Now it is official: the Vault has a bad influence on, ahem, young impressionable minds
(And old rotters too)
After all the discussion about the late Mr. Suster and Mr. Samuels anecdotes I just had to get
Black Pearl: Memoirs of a Victorian Sex-Magician. And I was not disappointed, at least not in the first volume which I nearly finished.
It is London 1895. Vicount Horby is a young man with too much money and nothing to do except to lead a life of a gentleman. In his case, this means seducing every woman he can get – and astoningshly every victorian woman is willing - and hanging out with each and every historical character there is. And visiting with them fancy bordellos when not lurking in backroom clubs. The list of his friends is remarkable. From college buddy Aleister Crowley who initiates him into the Order of the Golden Dawn to infamous newspaperman Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde. There is Arthur Machen and Bram Stoker, Yeats and H.G.Wells, and the Marquis of Queensberry, with whom he does a bet which of them can seduce Lilly Langtry first.
The historical characters comes here more alive than in a lot of historical novels I have read. Even Sax Rhomer gets his plug, when our hero meets him at the Golden Dawn and says that he liked his
Brood of the Witch Queen better than Fu Manchu
.
There are even a few good stories in the story, as when Horby and Arthur Machen visit a bizarre club called The Vanishing Society, where indeed a gentleman vanishes afterwards to be found later dead. Horby and Machen later try to visit the club again, but it has vanished, seemingly never was there. It is quite an effective little chapter, not unlike one of those club-tales in any horror anthology.
(When you read it you wonder if this really was such a remarkable time in England. There is such a wealth of literary or artistic giants in the same time and space, all knowing each other, it is quite unbelievable. Compared to this we live in a new dark age.)
To break the monotone of one erotic encounter to the next, the novel is interrupted with letters from Horbys former gouvernante Rosemary Radcliffe who seduced him as a boy and likes to send him long letters detailing
her various sexual encounters or letters of his friend Claire who visits Paris and serves as an altar in a black mass.
Of course first and foremost this is a porn novel. As it is victorian themed, there is also a lot of kinky stuff. This London at the turn of the century is something like a fetishist dream with the lovingly descriptions of corsetts and pettycoats, followed by another round of birching.
But place and time is equally important here. The occult angle is a lot of fun, as it didn´t just serves as an excuse for the next pornscene; there are a lot of facts about the ideas of the occult societys (of course Horby is mostly there for getting high and the girls).
For such a novel this is very well written and constructed, often quite witty and amusing. They really sell this as real with fake Editor Prefaces, and the nostalgic musings of the first person narrator how the glory of the clubs and dance halls have vanished at the later time of his writing.
And the fuck scenes are done well too. As I gathered this and the latter books in this series was written by Suster and his wife, and they must have had a lot of fun. Even when the tongue in cheek threatened to burst free.
However, my intention to have a good read and a quit wank were abruptly interrupted by the sudden intrusion of Aleister Crowley.What´s not to like?
(And old rotters too)
