The Magus by John Fowles (1972)

Big Listen 2023 

The Magus

Written John Fowles. Read by Nicholas Boulton

Published - 1965 (revised1977) Audible – 2012

Audible / digital download

   Let’s start with a slight confession. I don’t like large books. That is to say; I don’t like books with large page counts. Anything much past 200 pages is going to stretch my patience and good will.  This is probably because I read quite slowly, although quite thoroughly, and unless it’s got a high ideas to page ratio then its going to get put down about two weeks in.  I will always promise to pick it back up again soon but there are books that are now almost 10 years pending!  This has become more pronounced the older I get and seems to be centred around fiction rather than biographies or factual books.  That means there are a lot of novels that I’ve always wanted to read but their size dictates that I will almost certainly never get round to them.

   Now The Magus has been on my TBR list since the early 1990s, when I started working in my first bookstore and was exposed to the entire top selling fiction back catalogue. I think I was first drawn to this one by its enigmatic title, an arcane word for a magician. Not in a Paul Daniels kind of way but rather more like John Constantine in the Hellblazer comics.  It also came very recommend to me by a colleague, whose tastes and appreciation of authors like J G Ballard and Ian McEwan matched my own.  But nothing happened back then because it’s a brick of a book. And with a back cover blurb that only teased the general direction of the plot, rather than offering a clear indication of the story, it just kept getting passed over.

   And then I got audible. And it popped up again, free to members at the time and its 656 pages seemed somehow less intimidating when presented as a 27 hours listen.  Yes that’s still a lot of time but daily chores melt away with a good book in your ears and there’s a never-ending supply of that.  So, I finally gave it a go and I’m very glad I did. The Magus may not only be one of the finest written books I’ve ever encountered but it may also be the most beautifully narrated as well.  I’m actually grateful that my own dithering has meant that this is how I first encountered the story.

   So, what is it about then? Ok, the back of a fag-packet plot is this. Nicholas Urfe, a young and arrogant misanthrope, reluctantly takes a teaching job on a small Greek Island in order to escape England and himself.  While there, he becomes entwined in the psychological gameplay of Maurice Conchise, a wealthy recluse and enigmatic trickster figure.  A chess game of discovery begins, and the stakes get progressively higher as the truth becomes more obscure. Beyond those mechanics, it’s really about relationships and identity, truth and belief but nothing is dictated only ever left for the reader to pick up on… or not.  There are some folks that will tell you it’s boring, nothing happens and the ending in inconclusive. I’m very much of the opinion that its sublime and encapsulates life. It’s also just a little bit meta, which I’m always drawn to.  Its powerful stuff on the page but in the ear it becomes something much more magical.

   At which point I better now call out the narrator; Nicholas Boulton, because his is a contribution way beyond simply reading the words.  His voice is authentically that of Nicholas.  He makes him real and so makes the experience of listening feel like an actual conversation between the fiction and the reader

   And here’s my justification for that statement.  I started listening to The Magus in England and then took it on holiday to Menorca to finish it off. I thought the complementary climate would add to that of the story’s and bring a little something extra to the experience.  But after only a couple of days I had to stop and read something else as it actually became all too heady a brew.  That first-person narrative, written so eloquently by Fowles and embodied so perfectly by Boulton, placed the thoughts and motives of Nicholas Urfe directly in with my own. And so sitting in the immersive heat with the dry air, the smells and noises of the island all around me, the walls of reality began to feel just a little too porous. The anger, confusion and general emotional state of the character began to mix with my own.  I’ve been emotionally engaged by books before but this felt like a possession.

   I finished it in the airport and on the flight home, surrounded by plastic, air-conditioned cool air and hundreds of other people.  I still felt like I lived the end but at least the experience was only one way.

Steve.

The Filth (2002)

The Filth #1 to #13

Grant Morrison, Chris Weston, Gary Erskine.

