There's a lot to the person of Dylan Thomas, to the point where I don't feel like the right person to really talk about it as others who actually like his work are bound to have done a better job of it than I ever could.
As you may guess, I am not a fan of his collection Adventures in the Skin Trade. The unfinished titular novel is the most interesting piece as, though there are times when the author inserts his barely-comprehensible symbolism into the story, overall the characters are given some actual depth, as far as can be expected given the relative shortness of the fragment. The need for things to happen seems to have kept Thomas in check.
That is not so with the other stories in this book. Some are interesting and because Thomas shows restraint, are fairly competent. These are also usually extremely bizarre, like the story of a child crucifying an idiot to a tree or of a father who seduces his daughter and burns the incestuous product of the union in a big bonfire. But very soon Thomas starts to lose himself, with stuff like The Lemon still having the same bizarre furnishings but the whole thread of narrative is lost amid a confusing jumble of perspective shifts and symbolic statements which are so odd and lacking in logic that one is left to consider how much of this is actually happening in the story and how much is symbolic word-porn.
So too a story of a man in love with his two scarecrows is drowned in so much poetic moonshine that it becomes almost impossible to follow what is even being said. This is largely the style of most of the "stories" in the middle section of this book, made worse with some stories having no paragraphs or much of a break at all, being corner-to-corner walls of text that go page after page. All until the last two or so where Thomas suddenly dials back on the sensory overload. The last story, The Followers, would seem a bit tedious in most other books but in this one it was a welcome relief because what was happening was actually comprehensible: two old farts follow a woman in the rain and spy on her through her window. Nice, simple and lawsuit-worthy !
Thursday 30 June 2016
Tuesday 21 June 2016
The Devil's Christmas Box by H.C.Mason (1921)
H.C.Mason was a South African astronomer, newspaper editor and veteran of the Anglo-Boer war. Unfortunately there is no more information about him available at present outside of what was written down in his obituary.
This appears to be Mason's only pure novel, he wrote besides this a collection of essays and a book on religion and philosophy. The Devil's Christmas Box itself is somewhat of a mess, a mixture of questionable science fiction, long didactic sermons on socialism and a love story. The whole thing is introduced via confused pseudo-scientific gobbledygook about the novel proper being dictated to a medium from off planet.
The part that is rather hard to swallow is how the author of this mysterious message claims that there are countless worlds with an absolutely identical history to Earth, up to bearing the exact duplicates of every person on Earth. This theory, which appears to have had some life in science fiction circles due to it being presented in Tales of Tomorrow three decades after this book was published, is laughable if only one knows anything about probability. Nor is it helped when the author claims that even the stars as seen from these other planets are exactly identical as seen from the globe. And yet towards the end the narrator goes on about how the duplicate beings on such planets might be united in death as one and in fact function as sort of continous reincarnation of one person into the same life, to try and make a better show of it. He of course completely forgets his own statements as to the absolutely identical nature of all these mirror Earths, down to the most minute detail, where no deviation can occur without some extra planetary influence, like his own. So this seems to me a rather pointless idea of an eternal life.
When the story itself begins, it is just a romance, focusing on Ronald Sanderson, one of those main characters, extremely handsome, strong and an absolute genius, whose statements about his own cardinal importance to the world and the ability to acquire any political seat he should strive for are not, in this one instance, to be taken as vanity, because they are simply stating an absolute truth ! You know, one of those characters you hope get their asses kicked sooner or later. The first part, which deals with an alternate future where a Boer rebellion against the South African Goverment is put down successfully, includes scenes of Ronald's time in the army, terrible crash landing in enemy territory and him being cared for by his one true love while behind enemy lines. It honestly feels this is the strongest part of the book and had Mason simply stuck to this and expanded on it, it may have been a good read.
The second part, with a tyrannical League of nations that the main character tries to depose via bomb threats but ends up accidentally blowing up the world, seems incongruous to the preceding section, and though the ending scene of the world's end is sufficiently grim to at least be entertaining, it's all rather sketchy, with barely any details and is over far too quickly.
