Oct 02 2020

The Night Archer and Other Stories by Michael Oren

Reading Michael Oren’s debut collection of short stories reminded me very much of being a teenager again and reading two of Roald Dahl’s short story collections for adults, Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch, once I’d exhausted his works for younger readers. Densely packed with entertainment value, each book was a wild ride that I wouldn’t see the likes of again from a single author till Jeffrey Archer’s A Twist In The Tale. The Night Archer carries on in this tradition, deftly leaping genre boundaries to pull together a collection of stories whose primary shared trait is a surprising bend in the narrative. With fifty-one tales gathered together, there’s an abundance of reading material to be had here.

And that’s part of this book’s problem. Had each story been a remarkable gem, polished to a sheen and set carefully amidst others that would only enhance its beauty, this would have been a treasury of truly remarkable writing. With some tight editing, excising more than one repetition of theme and perhaps narrowing the selection to a trim twenty-eight or so (the number I personally marked down as being either good or interesting, with a further thirteen that had real potential,) stories like Jorge and The World Of Antonia Flechette, both excellent pieces on the road not taken, would have stood out better. As it is, the really great stories tended to be interspersed with what seem like lesser clones, or writing warm ups almost. You could have split this volume in two and published the second after several years and the stories would have had a much stronger impact for not being jumbled up all together in one book.

Of the gems, I found that I tended to enjoy the longer works, particularly Aniksht, the story of 4+ generations of one Jewish family surviving the brutality of the 20th century, as well as An Agent Of Unit Forty, the unironic tale of a university professor whose big mouth and bigger ego get him into trouble. The Thirty-Year Rule was a brilliant skewering of American, British and Russian interests in the Middle East, yet I still felt whole-heartedly for the protagonist and for his desire to look up and one day be reunited with his beloved. Metaxis and Nuevo Mundo were both fine examples of historical colonial horror, while What’s A Parent To Do? and The Widow’s Hero both spoke to the very realistic concerns of aging in the modern world. Ruin and Liberation, the first two stories of the book, were moving variations on the specters that haunt us at the ends of lives unfulfilled. The Curio Cabinet, featuring a frustrated police detective, was in my opinion the most successful of the outright murder mysteries included.

Of the duds, it should surprise no one that I rolled my eyes at Slave To Power. While I won’t dispute the historical accuracy, I felt it somewhat telling that the only tale which blamed a religion for the cruelty of its adherents was this story of a pasha overseeing impalements. Weird how the Cossacks who figured so largely as villains in other tales didn’t have their Christianity tied so closely to their crimes against humanity. I was also thoroughly annoyed by The Betsybob, which started out quite well and movingly but devolved into a weird, unfunny joke, devoid of the pathos that marked many of the earlier stories in the volume. I’ll give The Blind Man the benefit of the doubt in hoping that the kids’ protests were at their mother’s incredibly horrible assumption regarding the title character’s mental state, but there’s no saving D, a truly awful short story narrated by the father of an autistic child. Not only does the narrator claim that Douglas “does not feel, not entirely” but he also longs for his kid to grace him “with a real son’s smile.” Worse than this devaluation of the humanity of an autistic person was the romanticization of his unnamed father, who was portrayed as the real victim here.

Yet this is all of a parcel with the Dahl and the Archer, products of mid- to late-20th-century literature that were popular if edgy for the time. Looking back on single-author collections like those with the benefit of decades of social progress, it’s fascinating to see where the subversive veers into the sublime or, lamentably, into sheer nescience. The best of The Night Archer falls squarely in the former, with stories that feel transcendent of time, yet too many more feel stuck still in the 1970s and 80s. I would love to see the timeline of when these stories were written, and honestly would have preferred that to the somewhat banal introduction reminding us that there is no freedom without form or limits, whether in writing or in life. True, but much less interesting than a thoughtful discussion of how the stories in this book specifically came to be.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/10/02/the-night-archer-and-other-stories-by-michael-oren/

Sep 30 2020

The Paper Boat: A Refugee Story by Thao Lam

This powerful picture book is a wordless recreation via metaphor of the author’s family’s journey from Vietnam to Canada at the end of the Vietnam War. Only two at the time, Thao Lam remembers little of the events themselves, but has taken her mother’s story and crafted it beautifully for this children’s book.