Publisher – DC Vertigo

    A short while ago I was sorting through a pile of pages I found lodged between bookshelves.  It was a mix of promo posters, some of my own doodles, various torn out interviews and features from film magazines and a couple of adverts for upcoming comics. That is comics that were upcoming some twenty years ago!  One of them was for Grant Morrison and Chris Weston’s The Filth, which was “arriving instore in June 2002.”  The central image of two dolphins cresting the water with a sci-fi sea-base behind them had blown me away back then and still does now.  What makes it so stunning, apart from the sheer quality of the artwork, is that the dolphins are augmented with small metal arms and are wearing gasmasks and air tanks. Their skin looks corrupted and is possibly infected from the surgically attached appendages and they are also branded with the same corporate logo on their dorsal fins.  And then you notice that the sea is full of bottles and metal, old tyres, and rubbish. The waters are truly polluted and the sea-base… the sea-base you realise looks a lot like a Tiffanny lamp, glowing with warm coloured lights and very much at odds with its surroundings. As a single image to sell a 13-part comic book series, it was and remains still, a stunningly potent hit. Within a few minutes of looking at it again, I was online reading about deluxe editions of the collected series and an about-book which promised to venture deep into the workings of the series.  The latter was ordered instantly, but the former was passed over due to cost and the fact that I still have all 13 issues safely up in the attic.

   A couple of days later and I had retrieved the comics from the “Grant Morrison box” (it’s a thing), plus a little something else that caught my eye.  I started rereading them while I waited for “Curing the Postmodern Blues: Reading Grant Morrison and Chris Weston’s The Filth in the 21^st Century” to arrive.  It was time to see if it all still stood up.

   But first; a tangential detour via Marvel Knights Double Shot #2.

   As the name might suggest this a Marvel comic containing two short strips based on characters from the slightly edgier and darker side of the MCU.  In fact, its “VIOLENT CONTENT” is announced on the cover as a warning, or more likely as a lure, although I think they were flattering themselves.

  The issue contains a Ted McKeever Man-Thing story and a Nick Fury tale spun by Grant Morrison.  I would have bought it for all of those reasons, although if memory serves, I don’t think I particular enjoyed it at the time.  Regardless of that, I kept it and had filed it away with the rest of Morrison’s comics.  Which is why I saw it when I was retrieving The Filth comics and pulled it out the box as well.  And here is the reason why; What I know now, but didn’t know back then, is that The Filth was originally a story idea for a Nick Fury strip, but it grew into something bigger and far stranger and so they decided to keep it and develop it as a creator owned project instead.  And not knowing that fact in 2002, the significance that the Marvel Knights Double Shot #2 came out just a month prior to the premier issue of The Filth, suggested to me that I might now find significant parallels between the two, in their intent if not their execution.

   Nick’s World begins with a flat tyre on a rainy day and with Fury being reminded by the female agent with him that he has already confessed that he always gets diarrhoea forty minutes after eating Carbonara… and that that was thirty-eight minutes ago. The clock is ticking, and the peril is scatological. OK, this is not your usual Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD shenanigans.

   What then follows is the revelation that an enemy agent is being trained to impersonate Fury and the quality of that impersonation is being put to the test inside a computer simulations.  The chief scientist in charge of this experiment is uncompromising and yet the enemy agent is not achieving any of the desired results. Nanotech removes the Agents eye and two telepathic three-eyed, dome headed aliens are on hand to assist with the fitting of the new eyepatch.  But then this isn’t quite the truth either because this is a Grant Morrison story so there are further layers of reality at play than just that.  It transpires the enemy agent is already in the hands of SHIELD, who are revealed beneath the rubber masked disguises of the two aliens and the chief scientist, who was in fact the real Nick Fury all the time. There is brutality and farce, heroics and ridicule.  And at its conclusion, the half blind, broken enemy agent is kicked out into a litter strewn alleyway in his underwear like just another bit of rubbish.  The laboratory is dismantled revealing itself to be nothing more than theatrical flats and Fury walks off to get on with his next mission, just as super-agent cool as you like. The coda comes in the form a comment made by a SHIELD agent, looking out of the panel and perhaps directly at the reader, who casually states; “Hey! Its Nick’s world… we just die in it!”

   Even with what I remember from my last reading of The Filth several years ago, I can already tell my hunch has paid off.  And what’s more, I can now actually appreciate this story for what it is; the first rough draft of The Filth.

The Filth #01

   As someone who read Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles the first time around, monthly and in its 3 volumes over a protracted period, I was changed by it and in ways I won’t go into here. Suffice to say, and however good and mind blowing it was going to be, The Filth was never going to be that good.  Which on reflection was unfair because it wasn’t intended to elicit the same response.  Epiphanies are not double-decker buses; they don’t turn up in twos.  In fact, it’s been said that The Filth was the antidote to The Invisibles. That might also be why I kept it at arm’s length; because I didn’t actually want to be cured, not even now.

   Which is not to say I didn’t think it was a brilliant, clever, and sexy comic book at the time it came out. In fact, I wished The Invisibles had had such a creative and consistent artist as Chris Weston through its entire run.  We might not have had to magic-wank over sigils to get the sales figures back up!