The other negatives include a part detailing Ronald's school dayss which simply drags on ad infinitum, or the incessant prattlings of Professor Selliers (who, old man though he is, is friends with Ronald's sister since she is twelve and then marries her later on, nothing at all off-putting about that) about the damnable state of capitalism and the virtues of socialism, which in his view should be based and put in operation in accordance with religion ! Clearly it seems very credible that, like Mason writes in the introduction, the book was written when there was "nothing but propaganda" out talking about Soviet Russia. Because if it was written any later, he would probably have to know how pro-religious his chosen world-view really was.
Another interesting part is how Mason tiptoes around the idea of the native population of South Africa. He never features any until the very end, and even then their emancipation seems to have come in part from the Tyrannical League being in power....though Mason doesn't say that it's a bad thing, he goes on about hurting European resettlement in Africa as if that was in any way important.
In short, a confusing and confused hodgepodge of different ideas and stories which never really comes together.
This appears to be Mason's only pure novel, he wrote besides this a collection of essays and a book on religion and philosophy. The Devil's Christmas Box itself is somewhat of a mess, a mixture of questionable science fiction, long didactic sermons on socialism and a love story. The whole thing is introduced via confused pseudo-scientific gobbledygook about the novel proper being dictated to a medium from off planet.
The part that is rather hard to swallow is how the author of this mysterious message claims that there are countless worlds with an absolutely identical history to Earth, up to bearing the exact duplicates of every person on Earth. This theory, which appears to have had some life in science fiction circles due to it being presented in Tales of Tomorrow three decades after this book was published, is laughable if only one knows anything about probability. Nor is it helped when the author claims that even the stars as seen from these other planets are exactly identical as seen from the globe. And yet towards the end the narrator goes on about how the duplicate beings on such planets might be united in death as one and in fact function as sort of continous reincarnation of one person into the same life, to try and make a better show of it. He of course completely forgets his own statements as to the absolutely identical nature of all these mirror Earths, down to the most minute detail, where no deviation can occur without some extra planetary influence, like his own. So this seems to me a rather pointless idea of an eternal life.
When the story itself begins, it is just a romance, focusing on Ronald Sanderson, one of those main characters, extremely handsome, strong and an absolute genius, whose statements about his own cardinal importance to the world and the ability to acquire any political seat he should strive for are not, in this one instance, to be taken as vanity, because they are simply stating an absolute truth ! You know, one of those characters you hope get their asses kicked sooner or later. The first part, which deals with an alternate future where a Boer rebellion against the South African Goverment is put down successfully, includes scenes of Ronald's time in the army, terrible crash landing in enemy territory and him being cared for by his one true love while behind enemy lines. It honestly feels this is the strongest part of the book and had Mason simply stuck to this and expanded on it, it may have been a good read.
The second part, with a tyrannical League of nations that the main character tries to depose via bomb threats but ends up accidentally blowing up the world, seems incongruous to the preceding section, and though the ending scene of the world's end is sufficiently grim to at least be entertaining, it's all rather sketchy, with barely any details and is over far too quickly.
The other negatives include a part detailing Ronald's school dayss which simply drags on ad infinitum, or the incessant prattlings of Professor Selliers (who, old man though he is, is friends with Ronald's sister since she is twelve and then marries her later on, nothing at all off-putting about that) about the damnable state of capitalism and the virtues of socialism, which in his view should be based and put in operation in accordance with religion ! Clearly it seems very credible that, like Mason writes in the introduction, the book was written when there was "nothing but propaganda" out talking about Soviet Russia. Because if it was written any later, he would probably have to know how pro-religious his chosen world-view really was.
Another interesting part is how Mason tiptoes around the idea of the native population of South Africa. He never features any until the very end, and even then their emancipation seems to have come in part from the Tyrannical League being in power....though Mason doesn't say that it's a bad thing, he goes on about hurting European resettlement in Africa as if that was in any way important.
In short, a confusing and confused hodgepodge of different ideas and stories which never really comes together.
