treatment, and at times accompanied him in his visits to Hanwell Asylum.

With respect to the local allusions which the narrative contains, he was led to introduce them from his affection for the scenes in the midst of which he wrote; and indeed the broken, yet rich and luxuriant, scenery of the Undercliffe seemed to have a kind of natural harmony with the Old Man's character.

image from 1882 Rivington edition

The Old Man's Home, William Adams, Fourth Edition, 1847 -  Google Books full view.
Sacred allegories, William Adams, 1849 - Google Books full view.

The Borrowers - not of this world

Somehow I'd managed to miss seeing, until yesterday, The Borrowers, Peter Hewitt's 1997 film adaptation of Mary Norton's classic children's book series about a family - later revealed to be a race - of miniature people who live by cannibalising items left around by humans. There have been other adaptations: the BBC's 1992 one springs to mind particularly, but there has also been a nice-looking 2010 anime adaptation from the studio that produced Spirited Away, and a very recent BBC adaptation over Christmas and New Year.

The Jacket

A slight curiosity of literature: Jack London's 1915 The Jacket (a.k.a. The Star Rover), which is online in various imprints at the Internet Archive (such as ID starrover01londgoog) and Project Gutenberg (Etext 1162). It tells of a university professor, Darrell Standing, wrongly imprisoned in San Quentin State Prison, who is subjected to torture by straitjacket when he is suspected of concealing information about stolen dynamite. He finds he can relieve the torment by astral travel, going through space and time to past lives.

I read it a while back, and it's an odd mix. The framing narrative of Standing's imprisonment is harrowing social realism, based on Jack London's conversations with ex-convict Ed Morrell.  As told later in the latter's 1924 autobiography The Twenty-Fifth Man (see Providentia or The Encyclopedia of American Prisons for an an overview), California's San Quentin was notorious for its treatment of prisoners in the early 20th century.  One form of punishment/coercion was the 'San Quentin Overcoat', a form of torture introduced in 1900 and only eradicated after multiple boards of enquiry and public debate over more than a decade.  But Standing's astral travels are a series of historical fantasy vignettes of varying literary quality; if the Wikipedia article is correct, at least part of the historical material comprised out-takes from a Western historical novel Jack London planned to write.

It was adapted to film twice: in 1923, and in 2005 as psychological / time travel thriller The Jacket.  I saw the latter last night, and it wasn't at all bad.  Structurally it's more coherent than the novel, taking the hero (a Gulf War veteran subjected to experimental treatment in an institution for the criminally insane in 1992) fifteen years into the future, a future in which he finds he died of an explained head injury in 1993. His attempts to elucidate how he died allow him to take information back into 1992 and become an agent of redemption in the lives of others who suffered through wrong decisions in the original timeline.

- Ray

The Last Ringbearer

MetaFilter currently has an excellent thread worth visiting - The Last Ringbearer - which has a wealth of links concerning 'parallel novels': works that retell others from the viewpoint of a different character or perspective.

The particular focus of the thread, however, is Middle-earth according to Mordor ("A newly translated Russian novel retells Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings' from the perspective of the bad guys") - this Salon article by Laura Miller discusses Последний кольценосец (The Last Ringbearer) by Russian paleontologist Kirill Eskov. Working by the aphorism that "history is written by the victors", this is a counter-text to The Lord of the Rings that tells of the last days and aftermath of the War of the Ring from the viewpoint of the forces of Sauron. As Miller describes it:

... a well-written, energetic adventure yarn that offers an intriguing gloss on what some critics have described as the overly simplistic morality of Tolkien's masterpiece.

In Yeskov's retelling, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science "destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!"
...
The protagonist of "The Last Ringbearer" is a field medic from Umbar (a southern land), who is ably assisted by an Orocuen -- that is, orc -- scout, who is not a demonic creature like the orcs in "The Lord of the Rings," but an ordinary man.
...
In Yeskov's scenario, "The Lord of the Rings" is a highly romanticized and mythologized version of the fall of Mordor, perhaps even outright propaganda; "The Last Ringbearer" is supposed to be the more complicated and less sentimental true story.

The Last Ringbearer is in tune with a number of criticisms of Tolkien's mythos mentioned in the MetaFilter thread that, much as I enjoyed the Lord of the Rings films, I don't find hard to disagree with. There's Michael Moorcock's 1989 essay Epic Pooh. And David Brin's J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress (Salon again, Dec 17th 2002), that attacks its pro-aristocratic Romanticism. And Fantasy and revolution, an interview in International Socialism in which fantasy author China Miéville says: "Tolkien's worldview was resolutely rural, petty bourgeois, conservative, anti-modernist, misanthropically Christian and anti-intellectual".