   But back to The Filth’s first issue.

   For my sins, I was the manager of a branch of Forbidden Planet back then and on the day we unpacked that issue, every member of staff read it on their lunch break. And everyone was blown away.  There’s a lot going on it those 22 pages and it’s all so very, very seedy and also so very, very gorgeous as the everyday reality is peeled away to reveal “the truth” of a reality policed by The Filth.  And that’s without labouring the erotic shock moment where the Greg Feely para-persona is “extracted” (I’m avoiding using the word milked!) from out of Agent Slade’s body by the deeply sexy female Filth agent; Spector, wearing nothing more than a confident comb-over!

   Having only that first issue it was all a bit confusing but with the hindsight of having now read all of it several times, and knowing the bigger picture, it feels like the perfect set up for what was to come.  Even the comb-over is justified once you know the relationship between the two agents.

   And either side of all that first issue setup, are a handful of pages that introduce us to the villain of the piece, one Sparticus Hughes. At this point he appears pretty arch but as his stories develop we’ll discover he’s just a little bit further down the road of understanding than Agent Slade is. The difference between them is how they respond to the truth.

The Filth #02 to #13

   Exactly how big do I want to make this post? I couldn’t explain it all to you in a dozen more paragraphs.  I couldn’t guarantee that we would all take the same meanings away from it at the end either.  For that matter, I suspect I have entertained a variety of conflicting conclusions upon each reading.  What I do know is that its words and pictures in perfect synchronicity. It’s as fresh and original and relevant now as it was on first release. And, that in its own strange blood, spunk, spit and skid-stained way, The Filth is sort of optimistic.

   If I haven’t sold it to you yet, then here’s a few visual teasers.

Steve

Comic Book Babylon by Tim Pilcher. (2019)

Comic Book Babylon

Written and read by Tim Pilcher

Audible - 2019 

Audible / digital download

  There have been other books, plays, comics and audios since I last posted here but for a variety of reasons we'll get round to those later.  One of them may even be the best reading of the best book I've ever listened to but I haven't found the right words to describe that one yet so those thoughts will have to continue fermenting.

   Another thing worth mentioning is that I am currently in the middle of a reread of Grant Morrison's The Filth comic series and so when this book was recommended to me on the weekend, it felt like another little signpost back onto the synchronicity highway.  There have been far too many random nudges in recent weeks that have turned me back to look at the late 90s early 00s and all of the many crazy, counter cultural ideas I was absorbing through books, TV, film and comics back then.  I've learned to just go with it when that nudging happens and see where it leads me.

   Vertigo comics was the mature adult imprint of DC comics that became home to Sandman and SwampThing, Hellblazer, Preacher and the Invisibles, to name some of the most popular series.  There were dozens of other lesser known but none the less important titles. And in its heyday it was an absolute guarantee of mature writing, cutting edge ideas and of great story telling.  They were also comics with almost zero superheroes in them or at least superheros that didn't follow the punchy solution to every problem.

   Comic Book Babylon is a small expose of the shenanigans in and around the Vertigo London offices in the mid 90's.  Of the drugs, drink, parties and blowing the company expense accounts.  Its also an interesting glimpse into the exploding comic scene back then and a poke behind the curtain of how the magic was made.  Maybe they don't make the best stories in their telling but there must have been plenty of proper quality work going on between the trips to the pub.

   I actually really liked this book and if anything I would love to know more about Vertigo as a whole, not for the excesses of its staff and contributers, but to get a better sense of what an outpouring of creativity it must have been.  There's an excellent documentary about 2000AD called: Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD.  I would love something similar about Vertigo even if that meant the London office might only get presented as a drunken footnote.

Steve

Marvel Premiere #43 featuring Paladin (1978)

   One day soon I’ll put together a timeline of my comics reading history through the 70s and early 80s. Most of it was black and white Marvel reprints interspersed with some altogether more anarchic British weeklies.  It was all just good entertaining fun at the time but on reflection a lot of it has proven to have been incredibly formative.  And as such, it’s interesting to occasionally dip back into the wellspring and taste the waters again.

   One that I’ve bought again recently, although it’s been on my mind to do so for a very long time now, is Marvel Premiere #43 featuring Paladin.  I only ever picked up a handful of the American size, all colour Marvel comics back in the late 70s because they were generally more expensive than the UK reprints and just not as readily available. If there were specialist comic book shops around back then, none of them were near me.  However, there was one newsagent in a local town that kept a well-stocked spinner and on an occasional Saturday morning shopping trip, I would treat myself to something new and lurid.

