• About
  • Index
  • The Lost Domain

Through the dark labyrinth

Through the dark labyrinth

Tag Archives: Maureen Kincaid Speller

Six weeks, four weeks, two weeks …

03 Friday Jun 2022

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on Six weeks, four weeks, two weeks …

Tags

Maureen Kincaid Speller

It didn’t begin then. In fact we have no idea when it began. But when we became aware that things were wrong happened on a Thursday in March. Maureen was feeling a little stiff. She turned her head sharply in an effort to relieve the ache and there was a loud crack. Instantly, her neck seemed to lock in place. She could still move her hands and feet (the first thing we checked), but she could barely move her head left or right, up or down.

The stiffness in her neck began to ease over the next few days, only to be replaced with pain in the lower back and in the leg. Movement, just getting out of bed, became difficult. “Bones,” the doctor said helpfully when we got to see her, and Maureen was prescribed painkillers. The painkillers didn’t make much difference, and over time stronger and stronger painkillers were prescribed. I assumed it was the effect of these ever stronger painkillers that left Maureen increasingly dazed and confused. She became unable to tell the difference between dreams and reality, and her speech became slurred. She also lost her appetite. In the week before things came to a head she ate, in total, two teaspoons of jelly.

I was becoming ever more worried. I knew Maureen’s mother had had alzheimer’s, and it was something Maureen was afraid of, and this increasing confusion was beginning to look alarmingly like alzheimer’s. So, six weeks to the day after that crack in the neck, I phoned the doctor yet again and described Maureen’s symptoms. The response was not what I expected: “Get her to A&E straight away, she could be having a stroke.” To this day, Maureen is convinced that my phone call, and my rush in getting her to hospital, probably saved her life.

I called 999, the first time I have ever done so. I was told an ambulance would be here in 20 minutes, it was actually sitting outside our house just five minutes later. That was the first of a string of interactions with ambulance drivers and hospital transport that have been almost unfailingly positive. But then, everyone we met after this point was wonderful.

We spent that afternoon sitting in A&E at the William Harvey Hospital, Maureen getting increasingly restless in a wheelchair, me just wondering what on earth was happening. Periodically, Maureen would be wheeled away for some test or other. After a while, we got to talk with a doctor, who asked her some simple questions: spell your name backwards, she couldn’t. Was it alzheimer’s? No. Was it a stroke? No. But he was going to keep her in overnight. This seemed like good news, but I wasn’t sure I felt reassured.

Late that afternoon we were taken to a small ward where Maureen got out of the wheelchair to sit in a comfortable chair while we waited for her to be admitted. At this point she was offered, and ate, a cheese sandwich, the first solid food she had eaten in a week. Also at this point the fire alarm went off. None of the people in the ward was in a position to move easily or quickly, so we sat looking at each other wondering what to do. By the time someone appeared with a trolley to move Maureen, the alarm was over and we all returned to our seats.

Then Maureen was wheeled away to start receiving treatment. When I was able to join her, briefly, a little later, I was told that her blood salts were way out of alignment. The potassium was too low, the calcium way, way too high, and this would cause confusion. They would need to sort this out before they could begin to find out what else was wrong with her.

The next day, when I went in to visit her, not knowing if she would be coming home or staying in or anything else come to that, I found she had been moved to the Richard Stevens Ward. Go right down that corridor to the end, turn left then keep on right down that corridor to the end, then left again and immediately right, then down the stairs and turn right. I found it. But Richard Stevens was a closed ward and they were reluctant to let me in. Visiting was strictly limited and had to be booked in advance. But because she had only just arrived on the ward (less than an hour before I turned up) they decided to bend the rules. Over the next few weeks they would bend the rules many times in our favour.

That first day I’m not sure she knew I was there, or who I was. A young man, who I would only see again once just before Maureen came home, was trying to get her to eat and at the same time fighting to stop her pulling out her catheter. A doctor spoke to me, but he couldn’t give me a prognosis because as yet they didn’t even have a diagnosis. But he did say they were going to put mittens on her to stop her pulling out the various lines plugged into her body.

Over the next few visits, there were slow signs of improvement, but she was still confused. I heard stories of strange nighttime escapades, of all the nursing staff walking out on strike, of an unlikely expedition to Greenwich, and once, when her brother was visiting with me, I received detailed instructions about a book she wanted me to find for her, a romantic novel set during the early days of aerial mapping in British archaeology. I looked, believe me. She was aware of me, aware of her surroundings, aware that she was ill but not exactly sure what that illness might be. There were glimmers of the old Maureen emerging, but not yet consistently or for long.

It was during this period that one of her doctors, a very nice woman of Iraqi origin, took me to one side. “You know it’s cancer,” she told me. I didn’t know. The calcium that was in her blood causing the confusion had been leeched from her bones by the cancer. The cancer was widespread, it was in her liver and in her breast. It was too widespread to be eradicated. The condition was terminal.

That night, and for a couple of days that followed, I did my mourning before Maureen even knew what was wrong with her. And yet at precisely this time the old Maureen was returning, and she seemed better every day I visited. And yet, I wasn’t really seeing any improvement, only an end.

All this time the confusion was in retreat. A few days after I heard the news, I was there when Maureen was compos mentis enough to be told about the cancer. She took it better than I had. But then, the news as it was related to her, seemed somewhat less cataclysmic than I had heard. She was very positive, talked determinedly of seeing my 70th birthday this autumn, our 30th wedding anniversary next summer, her 65th birthday the following spring. But there was inevitably an emotional toll that she mostly kept secret. It was around this time that I received a phone call from her one morning, she felt bad, she was convinced she was on the point of death, I must come and see her now. I called the ward: yes, do come in; she’s fine, but your presence will help. I got there mid-morning and spent three hours, I think, talking calmly and feeding her very thin slices of apple. That, I think, was the turning point. From that moment on the improvement in her condition came rapidly. The confusion disappeared more or less completely. She began demanding clothes so that she could get out of bed and sit in an arm chair during the day. And she wanted me to bring food in (the catering staff were generous and helpful and did their best to find the sorts of things she could enjoy, but hospital food is hospital food, so she wanted egg mayo sandwiches and chocolate and fruit and so on). And she wanted books and newspapers and other stuff.

