September Castle by Simon Raven (1983)

[Calenture]

Photo by John Knights

First published 1983; Grafton edition, 1985



“Basic human desires merge with the occult in a complex and erotic tale of a hunt across Europe. Ptolemaeos Tunne is determined to discover a hoard of valuable buried treasure. His only clue is a bizarre medieval legend about a possessed Greek princess with a bad reputation. What he doesn't know is that his sixteen-year-old mistress Jo-Jo has unwittingly betrayed him to some very dangerous enemies.”

In Ilyssos they believe that the soul is dead and is imprisoned in the ‘tomb’ of a living person’s body, until that body dies, when the soul comes to life and gains its freedom.

When the Despoina Xanthippe is taken to the castle at Arques – September Castle – she pines for the shores of her own country and the site of the sea and dies. This was the story told through a popular ballad of the time. But Ptolomaeos Tunne learns of an Appendix to the Ballad, which tells a darker version of the tale. It hints at less savoury events involving the possession of the Princess by a demon named Mussaloah, which forces her to eat very large animals alive and perform other disgusting acts (masturbation) publicly.

When the Princess is murdered the demon takes revenge for being ousted from her body by causing her soul to be trapped within her corpse. Able to move about until her body becomes too badly decomposed, she is interred and faces eternity as a prisoner of her own rotting corpse deep under the ground.

Buried with her is a fabulously valuable toy, brought back, it was said, from one of the dreams the demon had sent her – a huge golden shellfish, an Ecrivisse studded with jewels.

When Ptolomaeos learns this, he and a colourful band of friends, including his sixteen-year-old niece and mistress Jo-Jo Pelham, her friend and lover (also sixteen-year-old and psychic) the Marchioness Tullia Llewellyn ‘Baby’ Cantaloupe, and various unsavoury Cambridge dons, decide to unearth the truth and possibly the legendary Ecrivisse.

As Jo-Jo points out, it’s probably far more likely that the Despoina was an epileptic, which might have explained her embarrassing seizures when she masturbated publicly but naturally made her bit of an embarrassment to her family. Perhaps in the end she was injured but had truly believed that her soul was trapped inside a corpse, in which case she would have had the worst death imaginable, buried alive, believing her own body to be rotting about her, and believing this state of affairs would continue for eternity.

Like the much more readable Doctors Wear Scarlet, Raven presents us with a myth, then with possible explanations for the myth, which don’t frustrate the reader of horror fiction as his explanations are actually just as horrible. Although complicated, with its Rashomon-like retelling of Xanthippe’s story by the different characters, past and present, the book is still a compelling read, with tribadism, incest, ghosts, demons, psychic abilities, buried treasure, mind-altering drugs, murder and cannibalism. Plenty to keep one amused, then; but at the end, as Ptolomeaos delivers the final (and apparently true) version of the story, I felt I’d enjoyed the book but it went on just a little too long, and I was quite relieved to turn the last page.

Simon Arthur Noël Raven, writer and dramatist, born December 28 1927; died May 12 2001

"The death of Simon Raven, at the age of 73 after suffering a stroke, is proof that the devil looks after his own. He ought, by rights, to have died of shame at 30, or of drink at 50.
Instead, he survived to produce 25 novels, including Alms For Oblivion (1959-76), a 10-volume saga of English upper-class life, numerous screenplays, eight volumes of essays and memoirs, including Shadows On The Grass (1981) - "the filthiest book on cricket ever written," according to EW Swanton - and The First Born Of Egypt sequence (1984-92), which contains requests such as "Darling mummy, please may I be circumcised?" and "Please, sir, may I bugger you, sir?"

Michael Barber, The Guardian (obituary)

Howard Watson: The Gothic World of Simon Raven

[Johnlprobert]

Those links are excellent! I've got the House of Stratus reprint of Doctors Wear Scarlet but I've never read it as I remember trying to and finding the first few chapters a bit too ponderous. The Infinity Plus career overview puts his career into perspective nicely, though, and that obituary is an absolute scream.

[Calenture]

What I like about Raven was his ability to portray seriously seedy and decadent academics and point up the ridiculous wherever he saw it. Antique peers of the realm in bed with schoolgirls who read Greek, and a cleaner who decodes the carvings in a church, all adds to the fun. But I did find this book a bit of a struggle, I admit!

I think I fancy reading his novella The Islands of Sorrow as the Howard Watson page suggests it could be enjoyably grim.

[Johnlprobert]

His final book was a collection of horror stories - Remember Your Grammar & Other Tales of the Supernatural. I've still got that & I remember some of them being quite good. In fact it might be time to re-read it...

[cw67q]

I thought this the best of the three Raven novels I've read (Doctors Wear Scarlet and the Roses of Picardy were the others, I haven't tiouched the non-horror stuff). There are some very effective and atmospheric chiller scenes in this one. It is a stand-alonish sequal to "Roses of P", fetauring many of the same characters. Whilst the plots are independant it is probbaly best to read Roses first.

Roses is also a fine supernatural thriller/mystery, but I found one of the plot strands silly enough to strain even my willingness to suspend disbelief. (The "science" element of the plot).

Doctors wear scarlet features an engagingly ugly menagerie of characters (as do the two books above) but ultimately devolves into a pretty standard vampire story towards the end of the book. The black social comedy and grotesque population of the novel make it a good read, but the horror when it arrives doesn't live up to its foreshadowing. Also, call me squeamish, but I found the child abuse scene distasteful.

- chris

[Jojo Lapin X]

Aug 2, 2010 15:59:19 GMT Johnlprobert said:

His final book was a collection of horror stories - Remember Your Grammar & Other Tales of the Supernatural. I've still got that & I remember some of them being quite good. In fact it might be time to re-read it...

Amazon UK told me I already own REMEMBER YOUR GRAMMAR AND OTHER HAUNTED STORIES! Later I was even able to find it. I have no recollection of reading it, though.

The dust-jacket copy contains the following lovely example of faulty logic:

With such a huge output it is hardly surprising that he has not had much time to devote to a genre which has always attracted him, the ghost story.

[Johnlprobert]

Aug 2, 2010 16:28:10 GMT cw67q said:

Doctors wear scarlet features an engagingly ugly menagerie of characters (as do the two books above) but ultimately devolves into a pretty standard vampire story towards the end of the book.
- chris

That's interesting because the Robert Hartford-Davis film of Raven's book (Incense for the Damned - lovely title) was intended by its director to emphatically not be a standard vampire story - the bloodletting / drinking was meant to be an S&M variant. When the distributors insisted on tacking on a staking scene at the end Hartford-Davis was so upset he took his name off the film