Fiends that plague thee thus

“The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man’s blood with cold.” (Mervyn Peake, 1943)

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Illustrated by Mervyn Peake,
with an introduction by Marina Warner.
Cover design by Helen Lindon.
Vintage Classics, 2004.

“God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—”

Like the Ancient Mariner, whose glittering eye mesmerised the unwilling Wedding Guest, the story and the rhythm and the word choices of Coleridge’s Rime have the power to render the reader spellbound more than two centuries after its composition and publication.

Add to it not Gustave Doré’s engravings – superb as they are – but Mervyn Peake’s haunting images, and then this slim volume of what John Livingstone Lowes described as one of the two “most remarkable poems in English” provides an opportunity to venture into territories which only a poet’s mind can conceive.

And after a perusal – or better still, an incantation – of the poem perhaps we all will, like the Wedding Guest, believe ourselves undoubtedly sadder but also wiser humans.

An abyss next to you

WordPress Free Photo Library.

Serpentine by Philip Pullman,
illustrated by Tom Duxbury.
Penguin Books, 2020.

“That horrible endless bottomless— It must be like having an abyss right next to you every moment, knowing it’s there all the time . . . Just horrible.”

A year after the events in Lyra’s Oxford, but well before the action described in The Secret Commonwealth, Lyra and Pantalaimon are off on an archaeological dig organised by Jordan College, investigating a settlement of the Proto-Fisher people in the Trollesund region of Arctic Norroway.¹

While there they take the opportunity to visit Dr Lanselius, consul to the witch clans of the north, whom the pair want to ask about the separation that the witches can achieve with their dæmons. But Lanselius seems to already know about Lyra and Pan’s ability to separate, the result of the trauma that took place when Pan couldn’t follow Lyra to the Land of the Dead in The Amber Spyglass.

After Pan and Lanselius’s serpent dæmon go out of the room to converse, not only will Lyra know the consul has the same ability but she is also able to discuss the other separation that has taken place since they came back together, one which has meant their former easy familiarity is not only strained but is resulting in a growing alienation she finds most distressing.

Felines and fairies

Illustration for ‘Blue Beard’ by Arthur Rackham (1933).

Of Cats and Elfins:
Short Tales and Fantasies,
including The Cat’s Cradle Book (1940)
by Sylvia Townsend Warner,
introduced by Greer Gilman, with notes by Kate Macdonald.
Handheld Press, 2020.

What he felt was more than a whim; it was an earnest desire, a mental craving somehow to recreate a bright image that Time had once timelessly given, and then by course of time effaced. — ‘Stay, Corydon, Thou Swain’.

This volume of short stories is a collection in two halves which may vary in theme but not so much in style. The first contains an essay by Sylvia Townsend Warner and some tales that weren’t part of her story compilation Kingdoms of Elfin, first published in 1977, the year before she died; the second part was published as The Cat’s Cradle Book in 1940 as a selection of fables purporting to be related by the worldwide community of cats.

Despite the gap in years and the seemingly different subjects the tales have much in common: they’re subtly satirical at times, often upend traditional tropes at their conclusions, and contain some beautiful nature writing while confirming the endless contradictions in human – and even elfin – nature. When the tales in The Cat’s Cradle Book have non-human characters they’re clearly anthropomorphised, whereas the occasional elfin in the first part can almost feel zoomorphised.

This anthology of fairy tales and fables comes over as both tantalisingly ephemeral yet solidly permanent, like parallel worlds that one catches glimpses of that must surely exist in some reality even as they fade away from view. From the author of the haunting Lolly Willowes one can hardly expect otherwise.

The last Cathars

Medieval bishop.

Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294-1324
by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.
Penguin Books, 1980 (1975).

I’m not going to attempt a lengthy discussion of this famous and worthwhile book, first published in 1975 as Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 and translated by Barbara Bray in 1978 subtitled The Promised Land of Error, and later Cathars and Catholics in a French Village. Instead I’ll just focus on a couple of points.

Ladurie’s study was based on the Register of an Inquisition conducted in the early 14th century by the Cistercian Bishop of Pamiers, Jacques Fournier; he later became Pope Benedict XII and was responsible for transforming the old bishops palace in Avignon into the Palais des Papes before his death in 1342.

Described as “a sort of compulsive Maigret,” he rooted out Catharism in his diocese, which covered the medieval Comté de Foix – now Ariège – eighty years after Catharism had been officially destroyed in 1244 at the siege of Monségur.

Due to the efforts of Cathar missionaries the dualist heresy enjoyed a revival in the northern Pyrenees where it was kept alive by certain households and by migrant mountain shepherds. Because Montaillou is a study of real human beings and not heretical dogmas and practices per se, we learn more of the medieval peasant mind than of secret traditions – or of a Gnostic grail, real or imagined – but as such it makes extremely compelling reading.