She was undergoing all sorts of tests throughout this period. She was taken away for scans (I visited once when she had just returned from such a scan and she slept throughout the entire hour we were allotted), PET and MRI and whatever else they had. Blood was being taken every day. She developed a massive bruise probably a couple of inches across just below the elbow on her left arm, which took nearly four weeks to fade away. And occupational therapy were taking her away to walk a few steps along the corridor or climb a set of stairs. It was becoming routine for people who had seen her when she first arrived on the ward to turn up and tell her how much better she was looking. She was looking very well.

By now, oncology had mostly taken over her case. They were concerned that the cancer in her bones might have weakened the spine, so they took her to be fitted with a back brace, which she called her exo-skeleton, and later, more prosaically, her jacket. Also, because of how advanced the cancer was in her liver, they wanted to start chemotherapy right away, before they even had full results from the biopsy they had taken.

At the same time, they were now starting to talk about her coming home. I had a visit from one of the occupational therapy team. Yes, the house was fine. They could set up a bed in the dining room. Everything we needed would be provided. They could arrange for grab rails to be set up along the steps up to the front door. This was where I could go to get a wheelchair. The only sticking point was the care package. The initial thinking was for three home visits a day, but that could take several weeks to arrange. Over the next week the care package requirements went steadily down. Oh she probably only needs someone to come in first thing to help her get up in the morning. Oh, we’re impressed with how well she’s doing, so we can get away without a care package.

Meanwhile, at home, I had people come in to quote for a stairlift. It was all possible, but we would need to demolish a cupboard at the top of the stairs. And so, one day short of four weeks after we rushed Maureen in to A&E, our mate Gareth was busy knocking down the cupboard when I got a phone call. “This is William Harvey. Have the guys been yet about the bed?” Some men had been in first thing that morning to take our dining table apart and move it, and the carpet, upstairs. But there had been no word about the bed. “Er, no. Why?” “Oh, we’re sending Maureen home this afternoon.” Maureen, I knew, was having her second session of chemotherapy that morning. I would need to go in to be with her, because if nothing else I would need to take a case in order to bring home all her stuff, including what the rest of the ward had taken to calling her library. To allow time for the chemo session to end, I would need to be there around 2pm, which would mean getting a train around 12.30. But first I had to be there for the bed to arrive and be set up. It came just before 12. It came complete with armchair, foot stool, commode that doubles as a wheelchair, waterproof stool for showering and a couple of other things. It was all set up very efficiently, but I was beginning to fret about time. Then Gareth said, “Don’t worry, I’ll drive you there in the van.” He checked with Shaun, the builder who has overseen all the work we’ve had done in the house over the last few years, and all the work we’re planning to have over the rest of this year. But there was never any question, Shaun just said drop everything and go. So I rode up to William Harvey Hospital in a slightly ricketty builder’s van.

I reached Richard Stevens ward dead on two o’clock, left a couple of big boxes of chocolate with the nurses who have all been marvellous, and went to see Maureen. She had just got back from chemo, had a belated lunch, and was contemplating a nap before I was due for my usual visit at 3. When I walked in with a suitcase she looked at me as if she had no idea what was going on. Then two people from occupational therapy bustled up behind me. They had not been able to find her all day while she was in chemo, so they hadn’t yet told her she was going home. Then they hurried her away to do one last set of exercises climbing stairs while I got on with packing. We managed to say goodbye to only a few of the staff Maureen wanted to thank, then she was put into a wheelchair and we started away. At the last moment one of the occupational therapy people asked if they had left a walker along with the bed. I said no. “Oh you must have one. Here, take this,” grabbing a walking frame seemingly at random.

At first it seemed like we were being taken to the oncology unit, but at the last minute we veered off into what was called the Discharge Lounge, though I found myself unable to stop thinking about it as the Departure Lounge. And here we sat and waited, and sat and waited. It took something like two and a half hours for Maureen’s cornucopia of medications to arrive from the pharmacy, and another hour after that, with the Discharge Lounge almost emptied out and getting ready to close for the evening, before our transport home arrive. The two guys on the transport, along with just about every other member of their species we have encountered, were chatty, funny, and incredibly helpful. I’m not sure Maureen would have been able to climb the steps into our house without them. She was exhausted by now, spent a couple of hours in the armchair before finally managing to lever herself up onto the bed, and I was beginning to wonder whether we should have insisted on that care package after all, and whether I would be strong enough to cope.

The next couple of days were really stressful for both of us, as I spent my time worrying that I had taken on far more than I could manage. I was moving furniture around, cooking meals while slowly trying to take on board the fact that chemotherapy had changed Maureen’s tastes, and unpacking all the things that we had bought to make our lives easier while the hall filled up with cardboard. Perhaps the best purchase I made was a selection of Amazon Echo Dots and Echo Flexes, which gave us Alexa throughout the house. The fact that we could talk to each other even when we were in different rooms made a massive difference. And by that first weekend we were starting to get to grips with our new daily routine. Things were very different, and always would be, but at least we were fitting in with the new necessities and starting to find time to relax together again.

Then, on that first Monday, we both went back to William Harvey for a meeting with Maureen’s oncologist, which turned out to be the most positive event since this whole mess started. We learned that, even after only two chemo sessions, the cancer in the liver was responding well. We found out that a bone specialist had looked at Maureen’s scans and decided that the spine was nowhere near as fragile as had been thought, indeed it was pretty near normal, so she no longer had to wear the back brace. And, perhaps best of all, they had identified the breast cancer that started all this as the most common type, and that is one that responds well to hormone treatment. What this might mean in the long term we don’t know, but at least we can start thinking about a long term.