If you know Russian, an article by Kirill Eskov, How and why I wrote the apocryphal "Lord of the Rings", looks worth reading. Skimming via Google Translate: Eskov explains that he's not formally a writer, but a "graphomaniac" who writes for his own pleasure and that of friends. He mentions the long history of works that dissect and overturn fictional worlds, right back to Dio Chrysostom, whose rhetorical "Trojan speech" argued the Iliad to be pure PR, the siege of Troy a failure. He mentions the power to expose interesting facets of a work through the device of approaching a work from an ethical or aesthetic position radically different from that of its creator, citing examples including Andrzej Sapkowski (whose Złote popołudnie - Golden Afternoon - retells the story of Alice from the viewpoint of the Cheshire Cat), "Gloria Howard's take on Moby Dick from Ahab's wife's viewpoint" (I can find no reference to Gloria Howard - but the book has to be Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-Gazer: A Novel), and Tom Stoppard's Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

However, a further aspect of Eskov's motivation was to examine Tolkien's Middle Earth as a real world, and as a geologist he spotted problems. Plate tectonics requires that Middle Earth, as a supercontinent, would have central highlands, which Tolkien doesn't describe. Evidently there must be more to Middle Earth, so Eskov posits other continents and archipelagoes.  He asks about practicalities of Middle Earth that have to exist. What's the monetary system? How can Rohan sustain itself solely by breeding horses? What do the inhabitants of Mordor eat, and why is their capital city in the middle of a desert? And if Middle Earth is treated as a real world, then characters such as Aragorn and Faramir are historical personages whose actions, just as with historical figures in our world, are open to very differing interpretations Finally, he tackles the tropes of fantasy itself.  Fantasy has very strict canonical rules: no moral relativism, but a black-and-white morality. He accepted this groundrule, but attempted to arrange good and evil more realistically, by individual person rather than by race (his elves are "not evil and not good - they are simply alien").

For the moment anyway, The Last Ringbearer is available in the English translation by Yisroel Markov, authorised by the author, as a free download. To circumvent the undoubtedly grey copyright situation - see the Guardian's Lord of the Rings reworking a hit with fans, but not Tolkien estate - it's being released on a non-commercial basis. I won't link to it, but you'll find links via Eskov's Wikipedia entry and the Salon article.

Eskov has, by the way, written another novel called The Gospel of Aphranius, which attempts to construct a demythologised account of the events of the Gospels (rather like Frank Yerby's Judas, My Brother).

Update: see The Last Ringbearer, posted in December 2012 after I read the ePUB version of the 2nd Edition.

- Ray

Stranger in a strange land

These days Exeter Central Library is building up a strong collection of graphic novels, and whoever is doing the selection deserves credit for the variety of choice. I just borrowed The Arrival by Shaun Tan.

Burglar Bill and F Anstey

I first ran into F Anstey's comic recitations Burglar Bill and The Conscience-Curst! out of context in A Century of Humorous Verse, so it was a pleasure to find the full set in the Internet Archive: Burglar Bill, and other pieces for the use of the young reciter. With introduction, remarks, and stage-directions (1888, London : Bradbury, Agnew, & Co. - burglarbillother00anst). Originally published in Punch, they are do-able as recitations, but are actually a satire on the whole recitation format.

The title recitation, Burglar Bill - annotated with helpful directions to the reader - tells the maudlin story of a hardened burglar whose heart is touched by a meeting with a twee child.

Can it be his guardian angel,
Sent to stay his hand from crime?
[In a tone of awe]
He could wish she had selected
Some more seasonable time!
[Touch of peevish discontent here]

"Go away!" he whispers hoarsely,
"Burglars hev their bread ter earn.
I don't need no Gordian angel
Givin' of me sech a turn!"
[Shudder here, and retreat, shielding eyes with hand]
[Now change your manner to a naive surprise; this, in spite of anything we may have said previously, is in this particular instance NOT best indicated by a shrill falsetto]

But the blue eyes open wider,
Ruby lips reveal their pearl:
[This must not be taken to refer to the Burglar]
"I is not a Garden anzel,
Only — dust a yickle dirl!"
[Be particularly artless here and through next stanza]

All turns out well, when he helps the yickle dirl, Bella, by using his burglaring tools to open the stuck door of her doll's house. Declining the offer of meeting her family, he returns home a sadder and wiser man.

In a garret, worn and weary,
Burglar Bill has sunk to rest,
Clasping tenderly a crumpled
Cheesecake to his burly breast.
[Dwell lovingly upon the word "cheesecake," which you should press home upon every one of your hearers, remembering to fold your hands lightly over your heart as you conclude. If you do not find that several susceptible and eligible bachelors have been knocked completely out of time by this little recitation, you will have made less progress in your Art than may be confidently anticipated]

The other recitation I'd seen before is comic horror: The Conscience-Curst! tells of a stranger who confesses to a village policeman to the serial murder of various uncles.