   The real highlights from that Newsagent’s comic rack were The Torpedo, Jack of Hearts, and Deathlok the Demolisher. After that it was Paladin.  Paladin - “Super Soldier of Fortune” - was easily the more obscure of those and who, to the best of my knowledge, has never had his name in the title of another comic book since.  I didn’t encounter him again until a guest appearance in a Punisher Graphic novel well over a decade later, and he wasn’t handled the best as I recall but that Premiere meeting stayed with me.

   Rereading that comic again a couple of times in the last week, was fascinating and I can fully understand why it left an impression on me then.

   

   On the surface it’s your traditional struggle between a hero and a villain with an attractive woman’s life as the stakes.  It’s also pretty much one long fights scene over two consecutive nights.  The dialogue is a touch verbose in style, which was very much the house style back then, but beyond all of that, there is actually something a little more unusual about the book.

   For starters if he has any special powers they aren’t really shown off to any great degree in this story and in actual fact, he seems to get rescued by the woman he’s trying to keep alive, almost as many times as he saves her.  And then when he thinks he has failed to do that, he goes out for blind revenge on her supposed killer, and still keeps getting his arsed kicked until some good luck and couple of well-placed bullets draw the battle to a premature close. Which isn’t to say Paladin is rubbish at what he does but he’s certainly flawed and emotional and he’s up against someone with far more power and crazies than himself.

   Writer Don McGregor gives the conversational exchanges between the three main characters a heavy air of fatalism.  If there is any peace to be had at the end of it all, it feels like it will be short lived.  All three of them seem self-destructive and the story’s happy ending, if that is what it is, feels like just a snatched moment that wont last beyond the rest of the night.

   On top of that, there is a real neon noir feel to the art with a moody pallet of colours that never lets you forget that its nighttime in the city.  And I’m not sure if its me buying into it more than I should but I could really hear the bullets and broken glass and the sound of the wind whipping around the top of the skyscrapers.

   Now I wouldn’t necessarily have been able to pull all of that apart and name it back when I was ten years old, but I would have felt it and recognised it as a far more potent brew than my previous regular visits to the Marvel universe via black and white reprints of The Hulk and Spider-Man.

   I don’t think Paladin is one of Marvels finest creations or that comic fans were robbed by him never getting his own book.  I’m not even sure that everything that is great about that one issue could have even been sustained over a longer ongoing run. But it spoke to me and illustrated my leanings to the darker side of Marvel Comics.  I’m not sure I ever fully bought into the heroic hero, the one with the great powers that does the right thing because it’s the right thing to do but I’ve a lot of time for morally ambiguous and flawed characters that stumble and fall towards their own versions of redemption and truth.  I learned that from reading comics like this and then I went looking for it in films, TV and books.

   Marvel Premiere #43 feels like its even more important a comic to me than I first thought, and I won’t be letting it go quite so easily again.  One for the reliquary, I think.

Steve

Agroland by Daniel Arthur Smith (2014)

Agroland

Daniel Arthur Smith

Publisher - Holt Smith Ltd - 2014

Paperback - £3.73

  This is an interesting book and for quite contradictory reasons.  And to be clear, I do mean the book and not the story.

   I'm reading multiple things at the moment for which blog posts are already half drafted.  I'm also listening to lots of interesting things which are similarly up for future pondering.  Along with these explorations is the realisation that my tastes are linked by sympathetic threads and synchronicities.  Pulling on those to see how far back they go or where they might lead is not only interesting but possibly one of the main reasons for this blog existing.

   That said, every once in a while its nice to pick up something random, on a whim as it were, just to see how it feels and fits against everything else.  Argoland is one such selection.

   I first came to it because the cover image had flashed up on my Facebook feed, one of many such adverts for books that I get, although at first I had thought it was for a film or new TV show.  It reads like it could be.

In a desolate desert, members of an isolated agricultural station discover a stranger, dehydrated, delirious, and near death from exposure. His weak frame is thin, desiccated. His blistered flesh is wooden, and in his madness a faint, raspy chant slips from his near lipless mouth: "So many, not enough. So many, not enough."

  What I read sounded interesting enough to get me onto Amazon with the thought that it might make a distracting weekend listen if the audio book was cheap enough.  And it was... but the paperback was even cheaper still!  So at only £3.73, I was happy to take a gamble and at least then I would still have something I could pass on to a charity shop if it failed to earn its place on my bookshelf.