And so it goes on. It is now just over two weeks since Maureen came home, and just over twelve weeks since that click in the neck that started it all. We are still learning how to cope, we are still experimenting with what food and drink works best for her. We have had issues. One of the tablets that Maureen has to take twice a day ran out. Our GP is supposed to renew the prescriptions, but hadn’t bothered (no surprise there: our GP surgery is one of the worst rated in the country, but provision of GPs in Folkestone is so bad that there is no chance of changing to a better surgery). So I contacted the oncology department at William Harvey, who in turn found a doctor at Kent and Canterbury hospital who would write a prescription for us. So yesterday, I had to go over to Canterbury to collect the prescription, then I went to get it filled. Except it was a bank holiday, so our usual pharmacy was closed. One of the pharmacies that was open in town was at Sainsbury’s, so when I went shopping I called in there: but they didn’t have the drug in question in stock. So I had to make yet another expedition to find that Boots in town was open and, after a lot of waiting around (the drug in question is a morphine derivative so there was a lot of checking involved), I finally came away with the necessary drug. But there have been good times also. We are tentatively starting to have visitors. On Tuesday our friend Tracey (who was a godsend while Maureen was in hospital) came to visit; and on Wednesday Maureen’s brother and sister-in-law spent the afternoon here. Two visits on consecutive days was probably a bad idea, Maureen was tired out most of yesterday, but they were also invigorating. We’re hoping to have one or two more visitors over the coming weeks.

Meanwhile the transformation of the house by Shaun and Gareth is starting. Most of this is stuff we planned long before Maureen fell ill, but surprisingly the plans work really well at future-proofing the house to accommodate Maureen’s new circumstances (and perhaps also my increasing age). It seems odd to say it, given the situation, but life is good.

It all comes round again

27 Sunday Jun 2021

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, music

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Al Stewart, Alexis Korner, Ashley Hutchings, Bert Jansch, Bob Dylan, Clive James, Danny Thompson, Dave Pegg, Dave Swarbrick, Fairport Convention, Jacques Brel, Jacqui McShee, Jeannie Franklyn, Joe Boyd, John Renbourn, Joni Mitchell, Judy Dyble, Julie Covington, Linda Thompson, Martin Lamble, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Mr Fox, Pentangle, Pete Atkin, Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, Scott Walker, Steeleye Span, Teddy Thompson, Terry Cox

There was a television drama series, back in the late-1960s, called Take Three Girls. Remember it? No, I don’t, not much (it was apparently the BBC’s first drama series in colour, though I doubt we actually had a colour TV by then, and anyway I suspect that what I do remember I’m getting confused with the slightly later series, Rock Follies, which starred the wonderful Julie Covington who had, incidentally, produced some pretty good covers of early Pete Atkin/Clive James songs, but that’s taking me down a rabbit hole I don’t want to explore right now …)

Where was I? Oh yes, Take Three Girls. There is one thing I remember about the series to this day: the theme music. It mesmerised me. I found out, after a while, that the song was called “Light Flight” –

Let’s get away you say find a better place
Miles and miles away from the city’s race

– (quoted from memory probably ten years after I last heard the song) and the song was performed by a group called Pentangle. I went out and bought their most recent album, Basket of Light, which also happened to include “Light Flight”. That album became easily the most played record in my collection for the next 20 years or more.

It would be wrong to say that Pentangle was my introduction to folk rock because a) the term hadn’t been invented yet, and b) Pentangle was really more a sort of folk jazz. The rhythm section, Danny Thompson on double bass and Terry Cox on drums, were both jazz musicians who had played together with the great Alexis Korner. Up front were the guitarists and flat mates, John Renbourn who was into folk played with a baroque style, and Bert Jansch who was, right up to his death in 2011, one of the greatest and most influential of all blues and folk guitarists. To complement Jansch’s rather growly vocals, they brought in Jacqui McShee, who ran her own folk club and who had a hypnotically clear voice but who was so nervous of performing that she had to sit down for all their appearances.

For just five years following their formation in 1967, Pentangle did extraordinary things with traditional songs, adding complex guitar parts up front and varied rhythmic patterns behind. What Danny Thompson does with the double bass on their own composition, “Train Song”, is more like free jazz than anything traditional. And the interplay of Jansch’s and McShee’s voices made every song sound mysterious, sexy and enchanting. Folk music became something entirely other than the finger-in-the-ear, droning voices, and grudgingly-accepted acoustic guitar of most folk music to that point.

In his wonderful memoir, Beeswing, Richard Thompson says he was “fairly unenthused” by Pentangle. But for me they were the gateway drug, the necessary ear training so that I was ready for what came next. And what came next was Fairport Convention.

Oddly, Pentangle and Fairport were in lockstep in those early years. They both formed in 1967, and both released their classic albums, Basket of Light and Liege and Lief in 1969. But in my memory, Pentangle always came first, probably because I knew Pentangle before I heard of Fairport, and knew Basket of Light before I heard of Liege and Lief. In a way, I bought Liege and Lief because of Basket of Light, because Pentangle had shown me how inventive and exciting folk music could be so I was ready to try this other highly praised reinvention of folk.

Liege and Lief was nothing short of a revelation, a pounding, thrilling piece of rock music. A few years later, when I was at university, I got into one of those long, rambling, late night conversations at a party at a house way out in the middle of nowhere outside Portstewart. It started out being about Jacques Brel, whose work I loved when covered by other artists (I’m thinking particularly of Scott Walker) but whose own performances I barely knew. But it meandered on from there as such conversations have a habit of doing, and at some point came around to the inevitable question: “So, what sort of music do you like?” To which I answered that I was mostly into folk. Except I’m not sure that was true. I bought Transatlantic samplers, so I was familiar with the work of people like Mr Fox, and I had a few Steeleye Span albums, though other than Below the Salt I got tired of them very quickly. But I really didn’t have that much in the way of folk music. But I liked the people who had emerged from folk music, the singer-songwriters like Al Stewart, Sandy Denny, and, of course, Joni Mitchell; and I liked the groups who had made something fresh out of folk music, by which I mean (because there weren’t really that many others) Pentangle and Fairport.

Pentangle, of course, only lasted a few years, and I got every album they released though I never saw them live (when they were reincarnated with different personnel some years later I had no interest in them at all). Fairport I followed for a few years. I got the two albums that preceded Liege and Lief, What We Did on Our Holidays which is okay and Unhalfbricking which is excellent, and at one point I even had a copy of their first LP with Judy Dyble on vocals, but she never worked for me as a singer. After Liege and Lief I kept up with them for a while through their innumerable personnel changes. Though I didn’t see them live at this time, it was their live albums that were generally most interesting, including the original vinyl version of Live at the LA Troubadour which includes a version of “Matty Groves”, with Simon Nicol on vocals, in which he changes the line:

Lord Arnold struck the very next blow
And Matty struck no more

to the rather more effective:

Lord Arnold struck the very next blow
And Matty struck the floor

accompanied, if I remember rightly, by a thump on the drum from Dave Mattocks. Alas, when a retitled version of that album was reissued on CD they switched to another version of “Matty Groves” with the conventional lyrics.