As before, you should devote special attention to your title, which may be announced after this fashion. Stalk into the middle of the room or platform, with one hand in your bosom and your eyes staring as in a trance. Then, in a hollow voice, hurl the name of the poem at the nearest old lady:

THE CONSCIENCE-CURST!
[And, if you do it properly, she will jump like anything]

The night-owl shrieked: a gibbous moon peered pallid o'er the yew;
The clammy tombstones each distilled a dank unwholesome dew;
[Shudder here with your shoulders]
As through the sleeping village passed a wight of aspect weird,
Whose haggard face was half obscured by a long neglected beard.
[In order that the audience should grasp this idea, you should pass your hand lightly over your chin]

His convex spectacles gave back the gleaming of the moon,
He wore a pair of overcoats, although the time was June.
[Give a dark significance to this piece of apparent eccentricity]
Two slippers wrought in faded wools hid his ungainly feet,
And he danced a grisly polka-step all down the silent street.
[You might just indicate this, if you think you can do so in a sufficiently ghastly and impressive manner; otherwise — don't]

...

"My Uncle Joseph sold ('purvey,' I think, he termed it) meat,
His veins with vital fluid were abnormally replete!
[Close your eyes, and shiver here, as if at some unpleasing reminiscence]
Who would have thought so old a man ——?... [with a dazed abruptness]
Enough! — Within the tank
I flung the still unconscious corpse of my favourite Uncle Frank!
[Here you should strike the attitude of a man who is hurling a favourite uncle to his doom]

Burglar Bill, and other pieces for the use of the young reciter satirises various styles: "Sympathetic Artless"; "Sporting Sensational"; "Tear-Laden Domestic"; "Melodramatic Weird"; "Low-Life Realistic"; "Transatlantic Familiar"; "Sensually Harrowing"; "Marine Emotional"; "Bucolic Buttonholing"; "Triumphant Tragic"; "Voluptuously Melancholic"; and "Homely Pathetic". They're very worth reading, taking a dig not only at recitation but at late-Victorian poetry genres in general. Gaslight (a nice resource of Victorian weirdness) has a sampler here; and as I said, the full batch is here.

F Anstey - Thomas Anstey Guthrie - isn't much remembered these days, but as a late-Victorian / early 20th century writer he left a surprising trail of adaptations. It seems likely - though I've not seen direct confirmation - that Janet and Allan Ahlberg's Burglar Bill is loosely based on the Anstey character; his novella The Tinted Venus as adapted into the Broadway musical and film One Touch of Venus; The Brass Bottle became a movie more than once (e.g. The Brass Bottle); and the story Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers (a comedy in which a father and son magically switch bodies - see Gutenberg EBook-No. 26853) has been multiply filmed - see Wikipedia).

Check out F Anstey works online: Project Gutenberg / Internet Archive; they're variable but interesting.  His Baboo Jabberjee and A Bayard from Bengal comes across as a bit racist by modern standards, but are nevertheless socially well-observed 'outsider commentary' comedies about an educated-but-naive Indian character struggling with the foibles of English society.  Ones particularly worth checking out those - commercially unsuccessful, which is a pity - are those where Guthrie broke away from his Punch typecasting as a comic writer. The Statement of Stella Mabberly, for instance, is a pretty good psychological horror novel; and the 1891 Tourmalin's Time Cheques (1891) is in SF/fantasy territory. It tells of Peter Tourmalin, bored on a long ship journey who makes a deal with a 'time bank' enabling him to draw 'time cheques' that revisit previously deposited hours if he wants to take a break from routine.  He deposits the rest of the journey, and instantly finds himself at home in the middle of planning arrangements for his marriage. When he draws the cheques, however, they drop him into increasingly fraught out-of-sequence segments of the timeline aboard the ship, and complications increase as the interest accrued on the time deposit adds extra time where he revisits segments already experienced.

See Brian M. Stableford Yesterday's bestsellers: a journey through literary history, pages 69-, for a good overview of Anstey and his works; it mention's Anstey's largely unexplored talent for darker fantasy. Despite his success as a humorist, he expressed in his autobiography, A Long Retrospect (sampled here at Gaslight), his regret at the lack of success of his serious works.
- Ray

Fantasy/SF: recent reading

Further to The Eyre Affair: I just finished, and very much enjoyed, the second in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, Lost in a Good Book. As explained earlier, Thursday is a detective / security services operative in a world culturally similar to ours, but differing in its all-pervading relationship to literature, limited access to time travel, and the ability of some characters to jump in and out of books. Oh, and Wales is a socialist republic and cheese is illegal.

