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Post by Johnlprobert on Aug 7, 2010 16:18:01 GMT
Simon Raven - Remember Your Grammar & Other Haunted Stories
Winged Lion Press 1997
Contents:
Remember Your Grammar The Team Photograph The Sarcophagus The Bottle of 1912 The Amateur The Proselyte The Caddy The Tric Trac Man Fair Rosamund The Guide The Spirit of Cricket to Come
After Rog posted notes on Simon Raven's September Castle I remembered I have this slim volume (only 100 pages) on the shelves that I picked up for a couple of quid many years ago.
The volume also boasts a photo of the author smoking a fag and looking quite pissed (it was probably a bit of a feat to catch him sober having read that Guardian obit)
More notes on these stories as I read them to Lady P - hopefully they're filled with decadence. We've also taken Incense for the Damned from our DVD Vault so we're planning a bit of a Ravenfest.
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Post by fullbreakfast on Aug 7, 2010 23:17:51 GMT
Will be interested to see what you make of it, though you can't be stung for a couple of quid...
My view for what it's worth:
Remember Your Grammar, The Team Photograph, The Amateur, The Proselyte and The Caddy are good supernatural tales - a couple of them first rate. The Sarcophagus could have been written by Roald Dahl on top of his form. The others are just curiosities really; if I was feeling uncharitable I might describe The Bottle of 1912 as sentimental tosh. But there is a certain cold-bloodedness at work in some of the other stories which seems characteristic of Raven's better work.
Interestingly, if you read The English Gentleman (Raven's non-fictional and in parts autobiographical work on that topic) it's apparent that The Team Photograph is a variation fairly closely based on his actual experience at Charterhouse.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Aug 9, 2010 7:40:48 GMT
Remember Your Grammar - Simon (Raven I think) and his friend James are busy drinking & gambling in Venice. One night, when the money's run out, they go off for a wander and stumble across a patch of grass with a headstone that boasts a Latin inscription. James translates it and wants to go back to see it again. That night Simon realises James' translation was all wrong and dashed back to the spot only to find his friend vanished and his name on the headstone.
All these stories are very short but this one does a superb job of kicking off the collection by conjuring up an almost Jamesian atmosphere (although James probably never drank as much) and the backdrop of Venice and the almost (but not quite) academic atmosphere add considerably to the uneasiness.
The Team Photograph - It's 1945 and the cricketing First XI team photo has 12 people owing to naughty Otto the head boy insisting he be part of the team instead of 'swarthy' Daniel. Now it's 40 years later and Otto's dead and his image has gone from the photo. While effective this is a very slight tale of revenge that could probably have gone on longer.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Aug 11, 2010 22:05:58 GMT
The Sarcophagus - A Dennis Wheatley parody done entirely in dialogue, this has to be one the best stories we've read in ages, with a twist that had us almost crying with laughter. This one is seriously brilliant stuff. Monks, nuns, weird rituals, virgin sacrifices, French bicycle races and the most bizarre cure for impotence I've ever come across. Quite superb.
The Bottle of 1912 - A much quieter, straightforward little ghost story that can't compete with The Sarcophagus. I don't actually think anything is going to be able to compete with The Sarcophagus, but we live in hope!
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Post by dem bones on Aug 12, 2010 10:23:14 GMT
i somnambulated through Doctor's Wear Scarlet many moons ago, most likely wasn't ready for it, but the only Raven short i've read (other than Chriseis,the often-anthologised extract from Doctors ...) is the aforementioned The Bottle of 1912 in The Oxford Book Of Ghost Stories, and very underwhelmed by it i was too. But The Sarcophagus sounds so must-have it's bordering on the obscene!
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Post by Johnlprobert on Aug 13, 2010 10:54:13 GMT
The Amateur - For most of its length this is an excuse for Mr Raven to prattle on about his own sexual excesses and deviancy in the guise of Rollo Rutupin, the narrator. What's the mystery behind the fellow who was buried beneath an obelisk surrounded by a moat in a graveyard at Perth? It couldn't be because he was a bit of a naughty fellow, could it? And what does that Latin inscription mean? Debauchery? All of this points to bad news for Rollo's blond-haird squared jawed 'male companion' Micky, who soon isn't going to be half the man he was. Almost utter filth from beginning to end. As always, in true Dennis Wheatley fashion, the only reason I am drawing Vault members' attention to this tale and describing it in such detail is so you can all have your own opportunity to give it the condemnatory thrashing it so soundly deserves.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Aug 20, 2010 9:48:30 GMT
The Proselyte - A very slight tale of someone 'chosen' to join the ranks of a cult at a French cemetary.