Tuesday 14 June 2016
Uncle Bijah's Ghost by Jennette Lee (1922)
Jennette Lee (1860/1-1951) (also going by Jennette Perry Lee and Jennette Barbour Perry Lee) was a teacher of Philosophy, Rhetoric and Composition and later teaching courses on Criticism. She married clergyman Gerald Stanley Lee. That is the extent of the relevant information I could really find about her, not even a single photograph. I do know that her novel "Simeon Tetlow's Shadow" was adapted into the 1918 silent film Ruler of the Road, which may or may not have become lost since then.
Uncle Bijah's Ghost starts out promising: with the arrival of the late Abijah Bowen's distant relations, coming to take up the place after his death. There are strange rumours about the house and the way he died. Phoebe, the eldest daughter of Phineas Bowen, finds herself confronted with feelings and experiences that she can't explain and there is a genuine atmosphere of rising dread as we learn more about Old Bijah.
However, at about two thirds of the way through all this action grinds to a halt and we have Phoebe's father going on a lengthy diatribe about elementals and mental impressions on objects, accidental telepathy and whatnot and it effectively kills the whole atmosphere of the piece, so intriguing before, as we never have any of the previous mysterious and supernatural events recur and instead the last pages of the book are taken up with a "Treasure hunt", which amounts to digging below the one tree directly facing the house to find it. There's a momentary discovery of a large metal object and one hopes that some sort of sinister twist would be involved, but apparently all it is is something that has even more money in it.
I'm not sure why the author decided to throw the entire plot overboard, but I honestly can't say it had any positive results. The book's ending seems a tad sudden too, as Bijah's old house maid is brought into the story more then halfway through to do basically nothing, and the younger children are almost completely incidental to the proceedings.
Uncle Bijah's Ghost starts out promising: with the arrival of the late Abijah Bowen's distant relations, coming to take up the place after his death. There are strange rumours about the house and the way he died. Phoebe, the eldest daughter of Phineas Bowen, finds herself confronted with feelings and experiences that she can't explain and there is a genuine atmosphere of rising dread as we learn more about Old Bijah.
However, at about two thirds of the way through all this action grinds to a halt and we have Phoebe's father going on a lengthy diatribe about elementals and mental impressions on objects, accidental telepathy and whatnot and it effectively kills the whole atmosphere of the piece, so intriguing before, as we never have any of the previous mysterious and supernatural events recur and instead the last pages of the book are taken up with a "Treasure hunt", which amounts to digging below the one tree directly facing the house to find it. There's a momentary discovery of a large metal object and one hopes that some sort of sinister twist would be involved, but apparently all it is is something that has even more money in it.
I'm not sure why the author decided to throw the entire plot overboard, but I honestly can't say it had any positive results. The book's ending seems a tad sudden too, as Bijah's old house maid is brought into the story more then halfway through to do basically nothing, and the younger children are almost completely incidental to the proceedings.
Thursday 2 June 2016
Grinmar, A Novel by Nathan Kussy (1907)
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| Picture courtesy of the Kussy Family Pictures at Picasaweb |
Nathan Kussy was a Jewish lawyer and member of the Board of education in the US (presumabely New Jersey but I'm not sure) whose father was born in Bohemia and who wrote two things of interest. The Abyss, a novel about beggars and outcasts which is described by the Columbia Daily Spectator thusly
"Such unbelievable practices as the maiming of a child's hand to enable him to become a better beggar are described in great detail. The incident of a deformed girl who was encased in a monkey's skin and trained to pass off as one is another of the abhorent pictures he draws. At times he is extremely sentimental. "
The other is the current work, which appears to be Kussy's first, published about nine years before Abyss. It takes place in the Fifteen hundreds and concernes the diabolical plan of bloody vengeance of one old miser against all his enemies, who keep fawning over him to win his inheritance.
The story is very well handled and when Kussy is compelled to deal with his human characters, he draws you in and writes very well indeed, his title character is a charming rogue, who takes immense pride in entertaining his guests before he leaves them to their demise. The only part worth lamenting is that Kussy added a long section concerning the changes of the weather before and after the main text. The prologue does at least do it's job of setting up the terrible snowstorm at the novel's outset, but the epilogue prattles poetically a bit too long, and honestly could have been cut except for sections of the final instalment (for both prologue and epilogue come in several parts) which directly tie into the novel's end.
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