Joker Moon - George R R Martin (ed)

 Joker Moon is the third of the Wild Cards Mosaic I have read.   It is, I believe, the most recent of the ones I have read.   I still like Mississippi Roll the best, and this the least.   Mississippi Roll works well because the action is concentrated aboard the steam ship.  Three Kings has a strong storyline which, fortuitously, closely mirrored reality.  Joker Moon is unfortunately all over the place, from India in the Fifties to, obviously, the Moon.   And the central character, Theodorus, is your typical Elon Musk over-indulged brat.  Okay, you're going to feel sorry for anyone who turns into a snail-centaur.  But he's still a brat.

That said, there are plenty of more appealing characters.  I liked the all the astro- and cosmonauts.  I liked Tiago, who attracts trash like a semi-human recycling centre.   Even Aarti the Moon Maid, a female Indian mirror of Theodorus has more going for her than, well, than Theodorus.

The main attraction of the Wild Cards series is to enjoy the collaboration of multiple genre writers (11 of them in this case), each developing their theme and characters.  There was no poor or inferior writing in Joker Moon.   Some was exceptional.  I particularly enjoyed the sections done by Michael Cassutt and Leo Kendren.

The Moon and the Bonfires - Cesare Pavese

 The Moon and the Bonfires was Pavese's last novel.  It was published in 1950; he committed suicide in August that year.   He was forty-one.   Some say he was the most influential Italian novelist of his time, which makes it odd that this translation by Tim Parks didn't join the Penguin Classics until 2021.  I bought The Penguin Classics Book this time last year and Pavese isn't even mentioned in the index.

Anyway, this slim volume - a very short novel, I would suggest, rather than a novella - is about 'Eel', a bastard boy given as cheap labour to a fatrmer up in the Piedmont hills.  He works the farm, is given basic skills and an element of freedom.  He observes the farmer's three daughters, he makes friends with other farm workers and with Nuto, a part-time amateur band leader and son of the local carpenter.

After his spell of military service Eel travels to America where he makes enough money to return to his roots after the war, twenty years since leaving.   While it is probably not technically his home, the village outside Canelli is the only home he has ever known, the place he has dreamed about during his time in America.

But he returns to find that everything in the village has changed.  The farms have all changed ownership and almost all the people he knew as a boy have either left or died.   Only Nuto remains, married with children, but still the same philosophical mentor for Eel.   Twenty years ago Nuto taught Eel about life and the possibilities of change.  Twenty years on, Nuto, who hasn't changed at all, guides forty year-old Eel around their old haunts and explains, piecemeal, what happened in his absence.   Mainly what happened was the war.  Was Nuto a partisan?  It is never fully explained.  He certainly had links with the partisans hiding in the hills.  Eel himself becomes a mentor to a lame farm boy called Cinto.  It all ends with two bonfires, one in 1949, one towards the end of the war when the partisans were avenging old scores.

The style is discursive, skipping from Eel's memories to Nuto's updates.  For all his links to this rich soil Eel remains the outsider, the observer - except perhaps when it comes to Cinto.  His recollections of the women on the farm where he was raised remain detached, oddly impersonal; such women were never for him.  He has known women but it is doubtful he has ever known love.  Pavese wrote the book in less than three months yet it is incredibly deep and immersive.   I loved it.   I'm pleased to see that Penguin have also published Tim Park's translation of Pavese's semi-autobiographical novella The House on the Hill.  I'll  be having that.

Crowley's Apprentice - Gerald Suster

 Israel Regardie (1907-85) was secretary, pupil and sometimes friend of Aleister Crowley, The Great Beast 666.   Gerald Suster (1951-2001) was pupil, friend and ultimately memoirist of Israel Regardie.  Regardie broke with Crowley before World War II and after the war qualified as a doctor of psychology and licenced chiropractor, settling in the USA.  Suster visited him there as a very young man and stayed with him in California and Arizona on many occasions.

This memoir therefore, is one notorious occultist (Suster got money out of News International when they defamed him in one of their scandal rags) writing about another.  Regardie had become notorious during the height of Crowley's time as self-described Wickedest Man in the World, and had been banned from entering England even though, like Suster, he was born in London.

In occult circles Regardie was praised and despised in equal measure because he was the one who wrote it all down and made the secret rituals of the Golden Dawn available and comprehensible to outsiders.  It was his writing, of course, that initially attracted Suster.

Crowley's Apprentice is interesting in many ways.  For the generalist it offers valuable insights into the rebirth of magic around 1900 and leads to other sources.

Royal Highness - Thomas Mann

 Royal Highness was written in 1909.  The royal in question is Prince Klaus Heinrich, second son of the Grand Duke of an unnamed grand duchy somewhere in central Germany.   Klaus Heinrich is born with the exact same disability (an underdeveloped left hand) as Wilhelm II, Kaiser Bill, who had been emperor of Germany for twenty years when Mann wrote this romantic comedy.

Klaus Heinrich is very much not Kaiser Bill.  Klaus Heinrich is one of the good guys, trained from birth to reflect well on his autocratic and aloof father and sickly older brother.  So Klaus Heinrich learns to hide his hand and become loved by the people.  He does a good job.  He is only twenty or so when his father dies and his brother Albrecht is recalled from the healthier south to succeed.  By this time the grand duchy is heavily in debt and the rural population is quietly starving.

Duke Albrecht is too highly bred to do anything about such things.  His sister Ditlinde has already married an aristocratic princeling with a talent for modern business, so it falls to Klaus Heinrich to try and fumble his amiable way to a solution.

An American millionaire of German ancestry visits the city to partake of its spa waters.  He likes the place and buys one of the many redundant royal palaces.  He has an only daughter, Imma, who is of mixed heritage (as was Mann through his mother), who is intellectual, sarcastic, and beautiful.  She will inherit all her father's riches.  Klaus Heinrich is genuinely in love with her and all too willing to do his obvious regal duty.  But before he can win Imma's heart, he desperately needs to do something about measuring up to her mind.

Royal Highness is what I didn't entirely expect from Thomas Mann - a joy.  The themes of liberating modernity clashing with stifling tradition are common to the works of his I have previously read (Death in Venice and The Holy Sinner, both reviewed on this blog) but here everything is enlightened by eccentric and oddly charming characters.  The court master of ceremonies with his brown toupee, Klaus Heinrich's tutor and friend Raoul Uberbein who commits suicide the day Klaus Heinrich becomes engaged, and Imma's batty companion Countess Lowenjoul who thinks prostitutes are conspiring against her.

The Great God Pan - Arthur Machen

 Arthur Machen was a Victorian bookman who is remembered today for his weird fiction, most of which (four stories) is collected in this Dover Thrift edition.  Machen was a member of the Golden Dawn so one might expect high magic to figure in his stories.  In fact his theme is primitive paganism and elemental beings.  The theme is in the title of 'The Great God Pan' but the structure of the piece is unexpected.  A doctor literally opens the mind of the young girl he adopted, sending her mindless but also unleashing a devilish offshoot on a death-dealing spree around London.  'The White People', nearly as famous in its own right as 'Pan' , is a bizarre account of what might be fairies or, more likely, those who live underground like the Tuatha.  'The Shining Pyramid' is definitely about the underground people and 'The Inmost Light' has underpinnings of alchemy whilst echoing the beginning of 'Pan' in the forbidden use of someone's essential being.

The stories are weird, not overtly horrific.  Machen deals in suggestion, unease, and comes at his horrors obliquely which only makes them more disturbing.  I am very impressed/