King Satyr - Ron Weighell

Sarob Press have just announced King Satyr, a full-length novel by Ron Weighell, inspired by the art of Austin Osman Spare and the occult scene of the late Sixties and the Nineteen Seventies.

This was left in an advanced draft form by Ron and has been edited by his wife Fran, who also provides an introduction about Ron’s life and work and an important bibliography of his writings.

As I noted in an earlier post, Ron drew inspiration from the work of Arthur Machen, M R James and Arthur Conan Doyle, but also had a strong personal vision informed by his deep knowledge of the esoteric. The novel richly reflects these influences and his profound scholarship.

All Ron’s previous books have soon become highly collectible and understandably so, and this edition is sure to attract strong interest. 

(Mark Valentine)

A Singular Interview

At The Endless Bookshelf, my answer to a singular question from bibliophile and poet Henry Wessells.

You can also read Henry’s encomium to Robert van Gulik, Diplomat, Orientalist, Novelist;  Henry’s poem ‘The Private Life of Books’, chosen for display at a Sheffield school library, an inspiration to the students; and further posts on ‘time in the novels of Jon A. Jackson’, William MacIlvanney and his Glaswegian crime novels, re-reading John Crowley’s Little, Big; and much more. 

(Mark Valentine)

The Devil At Saxon Wall - Gladys Mitchell

The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935) by Gladys Mitchell draws on the tradition of the Victorian inheritance mystery, but with added folklore and witchcraft thrown in. Three babies were born in the remote village of Saxon Wall, one to the family of the local manor, another to a woman reputed to be a witch, and another to a woman regarded as a simpleton. Only two of the children survived: but which two?

Hannibal Jones, a writer of sentimental novels, comes to the village to convalesce from nervous trouble and becomes unwillingly involved in its affairs, which include stories of changelings and impersonations and missing heirs. The pub, the Long Thin Man, is named after a local spirit connected with a tumulus on the downs above. There are spells, potions, the evil eye, and propitiation rites to bring much-needed rain.

A full cast of characters, as well as the witch and the supposed simpleton, includes a couple of Ivy Compton-Burnett-esque sister spinsters with brisk, brittle dialogue (we could have done with even more of them), a volatile vicar with a Japanese valet, and of course Mitchell’s reptilian psychiatrist-detective, Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange. These vivid characters and the deft twists in the plot are the novel’s main strengths.

Gladys Mitchell was the author of over sixty crime novels, and they are uneven in quality, as she herself admitted. At her best her books are vigorous, eventful, sly, full of rich colour and eccentric characters. But even Mitchell experts seem divided about this book. At The Stone House, the excellent website devoted to her, five commentators list the best and worst of her books. One puts it at thirteenth best on his list, another thinks it is her second greatest, but two others put it way down at no 55 and no 50, and one does not include it in his top 30.

I can see the difficulty. The author does rather layer on the rustic superstitions with a trowel. And despite its clever twists, the plot is a bit over-protracted and there is too much contrived mystification.  At the end of the book she provides an explanatory appendix about the role of each character. I could not help feeling such information ought to have been integrated adroitly into the plot.

The book is dedicated to Helen Simpson, the author of Cups, Wands and Swords, a Tarot novel, and other fiction with occult elements: the two were great friends and shared a serious interest in folklore and pagan survivals. Gladys Mitchell was clearly enjoying herself exploring these, and this gusto certainly comes across. Though it is a crime novel and must therefore follow a mostly rationalised route, the atavistic beliefs of the villagers are left intact and the book will certainly appeal to those who enjoy ‘folk horror’. 

(Mark Valentine)

Image from The Stone House.

 

Gingerbread for the Fisher King

In Chrétien de Troyes’ mediaeval Arthurian romance Perceval ou le Conte du Graal, he gives a list of “the rarest fruits” served at the meal offered by the legendary Fisher King to his knightly guest Perceval. 

We may assume two things about this list: that it comprised choice things thought of as rich and luxurious by his aristocratic 12^th century readers, which they would recognise and approve; and that it may also include elements of a symbolic nature.

The list is: “dates, figs, nutmegs, cloves, pomegranates, electuaries, gingerbread of Alexandria, aromatic jelly and so forth. Afterwards they had many draughts of piment without honey or pepper, of mulberry wine and clear syrup.”