Working in her preferred mixed-media/collage art style, she tells the tale of a Vietnamese family forced to flee their homeland by boat, merging seamlessly with the tale of ants also embarking on a perilous journey using a paper boat her mother folded to keep her quiet and entertained while hiding from military brutality. The ants have a hard time of it out on the open water, beset by heat, birds, hunger and storms. So it is almost magical when the ants make their way to safety, just as Ms Lam’s family does, finally settling in beautiful urban Canada.

This is a book that requires the reader to pore over each beautiful panel in order to get the full effect of the story. It’s especially important to pay attention on pages 28 & 29, as my 9 year-old and I needed to go back when we were done reading to see that the ants had made landfall and weren’t merely swimming in a calmer sea. I was probably slightly more affected by the book than he was, tho he did enjoy the art and the fact that there weren’t any words till the insightful author’s note at the end.

The Paper Boat is the kind of book that skillfully does the tough but necessary work of encouraging empathy, especially for refugees. While Ms Lam is carefully neutral about the involvement of Malaysia in resettling Vietnamese arrivals, I personally wish that the land I grew up in had shown far more hospitality then, and would show far more kindness and decency to the refugees they host now. Which is all very well for me to say, given that I live in a country with its own deplorable track record, that I’m hoping to help correct come November*. In the meantime, I’ll keep promoting books like this one in hopes that it will help open eyes, hearts and minds to the very real human suffering we can do so much to alleviate simply by recognizing the humanity in one another and treating others the way we would want to be treated.

*semi-regular reminder for Americans to check your voter registration and otherwise prepare yourself to vote by going to Vote.org.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/30/the-paper-boat-a-refugee-story-by-thao-lam/

Sep 29 2020

The Case of the Left-Handed Lady (Enola Holmes #2) by Nancy Springer

I absolutely panicked when I read somewhere that the Netflix movie Enola Holmes is based on more than the first novel in the book series, The Case Of The Missing Marquess, so borrowed this to squeeze in between the eleventy billion deadlines I’m facing (I was wrong, btw: the movie is based on only that first.) Fortunately, The Case Of The Left-Handed Lady is a fast read, like its predecessor. Unfortunately, it somehow manages to be slighter, despite the wealth of material introduced here.

Enola Holmes has successfully eluded her elder brothers, Sherlock and Mycroft, and saved the life of a marquess. Now established as the working class secretary for a nonexistent “perditologist”, she’s waiting for her first case to arrive so she might prove herself via her creation, Dr Ragostin. But then Dr John Watson of all people walks in, wanting to hire Dr Ragostin to search for, well, herself. Deciding to stall him, she picks up a lead to an actual case through their conversation: the disappearance of Lady Cecily Alistair, who is thought to have eloped but is nowhere to be found.

Enola undertakes several clever disguises as she ingratiates herself to Lady Cecily’s mother before going in search of the teenaged girl on her own. She also runs into trouble while performing her night-time charitable acts as the Sister Of The Streets. There’s a lot of sharp social commentary and a wealth of historical detail, as Sherlock eventually sniffs out her trail and comes in hot pursuit, even as Enola herself keeps sending signals to her mother for help, or at least news, through newspaper ads. The scenes where their investigations collide make for the best part of this novel.

Unfortunately, the main plot involving Lady Cecily’s disappearance is… really not great. Enola jumps to all sorts of conclusions, and while her legwork is exemplary, I found the denouement of who and howdunnit to be surprisingly weak. I also thought it unlikely that Sherlock wouldn’t decipher the language of flowers, but was willing to suspend my disbelief for that. The use of the howdunnit, on the other hand, was not something I could swallow, especially given Enola’s own opinions on the subject.