   Now I really like that its very easy to get your book out in this day and age and that you are not at the mercy of a handful of large publishing houses that dictate to readers what they will be enjoying this season.  The down side to this is that the quality of the writing and story telling can be sadly lacking, although the lack of an editorial second-eye can be absolutely disastrous.  For those reasons I'm always interested but very rarely pull the trigger on a sale.  Agroland somehow got past my predispositions.

   What I liked about it was that it was a quick read and divided into very small chapters which really suits how I dip in and out of fiction books in between other tasks.  Its not flabby with overindulgent prose or redundant scenes.  And the basic premise is intriguing as well and it's actually been written really well with some great lines and a good forward momentum. Danial Arthur Smith knows what he's doing and he does it well.

   What didn't work so well for me is that although it's set up to be a good old fashioned video nasty sort of a horror story, with a powerful supernatural villain and a large cast of victims in a trapped environment, it generally wimps out of showing us 99% of most of the kills, avoiding really getting into the blood and gore of it all.  Now that might be a deliberate style choice of the authors and out of good taste but for one disturbing exception. And its disturbing because it is the exception, but the very descriptive nature of the breast mutilation scene plus a lack of any real logic as to why that would be the creature's sweetmeat of choice made me ponder the author's psyche a little more at that moment than that of the antagonist.  I make no judgement on the morality, I desperately wanted the whole book to be much more visceral and gory, but it did make me raise a quizzical eyebrow and snap me out of the book when it happened.

   So on one level it worked, I don't feel robbed and I read a book over the weekend.  The writing was good and it restored my faith to see that it actually had an editor. And I was really inspired by the actual hard copy product that technology dropped into my hand so efficiently.  On the downside I'm left wondering what the point of it was, for the author, I mean.  Nothing new was added to the genre, and it wasn't even shooting to be the bloodiest version of this type of thing.  It might as well have been one of those horror films made for a small budget that pops up on the Horror Channel.  Handy for a writer and director breaking into the industry; an hour thirty of product to fill a gap in the schedule but to what greater purpose?  Is that a problem?  Well if you are begging money to make a film and have to get your script past a lot of gate keepers who want it to be what they paid for, then no.  If however you are living in an age where you can pretty much self publish what you want without too much, if any intervention from others, then whats the point of doing such a familiar dance that doesn't even have the courage of really going for it.

   I don't know but it leaves me feeling a little empty and thinking of words like: Content and Product when I should be using; Story.

Steve

Large Plants, Ghost Box generated memories of movies that never were and going to gigs with an eidolon

  

   I cant recall what my first Ghost Box CD was, or for that matter how I had first become aware of the music label.  It might have been through the A Year in the Country blog, but it wont have been in isolation. The name began to appear on a number of the sites that I was frequenting at the time; the kinds of places where like-minded folks go to sift through the debris of lost futures past and reconstruct what might have been.

   For those that don't know, Ghost Box is an independent record label that has been around since 2004.  Founded by Julian House and Jim Jupp, the label initially specialised in electronic music that captured the new millennium's fascination with the hauntological.  But as well as the music, there is a complimentary aesthetic to the sleeve designs that referenced old penguin paperbacks, educational materials, 70s sci-fi and children's cult TV.  As a consequence, each new release, tends to feel like its been pulled from an alternate past, being both new but strangely familiar, in both sound and appearance.

   Currently on their 43 major release, Ghost Box's scope has since broadened from just the sounds of retro synths to now including traditional folk, psychedelic rock and occasional spoken word.  The destination remains the same its just that now there are more pathways to get there.

   Large Plants album; The Carrier, (GBX041) has been described in a number of varied ways from "post apocalyptic downer fuzz rock" on Bandcamp, to "folk-rock magnificence." in Shindig.  All I know is that the cover art caught my eye and after listening to a couple of sample tracks, there was very little hesitation on buying this one.  I needed to hear the whole album.

   And here is the curious thing, and very much a part of the magic;  I'm not especially a fan of 70's rock music but being on the Ghost Box label, it's clearly doing something more alchemical than simple imitation.  It sounds like the music from an outlaw biker horror movie along the same lines as the wonderful Pyschomania (1973)  It was familiar from its first listen and I begin to imagine that maybe I saw The Carrier late one Friday night on BBC 2 in the early 80's, part of a series showing old cult horror films and that this was just its soundtrack.  That would explain why the music feels "known" and why I'm having flashes of horned marauding biker gangs terrorising the countryside. Unless I'm just confusing myself with the aforementioned Psychomania or perhaps the bikers of No Blade of Grass (1970).  Its an evocative brew.  I know there is no such lost film and yet the memories begin to coalesce.