Note that all these are prepared by the squires, not by the kitchen staff, suggesting also a haughty and ritual aspect. The viands are all exotic, from farther lands (and therefore costly); grapes, for example, grown in France and Burgundy and even in Southern England in those days, are not mentioned. The meal also does not include any flesh or fish, equally freely available, and perhaps thought insufficiently spiritual.

So, although the Fisher King’s own realm is famously a Waste Land, his table is still fruitful and full of rare delicacies. We might wonder what this signifies. A mystical interpretation might be that although the material world may be dreary and barren, we may still find intense joy and wonder through courtesy, ritual, gentility and the other qualities exemplified by the Fisher King and his squires.

Another view might look to the legends of fairy fruit in Celtic myths. Wanderers who stray into the realms of faery and eat the fruit there may not leave this land for a given period, and, when they do. they find that centuries have elapsed in the mortal world in their absence. There may be some affinities to these sorts of tales but yet the significance of the fruits of the Grail feast remains elusive.

One phrase caught my attention in the list. What was gingerbread of Alexandria? This fine term seems to be found nowhere else, in no other source, but it is used by Chrétien as if it would be quite familiar to his courtly audience. We should first note that medieval gingerbread does not mean the same thing as the modern biscuit as used, for example, in ‘gingerbread men’. It was a sweetmeat of warm honey, thickened with breadcrumbs and flavoured with spices.

I suspect it was known to Chrétien as “of Alexandria” because these spices came to Europe from the East via that city, a great trading entrepot for the Silk Road and the Spice Road. Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales refers to what was no doubt something similar as ‘roial spicerye of gyngebreed’. A similar mediaeval recipe is given in Two 15th c. Cookery-Books by Thomas Austin (1888), compiled from 15^th century manuscripts:

"Gyngerbrede.--Take a quart of hony, & sethe it, & skeme it clene; take Safroun, pouder Pepir, & throw ther-on; take grayted Bred, & make it so chargeaunt that it wol be y-lechyd; then take pouder Canelle, & straw ther-on y-now; then make yt square, lyke as thou wolt leche yt; take when thou lechyst hyt, an caste Box leves a-bouyn, y-stykyd ther-on, on clowys. And if thou wolt haue it Red, coloure it with Saunderys y-now."

Essentially, warm the honey and steep the breadcrumbs in it, and then add the mystic spices, in this case Saffron, Pepper and Cinnamon (‘Canelle’), and presumably Ginger, though this is not mentioned, and redden if you wish with Sandalwood. Shape and stiffen it into slices, and decorate with Cloves and Box Leaves. 

Now you too can try at home a delicacy fit for the Fisher King and his guest Sir Perceval. 

(Mark Valentine)

Shadows of London - Jonathan Wood

Jonathan Wood is the author and editor of a sequence of journals, chapbooks and serialised fictions issued from the late Eighties and on into the Nineties that were visionary and apocalyptic, and shared with Arthur Machen a keen interest in the mystical undercurrents of London. He has continued to explore these and related matters in his literary work since.

The modern, cosmopolitan, mercantile city meshes at every step with another city composed of myth, arcane history and unsolved mysteries. The tube map as a kabbalistic diagram, the upper rooms of obscure pubs as the headquarters of occult sects, the cellars of bookshops as nexuses of textual synchronicity. There is London and there is ShadowLondon.

Shadows of London, sub-titled A Whispered Nightshade for After Years (Zagava) is a further exploration of the secret city. The author modestly describes its contents as ‘fragments and meditations or prose poetry meanders and rituals’. But here are intensely concentrated observations whose brevity has the same distilled quality to be found in Hubert Crackanthorpe’s Vignettes, that 1890s slim volume of Embankment lamplight and the satanic glitter of fallen fruit.

It as a work that notices fine, fugitive details: fallen leaves, footsteps, children’s babble, clock chimes, the activities of magpies, the shuttered office of a ticket-collector.

The book evokes the brooding atmosphere before the fiery riots of 1978, when the author had recently come to live in the city, the ‘gnostic modernism’ of the new high rise architecture casting its shadows over the city, and a visit to a subterranean cinema in quest of the uncensored version of a film by certain cult art-provocateurs.

Shadows of London is a contemporary London Adventure, as rich and ruminatory, as deep and diversionary, as labyrinthine and lapidary, as Machen’s book, yet told in Jonathan Wood’s distinctive Armagnac style. It is available in a limited first edition of 199 hardback copies, and also in paperback.

(Mark Valentine)