Tag Archives: Contemporary Literature & Fiction

Enthusiasm and Divine Madness

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Enthusiasm and Divine Madness: On the Platonic Dialogue Phaedrus [Amazon, Abebooks, Publisher, Local Library] by Josef Pieper, trans Richard Winston, Clara Winston.

Had you told me I could enjoy an interpretation of Plato’s Phaedrus written by a German Neo-Thomistic philosopher noted for his sympathetic translation of C.S. Lewis, I would have been quite skeptical. Nevertheless, Pieper’s Enthusiasm and Divine Madness is accessible and engaging, although hardly as profound as other approaches I have read to the same dialogue.

To his credit, Pieper is concerned to encourage readers to explore the real issues of the dialogue, and not merely to treat it as a textual artifact. He assumes throughout, of course, that those readers will be Christian, heterosexual, and probably male. In his treatment, he proceeds through Plato’s text from start to finish, quoting seldom, but paraphrasing nearly its entirety.

The scene-setting and discussion of the earlier segments of the dialogue are especially good. Pieper is acutely conscious of how terribly funny so much of the repartee is. When it comes to discussing the frenzies, he dodges much of the matter of antique religion, evidently in an effort to keep the business “relevant” to the reader. In fact only the Muses are named out of the several deities in this section — Dionysos, Apollo, and Aphrodite go unmentioned. (For a contrasting treatment that grounds its relevance in those three gods particularly, see Aleister Crowley’s “Energized Enthusaism.”) Likewise, his treatment of the closing myth of Thoth both elides the divine characters of Tammuz and Thoth, and embraces the most superficial reading of the paradoxes in this writing about talking about talking about writing. (The reader who seeks an extreme sport of interpretation for this section must look to “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Derrida’s Dissemination.)

So while I may have found some of Pieper’s readings a bit shallow — especially in his anxieties to make Plato palatable for Christians — I still think he does a fine job of providing some context for the modern reader of the Phaedrus, and more importantly, throwing into relief the nature of the dilemmas addressed by the text. He intrudes very little of his own conclusions regarding the questions raised, even if he presumes a little too much about his readers. I suppose the presumptions were statistically warranted anyhow — at least in the mid-20th century when he wrote this book.

Men, Martians and Machines

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Men, Martians and Machines [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] by Eric Frank Russell.

This slender 1950s sf volume (my copy is from 1965) contains an introductory short story regarding the “emergency pilot” Jay Score, and then a series of three novellas about the extrasolar voyages of the spaceship Marathon. All are told in the voice of Sarge, a sergeant-at-arms for space-going vessels. Even in the opening pages, there’s some suspect attention given to racial difference, implying that the “Negro” humans who are given medical duties are as different from “white Terrestrials” as are the many-tentacled and alien-brained Martians who are another part of the crew.

Each novella introduces a new exoplanet, and the encounters with indigenous intelligences are all ultimately hostile. Captain McNulty’s perennial caution about harming natives gets mild scorn from Sarge. The whole thing has a sort of “boys’ adventure” feel to it, with lots of “thrilling” violence and “good-natured” grumbling banter.

These tales offer nothing like sexual impulse or even identity for their characters. The “mixed” crew doesn’t include women. Everyone of whatever species on the Marathon uses masculine pronouns, and the details of Martian sexuality aren’t given even the consideration of a passing enigma. Nor does any notion of gender or sexuality arise in considering the newly-encountered creatures of distant worlds.

The Martians are notable for being near-delirious chess enthusiasts, to the extent that they are never not thinking about the game–while their peculiar mental constitutions allow them to direct their attentions simultaneously for other tasks. I wonder if Russell was cued by Edgar Rice Burroughs to make chess an essential part of the Martian culture.

It almost goes without saying that there’s no technological speculation of current interest in this book, and there are a few mild clunkers–most notably the primitive approach to photography. It was not a read I’d counsel anyone to seek out for pleasure or enlightenment, although it was hardly a heavy lift.