“The prisoners of Montaillou were the last Cathars,” writes Le Roy Ladurie, and essentially Catharism as practised by these Languedoc peasants was Christian, not pagan or Gnostic. Any non-Christian elements which crept into their beliefs seems to have infiltrated Catholicism in equal measure (bar the obvious differences like reincarnation and dualism).

But any notion of a holy grail expounded by troubadours and the like (an ‘alternative history’ believed by many New Age thinkers) passed these occitan villagers by.

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Adapted from a review first published in 1981 in Pendragon, the Journal of the Pendragon Society XIV No 1, 13. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie died November 2023 aged 94.

Bother that cat!

Mog by Judith Kerr.

Mog the Forgetful Cat
written and illustrated by Judith Kerr.
Collins Picture Lions, 1975 (1970).

The very first picture book by the late author, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, was published in 1968. Two years later came Mog the Forgetful Cat which curiously also featured a tiger, if briefly; but while the tiger story was about a transgressive big cat, the very first book in the Mog series focuses on a lovable family pet getting into unforeseen scrapes.

Kerr’s tale features Mog as the feline who inspired the phrase, “Bother that cat!” The phrase – I’m guessing – is euphemised from “Bugger that cat!” though it was changed to “Drat that cat!” in US editions (Drat! of course itself being a euphemism for Damn!).

Mog’s name is short for ‘moggy’, meaning any domestic cat. By the end of the story we understand the reason for the repeated use of the exasperated expression: Mog is indeed very forgetful. Those who have owned moggies may well be familiar with individuals who are just like this.

Picking a quarrel

Portmeirion (image: Aderixon).

Blackground by Joan Aiken.
Gollancz Crime, 1990 (1989).

‘Most people, I suppose, have a public persona and a private one. […] Nearly everybody must have some secret self, removed, if only by a marginal distance, from the one offered to society.’ —XIII

Like pretty much every crime drama or murder mystery Joan Aiken’s novel is about masks – the visage one presents to the world, sometimes even to oneself, somewhat at variance to the individual beneath. And when murder is involved it’s a given that the fiction asks us readers to try and penetrate such disguises to seek out the perpetrator.

Our principal narrator, Catherine, has a variety of identities. As Cathy Smith she has been a student nurse but her mother, with both Welsh and Russian ancestry, calls her Katya; as Cat Conwil she is an actor in a television drama, playing Rosamund Vincy from Middlemarch, “the blonde minx who, by selfishness, snobbery and extravagance, utterly wrecks the life of her handsome, idealistic doctor husband.”

But Cat is not our only narrator: we have an omniscient storyteller who provides an alternative point of view. And, given that the murder doesn’t happen for quite a while, we are deliberately left floundering in a welter of clues, hints, digressions and diversions. Needless to say – this being by Aiken – it’s all extremely entertaining.

A nice quiet cruise?

Opening panel of ‘Cigars of the Pharaoh’ (1955).

Cigars of the Pharaoh by Hergé.
Les Cigares du Pharaon (1955)
translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner.
Methuen Children’s Books, 1975 (1971).

The fourth Tintin book Cigars of the Pharaoh has a bumpy backstory. Serialised in weekly instalments from December 1932 through to February 1934, it first appeared in black and white. A new edition then appeared in 1955, completely redrawn and with added colour and significant revisions.

But it seems the plot remained essentially the same. Intrepid reporter Tintin, together with his dog Snowy (Milou in French), are on a cruise in the Mediterranean, about to dock at Port Said. But trouble is not far away: he first encounters Sophocles Sarcophagus, an eccentric Egyptologist, then sinister film tycoon Rastapopoulos, followed quickly by detectives Thomson and Thompson.

How does the tomb of the Pharaoh Kih-Oskh link to a brand of cigar with a strange device, an Indian fakir with an Arab colonel, and an American cinema magnate with a pair of incompetent English sleuths?

The Art of Reviewing

© C A Lovegrove

I enjoy reading reviews, especially book reviews of course, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be something I’ve already read or even intend to read. And most of you will know I also enjoy writing reviews, and therefore have always tried to keep a few pointers in mind as advice for myself.

A query in Quora, the question-and-answer platform, got me trying to fill out the details of those pointers, for my own sake as well as for other interested folk. The question was, What are the things to keep in mind when reviewing?

Here’s my edited answer for what it’s worth, mostly as I first posted here on 14th February 2016 but now with a few additional thoughts.

The longest days

20 Books of Summer 746books.com

We’re into June now, the threshold to summer – for those of us in the northern hemisphere at least – and thus an opportune time for bookbloggers to consider hot reads, all courtesy of Cathy at 746books.com.

And when I say ‘hot reads’ I mean the meme 20 Books of Summer and its lesser siblings, 15 Books of Summer and 10 Books of Summer, which I’ve participated in for a few years now as a scarcely incentive to immerse myself in fiction and nonfiction.

And when I say ‘twenty books’ I mean that as usual I shan’t be naming a hard and fast list of precisely that number of titles but merely a wishlist of works I’d like to read – mostly those titles that will fit in with book meme events I want to participate in.