I’ve heard that this second is the weakest in the series, so will likely try to pick up some of the rest as soon as my schedule allows. Hopefully, I’ll also get the chance to review the movie soon!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/29/the-case-of-the-left-handed-lady-enola-holmes-2-by-nancy-springer/

Sep 28 2020

The Willows by Algernon Blackwood

The afterword of T Kingfisher’s terrific The Hollow Places (which I’ll shortly be reviewing over at CriminalElement.com) mentions that it’s based on the classic horror short story The Willows by Algernon Blackwood, which has been cited by H. P. Lovecraft as being one of the most terrifying stories ever written. Being a voraciously curious reader, I immediately went to look it up and read it. I’m a bit sorry I did, but only in relation to THP, which lost just a little bit of its luster when I realized that so much of it wasn’t original to Ms Kingfisher (THP is still a great book, tbc.)

The Willows itself is the tale of a canoeing expedition undertaken by Mr Blackwood’s unnamed narrator and his friend, The Swede, upon the Danube. They have an easy companionship, enjoying the various delights and enduring the various travails of their adventure, till they arrive in a Hungarian stretch of water where the river runs rapid and high. They decide to make camp in an archipelago of small islands inhabited primarily by willows. A passing boatman appears to warn them off, but they laugh off his pantomimed warnings as being peasant superstitions. But then night falls, and the duo find themselves victims of sabotage as something is lurking in the willows, seeking a victim on which to feed…

My immediate reaction to finishing this story was “holy shit, that was so incredibly gay!” As I do not use “gay” as a derogatory term, please know that I mean literally homosexual, as that was undoubtedly one of the most “I desperately need an outlet to discuss my sexual attraction to the same gender” stories I’ve ever read in my entire life. It’s as if Mr Blackwood sat down and thought, “Hmm, I want to talk about the sex I had on my last nature trip but society will literally try to imprison or otherwise crush me, so how do?” Substitute “imagination” for “homosexual longings” and the monster in the trees as “society’s homophobia” — I mean, the entire scene where the narrator and The Swede stumble around in a physical embrace, where the only way they can shut out thought of the monster is to surrender to pain or a swoon is so overwhelmingly “I just had anal for the the first time.” For fuck’s sake, there’s a scene with a column of nude bodies ascending to the sky in an awe-inspiring pillar! This is Brokeback Mountain by way of an Edwardian horror story, and frankly I am here for it.

But ofc, I had to see if anyone else had the same opinion, and was honestly shocked at how the internet failed me. Given how the sexual subtext of Victorian and post-Victorian fiction is fuel for hundreds of graduate theses, I do not understand how there is no serious mention of The Willows’ obvious metaphors to be found, barring one intrepid Reddit poster. Anyway, don’t take my word for it: you can read the whole story at Project Gutenberg as I did. Let me know what you think if you do!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/28/the-willows-by-algernon-blackwood/

Sep 24 2020

Swords and Deviltry by Fritz Leiber

It’s sometimes funny what sticks with a reader. I first encountered Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Fritz Leiber’s famed sword and sorcery duo and the protagonists of Swords and Deviltry, on the order of 40 years ago, and I remember very clearly that I started with the second volume: Swords Against Death. If I were recommending the series to someone who hadn’t read them before, I think I would have them start there too, and come back to the origin stories that make up Swords and Deviltry some time later.

Leiber himself did much the same; the three stories that comprise this volume (“The Snow Women” 1962, “The Unholy Grail” 1970, “Ill Met in Lankhmar” 1970) were published more than two decades after the first print appearance of the duo. It’s better to come back and have these stories fill in the details of the pair’s beginnings, to enjoy Leiber’s stylish tics, and see how Leiber conceives of his heroes as youths after having chronicled many of their later adventures.