But the departure of Sandy Denny was something that, so far as I was concerned, they never really recovered from, though the departure of Ashley Hutchings at the same time was no great loss because the addition of Dave Pegg on bass more than made up for it. But when Richard Thompson left as well … I think it was “Babbacombe” Lee when I realised I didn’t like the album anywhere near as much as I felt I should. After that, I bought Rising for the Moon because it was Denny’s temporary return, but otherwise I bought no more Fairport.

Years later, through Maureen Speller, I reconnected with Fairport, and we saw a later iteration of the group live a couple of times, and they were every bit as thrilling as you’d hope they would be. And I reacquired on CD several of their albums, but it is still the Denny/Thompson era that works best for me.

Post-Fairport I followed Sandy Denny through Fotheringay and her solo work (The North Star Ravens and the Grassman remains for me an absolute classic, though there are songs on each of her other three albums that I keep returning to). With Richard Thompson, for some reason, it was more hit and miss. I skipped Henry the Human Fly until quite a few years later, but I did get the albums he made with Linda Thompson, of which the first, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, and the last, Shoot Out the Lights, (an interesting circularity of titles there, given the rise and collapse of their relationship) are clearly the best. And I followed him intermittently into his solo work (the early compilation, (guitar, vocal) is essential), but I missed out on more albums than I ever bought. Even so, I continue to rate Thompson as one of the great guitar geniuses of our age, and a songwriter of rare power. (Have I seen him live? That’s the strange thing. I have a feeling I must have done, but I just couldn’t say for certain. I know I have seen his son, Teddy Thompson, in concert, but was he accompanying his father? Must have been, but the picture in my mind is blurred and fuzzy.)

All of which reminiscence is prompted by the fact that I have just read Richard Thompson’s Beeswing, his memoir covering the years from the formation of Fairport Convention to the break-up of his marriage to Linda Thompson. Beeswing, which is as elegantly and engagingly written as one might expect of Thompson, is subtitled “Fairport, Folk Rock and Finding My Voice”, as if the voice (by which he means his guitar playing rather than his singing) was in place by the time he went solo. What follows, a career that has so far lasted another 40-odd years, might generate the usual showbusiness anecdotes, but the story itself was essentially over. And he is right in that: the story lies in how he got going rather than in what he did when he got there.

It is the relatively narrow focus – a period of less than ten years taken from a career of over 50 years, and a life of over 70 years – that makes this book work. It’s like Dylan’s Chronicles in that respect. And those ten years contain all the dynamics, the interplay, the discovery, that we want to read about. Some of the stories are fairly well known, of course: how they were auditioning for a new singer and Sandy Denny ended up auditioning them; how she sang “A Sailor’s Life” in the dressing room before a gig in Southampton and they impulsively decided to include it in the set that night only for it to go down so well, both with the band and the audience, for them to invite Joe Boyd down to hear them play it again the next night, and how he then called on his mate Dave Swarbrick to play on the recording, thus essentially inventing folk rock. There’s a detail I didn’t know: I know that a guitar is tuned in fourths but I hadn’t realised that a violin is tuned in fifths, so it is physically impossible for a guitarist to match many of the chords that a violin plays, and vice versa, so the interplay between Swarb and Thompson on “A Sailor’s Life” and many other tracks involved them both developing new ways of playing their instruments. There are other well-known incidents that acquire a little more detail in the telling here. We learn that he barely knew the groupie Jeannie Franklyn when she attached herself to him, and after a couple of weeks together he seems to have been on the point of splitting with her when she accompanied them to a gig in Birmingham. That’s when the van crashed on the way home afterwards, and Jeannie along with drummer Martin Lamble were killed. The death of Lamble had a far greater effect on Thompson and the rest of the group. And then there’s stuff that is new, at least to me. I now know, for instance, why the magnificent “Sloth” is called that. Thompson and Swarb were making their first attempt to write songs together. They had two pieces of music they were working on, one was fast paced and one was slow paced. For convenience they called the fast tune “Fasth” (it would become “Walk Awhile”), and the slow tune “Slowth”. Only they never got around to deciding on a proper title for the slow tune, and “Slowth” mutated into “Sloth”.

And writing all that makes me want to just go away and listen again to “Sloth”, or “Meet on the Ledge”, or “Calvary Cross”, or any of a dozen other songs that are seared into my memory.

Modernisms

07 Thursday Jan 2021

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, history of ideas

≈ Comments Off on Modernisms

Tags

Anthony Powell, Constant Lambert, D.J. Taylor, E.M. Forster, Edith Sitwell, Ford Madox Hueffer, H.G. Wells, Henry James, John Middleton Murry, Joseph Conrad, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Muriel Jaeger, Peter Quennell, Sarah Cole, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, William Walton

When I read Lost Girls by D.J. Taylor last autumn, I was disappointed. It seemed to me that the book only really came alive when Taylor was discussing the London literary scene during the 1940s, and the four young women who were the titular subject of the book were at best only peripherally involved in that scene. So I decided to try a book that seemed to more directly address his interests. Which is how his 2016 literary history, The Prose Factory, appeared on my Christmas list (very many thanks, Maureen).

At the moment I am only into the second chapter, but already it is obvious that this is a subject he is much more interested in writing about. The book is a literary history of Britain from 1918 until, more or less, the present, and it is as general and has the sort of blinkers as one might expect. A cursory glance, for instance, suggests that H.G. Wells is the only science fiction writer to appear in the index; which is fine with me, I wasn’t really expecting anything else. As a broad account of literary movements it is providing exactly the sort of historical context I was hoping for, and at times it can be quite revealing.

When you look at literary history from a science fiction perspective, for instance, modernism tends to come across as a monolithic force, an instant literary establishment that, as the result of a quarrel between Henry James and H.G. Wells, conspired to exclude Wells and, in his wake, science fiction as a whole, from serious academic consideration. It wasn’t exactly like that. Reading Taylor’s chapter on modernism in the 1920s I wasn’t surprised to find that it was quite a fragmented movement, but I was surprised to learn how tribal it was.

