Category: Reviews

Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse

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At first sight this is an odd book for a German author, who as a young man had sufficiently strong callings to the priesthood that he briefly attended a seminary. But in 1911, in his mid 30’s, Hesse visited India and was introduced to Hindu mysticism and this has undoubtedly influenced this novel written in 1922. The story is set in ancient India, around 2500 years ago, it follows Siddhartha, and to a lesser extent his friend Govinda, in their quest for spiritual enlightenment. At first this leads them as young men to abandon their family homes and all their belongings and live in the forests as ascetic samanas, training their bodies to need nothing, using extended fasting and lack of clothes apart from a loincloth to preserve decency. This was a life of meditation and a severe deprivation of the body. A sample of the thoughts of Siddhartha are shown below and give a flavour of the sometimes difficult to follow text as Hesse can get caught up in the tautological expressions that he uses to try to explain Siddhartha thought processes for pages as a time.

Siddhartha and Govinda live with other samanas for a long time, occasionally begging for scraps of food as the bare minimum to stay alive but eventually they hear of a great teacher called Gautama (Buddha) and decide to travel to hear him teach. They eventually reach Gautama and hear him speak but whilst Govinda immediately resolves to follow the Buddha, Siddhartha instead explains that he feels that such enlightenment cannot be taught but must be individually gained through experiences and solitary meditation so the two friends part company. Leaving Govinda, Siddhartha travels until he reaches a river and there meets a ferryman who will become a significant character later in the book but for now he simply gets him to the other side whereupon he walks on to the next town. It is here that Hesse completely threw me as I thought I understood the path to enlightenment that Siddhartha was going to follow, but instead, on entering the town he sees a wealthy courtesan and is filled with desire. She however is not interested in the half starved gaunt and long haired ascetic standing in front of her and tells him that if he wants to know her better he has to be wealthy, clean and well dressed and he duly throws over his calling, gets his hair cut and body cleaned and perfumed, becomes a merchant and eventually earns a place in her bed. Definitely not what I had expected.

I admit I was somewhat daunted when beginning the book, not helped by Hesse’s undeserved reputation as a not very approachable writer, but as I read on I got more engrossed by the story and by the time of Siddhartha’s sudden change in direction I was highly intrigued as to where the novel was going and loved the ultimate resolution. It’s probably not a book for everyone, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. This is another of the Penguin Drop Caps series and eventually I will read all twenty six of these books, an explanation of the concept can be found on my my blog introducing the series here where I am also including links to each of the books as I review them.

Crusader Castles – T E Lawrence

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Originally written as Lawrence’s thesis for his Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern History at Oxford University in 1910 this was his first time in the Middle East, a part of the world that would become forever linked to him during the First World War as he became famous as Lawrence of Arabia. It doesn’t only deal with Crusader castles however as the year before he had cycled extensively in France exploring the castles there and this is also made use of in his paper. The basis of the thesis is exploring the differences and similarities of European castles with those constructed in the Middle East as part of the Crusades to determine if the castle builders in the East took their inspiration from Byzantine castles they found there, as was the belief of scholars at the time, or if they were more heavily influenced by the western European castles they had left behind. Lawrence was firmly of the opinion that the European castles drove the design of the Crusader castles and his thesis was instrumental in changing the opinion of academics in the subject as it was so well researched and full of examples making his case, most of which hadn’t been studied first hand before, that it ultimately resulted in his First Class degree. This sounds like it could be quite a dry subject but actually it is surprisingly well written and one of his tutors encouraged him to get it published soon after it was submitted, however the sheer number of photographs and drawings, none of which could sensibly left out, would have made such a project financially unviable in the 1910’s.

One interesting feature of the book is the addition of Lawrence’s notes alongside the text from his planned revisions in the 1930’s, these sometimes add to the text but quite often are almost his thought processes regarding what he has written. The section of the book reproduced below, which is discussing the fortifications at Carcassonne in France shows both these types.