The Caddy - This is more lke it! Ancient, hideous zombie cannibal revenge against the Ducth on a Britiah golf course! Another cracker!
The Tric Trac Man - Another winner. "How would you like to be under an eternal curse which never allowed you to get pissed and took all the excitement out of backgammon?"
Fair Rosamund, The Guide, and The Spirit of Cricket to Come are all very slight tales, with the last being a bit of a diatribe against the socialist dogma that 'if everyone cannot have something, then no-one shall'.
Even though a fair few of the tales are too slight to be recommended this little book is well worth a read as there are a couple of classics in here, especially for fans of the Dennis Wheatley public schoolboy era of horror writing.
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Post by dem bones on Aug 20, 2010 14:25:37 GMT
Simon Raven - Doctors Wear Scarlet (Berkley Medallion, August 1967) Blurb: Beware. This is a novel of horror - about a man’s passion for a dazzlingly beautiful Greek girl - a passion which begins innocently, but slowly turns into a fiendish nightmare.
All who knew of her shuddered at the mere mention of her name. Priestess of an ancient cult, she preyed upon the souls and bodies of her victims, so that little by little they were destroyed in order to satisfy her grotesquely loathsome lust.sorry, i don't have a scan of to compliment your review, Lord P., but here's a rather fetching Berkley edition of Doctors. Wear Scarlet. Going back to the importance (for some of us) of a striking cover, i got this way, way back when i'd never heard of Raven, wouldn't have taken the title to have anything to do with horror, and there's no way i'd have bought it were it not for the vampire imagery. Vague memories of the film version, Incense Of The Damned, with Patrick Mower succumbing rather psychedelically to a Lamia (i think!) Imogen Hassel and Oxford Professor Peter Cushing stealing the whole thing with a performance bordering on lunacy. Not sure if i even finished the novel - i think it takes an age to get going? The best-worst of Remember Your Grammar looks far more like my type of thing.
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Post by dem bones on Jun 29, 2011 19:48:28 GMT
Simon Raven - Doctors Wear Scarlet (Panther, 1967) Blurb This deliberately outrageous novel deserves to be read even by those who will find that they detest it - Guardian Obviously destined to be the most smashing popular success since Sapper - Spectator It terrifies, it sometimes nauseates but it demonstrates one thing triumphantly. Mr. Raven can write - The Times This is story-telling as it ought to be .... it is not, however, for the squeamish ... Bram Stoker himself could not have provided more dark shocks - Books & Bookmen A climax that is definitely X-certificate - Yorkshire Evening Post Still no bloody Remember Your Grammar, but picked up a second copy of Doctors Wear Scarlet for 50p earlier, and figured some of you would appreciate the cover as much as I do. It looks like this should have been the film. The press were a bit excitable in the 'sixties, weren't they?
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Post by doomovertheworld on Jul 1, 2011 9:51:31 GMT
i always rather dug Doctors Wear Scarlet. certainly it is better than the rather confused film version.
the other thing i like about the copy I've got (1969 film tie in edition) is the blurb from the times which is "It irritates. It terrifies. It sometimes nauseates. But it demonstrates one thing triumphantly: Mr. Raven can write" - classic! You don't get blurb like that anymore
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Post by helrunar on Jun 1, 2016 14:43:01 GMT
I'm actually a huge Simon Raven fan, having first read Doctors wear scarlet a few years ago (also saw the film version which had some good moments and lot that rather dragged). My real enthusiasm began when I discovered a Panther paperback edition of Raven's novel The Survivors in a used bookshop in Cambridge (Mass.) back in around 2013, if I've got the year right. I happen to work for a very large academic library in the area and we hold most of Raven's books so I have been able to read quite a few.
Raven's novels are a very peculiar jumble of gloriously acid mandarin stylistic indulgence, sharp observations on the absurdities wrought by human frailty, scathing flashes of wit, and frequent, caustic expressions of opinions that were already outrageously outdated and venomously offensive, even in the 1960s. It's hard to tell if he was anymore of a racist than anyone else in his day or simply thought that everyone tended to have an innate kernel of vileness that would expand under favorable opportunity. In some cases, what seems like deliberative offensiveness may actually be reportage since he put all his friends into his books.