In Lost in a Good Book, Thursday finds her husband has been "sidelined" (i.e. wiped from history) by the Goliath Corporation in order to blackmail her into retrieving one of its executives she trapped inside Poe's poem The Raven. She is also confronted with the impending end of the world. Her attempts to elucidate both mysteries lead her into being apprenticed to Jurisfiction, an organisation that works inside books to police the text. Her mentor is Miss Havisham, who we find wears trainers when Dickens is not describing her: one of many examples of what goes in books hidden behind the reader. For instance, when Thursday is taken into Great Expectations to help Magwitch get ashore (I'm sure Fforde must have read John Sutherland's Can Jane Eyre be Happy on this problem), we see out of Pip's sight in another part of the graveyard that an archaeological dig is going on to find earlier drafts of the text). The prison hulk from which Magwitch escapes is meanwhile being parasitised by "grammasites" that suck adjectives from descriptions. All very enjoyable, and I can't wait to get on to the next in the series, The Well of Lost Plots.

Elsewhere, I recommend the recent Guardian Books Blog posting World of Fantasy: Conan the Barbarian and his lily-white women ("Is it ridiculous to criticise Robert E Howard's enjoyably pulpy Conan stories for their 1930s attitudes to women and race?"): both the article and its discussion have good recommendations to fantasy novels, some little known.

One I followed, and liked, is Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1915 non-mythos novel Beyond Thirty (widely retitled The Lost Continent). The setting is 2137 and the Thirty refers to 30°W; a border not crossed by the isolationist Pan-American Federation since the collapse of Europe during the First World War over a century previously. The novel follows the adventures of Lieutenant Jefferson Turck, commander of the Coldwater - a Pan-American "aerosubmarine" - who is separated from his ship and forced to take its small launch to land on what once was England. After finding only wilderness at what once was Devonport and encountering a small tribe on the Isle of Wight 1, Turck and his crew reach the site of London, now a lion-infested forest with a few ruins (one for David Platt's Where London Stood, I think) and larger tribes. He teams up with a young woman called Victory, who turns out to be Queen of England. After capture by the armies of Menelek, head of the Abyssinian Empire, they finally escape to civilisation, an enlightened Asian empire governed from Peking. Turck asks the Chinese emperor who won the war in Europe:

"Pan-America, perhaps, and China, with the blacks of Abyssinia," he said. "Those who did not fight were the only ones to reap any of the rewards that are supposed to belong to victory. The combatants reaped naught but annihilation. You have seen--better than any man you must realize that there was no victory for any nation embroiled in that frightful war."

"When did it end?" I asked him.

Again he shook his head. "It has not ended yet. There has never been a formal peace declared in Europe. After a while there were none left to make peace, and the rude tribes which sprang from the survivors continued to fight among themselves because they knew no better condition of society. War razed the works of man--war and pestilence razed man. God give that there shall never be such another war!"

Turck and Victory return to Pan-America, and all is well.

My return to Pan-America was very different from anything I could possibly have imagined a year before. Instead of being received as a traitor to my country, I was acclaimed a hero. It was good to get back again, good to witness the kindly treatment that was accorded my dear Victory, and when I learned that Delcarte and Taylor had been found at the mouth of the Rhine and were already back in Pan-America my joy was unalloyed.

And now we are going back, Victory and I, with the men and the munitions and power to reclaim England for her queen. Again I shall cross thirty, but under what altered conditions!

A new epoch for Europe is inaugurated, with enlightened China on the east and enlightened Pan-America on the west-- the two great peace powers whom God has preserved to regenerate chastened and forgiven Europe. I have been through much--I have suffered much, but I have won two great laurel wreaths beyond thirty. One is the opportunity to rescue Europe from barbarism, the other is a little barbarian, and the greater of these is--Victory.

It's a polemical curiosity, clearly inspired by ERB's outrage at the ongoing WW1 and the prospect of US isolationism allowing Europe to tear itself apart. It also has a touch of the sexism and racism that's being discussed at the Guardian Books Blog in relation to the works of Robert E Howard, and the dénouement seems thoroughly naive - a world split between two civilisations trying to displace a third looks like a recipe for further conflict. It's nevertheless strangely readable: see Erblist or Project Gutenberg EText-No. 149 for the text; and FantasticFiction for editions and covers.
- RG

1. Nitpick: ERB's geography is pretty poor here. He says:

We skirted the northern shore of the island in fruitless search for man, and then at last landed upon an eastern point, where Newport should have stood

Nope. Newport is about 4.5 miles inland from the northern tip of the Island.