The God of Glass - Peter Redgrove

We're into the dark meat here, only for those of obscure tastes.  Redgrove, of course, is best known as a poet, but he also wrote lots of fiction and drama.  God of Glass was originally a radio play, in which form it won the 1978 Imperial Tobacco award for best original radio play.  That is what brought it to my attention. As regular followers will know I am a Doctor of Radio Drama, perhaps even the only Doctor of Radio Drama.  My current exploration of the original radio work of Ted Hughes brought up the link with Redgrove (which is very apparent in this novelisation).  I haven't tracked down the radio script yet, but I will, and I have just acquired some more of Redgrove's plays which I will review here in due course.

Anyway, first and foremost The God of Glass reminds us that the Seventies were a long, long time ago.  I was doing my first Drama degree when the play was commissioned and dropping out in my native Lancashire witch-country when it was produced.  I remember those times but I had forgotten the sort of ultra-sexualised earth-goddess cult which Hughes and Redgrove explored in their work, even though I was living in the middle of it and knew many pre-New-Age practitioners.  I probably forgot about it because it was so over-the-top and - as the cover image of the 1979 original hardback above suggests - bloody.

Geoffrey Glass is an African man who, released from a life sentence, appears in Cornwall as a perfectly civilised shaman.  The village is being plagued by pubescent girls in the throes of demonic possession.  The vicar is killed in a failed exorcism (this was the era of The Exorcist, remember) and Glass, who hasn't been involved in any way before - that is to say, he did not create the possessions - joins in the cure with more success.  He is espoused by the mothers of the victims and soon a Glass movement is spreading across the country.  Glass becomes a national icon - only to submit himself to the judgement of his peers, the officers of his movement, chiefly from the Cornish village where it all began, when his past comes to light.  Then, in a worldwide live telecast, all hell literally breaks loose.

As to why it is subtitled "A Morality", who better than Redgrove himself to explain?

...because it seeks, by adopting the mode and idiom of a horror story of exorcism, to redirect attention to the serious themes of adult rebirth, and the dire consequences of masculine non-participation n feminine blood-mysteries, behind the usually conventionalised currency of the modern supernatural tale.

It is all very, very weird.  Even the style - disjointed chapters, of startlingly different length, with occasional poetry thrown in - is unique.  How anything like this was achieved on BBC radio I cannot imagine.  But I was completely hooked and am intrigued to explore further.  This is writing on the furthest frontier, not just in its day but now.  Further dispatches from the front will follow.

Teatro Grottesco - Thomas Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti has become a cult writer since the millennium.  People liken him to Lovecraft, Poe, and M R James.  I like all those authors so naturally I was keen to try Ligotti.  My conclusion?  He's not like the aforementioned.  He's not scary, though he does successfully get under your skin, and for all the very obvious work that goes into crafting his stories, he ends up being a bit dull.  For me, the problem is that his first-person narrator has always the same characteristics - reclusive, obsessive, an outsider with a bad stomach - no matter whether he is a creative artist or a drudge in a slave-labour town.  The towns, likewise, are always in the north, on the border, and he has usually left by the time he comes to write down his experience.  There are other regular tropes - other recluses, bizarre modern artworks, and carnival performers (carnies are much scarier in America, apparently, than they are in the UK).  Frankly, some of the long pieces are distinctly over-wrought - by the time I've got to the end of some of his paragraphs I've forgotten what he began with.  I admire the work, the commitment to form.  I own Ligotti has created a fictional world almost as real as Lovecraft's Arkham.  But he's not adventurous enough for my taste.

Whit - Iain Banks

The thing about Iain Banks is, I'm never much interested in the story, which is often the same from book to book - large, complex families with issues and history not quite what it seems.  What takes me by the collar is the authorial voice, different from book to book, and the sheer exhilarating quality of the writing.  Take Whit, for example.  Loopy new age religious cult living a cultish life in pastoral Scotland?  Really, I couldn't care less.  But, cast in terms of Isis's awakening to the real world and the truths that can be found therein, I was enthralled all the way through.  Well, almost all the way.  The trouble with family mysteries is that they have to be tied up, the parties reconciled - and that is done, somewhat perfunctorily, at the end of Whit.  I'm not sure there was any other way it could be done but ... still ... you could cut the last chapter and miss nothing

Banks is a giant of contemporary English literature, a trailblazer of the important Scottish novel in the 21st century.  That he died too soon is inarguable.  I just hope he doesn't fall into post mortem obscurity.