I go back for his glorious way with that declining art, English prose, and for the themes of Pagan and occult survival rearing their unseen vastnesses in the most unlikely places. The novels The roses of Picardie and September Castle are particularly noteworthy essays in the art of reawakened ancient Pagan horror laced with an excoriating and often arch wit.
Definitely at best a minority taste--a cult novelist. As far as I am concerned, one does have to admire someone with the for-real surname Raven who entitled one of his volumes of autobiography Bird of ill omen.
H.
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Post by helrunar on Sept 8, 2017 15:33:28 GMT
I don't feel up to starting a new "topic" or "thread" for Raven's novel The Roses of Picardie (1980), but I do want to say at least a few things about it. First off, if Ro sees this note, I want to mention that Raven offers an homage (one of at least a few I have spotted in his books) to M. R. James--part 5 of the novel bears the title, "The Abbé Valcabriers' Scrapbook." It's in part 3 that the James tale "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book" receives a sort of mention; it's epitomised as being "about a greedy canon who stole treasure from the Chapter House. A thing like a demented monkey came and carried him off. Something like that."
The actual episode of the scrapbook in Raven's tale is more reminiscent, to this reader at least, of Sheridan Le Fanu. Specifically, one of those lengthy vignettes told by one of the characters to divert attention for a season in certain of his longer works. Think of "Madam Crowl's Ghost" without the dialect. Nevertheless, in this story, the episode of the scrap-book is very significant to the unfolding of the excessively complicated plotline.
The Roses of Picardie is a fairly long novel, but one that held my attention throughout. The author achieves this through a baroque gallery of characters, incidents that run the gamut from a breathlessly recounted episode in a gambling casino at the opening, to skullduggery in a very thinly veiled version of King's College Cambridge, to sundry scabrous horrors of Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, to cannibalism, vampirism, a florid but always stylishly phrased sense of carnal opulence, a sort of Willard theme about rats, and one of the most bizarre iterations ever conceived of the old "hidden map to buried treasure" party-piece. It all revolves around "The Roses of Picardie," which has nothing to do with the old music-hall favorite, but happens to be a necklace of priceless rubies, bearers of a mysterious and unremitting curse.
It must also be mentioned that the dialogue includes numerous occurrences of very offensive slurs referring to Jews, and somewhat fewer that denote people of color or "foreign" ethnicity. It may seem odd to make this comment, but often in Raven's novels I get the feeling that these words show up simply as reportage--that's the way the kind of people he writes about spoke in the 1970s. His characters are often though not always extremely rich. When not wealthy, they're usually dons or novelists down on their luck, along with the women who spent their time with such men.
Raven took three years to write this book, from 1976 to 1979. The litany of places where he wrote provides another clue regarding the world in which Raven moved and had his being; he wrote this at the very end of the book, as was his custom upon finishing a novel:
Deal...Corfu...Venice... Cannes...Athens...Rome...Monte Carlo...Dieppe.
Raven did not write a sequel to The Roses of Picardie, but characters and episodes from the book do feature in his First-Born of Egypt novel sequence, written over the period of the 1980s and into the early 1990s.
cheers, H.