Swords and Deviltry by Fritz Leiber

I have always enjoyed the mock archaic summaries that Leiber places in the table of contents. Here, for example, is what he says about “The Snow Women”:

Of the ice magic of women and of a cold war between the sexes, setting forth the predicament of a resourceful youth ringed by three masterful women, together with pertinent information on father-son love, the bravery of actors, and the courage of fools. (p. 3)

Much of the story is there, and yet it isn’t — a splendid teaser.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/24/swords-and-deviltry-by-fritz-leiber/

Sep 22 2020

Dracula’s Child by J.S. Barnes

As pastiche, J. S. Barnes’ Dracula’s Child is a remarkable sequel to Bram Stoker’s classic tale of vampiric horror, the legendary Dracula. Told in an epistolary manner similar to its predecessor, it tells the tale of the surviving vampire hunters some thirteen years past their execution of the dark Transylvanian lord, as pieced together by a young man on the eve of one of the greatest real-life horrors to sweep through Europe, the scourge of The Great War.

Having retired to the countryside, Mina and Jonathan Harker are married but not entirely happily. Their son, Quincey, is a smart, sensitive boy on the verge of adolescence. The occasion of his twelfth birthday party draws Jack Seward, Abraham Van Helsing and Lord Arthur Godalming, with his delicate lady wife Caroline in tow, to the grounds of Shore Green to celebrate. But Van Helsing is seized with a fit and collapses after suddenly warning the assembled party of dire things to come.

The Harkers immediately take on the responsibility of Van Helsing’s care, as he has no other family left. The Godalmings promise to cover any additional expenses after Dr Seward sends a beautiful young nurse, Sarah-Ann Dowell, to assist the Harkers. But Sarah-Ann’s arrival seems to stir up inappropriate feelings in the Harker men, even as she worries about her own lover back in London, a gangster she’s been trying to reform. Meanwhile in Europe, two hedonistic bachelors form an attachment that sees their paths cross that of a scientist determined to bring an unusual species of bat back to England for display. But surely none of these odd events can have anything to do with Dracula, given that he was executed and put into the earth so many years since?

Finding out exactly how all this has to do with Dracula is only part of the charm of this novel, that keeps Mr Stoker’s prosody while filing off some of the duller aspects of his writing, to tell a lively tale of a resurrected vampire hellbent not only on dominion but also revenge. In expanding the ambitions of Mr Stoker’s original, the events of Dracula’s Child take a decidedly political turn, as the press, the police and even parliament itself are pulled into the shadows of a dark cabal that believes the ends justify the means. One of my favorite passages from the book involves a motorist refusing to assist our heroes because he believes that the count is bringing order back to England: a terrifying but not at all unrealistic depiction of the kind of bullheaded arrogance seen in too many “patriotic” citizens the world over.

I do wish that an explanation had been given as to the source of the many dreams and oracular pronouncements that aided our vampire hunters tho. The emphasis on faith in the text was appropriately Edwardian but I felt that the evil was better accounted for: if God was willing to work so many miracles through the subconscious, why not do more to stop Dracula and his minions directly? The wonderful set pieces felt marred by the fact that I often had no idea why some of them were happening. There was tons of creepy Gothic/gaslight atmosphere but my critical mind kept wondering how we were getting into and out of these passes.

That said, this was a perfect novel to kick off the changing seasons, as the nights get longer and the days grow chillier, and all you want to do is enjoy hot soups and snuggle under the covers with a good, scary read. We’ve been given the opportunity to speak with Mr Barnes about Dracula’s Child, so you can look forward to that interview in the coming days! The novel itself comes out today from Titan Press, and is available from all good booksellers.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/22/draculas-child-by-j-s-barnes/

Sep 21 2020

We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson

It’s starting to get cold here in Maryland, so time for my thoughts to turn to hot soups and snuggling under the covers with a creepy tale or two! First up, an American classic that isn’t, perhaps, as overtly scary as its reputation has made it out to be, tho many literary people have certainly gone looking for a there that isn’t there. Or perhaps I have been merely been desensitized by years of reading thrillers: I imagine the subject matter back when it was written in the 1960s seemed far more transgressive of the “natural”. Still, that doesn’t excuse modern critics from parroting similar interpretations over half a century on.

Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In The Castle is an extremely straightforward story of the remnants of a traumatized family living in a small town that hates them, but its reputation has been built up in such a manner that I’m honestly baffled, having finally read it, when people suggest it should be treated as metaphor, as if the story itself needs to be metaphysically papered over in order to work. The edition I read included an afterword by Jonathan Lethem (and thank you to the editor for wisely sticking it at the end of the book instead of the front) which aimed to point out the obvious to, I assume, the oblivious. While I did appreciate the inclusion of certain of Ms Jackson’s biographical details that likely influenced the writing of the book, I was less enthused by Mr Lethem’s smug championing of her work as well as by his unnecessary (and IMO occasionally wrong) analysis of the text. Hence this rant.

Anyhoo, WHALitC is narrated by Mary Katharine “Merricat” Blackwood, an 18 year-old seemingly frozen on the cusp of womanhood. She lives by a set of very strict rules handed down by her beloved, almost-a-decade older sister, Constance, with whom she lives in a beautiful house on the outskirts of town. Their mother had insisted that their father set up a wall all around their property, cutting off easy walking access from the village to the highway, because she didn’t like the villagers crossing so close to their front door. But their mother is dead now, as is their father and brother Thomas and Aunt Dorothy. Only their invalid Uncle Julian survived the deadly dinner that killed the rest of them, and for which Constance was charged with but eventually acquitted of murder.

As the book opens, Merricat is describing one of her twice-weekly walks to town for supplies. She hates the people there and it seems the loathing is mutual, tho it’s easy to read between the lines of her unreliable narrative. She’s happiest back home with her cat Jonas and with Constance, whose agoraphobia doesn’t stop her from running a functioning and warm, if quite small, household. With spring taking hold, Merricat resolves to be kinder to Uncle Julian, and constantly checks in on the many protective totems she’s placed around the grounds of the estate in an effort to keep out trespassers. She’s concerned however that Constance is starting to show signs of interest in leaving the grounds for the first time in years.

And then Cousin Charles appears. Loud and vital, he quickens something in Constance, who seems blind to his obvious flaws. So Merricat will have to take matters into her own hands, and not, as is glaringly obvious from the first few pages, for the first time either.

I came to this book after Cynthia’s scathing review of Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full Of Ghosts, and while the similarities there teeter between homage and a less sincere imitation, I do feel that WHALitC reminded me most, at least tonally and in its ending, of Marilynne Robinson’s harrowing Housekeeping. I don’t think Housekeeping was meant to be a horror novel — honestly, I don’t think WHALitC should be considered a horror novel either — but both books evoke a creepy sense of detachment from reality, a willing embrace of a self-destructive co-dependency that eschews “normal” society. WHALitC leans into that more tho, I feel, talking as well about sex and class in a masterclass of very pointedly discussing a subject while never addressing it directly. It’s a weird, sad, creepy book, a beautifully written Gothic mystery with, in the form of Uncle Julian’s ravings regarding Merricat, just enough supernatural influence to make it the kind of book people would recommend at Halloween. Personally, I felt it a cautionary tale for rich people: teach your kids how to get along with the poors or set them up for anguish and implosion, tho I don’t think that was Ms Jackson’s aim at all. More’s the pity, as this is one of the best examples of what inevitably happens to dynasties that consider themselves better than the hoi polloi. I wonder sometimes how the literary criticism of this book has been influenced by the critics’ own assumptions of class, whether aloofness or solidarity are their watchwords. In this neverending year of 2020, one would hope for a greater empathy, and not one primarily reserved for the murderous rich either.

We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson was published September 21st, 1962 (complete coincidence that I originally published this review on its 58th anniversary!) and is available from all good booksellers, including

Want it now? For the Kindle version, click here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/21/we-have-always-lived-in-the-castle-by-shirley-jackson/

Sep 20 2020

Und keiner weint mir nach by Siegfried Sommer

When the editors of the Süddeutsche Zeitung planned out their 20-book set “Selected Munich,” Siegfried Sommer must have seemed a natural to kick off the series. He had been born in the city in 1914, died there in 1996, lived practically all of his life in Munich except for his time in the army during World War II. After the war, the occupation authorities deemed him sufficiently non-Nazi that he was allowed to work for the newly founded Süddeutsche. Although he had published a small amount before the war, he came into his own with the newspaper work. In 1949, he switched to a competing Munich paper, the Abendzeitung (Evening Newspaper, often called AZ) and in December of that year he started a local column titled “Blasius the Pedestrian.” He continued writing Blasius for nearly 40 years and almost 3500 pieces, ending on January 2, 1987.