The father of literary modernism, as I suppose we might put it, was Henry James, who is barely mentioned in Taylor’s book primarily because he had died in 1916. He brought a number of his Romney Marsh friends and neighbours, such as Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford, into the modernist camp on his coat tails, though it has to be said that at the time Conrad and Ford were more readily seen among the Georgians, the conservative, traditionalist literary movement that began with the end of the Edwardian era and fizzled out during the First World War.

It was after the war that modernism really got going, often lauded within the pages of the plethora of small magazines that were published throughout those years. These are magazines with famous names – Criterion, The Athenaeum – but they were still decidedly small. Even the best of them were lucky to have a circulation of 1,000, and those subscribers were fickle, if they grew weary of John Middleton Murry’s jeremiads in The Athenaeum, they would switch to T.S. Eliot’s austere pronouncements in Criterion. And though Taylor doesn’t say so, I get the distinct impression that this readership primarily consisted of academics in Oxford and Cambridge, and would-be writers in London plodding from the offices of one small magazine to the next in the hope of getting published. Despite this, the magazines were influential, at least in terms of how later academics look back on the modernists.

Middleton Murry was the cheerleader for one tribe of modernists, endorsing a number of the newer writers. But he seems to have been at war with everyone, and fairly soon lost his influence. Another tribe centred on the Sitwells, who were early advocates of the work of Eliot. Their circle included the composers William Walton and Constant Lambert, and they brought into their branch of modernism something of the polyrhythms and improvisation of jazz, the other great artistic movement of the decade but one that was not otherwise widely taken up by modernists. But the Sitwells were self-obsessed, idiosyncratic, and argumentative. Edith Sitwell in particular seems to have delighted in her feuds. There is one delightful vignette in Taylor’s book in which someone came upon Edith Sitwell and Virginia Woolf sitting side by side on a settee during one of their periodic truces, and I got a vivid impression of two tight-lipped women each preparing to spit venom at the other. Woolf, and Bloomsbury, introduces another tribe, one that encompassed the artistic as much as the literary, and whose publishing house, the Hogarth Press, brought out books by writers like E.M.Forster, Peter Quennell, and Muriel Jaeger, who weren’t all normally classed as modernists. Though the most notable title from the Hogarth Press was probably the first edition of “The Waste Land”, which brings us inevitably to Eliot himself, buttoned-up and puritanical, whose early poems, and especially “The Waste Land”, made him the torchbearer for post-war modernism. He inspired reverence – Taylor tells of a young Anthony Powell gazing in wonder when he chanced to spy Eliot dining alone at a Charlotte Street restaurant – and there were any number of would be writers trying to copy his work (as successfully as such copyists invariably are); but he also inspire mystification and condemnation, especially from critics like J.C. Squire, the last of the Georgians. Though Eliot himself, politically conservative and religiously inclined, probably had more in common with the Georgians than with the new generation of would-be revolutionaries who followed in his wake.

And this, I suspect, barely does justice to the internecine conflicts that characterised the first decade or so of literary modernism in Britain. I mean, where does one fit James Joyce, championed by Eliot but hardly the clubbable type one might find in Bloomsbury or at a Sitwell country home? So when Sarah Cole, in her truly wonderful book, Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century, argues that Wells was a modernist writer all along, the response has to be: of course, but what brand of modernist?

Boundaries

07 Wednesday Oct 2020

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Andrei Tarkovsky, Christopher Priest, M. John Harrison, Maureen Kincaid Speller, nina allan, Robert Holdstock, Steve Erickson

[This is, I suppose, a place holder for something I may want to explore at greater length elsewhere. But for now …]

I don’t normally listen to podcasts, I suppose I tend to be visually rather than aurally directed. But Maureen insisted that I should listen to an episode of Weird Studies, to be precise, Episode 81: Gnostic Lit: On M. John Harrison’s ‘The Course of the Heart’. She said I would enjoy it; she was absolutely right. In a sense it amplifies and runs variations on some of the things I was talking about when I discussed The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again a little while ago.

One of the things that caught my attention was an opening discussion about zones, specifically referring to Tarkovsky’s Stalker. (The two people hosting the podcast don’t seem to be overly familiar with Harrison’s other work, so they completely miss how closely this relates to the middle volume in his Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, Nova Swing. A pity, that could have opened up a much wider and even more complex discussion.) But I found myself thinking less of the zones, however we might choose to characterise them, than of the boundaries between zones. And I realised how much of my favourite literature, the literature that for me best exemplifies the fantastic, is specifically concerned with the identification and the examination of such boundaries.

Harrison is, of course, the prime example here. The Course of the Heart concerns the relationship between mundane reality and the pleroma, here identified as the vanished land of the Coeur. Typically, the pleroma is not real and its achievement is more associated with loss than with achievement, so in Nova Swing the story moves between everyday disappointment and the unfulfilled promise of the pleroma-like zone. Exactly the same dynamic is there in The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, as it is in stories like “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium” or, more recently, “In Autotelia”.

But it is not just Harrison who explores this boundary between the worlds. Think, for instance, of Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock. The edge of Ryhope Wood is exactly the sort of border between Saubade and the zone that we encounter in Nova Swing. Crossing that border, entering the wood, is less a journey into a land of myth than it is into a land of promise.

Or there is the boundary between England and the Dream Archipelago in Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation. It is not just that these are two sides of a shattered mind, it is that each is a realm of promise. To Peter Sinclair in Britain, the Dream Archipelago is the longed-for but ultimately unsatisfying pleroma; to Peter Sinclair in the Dream Archipelago, it is the other way round. As the boundaries between the two worlds become ever more porous, so the other land becomes more expressly the dream that is unfulfilled, the desire that is unsatisfied.

And there are others. The sister who disappears and then, perhaps, reappears, crosses one way and then the other across this very boundary in Nina Allan’s The Rift. The multiple Americas of Steve Erickson’s Rubicon Beach are separated one from the other by just such a boundary.