Sometimes the notes are somewhat ironic, where he either no longer agrees with what he wrote or how he wrote it, or even the references he cites. I have long had an interest in castles and architecture mainly from having been taken to most of the extant castles in Wales as a young boy with my family. I do love the chance to visit castles I haven’t been to before and a trip to the Levant in 1996 allowed me to follow, if only briefly, in Lawrence’s footsteps.

Below is one of my photographs of Krak des Chevaliers in Syria, described by Lawrence “as a finished example of the style of the Order (The Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, commonly known as the Knights Hospitaller) and perhaps the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world”. This castle is truly enormous, as can be appreciated from the barely visible person standing on top of the Warden’s Tower, a place I had been an hour or so earlier. Lawrence dedicates many pages to this castle in the thesis with extensive descriptions, plans, photographs and drawings, the result of spending five days intensively studying the castle.

The book concludes with several of the letters Lawrence wrote during his travels in the UK and Europe, almost exclusively to his mother but dealing more with the architecture and military history he was learning about. These were originally published, with a foreword by his mother, as the second volume of the Golden Cockerel first edition of this work printed in 1936, a year after Lawrence’s untimely death in a motorcycle accident. But nowadays they are normally included with the main text in one volume as in this lovely Folio Society edition from 2010.

The Poems of Robert Burns

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There is one name that comes to mind immediately when you think of New Years Eve and that is Robert Burns due to the international fame of Auld Lang Syne (Old Long Since) a song about a couple of friends enjoying a drink and reminiscing about things they have done in the past. But there is a lot more to Burns than a song that most people know the first verse and chorus to, even if they don’t know any more or what it means and this edition of The Penguin Poets from 1946 is a great introduction. The collection consists of forty three poems and fifty six songs and helpfully for those of us that struggle with the Scots language and dialect there is a single page glossary of common words and translations of lots of others alongside the lines where they occur.

I first came across Burns at school where he was introduced as one of the pioneers of the romantic movement in poetry although we didn’t do much more than the really famous ones including, ‘To a Mouse’, ‘To a Haggis’, ‘A Red, Red Rose’ and the comedic rage expressed in ‘To a Louse’ where Burns gets so annoyed when he sees a louse on a lady’s bonnet in church, all of which are of course in this collection. I really fell in love with the musicality of Burns’ verse however when I was lucky enough to be at The Scotch Malt Whisky Society in Edinburgh for Burns Night and to hear the poems recited with the correct accent made for a wonderful evening which of course included ‘To a Haggis’ and the appropriate, for the venue, ‘Scotch Drink’, the first verse of which (after the initial quote from Solomon’s Proverbs) goes as follows…

Let other Poets raise a fracas
‘Bout vines, an’ wines, an’ drucken Bacchus,
An’ crabbit names an’ stories wrack us,
An’ grate our lug:
I sing the juice Scotch bear can mak us,
In glass or jug.

Scotch bear is barley and Burns is of course talking about whisky, the full twenty one verses of the poem can be read here, let no-one say that Burns wasn’t keen to celebrate his national drink. When I first started to read this book for this blog I did have some problems with the unfamiliar Scots dialect but as I progressed through the works I gradually found it easier to understand and found I needed to refer back to the glossary less and less. Interestingly when I have heard Burns recited I have often had far fewer issues with understanding, I guess this is similar to the way I find reading Middle English easier if I read it aloud and it then seems to make more sense than just reading silently.

So let’s finish where we started with Auld Lang Syne. This is the original version from 1788, in 1795 he changed the first line of the chorus to ‘For auld lang syne, my dear’

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne?

(Chorus)
For auld lang syne, my jo,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp!
And surely I’ll be mine!
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

We twa hae run about the braes
And pu’d the gowans fine;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary foot
Sin auld lang syne.

We twa hae paidl’d i’ the burn,
Frae mornin’ sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin auld lang syne.

