Lore of Proserpine (1913) by Maurice Hewlett

Maurice Hewlett, Author, poet and potential son-in-law to Posseidon

Maurice Hewlett was a British novelist who, when not publishing historical novels, took to seriously claiming that not only do Fairies exist, but that he met them personally numerous times, and even had somewhat of a long winded affair with a daughter of Posseidon.

Lore of Proserpine is a very odd book. The title character, the Roman Springtime Goddess Proserpina, though claimed to be somewhat of a Goddess ruling over all the fairies, only features in the final chapter of the book in passing. The beginning of the book itself talks about a tennant no one ever sees, who had his windows replaced with a mysterious glass that alters perception, but that's rather spoiled by being nothing more than an allegory.

The next two "stories" if they may be called that, are steeped deep with personal anecdotes of Hewlett's history, and the actual "encounters" as he describes them make one think that at the very least Hewlett himself may have believed them to be genuine if by nothing else than from the way they just end abruptly without any sort of payoff. A writer trying to weave a story would, and should have, used the image of a pale elven boy with gleaming, dark, pupil-less eyes torturing a rabbit or a story of seeing two lesbian fairies on Parliament Hill as a preface to further, fantastic adventurings. But Hewlett doesn't, all the while repeating to us how everything he says happened and how he saw it.

Later he does slip into the mode of a conventional storyteller, giving "other people's" accounts of fairy child-nappings or of wooing the spirit of a tree during a storm, and these as full stories with a beginning, middle and end. Sometimes he puts himself into the story too, and indeed what can one say to the supposed authenticity of a crowd of Londoners gathering, by some supernatural foresight, in a park at night to accost a messenger boy because he's probably the God Hermes and can fulfill fortunes, good or bad, via the telegram he delivers, with Hewlett himself seeing a lady he knows help a friend make her petition ? Or his claim, coming suddenly at the tail end of a different narrative, that he was present in a house where a woman gave birth to a fairy child fathered by the spirit of a rose and then said child disappeared ?

The parts of this book which aspire towards the analytical while preaching the existence of fairies are the dullest part of the whole affair, apart from those parts where Hewlett unironically asserts that the Greek Gods do exist in some tangible fashion, and after all, if he had fooled around with one of them it would probably be bad form to tell her her daddy's just a figment of her imagination and then again so is she.

Upon completion one has to pause and wonder about Hewlett. On one hand the inclusion of "borrowed" stories he had no part in, beyond claiming to have seen or met the personage in question, or someone known to them years later, and the rather shocking claim that there were in 1913 a quarter million fairy wives in England, plucked out of Sea or Meadow (and thus, without documentation, one should add) leads one to lean on the side of a bet or an intentional bid of ribaldry. On the other, the earlier parts of the book have that shakey quality, lacking in propper setup and delivery, seen so often in the works of Theosophists and other spiritualists who claim the non corporeal is real, which makes things rather uncertain.

The Little People by John Christopher (1966)

Okay so. Imagine youself browsing and then randomly seeing this.

Now, who wouldn't immediately try to find out/get their hands on it ? Because I would, always.

The idea is that an Englishwoman inherits an Irish Castle in the middle of bugger all and she tries to turn it into a hotel, but then they find out that theres actual Little People living in the old tower. We learn they were created via some evil Nazi experiments, and then they suddenly start using their psychics powers to psychologically torture the people at the Hotel before just suddenly getting kicked a few times and crawling away.

Sadly, Christopher spends a third of the book focusing on the Hotel guests before he finally springs the Little people at us, and they only are focused on, beyond everyone's partially self centered disputations about their future and welfare and whether or not to make them a brand, for a handful of pages. Despite Christopher setting up them being savage, sociopathic bastards who use whips and can screw with people's minds, and even has one of them, apparently their leader (since that never becomes a real thing in the book) be built up as this dazzlingly beautiful, Ayesha type figure, but nothing ever comes of it and she disappears from any focus after the time when she almost jerks one of the humans off without him intending her to.

If anything, this would have been so much better had Christopher, if he did not intend to make the book any longer, to cut down his focus on the guests and increase the time spent on exploring and showcasing the Little people, maybe even have them actually kill some of the guests like it seemed they were going to do.

The Image of a Drawn Sword (1950) by Jocelyn Brooke

It seems King Penguin had decided to adorn their reprints of Brooke's works by illustrations depicting him in some fashion, though for what reason I do not know, beyond perhaps them striking onto the autobiographical nature of his works and running with it as a theme

When one starts off a description of something by calling it Kafkaesque, one is bound to shoot oneself in the foot if not carefull. Jocelyn Brooke's The Image of a Drawn Sword has been described thus by the press, and even the publishing company King Penguin couldn't restrain from cojuring up images of the old but un ageing Prague Jew. And yet I find this description not quite fitting.

Kafka certainly did not invent the fantastic creeping into one's life unawares and without explanation, nor the sense of disassociation and general 'wrongness' that can apply to a situation, and by extension to one's whole life. Brooke contradicted himself on whether or not he had read Kafka by the time when he wrote Sword, but I should  come to the man's defence, after having read his book, and say that the situations presented do not warrant the accusation, as it were.

The story, if anything, feels a bit anemic on that front, at any case. The title character, Reynard, finds himself experiencing odd moments where his lethargy seeps over into the slow unravelling of his personality and consciousness. Perhaps this is the clue for later events, but whatever may occur, it seems Reynard finds himself suddenly in situations which, contrary to all his personal experiences, seem very much distanced in time from occasions which, to him, seem a couple of weeks distant at first.

Yet there is never a jolt where Reynard finds himself unsure where he is or how he had gotten there. Indeed, he passes along through the novel quite smoothly, it is only the time of the place he arrives at that seems at odds with his own internal clock.

One regrets then that Brooke did not make the novel any longer or expand at all upon this theme. While the idea is interesting, and the events in the latter section of the novel are gripping enough, the concept as a whole could be utilised a bit better, and the alterations and sudden, unaccountable leaps in his consciousness could furnish a bit more meat to the story. A quick read, and an enjoyable one at that, yes, though if one wishes to experience this idea done in a more fantastic sort of way, I'd say Ruthven Tod's The Lost Traveller might satisfy due to it's superior length. If anyone wants a story of this type with answers well, it seems I don't know what to tell them.

Most interestingly, the novel is not without connection to other work written by Brooke. Anthony Powell, King Penguin's court Biographer on Brooke, completely fails to mention the fictional Dog Inn, located in the untraceable, fictional region of Clambercrown, is the title subject of Brooke's semi autobiographical novel, The Dog at Clambercrown (1955).

Having nothing more to say, I will end my review as suddenly as Brooke ended his book.