'The Book Lovers' by Steve Aylett: A Guest Review by Bill Ectric

The Book Lovers by Steve Aylett (Snowbooks, 2024) is a steampunk noir masterpiece. It’s a detective story about rare, fantastic books, human relationships, and a kidnapping.

The story unfolds in a dystopian city where the populace barely notices a planned book-burning initiative. It’s like Fahrenheit 451, or Nazi Germany, or present-day Florida. People who still read are referred to derisively as “book eaters.” They meet in out-of-the-way arcane bookstores that require secret passwords to get in. Of special interest are “forked books,” which change plots halfway through depending on who reads them. Books become both mythological symbols and comic props. While intelligent rebel types rendezvous in a basement library, men of wealth and power control the city unscrupulously.

Unlawful politicians consorting with greedy industrialists is a durable trope in Aylett’s fiction. In The Book Lovers, the backroom banter advances the plot with hilarious hyperbolic machinations. Metaphors become dynamic machine parts. Fear and denial produce enough energy to illuminate a city.

“Take a look at these ordeal cylinders,” says Jay Brewster, showing off his factory to Detective Nightjar. “Fitted with diachronic-suppressive valves. Solid state, you could say.”

Diachronic refers to how language develops and evolves. Diachronic-suppressive would mean hindering the development of language. This, and the planned book burning, all to keep the populace from getting any ideas. He continues, “The mounting tension avoids these junctions and transpires through pipework to the ramification plate, which stops it dead.” The punishing ramifications of dissent make people afraid to protest. They swallow their voice and keep quiet. This result is a vat full of “denial so stale and baked-in it stinks to high heaven, though we don’t notice.”

In an interesting twist, the book purports to feature one or two sapiosexual characters. Because sapiosexuality is sexual attraction to another person’s mind, it was not easy to tell who was making out. All I know for sure is that I read the book twice and I loved it.

The Book Lovers

Steve Aylett

Snowbooks (2 Dec. 2024)

Paperback‏ ‎ 336 pages

ISBN-10 ‏‎ 1913525325

ISBN-13 ‎ 978-1913525323

(Bill Ectric)

Griffin Passant by Eric Ravilious

Incline Press of Oldham, Lancashire, is a hand-printing fine press with the motto: ‘For the reader who collects and the collector who reads.’ When their latest newsletter arrived, I was at once enthralled by the title ‘Eric Ravilious and the Griffin passant he engraved for London Transport.' Not only am I an enthusiast of mid-20^th century modern English artists such as Ravilious, but also of all matters heraldic.

The notice explained that a zinc printing block depicting the eponymous beast had turned up among a jumble of commercial designs and, fortunately, been recognised for what it was. The griffin was adopted, and adapted, from the arms of the City of London Corporation. It had been commissioned from Ravilious to adorn items in London Transport’s canteens, such as packets of tea, biscuits, chocolate and chipolata sausages. I like the fact they had a care for style and distinction even in ordinary things. The original engraving seems lost and this block may be its only preserved form.

The pamphlet, Griffin Passant, offers an imprint of the griffin and a note about its origin and rediscovery. As ever with this press, there is a care for nice details: ‘The text is hand set in Blado and Poliphilus types, in an edition of 225 numbered copies. The handmade ledger paper we have used is watermarked T H SAUNDERS 1962, when use of this image was still current. The pages are sewn into a card cover with a titled wrapper.’

The Press offers other pleasant, well-crafted editions, including of Edward Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ and G.K. Chesterton’s ‘The Rolling English Drunkard’.

(Mark Valentine)

"Mr. Godly Beside Himself" by Gerald Bullett

Gerald Bullett's novel Mr. Godly Beside Himself* celebrates its one hundredth anniversary this month. Its history is almost as odd as the novel itself is. The concept for the book had a trial run in a short story, “The Enchanted Moment,” which appeared in Bullett’s collection The Street of the Eye and Nine Other Tales (published by John Lane in October 1923); no magazine publication is currently known. The novel itself came out from John Lane in November 1924 (and from Boni & Liveright in the US in 1925). It received some good reviews, but apparently did not sell well in either country. But Bullet wasn’t done with the idea yet. In 1926, Ernest Benn published Mr. Godly Beside Himself: A Comedy in Four Acts.