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
And gie’s a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak a right guid willy waught,
For auld lang syne.

Happy new year

The Gospel As Recorded by St. Mark

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As this blog is being published on Christmas eve, I have taken the opportunity to review another of the privately printed Christmas books given by Alan and Richard Lane as gifts, in this case the book for Christmas 1951. I’m not going to attempt to review the gospel itself, this blog is concerned with the new translation, this edition of the translation and this book in particular. Penguin were to publish a new translation of The Four Gospels by E V Rieu a year later in November 1952 so this was a first view of this very readable new translation. It was a little odd to select the gospel of Mark as a Christmas gift as only Matthew and Luke include the birth of Jesus, which you would have thought would have been a consideration, but as you can see below Mark starts with the adult Christ being baptised by John in the River Jordan.

Mark is one of the three synoptic gospels where the same stories are told in much the same sequence and in similar words, indeed three quarters of Mark’s gospel also appears in those of Matthew and Luke whilst the gospel of St John is quite different both in style and content. As I said earlier the big difference is the lack of a nativity story in Mark but you also don’t get the Sermon on the Mount or several parables amongst other items in Mark which is quite a bit shorter than the other three gospels.

Looking at the first page as translated by Dr. Rieu it is clear that it is written as much more of story than the classic King James translation which I grew up with, which for all its magnificent prose can be a little daunting to approach, particularly for a modern reader. By way of contrast this is the same passage in the King James version.

1:1 The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God;

1:2 As it is written in the prophets, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.

1:3 The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

1:4 John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.

1:5 And there went out unto him all the land of Judaea, and they of Jerusalem, and were all baptized of him in the river of Jordan, confessing their sins.

1:6 And John was clothed with camel’s hair, and with a girdle of a skin about his loins; and he did eat locusts and wild honey;

1:7 And preached, saying, There cometh one mightier than I after me, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose.

1:8 I indeed have baptised you with water: but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost.

1:9 And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan.

1:10 And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him:

1:11 And there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

It is almost forty years since I first read E V Rieu’s translation of the four gospels. I took it, along with a couple of others from the Penguin Classics series, as my in flight reading for the first time I crossed the Atlantic in February 1986. I’m not remotely religious although I did go to a Church of England primary school for my education between the ages of four and eleven, but the way the gospels are presented in this translation means you can read them more like a collection of four novellas and enjoy the stories as they are told. This edition is really beautifully produced with canvas covered boards and terracotta cloth labels blocked in gold. The pages are a lovely grey and compliment the overall design by Hans Schmoller well. The lion design by Reynolds Stone is different to the one, also engraved by him, used for the Penguin Classic when it was finally published.

My copy was given to typographer Ruari McLean (it has his bookplate inside) who had joined Penguin Books in 1946 with specific responsibility for Puffin books and was instrumental in introducing Jan Tschichold to Penguin. By 1949 he had moved on and was working with Rev. Marcus Morris on the design of a new comic for boys he had devised called Eagle, which would go on to massive success in the 1950’s and 60’s. Tschichold would radically redesign Penguin books in the late 1940’s and came up with The Penguin Composition Rules.

Paint Your Dragon – Tom Holt

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Chosen by way of a comedy interlude between two serious works, I actually have no memory of acquiring this book although I suspect it was part of a job lot of second hand fantasy novels I bought in the early 2000’s most of which have been read and passed on to other people who might be interested. This is the only book by Tom Holt I own, although he has written over seventy novels along with numerous novellas and short stories in his own name and that of K J Parker since giving up his original job as a solicitor in Somerset. As I have probably owned this book for a couple of decades it seems only right to finally read it especially when I read the back cover and it sounds intriguing…