Und keiner weint mir nach

Two years after Sommer’s death, and about six months after I moved to the city, Munich honored him with a life-sized statue on the south side of the downtown pedestrian zone. Set not on a pedestal but on a mount only about an inch high, the statue depicts a slightly rumpled man in a half-zipped jacket, newspaper under his arm, walking the city and observing, as Sommer must have done to gather the material for his column. The statue appears on the cover of Und keiner weint mir nach, with a bit of the view towards Munich’s central square.

The book, first published in 1954, takes place in and around the house at Mondstrasse 46, which is a real enough address in contemporary Munich but not as Sommer depicts it. The building that Sommer describes is a cheaply built set of apartments five stories tall, including the set of three up under the roof. All the other floors have five apartments, except the ground floor that is divided between the Hausmeister‘s (superintendent’s) rooms and those of the Steins, a family so proud that no one has seen the interior of their apartment. Sommer sketches each of the families or persons in the building’s 20 apartments, building up a portrait of lower middle-class Munich life.

On the one hand, this approach allows Sommer to introduce the complete ensemble, to show readers how closely involved the tenants are with each other’s lives, and to begin to portray the dynamics among the different people in the house. On the other hand, for a casual reader it is a lot of characters to keep track of all at once, and I was not always certain whose job was sharpening scissors, who drank and who abstained, who was barely hanging on to a job, and who was determined to come up in the world. Fairly soon, though, Sommer devotes more attention to the group of kids who live together in Mondstrasse and play in the street out front or in the various yards and construction sites nearby.

The book begins in the the mid-1920s, after the tumults and hyperinflation of Weimar Germany’s early years (in particular, the first Nazi putsch in Munich), but before the Great Depression. The timing is not immediately clear — or at least it wasn’t to me, perhaps there are more subtle signs that I missed — but that is also an effect of Sommer’s extremely close focus on events in and around the Mondstrasse. The characters are not interested in the wider world (although one is very casually nicknamed “Nazi” Kastl); most of them have difficulties enough getting by day to day.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/20/und-keiner-weint-mir-nach-by-siegfried-sommer/

Sep 19 2020

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle

The magic is still there, in The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. More than half a century after its publication, it’s still lodged partly in a timeless yet post-WWII America and partly in places whose times and locations are much more suspect, nearly pure mythical settings of village and unhappy kingdom and enchanted castle, leavened by characters such as Schmendrick the Magician (could a wizard have a more deflating name?) and the equally grounded Molly. And I suppose magic, enchantment, is one of the things that the book is about, if it has to be about anything beyond its story.

The Last Unicorn

At the point in the tale where Beagle picks it up — pointedly not the beginning, because he tells readers on the second page that unicorns are immortal — she lives amidst enchantment, unselfconscious of her magic, and just as unaware that she is the last. “…[S]he had no idea of months and years and centuries, or even of seasons. It was always spring in her forest, because she lived there, and she wandered all day among the great beech trees, keeping watch over the animals that lived in the ground and under bushes, in nests and caves, earths and treetops. Generation after generation, wolves and rabbits alike, they hunted and loved and had children and died, and as the unicorn did none of these things, she never grew tired of watching them.” (p. 2)

One day, hunters enter her woods, looking for deer but talking of unicorns. One says they are long gone; the other says there is one left “good luck to the lonely old thing, I say.” (p. 3) The talk about what the books say about unicorns, about what their great-grandmothers said about having met one when they were very young. Then the hunters ride off, knowing they will bag no game in a unicorn’s wood. But their talk has disenchanted the unicorn:

The unicorn stood at the edge of the forest and said aloud, ‘I am the only unicorn there is.’ They were the first words she had spoken, even to herself, in more than a hundred years.
“That can’t be, she thought, She had never minded being alone, never seeing another unicorn, because she had always known that there were others like her in the world, and a unicorn needs no more than that for company. ‘But I would know if all the others were gone. I’d be gone too. Nothing can happen to them that does not happen to me.’ (p. 6)

The seed of doubt, planted, grows quickly. She wonders, she worries, she is under the spell of not knowing and finally decides to leave her woods, leave quickly without fully admitting it to herself, in the hope that she will soon return. When she emerges, she finds the world changed: paved roads, things the reader will recognize as automobiles. But those are not the worst differences for her.