Declare

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Declare [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Tim Powers

I came to Tim Powers’ Declare on the strength of a friend’s recommendation, and also Charles Stross’ comparison to his own work in The Atrocity Archives. Although the subject matter of espionage plus supernatural elements was certainly similar to Stross’ “Laundry” novels, I was surprised to find myself comparing Declare to a very different, and altogether more popular book: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Both are bulky, character-oriented novels rooted in the socio-political frames of particular periods; both are self-consciously English; both have emotional depth; both mix in some real historical persons as characters; both introduce their central supernatural elements in a gradual manner; and in both cases those elements are anchored in archaic intelligences and their complex relations with humanity. I would even compare the narrative role that Powers assigns to T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”) to that occupied by the Raven King in Clarke’s book. And both Powers and Clarke are performing a comparable sort of transcendent pastiche: adding magic to the LeCarre spy thriller on the one hand and to the Austen saga of realist satire on the other. Powers gets more points for fidelity to history, Clarke for verisimilitude of magic.

Comparisons aside, I did very much enjoy Declare. It was not a flawless book. There was a certain attribution of supernatural efficacy to Christian piety and sacraments that was never properly justified, and I occasionally found a sentence in laughable need of easy repair. (An example of both from p. 486: “He opened his mouth to speak the first words of the Our Father, but realized that he had forgotten them.”) But there is a healthy and profitable use of dramatic irony — attentive readers can stay a half-step ahead of the central characters — and Powers manages to instill a real numinosity into the higher orders of espionage that he invents for World War II and the Cold War. The psychology of double-agency is a long-standing interest of mine, and Powers makes it central to his novel in a way that I appreciated. The recruitment and induction of spies (“agent-runners”) is presented through an explicitly initiatory framework that should be accessible and engaging to those who share those interests with me as well.

Father, interrupted Manfred, I pay due reverence to your holy profession; but I am sovereign here, and will allow no meddling priest to interfere in the affairs of my domestic. If you have aught to say, attend me to my chamber – I do not use to let my Wife be acquainted with the secret affairs of my state; they are not within a woman’s province. My lord; said the holy man, I am no intruder into the secrets of families. My office is to promote peace, to heal divisions, to preach repentance, and teach mankind to curb their headstrong passions.

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]

The Gone-Away World

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Gone-Away World [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Nick Harkaway.

Although I came to this novel on the basis of my appreciation of a later work by the same author, it made an eerily good match for the most recent feature film I enjoyed. If you liked the martial arts action, twisted humor, melodramatic pathos, and reality-warping mindfuckery of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, you might find that Nick Harkaway’s doorstop 2008 first novel actually delivers a kindred experience.

The Gone-Away World contains about half a dozen major anagnorises or revelatory plot pivots, each with perfectly adequate narrative preparation and often outright foreshadowing. After getting caught with my pants down by a couple of these, I got really vigilant, paying special attention to what the story hadn’t told me at that point, and my effort was rewarded with being able to anticipate the next big surprise by maybe two or three pages. Then as I kept on reading, feeling pleased with myself, I got surprised again! (Well, I sort of saw that coming.) And again! (OMG, how could I fail to have seen that coming!) It was like losing a sparring bout.

The semi-fantastic post-apocalyptic setting is definitely sui generis (although comparisons others have made to Vonnegut have some merit), and it took me a few of the book’s longish chapters to get comfortable with the narrative framing. But even before that point I found the prose fast-moving and congenial.

There’s possibly an allegory here, certainly a parable. I had to wonder if Harkaway named “FOX”–“the gunk … inFOrmationally eXtra-saturated” (259) that stabilizes reality after the Go Away War has totally disrupted it– as a conscious poke at US propaganda media. The book takes aim at even bigger troubles, though, if you want to read it that way. The repeated tacit references to Andromeda in the final arc were poignant.

On the whole, I liked this novel a lot and found it to be a lively ride. It fell a little short of the tremendously high esteem I have for Harkaway’s Gnomon, but that’s hardly grounds to dismiss it. It is perhaps, as I’ve seen some suggest, more accessible than the later book, while still delivering a considerable taste of what the writer has to offer.

Ares Express

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Ares Express [Amazon, Local Library] by Ian McDonald.

Ares Express is classed as a sequel to the author’s wonderful far-future Mars story Desolation Road. As I anticipated, the continuous characters from Desolation Road are few and somewhat peripheral. It would be a fine stand-alone read, and no one should avoid it for lack of familiarity with the previous volume.