To my surprise this retelling of the George and the dragon story is largely set in modern day Birmingham (England not USA). The local council has commissioned renowned sculptor Bianca Wilson to create a grand statue for the square outside the town hall and much to her amazement she finds herself selecting George and the dragon as the subject, very different to previous works of hers. It’s as though she is being led into the subject, and that’s because she probably is. One of the main premises of the book is that it is possible for the dead to inhabit a statue and effectively come alive again with the statue returning to flesh and blood when it is possessed. The first inkling that Bianca gets that something is amiss is when she and her friend Mike arrive in her studio one morning and on the plinth is just St George, several tonnes of Carrara marble in the shape of a dragon has vanished overnight with no trace of the mechanical equipment that would have been needed to cut it from the plinth or lift it onto presumably a flat bed lorry. Even more oddly the next day the dragon is back and George goes missing and there is a bit of toing and froing over the following days before both statues disappear. In the meantime we are introduced to some more protagonists, to wit five demons that got left behind in the Cotswolds region of England on their way on holiday from Hell to a country music event in Nashville.

I really enjoyed the interplay between the demons, one of which is female and is attracted to the effective leader of the stragglers much to his obvious concern and the situations they get into when they get recruited by St George to help him win the big rematch with the dragon, because who says the saint has to be the good guy after all? The other main characters include Chubby who makes his money selling time to people who need it along with his worryingly sentient computer and Kurt, a professional hit-man who may or may not be dead already. Holt manages to keep the various sub-plots moving at a rapid pace but not so that you lose track of who is doing what, where and why and I loved that the most likeable characters are the least obvious contenders for that position and that St George is clearly a nasty piece of work who apparently won the first contest with the dragon due to a fix with a gambling syndicate so you are rooting for the dragon almost from the start of the book.

I really enjoyed this book and am now surprised I haven’t any more works by Tom Holt. From the evidence of this book he seems to fall into much the same comic fantasy genre as Robert Rankin with unbelievable things happening in a fully believable modern setting.

The Dark Invader – Captain Von Rintelen

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The first Penguin books were published in July 1935 and introduced their distinctive colour coding by subject category, a scheme copied from the Albatross Books in Europe. Initially there was just orange for fiction, dark blue for biography and green for crime but gradually more categories and colours were added including the first cerise for travel and adventure in September 1936. This is that first title and tells in his own words the story of how German WWI spy and saboteur Captain Von Rintelen operated in America for a few short months in 1915 and what happened to him afterwards. It may be thought of as an odd book to be publishing so close to WWII but presumably it was seen as an object lesson for possible activity if Germany did indeed start war again.

Rintelen was chosen from the German Naval Command to go to America to try to stop munitions being shipped to the the Allies. The latest American shells were made from steel rather than the inferior iron still utilised in Europe so were far more destructive, America was still neutral in the conflict so Germany had at first tried to stop America supplying weapons at all as they were seen as taking sides but America then offered to supply Germany as well knowing full well that the British blockade of German shipping routes meant that such a trade was impossible. The only option to the Germans was therefore to stop the ships somehow and Rintelen was just the man, he spoke English fluently and apparently had no problem passing as either English or American and had proved his resourcefulness already in transferring five million marks worth of gold by train and lorry from Berlin to Constantinople to pay bills for the cruisers Goeben and Breslau as German paper money wasn’t being accepted. Rintelen travelled to America via Denmark using papers describing him as a Swiss merchant but once there found that the contact he had arranged had not turned up so he had to start from nothing in the way of a plan but at least he had three million dollars which he had managed to transfer to American banks via various circuitous routes.

Rintelen was to be in America for just four months but in that time managed to do an amazing number of things from arranging manufacture and distribution on board ships of incendiary devices timed to go off during the Atlantic crossing to gaining the contract to supply Russia with wartime supplies none of which made it due to the ships being planted with the devices but which significantly added to the his coffers due to being paid at loading. He also formed a union of dock workers which came out on strike thereby preventing further ships being loaded and ultimately discussed with the deposed president of Mexico starting an uprising with an invasion of America to regain Arizona and therefore directing munitions to an America/Mexico war rather than Europe. That he managed to do so much in so little time and caused major disruption to military supplies across the Atlantic was a tribute to his resourcefulness, that he managed to also largely deflect suspicion from himself was remarkable. However his superiors were not so careful and intercepted telegrams in a code the Allies had access to led to his downfall.