Of course, and it is probably rather bathetic to point this out, identifying and crossing such a boundary is commonly figured as an act of creativity. The two Peter Sinclairs are both writers, the secret of Ryhope Wood is first revealed in the pages of a diary, the story of the Coeur is imagined into life in the stories that one character tells to another. But still I can’t help thinking there is something here, something that might repay further consideration. Something to ponder upon further, I suspect.

folk rock

29 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in music, Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on folk rock

Tags

Al Stewart, Aleister Crowley, Amazing Blondel, Beatles, Bert Jansch, Bob Dylan, Cecil Sharp, Danny Thompson, Davy Graham, Donovan, Ewan McColl, Fairfield Parlour, Fairport Convention, Ghost Box, Jackson C. Frank, Jacqui McShee, John Renbourn, Magna Carta, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Mr Fox, Paul Simon, Pentangle, Planxty, Ralph McTell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Rob Young, Sandy Denny, Simon Nicol, Steeleye Span, Terry Cox, The Dubliners, The Spinners, Vashti Bunyan, William Blake

basket of lightI grew up with folk-rock, that curious hybrid which took (so-called) traditional tunes and added rock instrumentation. For a decade or more throughout the 1970s, the most-played record I owned was Basket of Light by Pentangle, one of the first folk-rock outfits (though I’ve never been convinced that the term rightly applies to them, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Jacqui McShee certainly came from the folk tradition, but what Danny Thompson and Terry Cox brought to the mix was more a jazz infusion than a rock sound). And then there liege and liefwas Leige and Lief by Fairport Convention, which certainly was folk rock, and Below the Salt by Steeleye Span, which always sounded to me like an outfit that wasn’t really convinced by what they were doing and thought the rock stuff was a little infra dig. Anyway, by the time they got to All Around My Hat and the abysmal Rocket Cottage, they had pretty much given up on being anything but a pop group.

There were others, of course. One of the things that first drew Maureen and I together was that I was the only other person she’d met who knew who Mr Fox were. But those three, Pentangle and Fairport in their pomp, with a little bit of Steeleye on the side, were the great triumvirate of folk rock. There were a couple of live albums by Fairport, Live at the LA Troubadour and Full House, that you don’t seem to get any more. There’s a version of Full House that has been released, but it’s not quite the same as the original; Simon Nicol’s version of “Matty Groves” is different, and the original was superior (in the original, Nicols sang: “Lord Arnold struck the very next blow, and Matty struck the floor”; the other version, more familiar but less dramatic, goes “Lord Arnold struck the very next blow, and Matty struck no more”). But those albums were ones I always listened to with amazement, even though it would be many years before I ever saw a Fairport line-up on stage.

north star grassman and the ravensI had grown up on the Beatles, (I was 11 when I watched their first ever appearance on British television), and my musical taste continued to be informed by what were then known as beat groups. So I never had any particular interest in or liking for the old finger-in-the-ear traditional singer, but when the folk song and the rock music merged, suddenly my ears pricked up. For a while my record collection held some real oddities (anyone remember Magna Carta, Fairfield Parlour, Amazing Blondel? No, me neither, not any longer.) but as the folk-rock wave of the 70s began to recede, my tastes began to shift back to the rockier side of things. Though with some variations: the astonishing and idiosyncratic songs on Sandy Denny’s The North Star Grassman and the Ravens and Sandy, certainly had a folk heritage, but they were hardly what I’d call folk songs, and the new direction they were opening up was one I was very interested in pursuing.

electric edenAll of which is a long-winded way of getting around to talking about Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music by Rob Young. I was drawn to the book because it is largely a history of British folk rock, and in so far as that is what the book is, it’s a good book. Unfortunately, Young tries to cast his net wider than that, and that bit is problematic.

He starts with a chapter about Vashti Bunyan, which is a mark against him right from the beginning. Really! Surely, she had the most anaemic singing voice ever recorded, and her album, Just Another Diamond Day, justifiably sold about 20 copies. But in the decades since then, she has somehow been transformed into an iconic figure in the history of British folk music. I don’t understand this, but Young is far from the only person to put her up on that pillar. This chapter does tell us some things about Young’s book. In the first place, when it comes to actually writing about music, Young is crap. But then, there are very few people who are able to write well about music, though not many of them reach for the sort of extravagant and laboured metaphors that Young employs. In the second place, Young is largely uncritical: if the song or album or group can be squeezed into his history, then it is by default good. Okay, as the book goes on there are a couple of albums which he doesn’t greet with unalloyed praise (Rocket Cottage, of course, being one), but this is not exactly a work of criticism. Thirdly, the book is only accidentally about folk music; the clue is in the sub-title, “Visionary Music”, though he never actually explains what visionary music is, and for much of the book he blurs the boundaries so that folk rock is inevitably equated with visionary music. So Vashti, setting off in her gypsy caravan for Donovan’s Scottish island, which he has already left, is of interest because she is visionary rather than because she is a folk singer.

Now it is when we come to that term, “folk singer”, that things become interesting. Leaving Vashti to wander off stage, never to return, Young now goes back in time to the early collectors, Cecil Sharp, the Child Ballads, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and so on. This is where the book becomes interesting, because you start to realize how problematic the whole thing is. The whole collecting thing was tied up with a strand of late-19th century nationalism that echoed similar movements in Europe, and therefore inevitably has a rather dubious right-wing vibe. It was also rather indiscriminate, the collectors picked up on anything that grizzled country folk liked to sing, whether traditional ballads or music hall songs or something they had extemporized themselves, but because of where they came from they were all deemed authentic. “Authentic” became a nonce-word that plagued folk music for decades after, everything was geared to digging back to find the most ancient and therefore most authentic version of every song. The truth is that there is nothing authentic about folk music: tunes are remembered and forgotten, lyrics get changed constantly, lines are misremembered and new lines are cobbled together, and one set of words could be put to a different tune then the words would be changed to fit the tune. But for the panjandrums of Cecil Sharp House, the songs were set in stone, their authenticity an earnest of their importance. By the 1950s, Ewan McColl (or Jimmy Miller from Salford, as he was originally) was so insistent on authenticity that singers at his folk club had to employ the accent of whichever region the song had been collected from. Folk music was associated with various popular, left-wing causes, the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass in the 1930s, the Aldermaston Marches in the 1960s, and yet the traditionalists were extraordinarily authoritarian.

bert janschThe guitar, for example, was not an authentic instrument, and so it didn’t start to creep into the folk music scene until the late-50s and 60s. But the young masters of the guitar who came on the scene around this time, Renbourn and Jansch, Davy Graham, and so forth, began to change the scene. They brought a more fluid, fluent style to the traditional songs they played; they began writing their own pieces in the style of their vamped-up traditional songs; and they were listening to other popular music around at the time. After all, if guitars aren’t common in your chosen area of music, who do you listen to for techniques and ideas? The folk guitarists who came on the scene in the early-60s brought influences from jazz, from classical music, and from rock ‘n’ roll; and in time they brought in electric guitars.