‘How can it be?’ she wondered. ‘I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns, or if they had changed so that they hated all unicorns now and tried to kill them when they saw them. But not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else—what do they look like to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?’ (p. 11)

Magic seems to have gone out of the world. She wanders until one day she meets an eccentric butterfly whose speech makes only a modicum of sense, but who imparts important knowledge: “You can find your people if you are brave. They passed down all the roads long ago, and the Red Bull ran close behind them and covered their footprints. Let nothing you dismay, but don’t be half-safe.” (p. 15)

And with that what she had felt is confirmed. Something has befallen the other unicorns, she is truly the last, but maybe she can change that. The rest of the book that is her story is about whether or not she can. But not all of the book is about her. There is also Schmendrick the Magician, who seems to have no ability at all, but actually has more than anyone else if he can only find a way to consciously access it. There is also Molly Grue, who has been a bandit’s wife and who knows the way to Haggard’s kingdom that neither wizard nor unicorn would have known.

They are all seeking, and they all face fear and failure when they get close to what they have sought. There’s more, very much more all in a register halfway between Lyonesse and Schenectady. The book has kept its magic for half a hundred years now, and likely will for many more.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/19/the-last-unicorn-by-peter-s-beagle/

Sep 17 2020

Department Store by Gail Gibbons

Decided to devote a full work-week’s coverage to kid’s books, since it looks like I’m on an unintentional roll!

My mother-in-law lives in the Virginia mountains, and is a longstanding frequenter/supporter of her local library. She also loves their library book sales, and brings bundles up to us in Maryland, primarily of books for the kids (since Heaven knows, I do not need more books!) I was poking around in my eldest son’s room the other day, trying to help him find his scattered Diary Of A Wimpy Kid novels, when I came across this volume. It was pretty unusual for me in that it had the full color cover illustration stamped on its hard binding. Most of the hard covers I’ve encountered usually limit themselves to a single contrast color with the background, but this book was published in the 1980s, so perhaps that accounts for it (plus, I’m pretty sure it never came with a slip cover, given the library stampings and lack of tape marks.) Drawn in by the cover, I paused my search for Jms’ other books and began to flip through.

Department Store is a fairly short book, a non-fiction depiction of the workings of your average department store, oddly reminiscent of the DK Discoveries series I’d devoured as a kid, tho the latter covered topics far further flung in history. To see that treatment granted to the department store in its heyday is like opening a wonderfully weird and layered time capsule here in 2020, not far removed enough to find department stores romantic as we watch them sink in real time to their grand dame ends, but close enough to remember when economies worked the way they’re depicted in this volume. The borrowing history of the book, which seemed to have been checked out several times a year on average from 1985-1991, till a last gasp in 1995 before it was weeded from circulation in 2013, follows that timeline, such that it feels odd to be holding this book now, like holding a wake for someone who isn’t dead yet.

Because this book is gorgeously illustrated in brightly colored line drawings with a strong mid-century modern influence, it feels like a celebration, not only of department stores but also of the epoch in which they thrived. Gail Gibbons peoples her store with customers and employees of every color, in a delightful utopia of shopping pleasure. I turned the pages, admiring the craftsmanship even as I wondered “who is this for?” The answer, I’ve concluded, isn’t just for the kids in the past who wanted to know more about the workings of their economy, but also for posterity, for the future and the curious children who will look back and wonder about structures like these, just as I once obsessed over the workings of castles and frontier towns. It feels strange to be reading this book now — and I’m not sure my kids would appreciate it either — but I’m looking forward to handing it to a curious grandchild several decades from now who wants to know more about the pre-Internet world.

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