Recalled to Germany, supposedly to review progress and adjust plans Rintenlen was intercepted in his Swiss guise by the British and interned in reasonable luxury at a camp for officers before being transferred to America where he spent four years in a regular prison for actions carried out whilst America was neutral so he wasn’t recognised as a prisoner of war. All this is covered in the book with surprising insights into how well he was treated by the British as opposed to the Americans. The book finishes with him returning to Germany in 1921 as a largely forgotten man. Rintelen came back to Britain in 1933 as he despised Hitler and he lived here until his death in 1949.

This book, along with the sequel ‘The Return of the Dark Invader’ (not published by Penguin) went out of print around 1941/2 when books about the cleverness of German spies ceased to be of interest to the general public and both books stayed out of print for decades. I have found ‘The Dark Invader’ published in 1998 by Frank Cass under their Classics of Espionage series. Apart from that if you want to read this book, and I do recommend it not only for its historical interest but because it is very well written, then you need to hunt down an eighty to ninety year old copy. Fortunately it is surprisingly easy to find them and it shouldn’t cost much more than £10 for a Penguin.

The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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Dawn is breaking in post-war Barcelona when Daniel’s bookseller father guides him through the mist to a mysterious building hidden in the heart of the old city. Here in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, ten-year-old Daniel is allowed to choose one from the hundreds of thousands of abandoned volumes that line the labyrinthine corridors. Inexplicably drawn to ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ by Julian Carax, the boy clutches the book and he and his father leave. That night Daniel reads through the night totally captivated by the story and the quality of the writing and I know exactly how he felt as although my all night reading sessions are well behind me as I found it difficult to put this remarkable book by Zafón down. Perhaps a longer section than I would normally quote will give an insight into the wonderful descriptive prose and the building tension that is maintained throughout the 511 pages. This passage is very early in the book so doesn’t contain any spoilers and describes the night after Daniel took the book to Don Gustavo Barceló, another bookseller but one who knew more about the rarities of printing than Daniel’s father, for him to have a look at. There he discovered that he may well have the last remaining copy of Carax’s final novel and that all the other copies along with editions of all his other books had been systematically bought or stolen and mysteriously found burned over the years.

I turned off the light and sat in my father’s old armchair. The breeze from the street made the curtains flutter. I was not sleepy, nor did I feel like trying to sleep. I went over to the balcony and looked out far enough to see the hazy glow shed by the streetlamps in Puerta del Angel. A motionless figure stood in a patch of shadow on the cobbled street. The flickering amber glow of a cigarette was reflected in his eyes. He wore dark clothes, with one hand buried in the pocket of his jacket, the other holding the cigarette that wove a web of blue smoke around his profile. He observed me silently, his face obscured by the street lighting behind him. He remained there for almost a minute smoking nonchalantly, his eyes fixed on mine. Then, when the cathedral bells struck midnight, the figure gave a faint nod of the head, followed, I sensed, by a smile that I could not see. I wanted to return the greeting but was paralysed. The figure turned, and I saw the man walking away, with a slight limp. Any other night I would barely have noticed the presence of that stranger, but as soon as I’d lost sight of him in the mist, I felt a cold sweat on my forehead and found it hard to breathe. I had read an identical description of that scene in The Shadow of the Wind. In the story the protagonist would go out onto the balcony every night at midnight and discover that a stranger was watching him from the shadows, smoking nonchalantly. The stranger’s face was always veiled by darkness, and only his eyes could be guessed at in the night, burning like hot coals. The stranger would remain there, his right hand buried in the pocket of his black jacket, and then he would go away, limping. In the scene I had just witnessed, that stranger could have been any person of the night, a figure with no face and no name. In Carax’s novel, that figure was the devil.