   And with all of that in mind i don't want to take away from the fact that its a great album in its own right. Unlike a lot of Ghost Box CDs that I tend to play late at night while surfing the net or writing blogs,The Carrier comes in the car with me and gets taken on road trips.  It may well belong on the road. It may also be one of my favorite albums of the year so far.

   Which is why I felt very fortunate, just a few months later, to discover that Large Plants were one half of a Ghost Box double bill that was playing locally.  Tickets were extremely reasonable, the venue was intimate and familiar from seeing mates play gigs there, and it was just too good an opportunity to miss, even if I couldn't get anyone to go with me.  That said, I didn't feel alone. Had he have not died the previous October, I would have taken my good friend Mike Page along.  Mike had lived just a 10 minute walk away and I chose to park in his old street and walk up the way we had done on all of our previous visits.  Now Mike was sharp, intelligent and loved his science and he would have no time for the idea of an afterlife.  Had I have actually drawn him back into being for a night out, he would have spent the walk there arguing himself back out of existence.  But he lives in my memories now and I simply like the idea that he came along.  And he loved his music as much as his science and his art and his philosophy and he would have had the best night.  He would have liked Large Plants but he would have really loved Beautify Junkyards, the second band of the night.  He would have been blown away by their eclectic, ethereal and tribal European synths.  I know this intuitively Or maybe he just told me?! But I've gotten ahead of myself.

   Arriving at The Tin in The Coal Vaults at Coventry Canal Basin, I nursed a pint of coke within the brick cavern, for an hour of Ghost Box and similar sounding records.  Coloured lights rose and fell around the brickwork and an audience slowly gathered around an empty stage.  It seemed like a good mix of like-minded souls; groups of friends and couples, and all generally of a similar age.  The slightly younger and more interesting looking ones turned out to be the actual band members themselves but until they took to the stage, they were just part of the same crowd, summoned here by a shared love of the music and the hauntological.

   Just slightly past the hour, three quarters of Large Plants took to the stage and gave it to us straight; Their drummer was sick but, having practiced the first three tracks without him, in an earlier soundcheck, they were happy to move through the set list and play around the missing percussion.  And did they ever. What followed was some pretty stunning guitar playing and a live performance of the album that somehow didn't feel remotely lacking.  When it was over there was a promise to come back and play again with the full line up but for me nothing had been lost.

   Beautify Junkyards followed after a brief interlude and were refreshingly different but still "ghost box" in their own way.  I know they would have inspired Mike to his own guitar and keyboards, because quite frankly he wouldn't have looked out of place among their number.  I wasn't as familiar with their stuff prior to this but they won me over in a matter of minutes.

   And so that's where we are now; I'm still playing Large Plants and waiting for that return gig. And I'm even more convinced there was one more cult biker movie made in the 70's than previously remembered. Mike still hasn't manifested, in either a white suit like Marty Hopkirk, or in his more familiar khaki but that doesn't mean that his new collection of songs isn't coming along brilliantly and that we wont be hearing them through some alternative ghost-box. 

Goodnight Mike

Steve

Ghost Stories by M. R. James Vol 2 Read by Derek Jacobi (2009)

M R James Ghost Stories Volume Two

Written by M R James, Read by Derek Jacobi

Audible Original - 2009  

Audible / digital download

   I promised at the end of January, after I had listened to volume one, that I would be back to give volume two a go.  I'm not quite sure why I started listening to it now but it wasn't out of any great urge for a ghost story, rather just to be entertained.  I say this because I didn't find this volume anywhere near as engaging or chilling as the first one.  Perhaps there is a difference to listening in the darker winter months than the summer.  Its the same author and the same narrator but I just didn't feel it this time, it didn't quite connect in the same way.

The four tales included are; A Warning to the Curious, The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, The Mezzotint and A Neighbour's Landmark.  I enjoyed the last one the most simply because it was totally new to me, having never listened to or seen any other adaptions of it.  After that I liked The Mezzotint, although the TV adaption of that was only a couple of years ago and these were the visual that were played out in my mind's eye as I listened.   The first and second stories should have been  sure things but again, I just didn't feel that they thrilled me like other versions have previously.  Perhaps I'll revisit them again at the end of the year, when the nights draw in but until then its off to look at old comic books next

Steve