I read the novel before I knew anything of the idea’s other incarnations. I discussed it in a talk in 2013, “Fairy Elements in British Literary Writings in the Decade Following the Cottingley Fairy Photographs Episode” (later published in Mythlore, available online here), finding it an interesting idea but one somewhat diffusely executed (some of my points from this talk are quoted or reworked below).

It is a remarkably bizarre book. Mr. John Godly is a bored, married, middle-aged marine insurance official, who hopes to have an affair with his secretary, Maia, who is gradually revealed to be a fairy. Pursuing Maia leads Godly to meet a number of grotesque characters, some of whom seem to be competing for Maia’s attention, and with them he enters Fairyland. Meanwhile, his double from Fairyland, called Godelik (a stage direction in the play notes that this should be pronounced Go-de-lik), enters the human world and replaces Godly in his own life and work, with disastrous results. The build-up of the novel is slow, the style alternates between whimsy and burlesque (in a manner reminiscent of James Stephens’s The Crock of Gold), and the writing style is at times especially verbose, so it’s not really a book one can recommend without reservations. E.F. Bleiler, in his Guide to Supernatural Fiction (1983), noted that “the episodes in Fairyland are very nicely handled, but the overlong preparatory sections are likely to discourage the reader, who may find the character-grotesques unnecessary and pointless.” In a brief autobiographical statement in Twentieth Century Authors (1942), Bullett (1893-1958) sums up his personal ambivalence about life: “I belong to no church and to no political party. I believe that no culture, no real civilization, is possible without freedom of thought and expression; but I do not believe in economic laissez-faire, the doctrine that every man has a right to beggar his neighbor if he can.” It seems that this kind of ambivalence shaped Bullett’s Fairyland as well; yet there is some sort of revolution brewing there, but it is rather nebulous.

Gerald Bullett

Aspects of the novel have stayed with me over the years in ways that many books I have read don’t. Particularly, I enjoyed the mild (but occasional) satire, as in where Godly meets Old Fairy Fumpum, the King of the Ancients, and learns of political factions in Fairyland. Fumpum describes The Noo Party, of comparatively recent growth, as the most formidable power for evil in the world.

These god-abandoned and unprofitable persons had succeeded in setting themselves up in authority in a land where authority had never been known. They established an absolute autocracy, and ruled the country, through their Dictator, with an iron hand. . . .  They were known, these creatures, as Yewman Beans . . .  and they were the evident source of all the political evils of the day. . . . They invented marriage ceremonies [the fairies had no such vows] and made mock-laws of astonishing ferocity. They pretended to eat strange prehistoric beasts, such as the pig, the cow, the mutton-chop. . . . There was, for example, the extraordinary vogue of a pantomime piece, invented by a certain Berry, about a fairy who grew up and died—manifest absurdity [for fairies do not die]. . . . Immature fairies were very entertained by tales of death, though what interest they could find in such silliness Old Fairy Fumpum could not imagine. (163-5)

Overall, though, I don’t think Bullett knew just where he wanted to go with this idea. Hence the three variations. The short story tells of Mr. John Pardoe, a middle-aged insurance man, dissatisfied with his life, with a wife and young son. In a single moment, Pardoe appears in fairyland in the company of Dionysus, and spends the day there quite happily before suddenly returning home, a changed man.

The plot of the play hews closer to the novel. It comprises four acts, with two scenes in each of the first three acts, but only one scene in the fourth. The first two acts show Mr. Godly and his wife, and with Maia at work, then Godly goes to dinner with Maia’s family and quarrels with them. In a forest in Fairyland, Godly meets Maia, and sees himself traveling in the opposite direction. Thus Mrs. Godly is enchanted by Godelik, and everyone in the everyday world thinks he has suffered some kind of shock. Godelik, however, chafes in his London clothes, and departs, just as Godly returns.

The plays seems unlikely to have been a success on stage (I do not know if it was ever attempted). The short story is too brief to do justice to its themes, and the novel meanders without enough focus. It is a pity that Bullett never managed to find an apt way to make his themes and plot more compatible. The novel is occasionally compared to Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), but Mr. Godly Beside Himself is not quite of a similar high quality. Still, I am glad to have read both the short story and the novel.

*The UK editions do not use a full stop after “Mr” while the US edition does.   