The plot flies along at a breakneck speed with multiple clues as well as a few blind alleys as to what is going on as Daniel tries to find out what happened to Julian Carax and how he came to be found shot dead in Barcelona when he should have been safely in Paris and what the wartime thug, murderer and now Inspector of Police Fumero has to do with it, as we progress from 1945 when Daniel first visits the Cemetery of Forgotten Books to the end of 1955 when the story finally reaches its denouement. Along the way a cast of superbly drawn characters are introduced, some of which help but more than a few are there to hinder Daniel’s fascination with Carax and his slowly developing interest in women as he goes through his adolescence. At about two thirds through the book and three days after I started I still hasn’t worked out how everybody was linked and how the various plot strands were connected so took an evening off reading to think through what I knew so far without adding more detail. This proved to be a good idea as I finally realised where the story was going and who the man watching from the shadows was, just in time as Zafón was about to upend the story and make my guess a possibility. I read the remainder of the book the next evening as Zafón neatly tied up all the loose ends in an eminently satisfying way.

Sadly Carlos Ruiz Zafón died of cancer in 2020 aged just 55, robbing the world of a great author well before his time. This English language version of the book is translated by Lucia Graves, daughter of the poet and novelist Robert Graves. She was brought up in Mallorca from the age of three, and according to her memoir ‘A Woman Unknown’ she grew up speaking English at home, Catalan with locals, and Spanish at school and it is she who has translated into English all five of Zafón’s ‘Cemetery of Forgotten’ novels.

This is the fifth book from the Penguin Drop Caps series I have written about along with a general overview of the series. There are twenty six in total, one author per letter of the alphabet and previously I have covered Ellery Queen, John Steinbeck, Xinran and W B Yeats.

Holy Terrors – Arthur Machen

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it’s a riff on Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” which is one of the best horror stories ever written. Maybe the best in the English language. Mine isn’t anywhere near that good, but I loved the chance to put neurotic behavior—obsessive/compulsive disorder—together with the idea of a monster-filled macroverse. That was a good combination. As for Machen vs. Lovecraft: sure, Lovecraft was ultimately better, because he did more with those concepts, but “The Great God Pan” is more reader-friendly. And Machen was there first. He wrote “Pan” in 1895, when HPL was five years old.

The above quote is by Stephen King and if anyone can judge a horror story then he is probably the man, it can be found on his website here as part of one of his ‘self interviews’. Sadly I don’t have a copy of ‘The Great God Pan’ as this is the only book I have by Arthur Machen, which is actually the pen name of Welsh fantasy and horror writer Arthur Llewellyn Jones. Even Lovecraft regarded Machen as a great in the horror story genre naming him amongst the four modern masters of the style and he was highly influential in the development of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu stories. This book consists of fourteen short stories which whilst none of them are of the horror genre give a glimpse of the abilities of this popular writer many of whose works are still in print almost eighty years after his death. Indeed several bear the mark of another writer who came later that of Roald Dahl and his ‘Tales of the Unexpected’.

As is often the case with collections of short stories the better examples are the longer ones, especially in this set, the final tale of which, that I will also come to last, is excellent. The stories range from a story about a clergyman who vanishes without trace from his home for six weeks only to re-appear exactly as he was last seen by his housekeeper working at his desk and with no feeling that he had stepped away for more than a few minutes. One story I particularly enjoyed is ‘The Tree of Life’ which tells of a seriously unwell man running the lands of his estate from his sick bed by communicating his wishes via his land agent. The ending of the tale completely upends the story so far but in a completely believable manner. ‘The Bright Boy’ and ‘The Happy Children’ are the closest we get to horror in this collection with the first story of a man with the appearance of a boy and the odd occurrences that happen in the vicinity of the house where he lives with his supposed parents. The happy children tells however of a journalist unexpectedly coming across the spirits of dead children in the streets of a Yorkshire town before they process up to the abbey ruins. There is also the story an unspecified ceremony being performed at a strange stone in the woods that I wish was longer as the atmosphere is so well created and then it stops leaving me wanting more and ‘The Soldiers Rest’ where it gradually becomes clear what sort of rest he is having. All of these are wonderfully written but it is the final story of this collection along with one that is sadly missing that cement Machen in his position as a truly great writer of short stories never mind his horror novels.