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Post by hwatson4964 on Nov 2, 2017 16:46:45 GMT
I don't feel up to starting a new "topic" or "thread" for Raven's novel The Roses of Picardie (1980), but I do want to say at least a few things about it. First off, if Ro sees this note, I want to mention that Raven offers an homage (one of at least a few I have spotted in his books) to M. R. James--part 5 of the novel bears the title, "The Abbé Valcabriers' Scrapbook." It's in part 3 that the James tale "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book" receives a sort of mention; it's epitomised as being "about a greedy canon who stole treasure from the Chapter House. A thing like a demented monkey came and carried him off. Something like that." The actual episode of the scrapbook in Raven's tale is more reminiscent, to this reader at least, of Sheridan Le Fanu. Specifically, one of those lengthy vignettes told by one of the characters to divert attention for a season in certain of his longer works. Think of "Madam Crowl's Ghost" without the dialect. Nevertheless, in this story, the episode of the scrap-book is very significant to the unfolding of the excessively complicated plotline. The Roses of Picardie is a fairly long novel, but one that held my attention throughout. The author achieves this through a baroque gallery of characters, incidents that run the gamut from a breathlessly recounted episode in a gambling casino at the opening, to skullduggery in a very thinly veiled version of King's College Cambridge, to sundry scabrous horrors of Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, to cannibalism, vampirism, a florid but always stylishly phrased sense of carnal opulence, a sort of Willard theme about rats, and one of the most bizarre iterations ever conceived of the old "hidden map to buried treasure" party-piece. It all revolves around "The Roses of Picardie," which has nothing to do with the old music-hall favorite, but happens to be a necklace of priceless rubies, bearers of a mysterious and unremitting curse. It must also be mentioned that the dialogue includes numerous occurrences of very offensive slurs referring to Jews, and somewhat fewer that denote people of color or "foreign" ethnicity. It may seem odd to make this comment, but often in Raven's novels I get the feeling that these words show up simply as reportage--that's the way the kind of people he writes about spoke in the 1970s. His characters are often though not always extremely rich. When not wealthy, they're usually dons or novelists down on their luck, along with the women who spent their time with such men. Raven took three years to write this book, from 1976 to 1979. The litany of places where he wrote provides another clue regarding the world in which Raven moved and had his being; he wrote this at the very end of the book, as was his custom upon finishing a novel: Deal...Corfu...Venice... Cannes...Athens...Rome...Monte Carlo...Dieppe.
Raven did not write a sequel to The Roses of Picardie, but characters and episodes from the book do feature in his First-Born of Egypt novel sequence, written over the period of the 1980s and into the early 1990s. cheers, H.
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Post by hwatson4964 on Nov 2, 2017 16:58:37 GMT
I have to declare an interest here first. I worked for Random House UK Ltd in the 90's, who had, along with many other imprints, had bought up Anthony Blond's various incarnations, including most of Simon Raven's backlist. I'm the one who nagged Caroline Michel, when she was at Vintage, to reprint the Alms for Oblivion. I also managed to convince David Fernbach at GMP to reprint The Feathers of Death, the Captain's debut novel of 1959. I later when on to select and edit The World of Simon Raven, the non-fiction reader for Prion, now part of Carlton. Duckworth also published the Captain's biography a few years before his death. I also wrote a couple of pieces somewhere on the web, too. Worms Feed on Hector about the Gothic novels and Sticky Wickets, although the latter is lost on Geocities, apparently! The Amateur also appears in Turf Accounts, edited by Ged Armitage and Mike Seabrook - the latter provided the introduction for the reprint of TFoD. Movie rights, as far as I know, are still held by Beaver Films, which was something to do with Lord Attenborough and Bryan Forbes. However, theatrical rights are okay and would make a superb vehicle for the likes of Simon Russell Beale, who's gathering plaudits for The Death of Stalin. The Islands of Sorrow, for those fans of Remember Your Grammar, is a novella, published by the same imprint. Unfortunately, his wife died a few years ago and he took it rather hard, but he does have copies of the books if anyone can track him down. Not necessarily in the macabre vein is Close of Play, but betrays that venal wit of his, as there's a murderer who nearly gets away apart from one little thing - but that would be telling! Good role for Bill Nighy in there, too! Most of the rest of the backlist is published, as you know, by House of Stratus, but Victoria Library, Westminster, has a number of his more rarer titles down in store. You can check it out via their website. As for his last published book, Is There Anyone There? Said the Traveller. That was reverted quite early on, after publication, because he was sued by a couple of people mentioned in the book. It cost RH UK Ltd £30,000 at the time and I ended up writing the reversion letter, too! However, I did include some of it in TWOSR, as well as a pithy little tale reprinted in The Erotic Review - if you do find a copy in a second-hand bookshop, please don't give it as a birthday present to your favourite maiden aunt, that's all I can say!!
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Post by helrunar on Nov 2, 2017 19:33:41 GMT
hwatson, I'm in total fanboy mode hearing from someone so close to the Captain (I'm afraid I think of him, quite irreverently, as dear old Simon though of course I never knew him). I just finished re-reading Bring forth the body, from Alms--brilliant work and if anything, I enjoyed it even more the second time around than the first.
I have no connections to anyone or anything, just a tired middle aged homosexual in New England looking for genuine wit and scathingly vitriolic prose in an age that increasingly exalts the meretricious, mediocre and muddled. He saw it all coming early on, of course...
cheers, H.
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