'The Mystery of Angelina Frood' by R. Austin Freeman

R. Austin Freeman’s The Mystery of Angelina Frood (1924), which celebrates its centenary this month, is a playful homage to one of the greatest mysteries of English literature as well as an atmospheric and ingenious thriller.

As I have suggested before, Freeman has a good claim to be the perennial vice-captain to Conan Doyle in the Victorian and Edwardian detective story. His main investigator, Dr John Thorndyke, is both a doctor and a barrister, useful attributes in the crime field. He is assisted by his own Watson, Jervis, and by a factotum, Mr Polton, who is a dab hand in the laboratory with forensic experiments.

Like Arthur Machen, Freeman seems to have known the byways and backwaters of London well and these often feature in his fiction. And like Conan Doyle, he sometimes seems to be enjoying stretching the reader’s credulity with high-spirited plots, which, however, may be enjoyed for their audacity and verve.

I have discussed in a note on the ‘Strange Case of JohnJasper’ the numerous attempts to solve Charles Dickens’ famously unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), including both literary discussion and fictional continuations, and at least one example of a conclusion said to have been received from Dickens’ spirit: alas, the great writer’s faculties appear to have deteriorated somewhat on the astral plane.

M. R. James was also a keen Droodian and was part of an informal group, The Drood Syndicate, who went on an excursion to the scene of the story, the Kent cathedral city of Rochester, where Freeman’s story is also mostly set. Freeman also has scenes in the neighbouring coastal town of Chatham, evoking its many dim narrow passages down to the wharves.

Freeman evidently enjoyed the Drood Game, and in The Mystery of Angelina Frood,  he devised a lively and mischievous pastiche. The names Drood and Frood no doubt derive from Strood, a a town adjacent to the cathedral city. There are many sly allusions throughout to the Dickens novel. One of the plot elements in Dickens’ book involves the action of quicklime upon an interred body, where the science has in fact moved on since his time. Thorndike, of course, who is well-informed about the latest forensic advances, and also adept at methodical experiments, is able to demonstrate that the results cannot quite be as they are often assumed to be in speculations about Dickens’ book.

Freeman’s tribute is an excellent if somewhat far-fetched tale of a night-time summons to the doctor, a shifty-looking stranger, a missing person and a concealed identity, told with the brazen gusto often found in this author – as I’ve remarked before, I sometimes think he concocted some of his more bizarre plots for a bet, if only with himself.

Among the theories explored by Drood savants are some involving shadowy figures, apparent conspiracies, impersonation, and cross-dressing, and it would be fair to say, without giving too much away, that Freeman makes use of all of these possibilities. And although in this case he is evidently relishing recasting Dickens’ Drood, playing with its themes, refashioning some of its characters in a more modern dress, nevertheless this is still his tale, with his own inventiveness, and I think the book still works on its own account, even for any reader unfamiliar with the Drood aspects.

My copy is an October 1936 reprint: five earlier reprints are listed after the first printing. It contains the remains of a Sunday School presentation sticker to a recipient whose name is scribbled out ‘For regular attendance during the year 194[?]’. I must say this was a more imaginative, and unusual, gift than the pious and improving tales usually offered.

Freeman’s tale also led me, incidentally, to an interesting byway. There is a reference in the book to ‘sermon paper’: the protagonist buys it at a stationer to write a long report to Dr Thorndyke. I wondered what exactly it was.  I found someone else had asked the same question because of an allusion to it by George Orwell in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. The answer, from the British Association of Paper Historians, was: ‘Sermon paper is actually Foolscap Quarto, nominally 8 x 6 1/2 inches (but there were slight variations between batches). The paper was sold 'ruled feint', i.e. lined with the thinnest line a nib could produce. In the 19th century these were produced by lining machines with adjustable nibs. During the 20th century the lines were printed using lithography.’

An old advertisement of Partridge and Cooper, Manufacturing Stationers, of 192 Fleet Street (Corner of Chancery Lane) offers it plain 4s a ream, ruled 4s 6d. One can imagine Victorian churchgoers groaning inwardly as the parson flourished in the pulpit a closely-written sheaf of the ecclesiastical foolscap. Does anyone produce—or use— sermon paper today?

(Mark Valentine)