The one that is missing is ‘The Bowmen’ which was first published on 14th September 1914 and tells the story of a horde of phantom bowmen from the Battle of Agincourt, five centuries earlier, which came to the aid of British troops at the Battle of Mons. This story, as it was published in The Evening News newspaper which Machen worked for at the time became believed as true and is the foundation of The Angel of Mons and evidence of divine intervention on behalf of the British soldiers. No matter how often Machen tried to say that he made it up he was rarely believed and the tale was spread around the world as fact. The story that completes this set is however ‘The Great Return’ and this is the first published story telling of the existence of the Holy Grail in modern times and the miracles that occur along with its reappearance. The story which along with Machen’s novel taking the same theme ‘The Secret Glory’, which he had already written by then but which wasn’t published until 1922, would clearly influence writers such as Dan Brown in his Da Vinci Code and George Lucas with Indiana Jones amongst others.

You can find out more about Machen via ‘The Friends of Arthur Machen‘ an international literary society dedicated to the works of this remarkable author.

Memoirs From Beyond the Tomb – François-René de Chateaubriand

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I was going to call this an autobiography, but it is so much more than the history of one man, for example there are over a hundred pages that detail the rise and fall of Napoleon from his early days in power when Chateaubriand was in various roles including Secretary to the Holy See until their split over the execution of the Duke of Enghien and then onwards to Moscow, exile to Elba, his return and ultimate defeat at Waterloo and final exile to St Helena. None of these later actions after his diplomatic roles ended involved Chateaubriand except as an observer on the impact in his beloved France. Chateaubriand is an excellent historian and writer but with considered views on the results of that history on himself, those around him and the wider public which add considerably to his narrative. But if you don’t know of him a section from his preface will give an idea of the breadth of his experience:

I have met nearly all the men who in my time have played a part, great or small, in my own country or abroad: from Washington to Napoleon, from Louis XVIII. to Alexander, from Pius VII. to Gregory XVI., from Fox, Burke, Pitt, Sheridan, Londonderry, Capo d’Istrias to Malesherbes, Mirabeau and the rest; from Nelson, Bolivar, Mehemet Pasha of Egypt to Suffren, Bougainville, La Pérouse, Moreau and so forth. I have been one of an unprecedented triumvirate: three poets of different interests and nationality, who filled, within the same decade, the post of minister of Foreign Affairs—myself in France, Mr. Canning in England, Señor Martinez de la Rosa in Spain. I have lived successively through the empty years of my youth and the years filled with the Republican Era, the annals of Bonaparte and the reign of the Legitimacy.

It should be pointed out at this point that this 2016 Folio edition is a reprint with some amendments of the abridged 1961 Hamish Hamilton Ltd. version, later a Penguin Classic, selected and translated by Robert Baldick and even at 367 pages doesn’t have room for Chateaubriand to encounter all the people listed above but it is still a substantial read covering an important part of French history from the Revolution through the entire time of Napoleon and beyond to the restoration of the Bourbons with Louis XVIII and Charles X and their subsequent fall. I have to admit that apart from the British view of Napoleon and the basic knowledge from school of the French Revolution I didn’t know much about this period of French history and Chateaubriand is in a unique position to expand my knowledge. As members of the nobility his eldest brother and wife were executed during the revolution and a lot of his family, including his mother were imprisoned, Chateaubriand was the tenth child, so as he was not seen as important at the beginning managed to escape France and lived in poverty in London, a time he writes about decades later in this book whilst a famous author and French Ambassador to the UK. The juxtaposition of his various positions through his life is one of the things that make the story so fascinating, he left the ambassadors role to become a member of the French government as Minister for Foreign Affairs in 1822.