Unlike his first Martian book with its sprawling ensemble, McDonald really focuses this one on the single heroine Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th, and the time-frame of the story is much briefer, so McDonald doesn’t pull off the same astonishing combination of little stories adding up to a big one. Although he still manages to avoid the word Mars throughout the novel, he also furnishes a lot of additional information about the fourth planet and its history, religions, and relations to “Motherworld,” in ways that are more direct than those of Desolation Road.

“Naked to our lens, human imagination had engineered its surface. Whether watered by slow canals, galloped across by green or red barbarians; contemplated by a wistful autumn people; the little world next one out, unlike the other globes in the system, rocky or smothered with steam, had always possessed a geography. Names were written on its skin.” (251-2)

Ares Express is full of thematic and iconic connections to Peter Pan. Sweetness kicks off the events of the book by fleeing her arranged wedding: she doesn’t want to grow up, at least not in the way dictated by her family — part of the engineer caste perpetually living on the massive nuclear-powered trains that serve as the principal long-distance transport on Mars. The Captain Hook role is occupied by Devastation Harx, a cult leader attempting to incite planetary cataclysm from his airship cathedral. The book is chock-full of urchins and micro-societies of voluntary castaways.

While the central course of events in Ares Express make up a coming-of-age novel, the most significant secondary plot-line features the adventures of Sweetness’ Grandmother Taal in her efforts to rescue the girl (and the planet). As a counterpoint to the rollicking cinematic action of Sweetness’ journey, Grandmother Taal’s story is more literary and episodic.

It’s no wonder to me that McDonald took about thirteen years to finish a second Mars story — his vision is too fine to waste on a rush job, and it’s clear that he had the necessary inspiration to continue here. Maybe there’ll be a third someday!

The Third Policeman

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Third Policeman [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Flann O’Brien, introduction by Denis Donoghue.

I am puzzled by the jacket copy on the John F. Byrne Irish Literature Series edition of The Third Policeman, which calls it a “brilliant comic novel.” Surely, this story is dark as dark can be, and portrays a tragedy with exacting, clinical detail. The tale is in fact profoundly absurd, and checkered with the narrator’s preoccupation with a perverse body of scholarship surrounding a narcoleptic alchemist. But that’s bicycling for you.

To experience the full effect of this novel, I recommend avoiding advance glosses of the plot, although the plot is really only a fraction of the value of reading it, but this plot is reeled out in an unusual and impressive manner. Moreover, such glosses tend to have inaccuracies, like the jacket copy’s misconception that the “narrator … is introduced to … de Selby’s view that the earth is not round but ‘sausage-shaped'” while at the police station, when in fact he has clearly done his exhaustive study of de Selby long before.

The 1999 introduction by Denis Donoghue insists on quoting a piece of a letter from author Flann O’Brien to William Saroyan, in which the ending of the book is perfectly spoiled. This same letter excerpt also appears at the end of the book, having been appended by the editors at the original (posthumous) 1967 publication, apparently in the belief that readers might need this assistance after failing to comprehend what they had read, despite it being as plainly put as possible. Donoghue’s introduction is otherwise worth reading (after the novel), with its brief biography of O’Brien (pseudonym of Brian O’Nolan) and a debatable attempt to classify the book as Menippean satire.

But the real attraction of this book is the wonderful language, which alternates among three modes. There are artful descriptions of imponderables. “The silence in the room was so unusually quiet that the beginning of it seemed rather loud when the utter stillness of the end of it had been encountered” (105). There are careful reviews of academic argumentation. “His conclusion was that ‘hammering is anything but what it appears to be’; such a statement, if not open to explicit refutation, seems unnecessary and unenlightening” (144-5 n). And there are personal encounters featuring ambivalent dialogues in spare and careful language. “And as I went upon my way I was slightly glad that I had met him” (49).

The book is organized into twelve chapters. If these reflect an esoteric infrastructure such as astrological houses, I haven’t persuaded myself so. The pace of the prose is fast, even if the pace of events described is sometimes so slow as to be entirely immobile. The Third Policeman had been on my virtual TBR pile for many years, and my actual one for some months, when I finally read it in a matter of a few days. Alas, I may read it again!

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