One of the things that comes across in the longest and best part of the book is how eclectic folk music became between the mid-60s and the mid-70s. Failing rock groups reinvented themselves as folk groups; most of the drummers who played in folk groups had originally started in rock bands. The folk musicians were listening to jazz and classical and rock; rock musicians were listening to folk; and from all of this new hybrids emerged. And thus were born Fairport and Pentangle and their ilk.

So far, so good. This is, of course, a partial account of British folk music during the period. There is no mention, for instance, of groups like The Spinners, The Dubliners or Planxty, though they were all very successful (The Spinners never seemed to be off British television screens throughout the 60s). No mention, either, of other performers who arose on the folk scene, like Al Stewart or Ralph McTell, even though these would go on to have very successful careers in ways that played very adroitly with the borders between folk and rock. And though there are nods to Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and Jackson C. Frank, the ways that the British folk scene interwove with the American folk revival of the 50s and 60s isn’t really developed. Nor, given the whole issue of authenticity that plagued folk music, is there any real discussion of whether folk musicians who wrote their own songs (which is the case with practically all of the performers I’ve mentioned so far, including the austere Ewan McColl) could be said to be part of the folk tradition. Can things like “Pentangling” by Pentangle or “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” by Sandy Denny really be considered folk songs? And if so, what is it that makes them folk?

But we come back, yet again, to that subtitle: “Visionary Music”. It is undefined; sometimes it means a songwriter who read William Blake, sometimes a song that refers to the landscape, sometimes a piece that pays homage to Aleister Crowley, sometimes it seems to be just a band that Rob Young happens to like. And over the course of the book, it transmutes into something called “acid folk” (don’t ask, I’ve no idea), or psychedelic folk (ditto); and by the end of the book he’s talking about obscure experimental musicians whose work, so far as I can see, bears no relationship to folk in any way. Which is another problem with the book, it is unfocussed, the subject drifts. It may be that those who like Ghost Box will find the final chapters of the book enthralling, but for me they have moved away from the area I was particularly interested in. Which to my mind makes the book over-long (660-odd pages) and rather bitty.

But the bits that I was interested in are very good indeed.

Shadowing the Clarke

15 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in awards, Shadow Clarke

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Adam Roberts, Anne Charnock, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Christopher Brown, James Bradley, Jaroslav Kalfar, Jeff Vandermeer, John Dos Passos, John Kessel, John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Kim Stanley Robinson, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Mohsin Hamid, Nick Harkaway, Nick Hubble, Nicola Barker, nina allan, Omar El Akkad, Paul McAuley

This time last year, I was engaged in the struggle to compile my personal shortlist for the first Arthur C. Clarke Award Shadow Jury. It was an interesting and revealing exercise. I was glad to step down from the Shadow Jury this year only because it is a time-consuming process and time is something I don’t have right now. But in every other respect, I was sorry to go and a part of me is itching to put together a personal shortlist again this year.

So why the hell not? Continue reading →

Greece

28 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in art

≈ Comments Off on Greece

Tags

Dirk Bogarde, George Katsimbalis, Gerald Durrell, Henry Miller, John Craxton, Lawrence Durrell, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Niko Ghika, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paul Nash

Many years ago, not long after Maureen and I had got together, we went up to Edinburgh to visit her friend Moira. At one point, Moira got out a bunch of photographs she had taken while on holiday in Greece some ten years before (in other words, let me be clear, some ten years before I even knew Moira existed). In one photograph, taken on the Acropolis, the central figure, perfectly framed and in sharp focus, striding directly towards the camera, was me.

Somehow, that weird coincidence encapsulates Greece for me. It is a locus made up of coincidences and connections, it is where all things come together.

Greece

Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1906–1994), Study for a poster. Tempera on cardboard, 1948. Benaki Museum – Ghika Gallery, Athens. © Benaki Museum 2018.

I first encountered Greece (if that is the right way to put it) through Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, which remains one of the funniest books I know, and also one of the loveliest. This led me inevitably to the work of his brother, Larry, particularly those exquisite travel books, Reflections on a Marine Venus and Bitter Lemons. From Lawrence Durrell I moved on to his friend, Henry Miller, and The Colossus of Marousi, the only one of Miller’s books I’ve been able to read with unalloyed pleasure.

That is one set of connections. Another set sprang also from Durrell, in a way. I developed a taste for travel literature, which I kept up for quite a few years until I OD’d on the stuff while reviewing it for places like The Good Book Guide and British Book News. Along the way I happened upon a book called A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor. When, as a result, I grabbed everything I could by Fermor, it was somehow no surprise that this led me back to Greece. (Although it seems only tangential to my literary discovery of Greece, I also devoured anything on TV relating to the country, such as the 1970s series like The Lotus Eaters and Who Pays the Ferryman?, and of course old films such as the Dirk Bogarde wartime adventure, Ill Met By Moonlight which seemed to be on TV endlessly when I was young. And Bogarde, of course, was playing Paddy Leigh Fermor, though it took me a little while to make that connection.)

In truth, the more I read about Leigh Fermor (and I’ve read biographies and letters and the like) the less I think I would have liked him in person. He was an incurable snob who spent much of his life freeloading on the rich and aristocratic types he fawned over. And yet I find him endlessly fascinating: he wrote like a dream, of course, and he had a genuine and admirable gift for friendship. He seemed to know everyone who was anyone in the postwar world of art and letters, and everyone loved Paddy.

ghika craxton fermor

Niko Ghika, John Craxton, Joan Fermor, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Barbara Ghika

Two of his lifelong friendships were with the Greek painter, Niko Ghika, and the English painter, John Craxton. (To give you a glimpse of what a peculiar world this was, Craxton first went to Greece immediately after the Second World War when he was encouraged to do so by the wife of an ambassador, who then gave him a lift in a bomber. “Of course she did,” Maureen commented, when I pointed this story out to her.) Now this triumvirate is the focus of an exhibition at the British Museum. I will probably write about this exhibition at greater length when I’ve had a chance to absorb the substantial catalogue that goes with it. For now, these are a few initial thoughts.