I found myself constantly learning French history as I read Chateaubriand’s story of riches to rags, back to riches, obscurity to fame and a return to relative obscurity in his later life as he largely became a recluse trying to complete the four sets of volumes (there is a total of forty two ‘books’ each of which form part of a published volume) that this work became. as the range covered kept expanding and he was also busy with many other projects. Originally he planned for these books to be published fifty years after his death but in fact the first part appeared just a year after he died with the rest published the following year. This was to be his masterpiece and it is a fascinating read. It sealed his place as one of the founders of French romanticism and influenced French writers for decades.

Designing Terry Pratchett’s Discworld – Paul Kidby

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Well I was halfway through the book that will now be the subject of next weeks blog when this arrived and was begging to be read. As regular readers of this blog will know I have been a reader of Terry Pratchett’s work since the very beginning of Discworld back in 1983 and have numerous pictures by Paul Kidby on my walls that attest to that interest, some signed by Paul, some by Terry. For Terry the art of Paul Kidby came the closest to what was in his mind of anyone who has illustrated his works so I was fascinated to read this book, indeed I had ordered it from Paul many months ago and whilst knowing it was to be published in November 2024 had lost track of the actual publication date so when this signed copy dropped through my door on Friday then it just leapt to the top of the to be read list and frankly I haven’t been remotely disappointed. The pages have a high gloss finish, entirely appropriate for the art book that this is, but making them extremely difficult to photograph.

The above picture is of Kidby in his surprisingly bare, and quite small, studio with his dog asleep under his desk. This is from a chapter where we look at the materials he uses to create his art, specific boards, brushes, pencils and paints that he prefers and this is interesting as he explains why he picks particular art supplies. But the vast majority of the book looks at the development of the various characters. All the major characters have at least a page discussing how Kidby came up with the their look and how they have changed over the years, so I’ll feature Lady Sybil Ramkin.

As you can see there is an original sketch which frankly looks more like the Clarecraft version of Lady Sybil than the later iterations by Kidby and there are often handwritten notes like the one featured above adding more details of the artistic influences to the illustrations. One thing I particularly liked was the inclusion of the original art when Kidby does one of his numerous parodies of famous paintings so that you can clearly see where his inspiration came from.

One of the joys of the book however is right at the end in a chapter called ‘The Road Not Taken’ where Kidby has produced a brief sketch for books that never were, Pratchett’s work in progress at the point of which he could no longer write and one of these is Twilight Canyons.

I was in the audience for ‘Bedtime Stories’ at the 2016 UK Discworld Convention, this section had always featured a reading from a book that hadn’t been published yet, initially read by Terry and latterly by his Personal Assistant Rob Wilkins. This was the first convention after Terry’s untimely death and seeing this on the programme had raised a definite buzz of anticipation, what would Rob do? Maybe just tell stories about how he and Terry had worked together and that indeed is how he started but suddenly he reached over for a sheaf of paper and started reading Twilight Canyons, a book that was clearly well in progress but which we would never get to read, the room fell even quieter as we all knew this was our only chance to experience this book.

Right after he finished the quite long extract he removed the On Air sign and the coat to reveal that the ‘table’ beside him was a shredder and he duly dropped the manuscript into the slot of the now working machine, continuing Terry’s wishes that all his unfinished work was to be destroyed. A sad but fitting end.

Rob wrote the afterword to this book where he explains that it is hoped that this will simply be the first in a series of volumes looking at various aspects of Pratchett’s work and I do hope there is more as this was a fascinating book.