Although Leigh Fermor was clearly the glue binding this group together, he was strangely absent from this exhibition, or at least he was out of the limelight. He was there in photographs, in quotations from some of his books and articles dotted about the place, but the focus, rightly, was on the magnificent paintings by Ghika and particularly Craxton. Though it was amusing to see a handful of Leigh Fermor’s letters on display, all with “IN HASTE” scrawled across the top; that seemed to be the only way he ever wrote anything.

ghikaGhika’s paintings could be, I think, somewhat disturbing. They were crowded with labyrinthine twists and turns in which the more you looked at them the more you seemed to be lost. But they were overgrown with a profusion of plants and leaves and flowers, a riot of colours, as if they were something out of a Jeff VanderMeer novel. And there, among Ghika’s friends, among the regular visitors to his home on Hydra, was George Katsimbalis, who was Henry Miller’s Colossus of Marousi, which brings us back round to tie in another set of connections.

craxtonBut the work we both fell in love with was by John Craxton. Bold lines, often very few colours, and an incredible vigorous sense of life, especially in the numerous paintings of groups of men around cafe tables or performing Greek dances. I’d seen his work before, since he provided the cover illustrations for all of Leigh Fermor’s books from Mani onwards, but I hadn’t realised this until we got to the exhibition. There is something pivotal in his work, we kept catching echoes of Paul Nash in one direction, Picasso in another, and was there something Ruralist or even possibly Preraphaelite in some individual pictures? Certainly I need to see more of his work.

 

Sharke infested custard

08 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction, Shadow Clarke

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Arthur C. Clarke Award, David Hebblethwaite, Jonathan McCalmont, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Megan AM, Nick Hubble, nina allan, Vajra Chandrasekera, Victoria Hoyle

I am, it turns out, a puritan.

This comes as something of a surprise to me. After a childhood brought up on The Children of the New Forest and its ilk (in my last year of primary school, when the class was told to write a story, I produced an 11-chapter, 22-page “novel” that was effectively a rewrite of The Children of the New Forest), I have always felt more inclined towards the wrong but wromantic Cavaliers than the right but repulsive Roundheads.

Nevertheless there it is: when it comes to science fiction, I would appear to be a puritan. Not, I hasten to add, in terms of what constitutes science fiction. On that issue I am decidedly catholic. But when it comes to criticism of, and commentary upon, science fiction, then I am most certainly a puritan. Continue reading →

Shadow Clarke: Occupy Me

30 Thursday Mar 2017

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, science fiction, Shadow Clarke

≈ Comments Off on Shadow Clarke: Occupy Me

Tags

Ali Shaw, Arthur C. Clarke Award, David Hebblethwaite, Emma Geen, Joanna Kavenna, Jonathan McCalmont, Lavie Tidhar, Lily Brooks-Dalton, Matthew de Abaitua, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Megan AM, Naomi Alderman, Nick Hubble, nina allan, Steph Swainston, Tricia Sullivan, Victoria Hoyle

Discussions of the Shadow Clarke choices continue apace. Since my last piece here, several more reviews have appeared.

Jonathan McCalmont on A Field Guide to Reality by Joanna Kavenna

Nina Allan on Fair Rebel by Steph Swainston

David Hebblethwaite on The Many Selves of Katherine North by Emma Geen

Megan AM on Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton and The Destructives by Matthew de Abaitua

Victoria Hoyle on Central Station by Lavie Tidhar

Nick Hubble on The Power by Naomi Alderman

Maureen Kincaid Speller on The Trees by Ali Shaw

and me on Occupy Me by Tricia Sullivan

I’ve included my review below the fold, but you really should go and take part in the discussions. Continue reading →

Shadow Clarke: The Underground Railroad

15 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by Paul Kincaid in awards, books, Shadow Clarke

≈ Comments Off on Shadow Clarke: The Underground Railroad

Tags

Aliya Whiteley, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Colson Whitehead, Joanna Kavenna, Johanna Sinisalo, Jonathan McCalmont, Lavie Tidhar, Matthew de Abaitua, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Megan AM, N.K. Jemisin, nina allan, Victoria Hoyle

The work of the Clarke Award Shadow Jury continues apace. The jurors are now taking turns to review the books they chose for their personal shortlists. So far you can find:

Nina Allan on The Destructives by Matthew de Abaitua and A Field Guide to Reality by Joanna Kavenna

Jonathan McCalmont on The Arrival of Missives by Aliya Whiteley

Victoria Hoyle on The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Megan AM on The Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo

Maureen Kincaid Speller on Central Station by Lavie Tidhar

And now there’s my review of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

I’m reproducing my review under the fold, but you really should head over to read the other reviews, and keep up with the Shadow Clarke hub, because that’s where the conversation is taking place. Continue reading →

← Older posts

Recent Comments

Jim Clarke on In the beginning
Lise Andreasen on A taxonomy of reviewing
Russell Letson on A taxonomy of reviewing
socrates17 on The Mysterious Disappearance o…
Checkmate in Berlin… on A year of big books and little…

Archives

Blogroll

  • Big Other
  • Paper Knife
  • Ruthless Culture

Adam Roberts Arthur C. Clarke Award Arthur C Clarke books of the year Brian Aldiss Christopher Priest David Mitchell E.L. Doctorow Frederik Pohl Gene Wolfe George Orwell H.G. Wells Harlan Ellison Helen MacInnes Henry James Iain Banks Ian McEwan Ian Watson Isaac Asimov J.G. Ballard James Tiptree Jr John Banville John Clute John Crowley John W. Campbell Keith Roberts Kim Stanley Robinson Lucius Shepard Martin Amis Mary Shelley Maureen Kincaid Speller m john harrison nina allan Patrick Leigh Fermor Philip K. Dick Robert Heinlein Robert Holdstock Robert Silverberg Russell Hoban Samuel R. Delany Stephen Baxter Steve Erickson Terry Bisson Thomas M. Disch Thomas More Ursula K. Le Guin William Boyd William Gibson William Shakespeare Winston Churchill

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Through the dark labyrinth
    • Join 1,694 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Through the dark labyrinth
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...